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 BE. BAUTAIN 
 A OO, 
 
 Héliogr. Dujardin. D’aprés un Médaillon de Friedrich. 
 
 ' Imp.Dumas Vorzet 
 

 
 RY OF PRiNA, 
 <a ED 
 FEB 18 1927 
 
 be, 
 ST AL seu 
 
 The PHILOSOPHY of 
 fie AR BE BAUTAIN 
 
 By 
 WALTER MARSHALL HORTON, Pu.D. 
 Associate Professor of Systematic Theology 
 
 in the 
 
 Oberlin Graduate School of Theology 
 
 THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 WASHINGTON SQUARE EAST, NEW YORK CITY 
 1926 
 
Copyright 1926 by 
 
 NEw YORK UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 ARTHUR HUNTINGTON NASON, PH.D., DIRECTOR 
 
 THE KENNEBEC JOURNAL PRESS 
 AUGUSTA, MAINE 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 are accustomed to break off at the Council of Trent, with 
 
 the remark that, apart from the decrees of the Vatican 
 Council, there is nothing more of importance to relate. “This may 
 be true with respect to the official pronouncements of the Church, 
 but the implied assumption, that Catholics have done no significant 
 thinking in the last few centuries, is certainly false. Particularly 
 misleading is the common impression that, in matters of philosophy 
 and apologetics, Catholics have done nothing more than to repeat 
 the arguments and the very words of the great mediaeval Scholas- 
 tics, without ever attempting to adapt them to the vicissitudes of 
 the modern world. 
 
 The last few centuries, on the contrary, have witnessed some 
 most interesting attempts on the part of Catholic thinkers to achieve 
 a new philosophical synthesis, based in part but not wholly upon 
 the mediaeval synthesis, in which modern intellectual tendencies 
 shall be as fully reckoned with as were the speculations of the 
 Moslem and Jewish philosophers in the system of St. “Thomas 
 Aquinas. ‘The history of the influence of Descartes upon Catholic 
 thought has never been thoroughly explored; at least in France, 
 the Cartesian tendency long outstripped the Thomistic, and its 
 effects have never wholly disappeared. “The philosophy of the 
 eighteenth century had its reaction, both positive and negative, upon 
 the Catholic thinkers of the early nineteenth century. A few, 
 like Professor Hermes of Bonn, boldly accepted the standards of 
 the Enlightenment, and defended Catholicism on grounds of 
 rationality; others, like de Bonald and de Maistre, appealed from 
 reason to tradition and authority, thus, all unintentionally, stirring 
 up a perfect hornets’ nest of philosophical problems, which it took 
 more than a generation to settle. But the most interesting epoch 
 of all is the second quarter of the nineteenth century. At this 
 time, under the combined influence of political Liberalism and 
 philosophical Idealism, Catholic thought began to show signs of 
 vigor and fecundity that seemed to. give promise of another burst 
 
 Pie xcs students of the history of Catholic Thought 
 
Vill THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 of creative and constructive thinking like that which illumined the 
 period from Anselm to Aquinas—a promise that grew brighter and 
 brighter in the years from 1830 to 1848, and whose fulfilment 
 was perhaps prevented only by the great wave of political and 
 theological reaction that set in at the middle of the century. 
 
 A few of the leaders of this Catholic Renaissance are well 
 known to us: J. A. Moehler and his colleagues at Tiibingen; 
 Géorres, Baader, and the whole illustrious circle at Munich; Lamen- 
 nais and Lacordaire in France; John Henry Newman—more timid 
 and reactionary than any of the Continental leaders—in England. 
 But the sudden and abortive ending of the movement buried many 
 interesting figures in undeserved oblivion, of whom perhaps the 
 most romantic and fascinating, as it seems to me, is Louis Bautain, 
 “the philosopher of Strasbourg.” In him, the most diverse intel- 
 lectual currents of the century, coming from both sides of the 
 Rhine, met and mingled to form a system of Christian philosophy 
 which in scope and plan, if not, alas, in execution, deserves to be 
 compared with the great systems of the Alexandrian fathers and 
 of the Scholastics. The critical philosophy of Kant and the specu- 
 lative systems of the post-Kantian Idealists; Scotch realism and 
 French traditionalism; the influence of Pascal, Descartes, and Male- 
 branche; classical Platonism modified by the influence of St. Au- 
 gustine and the German Romanticists; Christian mysticism, and 
 Jewish Cabalism; a first-hand knowledge of biology and genetic 
 psychology—all these elements went into Bautain’s melting-pot, 
 where they were refined by a most acute and critical intelligence 
 and fused by the ardor of a passionately religious spirit. Known 
 to Catholics as the protagonist of an obscure heresy called fideism, 
 of which he was never guilty in the form alleged; known to 
 Protestants, if at all, as a clerical reactionary of the school of 
 de Bonald and de Maistre—never was a philosophical genius more 
 grossly misunderstood by posterity. Yet his ideas, travelling sub- 
 terraneously through the works of one of his pupils, Father Gratry, 
 have exercised a profound influence upon the subsequent history of 
 Catholic thought in France. It is in the hope of reinstating Bau- 
 tain in his proper position in the history of religious thought that 
 the following pages are written. 
 
 My contention is, in brief, that Bautain represents a most inter- 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 esting modification of the Platonic strain in Christian thought, 
 under the combined influence of Kant, German Romanticism, and 
 French Traditionalism; that he initiated an anti-intellectualistic, 
 intuitionistic, voluntaristic tendency in, French Catholic thought 
 which still persists in the school of the “Philosophy of Action’’; 
 that, through this school, he stands in an ancestral relation to 
 French Catholic Modernism (much as Newman does to English 
 Catholic Modernism); that, finally, through this same line of 
 descent, he is to be reckoned among the progenitors of that great 
 anti-intellectualistic movement of recent years which in France is 
 associated with the name of Bergson, but which in Anglo-Saxon 
 countries goes by the name of Pragmatism. 
 
 This last point perhaps demands a word of explanation. Posi- 
 tivistic Pragmatists of the Dewey school will doubtless resent the 
 insinuation that a Catholic apologist is to be numbered among their 
 intellectual ancestors. “Their ancestors, they will insist, were all 
 good sober English empiricists and utilitarians like Hume and Mill; 
 there is no blot of mysticism or romanticism in their ’scutcheon; 
 if any Frenchman has influenced them, it is Auguste Comte. Quite 
 so; but let it be remembered that the Pragmatist movement, in its 
 inception, was by no means the cautious, severely scientific tendency 
 into which it has now evolved—or degenerated. It was a bold, head- 
 strong revolt against all rationalism, intellectualism, and scholastic 
 logic-chopping; and, in that revolt, scientific empiricism and relig- 
 ious mysticism fought side by side. The left-wing Pragmatism of 
 Peirce and Dewey was indeed the legitimate offspring of nine- 
 teenth-century empiricism, utilitarianism, and positivism; but the 
 right-wing Pragmatism of James, Schiller, and other religious 
 thinkers owed its origin to a more complex union of tendencies. 
 M. Berthelot has clearly showed, in his brilliant analysis of the 
 antecedents of Pragmatism (Un Romantisme Utilitaire), that if 
 we are to understand the relation of Pragmatism to preceding 
 philosophies we must study the vitalistic and voluntaristic tendencies 
 of German idealism, and not confine our attention to the Anglo- 
 Saxon side of the family tree. If, then, it is permissible to cite 
 such men as Kant, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Maine de Biran, Ravaisson 
 and Renouvier when making a list of the forerunners of Prag- 
 matism, it is equally permissible to cite the name of Bautain. One 
 
x THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 thing is certain, at any rate: that William James, in the Preface 
 to his lectures on “Pragmatism,” referred to Blondel and Le Roy, 
 the spiritual successors of Bautain, in terms which indicated that 
 he regarded them as comrades and companions-at-arms in the Prag- 
 matist crusade. 
 
 My thanks are due to M. le Professeur Gilson of the Sorbonne, 
 who first called my attention to Bautain; to M. le Supérieur Saba- 
 tier of the College of Juilly, and M. Abbé Laberthonniére, who 
 gave me a delightful day at the old college, and much help in 
 tracing Bautain’s influence; above all, to M. l’Abbé Eugéne Baudin, 
 professor of philosophy in the Faculty of Catholic Theology at 
 Strasbourg University, who put at my disposal his large collection 
 of Bautainiana, and. who has been giving me valuable advice and 
 assistance ever since—going so far as to annotate copies of impor- 
 tant Bautain manuscripts for my benefit. I am indebted to Pro- 
 fessors W. T. Bush of Columbia.and R. B. Perry of Harvard for 
 reading and criticizing my manuscript, to my friend Professor 
 Ross Collins of Syracuse for helping me with the proof-reading, 
 and to Professor Arthur H. Nason and Miss Hannah E. Steen of 
 the New York University Press for their efficient editorial over- 
 sight. “Throughout the progress of my research, I should have 
 fared ill without the constant and patient collaboration of my wife. 
 
 W.M. H. 
 
 Cape Porpoise, Maine. 
 August 19, 1926. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Rn PIRATE teen ny AL Aer ea MLA us Mla a A soa 1h vil 
 
 PMR CES UACHUSL IANS Win ees 1 gcc ets ignated ieke Gon als eye aa doaade Mae beta Re A ee 3 
 I. Catholic Thought in France under the Napoleonic Régime: 
 
 Them Teet Oli PACLTOT alist severe caer tte eke tartrate sn 3 
 
 Revival of Catholicism in France at beginning of nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Frayssinous, only clerical philosopher worthy of note during 
 Napoleonic period. Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme and its 
 significance. The Traditionalism of de Bonald and de Maistre. 
 
 II. Catholic Thought in France under ‘the Restoration: the 
 Diiheta Zinio yOrmar LacicLonal sti Moir vie, cut i. Oa 16 
 
 Lamennais’s Essai sur Pindifférence en matiéere de religion. Demo- 
 cratic and liberal tendencies implicit in the Essai. Ballanche. 
 
 III. The Religious and Philosophical Situation in France in 
 1833: the Decline of Traditionalism and the Rise of Lib- 
 rahe OER OMIGISH) Ganicge TAA Lek aise ed ano ik ae nce deg Laker 25 
 
 The Traditionalist apologetic inopportune after the Revolution of 
 1830. Lamennais’s change of front. The Political liberalism of 
 PAvenir and Ere Nouvelle. Prevailing philosophical tendencies; 
 triumph of Cousin’s Eclecticism over the Sensualism of Condillac 
 and the Scotch realism of Royer-Collard. Need of a new Catholic 
 apologetic to meet the new philosophical situation. The Abbé Bau- 
 tain and his attack upon the old apologetics. 
 
 IV. Main Currents in German Catholic Thought, 1800-1833 36 
 Parallels and contrasts between the Catholic revival in France and 
 the Catholic revival in Germany. Romanticism and Catholicism. 
 Three main tendencies in German Catholic Thought at this period. 
 Hermes and the school of Bonn. Giinther and the school of Vienna. 
 Schelling, Baader, and the school of Munich. The Tiibingen school. 
 The school of Mayence and its relation to the school of Strasbourg. 
 
 CuapTer I. Louis Bautain: The Odyssey of an Ardent Soul... 56 
 Early life. Relations with Cousin, Jouffroy, and Damiron at the 
 Ecole Normale. Thesis, De idealismo et phaenomenismo. Becomes 
 teacher of philosophy at Strasbourg; Fichte’s influence upon him 
 predominant at this period. Nervous breakdown; Mlle. Humann 
 rescues him from suicide and converts him to Catholicism. Course 
 in Metaphysics, 1821-22, marks conversion. Founding of the ‘Stras- 
 bourg School”; period of greatest influence. Controversy with the 
 Bishop of Strasbourg. Philosophie du Christianisme. Recantation. 
 Break-up of the Strasbourg School. Publication of Bautain’s philo- 
 sophical works; their complete failure to attract attention. Choses 
 de Pautre monde. 
 
 iAerEmit a habtain 4872 .Panvitalisties. .... Gisoyos oe ce, ae 102 
 Bautain as a system-builder. His central idea, life as conditional 
 
 spontaneity. Formulated most exactly in the Propositions générales 
 sur la vie. Bautain’s panvitalism. Four other ideas of great im- 
 
Xu 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 portance in his system: (1) the idea of Nature; (2) the idea of 
 Being, or God; (3) the idea of Man; (4) the idea of Rapport. 
 Ethical and political implications of the idea of life as rapport, or 
 limited spontaneity. Religious implications. Educational implications. 
 
 CHAPTER LLL. Bautain 1a a sVOlUNtaLISt. os tk ee eee 
 
 iD 
 
 II. 
 
 III. 
 
 CuapTer IV. Bautain’s Place in the History of Thought 
 
 I. 
 
 Il. 
 
 If. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Bautain’s Critique of the Reason: His Anti-Intellectualism 
 Genetic psychology of the knowing process: priority of will over 
 intellect. Reason and intelligence: Bautain as an intuitionist. Rea- 
 son and faith: Bautain as a fideist. Reason and revelation: Bautain 
 as a traditionalist. Final upshot of Bautain’s critique of the reason. 
 
 Bautain’s Theory of Truth and Certitude: His Semi-Prag- 
 MALiSMT Gaye eee ee Che GN ier a ee oo ae 
 
 The meaning of truth. The psychology of certitude. The criterion 
 of truth: Bautain and William James. 
 
 The Apologetics of the Heart and the Apologetics of the 
 Intelligence’ jr tps, tas al) SOs sees ates rer aU ee 
 
 The apologetics of the heart illustrated in the Philosophie du Chris- 
 tianisme. Relation to the apologetics of the intelligence. Theology, 
 philosophy, and science. The method of analogy. Bautain and the 
 old apologetics: rejection of the cosmological and teleological argu- 
 ments, and the argument from miracle. Why did the Church reject 
 the new apologetics? 
 
 Bautain and His Contemporaries 
 
 His critique of eighteenth-century philosophy. Critique of the Scotch 
 school. Critique of German Idealism and French Eclecticism. Cri- 
 tique of Scholasticism. Critique of Traditionalism. Position of 
 Bautain midway between French Traditionalism and German Catho- 
 lic Romanticism. 
 
 Bautain as an Eclectic: His Philosophy of the History of 
 Thought 
 
 Christian Eclecticism. ‘True and False Philosophy.” Classification 
 of the historic philosophies. Final formula for Bautain’s philosophy. 
 
 Bautain’s Influence upon the Subsequent History of French 
 
 Catholic Thought 
 
 French Catholic Thought in the nineteenth century falls into three 
 main periods; Bautain’s philosophy gives us the epitome of all three. 
 Bautain’s influence upon the dying Traditionalist movement: Bon- 
 netty and the school of Louvain. Influence upon Maret. Upon 
 Gratry. Ollé-Laprune. The Philosophy of Action. Its Relation to 
 Anglo-American Pragmatism and Catholic Modernism. Bautain’s 
 relation to the Modernist movement. The persistence of his influence. 
 
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 af ie: (athe: Ge. (6 te, vga ei) & Se Rie yal @ ie. (6 el a) py ene eae ‘ot Whe © oye hie e) ee re 
 
 PAGE 
 
 142 
 142 
 
 190 
 
 209 
 
 233 
 234 
 
 263 
 
 284 
 
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
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INTRODUCTION 
 
 I 
 
 CaTHOLIC —THOUGHT IN FRANCE UNDER THE NAPOLEONIC 
 REGIME: THE RIsE OF TRADITIONALISM 
 
 T THE DAWN of the nineteenth century, Roman Catholicism 
 seemed to have lost its hold upon the French people. In 
 the eyes of the average citizen of the Republic, the Church 
 
 stood condemned because of its close association with the Old 
 Régime. Public worship was no longer proscribed, as it had been 
 from 1792 to 1795; but many of the clergy were still in exile 
 or in prison because of their hostility to the new order, and the 
 little bands of the faithful which gathered here and there in private 
 houses and improvised sanctuaries did so under the shadow of public 
 disapproval. In the eyes of the intelligentsia, trained in the school 
 of Diderot, Voltaire, and d’Holbach, historic Christianity, like all 
 “positive” religions, was a vast imposture, devised by clever priests, 
 tending to shackle the intelligence and to put a drag upon all 
 progress. A certain reaction against atheism was visible; the man- 
 date had gone forth that atheism was aristocratic, hence not comme 
 iL faut for good citizens; but it would be going too far to say 
 that this nascent reaction against atheism was, as yet, a reaction 
 toward Catholicism. One professed a certain frigid Deism, after 
 the manner of Voltaire; one admired the creed of the Savoyard 
 Vicar, in Rousseau’s Emile; that was all. No defender of the 
 ancient faith of Christendom had yet arisen who could gain even 
 a hearing in philosophical circles. 
 
 Hardly had the century begun, however, when the winds of 
 public opinion began to shift, and a revival of Roman Catholicism 
 began—a revival which at first took the shape of a formal restora- 
 tion, supported chiefly by political reactionaries, for reasons of state, 
 but which finally, in the period between 1830 and 1848, assumed 
 the proportions of a genuine popular movement. For a time, to- 
 wards the middle of the century, and once again in its closing years, 
 it looked as though, by a process of mutual concessions, a reconcilia- 
 
4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 tion was about: to be effected between the ancient religious heritage 
 of France on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the secular 
 humanitarianism, secular science, and secular philosophy which in 
 the eighteenth century had come into open conflict with religion. 
 A liberalized, popularized, and modernized Catholicism seemed 
 about to become the center of a Christianized civilization. The 
 fact that we are to-day in the midst of a similar religious revival— 
 which likewise threatens to become a mere blind reaction, thus 
 failing to achieve that harmonious cultural synthesis which our 
 distraught and disintegrated civilization so badly needs—should lend 
 a peculiar interest to the history of this earlier movement. We 
 shall concern ourselves here primarily with its intellectual aspects; 
 but some account of its social and political aspects will be neces- 
 sary in order to give the proper perspective. 
 
 It was Bonaparte who began the external rehabilitation of Roman 
 Catholicism. Swept into power on the crest of a wave of reaction, 
 conscious that order and stability were what people craved, he saw 
 in the Catholic Church a powerful stabilizing agency, which, if 
 properly conciliated, might become a useful tool in his hands. 
 Not long after his accession as First Consul, he freed the imprisoned 
 priests, on condition that they should not oppose the Constitution; 
 and he opposed no obstacle to the return of the exiled priests. 
 Then, in swift succession, came the Concordat of 1801, making 
 Catholicism the official religion of France, and the amnesty of 
 1802, which brought back forty thousand emigrant nobles, most 
 of them ardent Catholics. At a stroke, Catholicism was lifted 
 from the depths of humiliation to the heights of eminent re- 
 spectability. 
 
 Much as the Catholics rejoiced at these events, it must be said 
 that the position of the Church under the Consulate and Empire 
 was hardly less humiliating than it had been under the Republic. 
 Then, she had at least preserved the dignity that goes with forti- 
 tude under persecution; now, she had bartered her soul in exchange 
 for temporal advantages, and Mephistopheles himself could not 
 have been more tenacious than Napoleon in holding her to the 
 bargain. He appointed the bishops himself; the captive Pope was 
 forced to confirm the appointments; the bishops appointed the 
 priests; and so the whole Church became an organ of the State. 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 The utterances of the priests were severely censored; a chorus of 
 adoration, fear-inspired, arose from every parish; the Catechism 
 was revised to include a section on love for the Emperor (penalty 
 for sinning against this commandment, eternal damnation) ;* and 
 the Master of Europe could smile with satisfaction as he observed 
 the exemplary loyalty of his clergy. 
 
 Under these circumstances, it was hardly to be expected that any 
 very vigorous or original thinkers should arise among the clergy. 
 Thought was precisely what Napoleon aimed to discourage. Dur- 
 ing the whole Napoleonic period, only one clerical philosopher at- 
 tracted even passing attention: Mer. Frayssinous, whose public 
 lectures at St. Sulpice achieved a considerable popularity between 
 the years 1803 and 1809.? 
 
 He was able [says Damiron] in the presence of an audience of gems 
 du monde, and, especially, young people, to speak in such a way as to get 
 a hearing for the words of a priest and a Catholic: it was no small suc- 
 cess in view of the prevailing state of mind. Adopting a Cartesian 
 position full of modifications and concessions, stripping the Scholastic 
 method of its quibbles and its bad form, he made, with a certain energetic 
 common sense and some conversance with contemporary science, some 
 fairly good objections to the sensualist hypothesis. If, later on, the 
 published lectures did not entirely revive the impression they created 
 when delivered, it was because they were no longer apropos, and because 
 there is nothing sufficiently original and powerful in their thought, and 
 nothing sufficiently distinguished in their style.* 
 
 It will be seen that there was nothing very startling about these 
 lectures; but Napoleon, who was suspicious of “ideology” of any 
 brand, twice put a stop to them: the first time because Frayssinous 
 objected to introducing a plea for conscription into a lecture on 
 the existence of God; the second time because he had protested 
 against the seizure of the Pope.* 
 
 If the clergy were condemned to intellectual sterility under this 
 system of censorship and surveillance, there were at least a few 
 
 *Foisset, Vie du R. P. Lacordaire, 1, Défense du Christianisme (Eng. trans., 
 17, 472. . London, 1836). 
 
 * These lectures, together with a second ’Damiron, Essai sur Vhistoire de la 
 series delivered during the Restoration,  philosophie en France au XIXme siécle, 
 were published in 1825, under the title of | Brussels, 1835, 62. 
 
 ‘ Foisset, op. cit., I, 11, 468-471. 
 
6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 laymen capable of original thinking; and some of them contributed 
 mightily to the Catholic revival. Chief among them were three 
 noblemen: Count Joseph de Maistre, the Viscount de Bonald, and 
 Francois-René de Chateaubriand. I mention de Maistre and de 
 Bonald first, because their earliest apologetical writings antedate 
 Chateaubriand’s; but neither of them attracted public attention till 
 much later.” Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, published 
 in 1802, was really the first effective shot fired by the Catholic 
 party. 
 
 The Génie du Christianisme is of course not a technical philo- 
 sophical work; none the less, it is a landmark in the history of 
 Catholic thought. It is the first systematic attempt to present an 
 apology for religion on the ground of what Rousseau, in a famous 
 remark, called its “utility.” The truth of Christianity is indeed 
 defended, with arguments which, as Masson points out, are largely 
 borrowed from the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith in Rous- 
 seau’s Emile ;° but it is upon the value of Christianity that Chateau- 
 briand chiefly insists: its aesthetic value, as exemplified in the stately 
 ceremonial of the Mass, the majestic architecture of the Gothic 
 cathedrals, and Dante’s Divine Comedy; its moral value, as ex- 
 emplified in the lives of martyrs and missionaries; its social value, 
 as exemplified in the manifold charitable institutions which the 
 Church has fostered. “Even though one should deny the super- 
 natural proofs of Christianity,” says Chateaubriand at the very end 
 of his book, “there would still remain, in the sublimity of its ethics, 
 in the immensity of its benefits, in the beauty of its ceremonial, the 
 sufficient means of proving that it is the divinest and purest form 
 of worship that ever men have practiced.” It is significant that 
 this phrase comes between a quotation from Rousseau and one from 
 Pascal. They, to be sure, are the classic exponents of the “argu- 
 ment from the heart”; but Chateaubriand worked out the argument 
 with such a wealth of detail, and made such an impression on the 
 general public, that he set the style for popular apologetics for 
 almost a century. If the reading of the Emile was for many a 
 
 ° Weill (Histoire du Catholicisme lib- Under the Empire, both lived in com- 
 éral en France, 6) points out that their parative obscurity. 
 influence was at its height during and ®See Masson, Rousseau et la Restaura- 
 even after the period of the Restoration. sion Religieuse. 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 French youth—including Chateaubriand himself—a first step back 
 toward religion, the reading of the Génie du Christianisme was a 
 second and much longer step, that led to the very doors of the 
 Church.‘ 
 
 Traditionalism, as the philosophy of de Maistre and de Bonald 
 came to be called, represents a very different type of apologetics. 
 It does not woo the soul; it storms and threatens. From one 
 point of view, it does not properly belong to the Napoleonic period, 
 for, as has been said, it was practically without influence in France 
 until the Restoration; but it was formulated at this period, and 
 it bears the marks of it: it is essentially an émigré philosophy, born 
 of bitter hostility to the French Revolution and to the philosophy 
 which paved the way for it. 
 
 “Is it possible,” wrote de Maistre to de Bonald after the publi- 
 cation of de Bonald’s Recherches philosophiques, “that Nature could 
 have played such a trick as to stretch two strings as perfectly in 
 tune as your mind and mine? .. . I have thought nothing you 
 have not written; I have written nothing you have not thought.” 
 It is most remarkable that these two men, whose careers kept them 
 widely separated throughout their lives, should have had so much 
 in common. Born in the same year (1754), they both remained 
 obscure personages in remote provincial towns until the Revolution 
 wrecked their fortunes, overturned all the institutions they held 
 dear, and drove them into exile. “Then, simultaneously, in 1796,° 
 they broke into print with books so similar in point of view that 
 they gave the effect of a concerted broadside: de Bonald with 
 his Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société, pub- 
 lished in Constance; de Maistre with his Considérations sur la 
 France, published in Neufchatel. Both books were proscribed by 
 the Directory, and naturally were not widely influential except 
 among émigrés. De Bonald later found favor with Napoleon 
 and returned to France; de Maistre spent most of his life an exile 
 from his native Savoy, as envoy of the King of Sardinia at the 
 Russian court; but in spite of the fact that they never collaborated 
 with one another, their works continued to show a remarkable 
 
 7 One of Bautain’s Jewish converts had Philosophy” led to the third and decisive 
 precisely this experience. For him, con- step of actual submission to the Church. 
 tact with Bautain and the “Strasbourg ® It is true that de Maistre had already 
 
 published some unimportant pamphlets. 
 
8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 degree of unanimity, which naturally augmented as time went on. 
 
 De Bonald and de Maistre are at one in their diagnosis of the 
 disease which caused the break-down of civilization in France in 
 1791: it was all the result of a false philosophy, which, carrying 
 out the principle of the Protestant Reformation, placed its trust in 
 the reason and conscience of the human individual, fancying it 
 could improve upon nature; it substituted a rational, artificially 
 concocted constitution for a divinely ordained social order that had 
 stood the test of the centuries; and it substituted its own wild 
 speculations about the universe for the traditional dogmas of the 
 Catholic Church, the trustee of all Truth. ‘The philosophies of 
 the eighteenth century talked much about Nature, and natural law, 
 and natural religion; but behold how Nature revenges herself 
 upon them, exposing the error of their most unnatural doctrines 
 by their odious consequences! ‘They appealed to reason: let it 
 be proved by reason, then, that authority and faith, not reason, are 
 the only safe guides; that society is not the result of a contract 
 between individuals, but of a primeval fiat of God; that human 
 nature is bad, not good, and the human conscience untrustworthy— 
 hence democracy is doomed to failure and the hope of universal 
 peace and endless progress is a chimera. 
 
 The doctrine which de Bonald and de Maistre both single out 
 as the chief object of their attack is Rousseau’s theory that civilized 
 society arose artificially, by contract, out of an original individual- 
 istic “state of nature,” when all men were free, equal, and virtuous 
 like the happy savages of North America.® They maintain, on the 
 contrary, that the social state is man’s natural state, and that the 
 individual by himself is helpless and morally corrupt. 
 
 Rousseau failed to distinguish, says de Bonald, between man’s 
 native state, which is one of infantile weakness, and his natural 
 state, which is a state of full development only to be reached in 
 society. [he savage state may be man’s native state, but it is not 
 his natural state. De Bonald is fond of citing certain cases of 
 children abandoned in the forest and left to grow up wild, to 
 prove that the individual owes all to society. “Man exists only 
 
 * Rousseau may not have meant. just 
 
 this, but this is how he was understood 
 by both friends and foes. 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 11° “Society 
 
 for society, and society forms him only for herself. 
 is the true and even the sole nature of man.’ As for the con- 
 tract theory, history and logic are both against it. As far back 
 as we may look, we shall always find man living in society and 
 subject to environment; and a contract, by very definition, pre- 
 supposes the existence of a regulative power to whose authority 
 the parties may appeal in case of violation. Hence power, not con- 
 tract, is the “principle constitutive of society.”** In the family, 
 the simplest society we know, not liberty and equality, but inequality 
 and subjection to authority, are the rule. Without inequality and 
 subjection, no society. 
 De Maistre seconds de Bonald most vigorously. 
 
 Man [he says] can modify everything within the sphere of his activity, 
 but he creates nothing; such is his law, in the physical as in the moral 
 realm. Man can of course plant a seedling, grow a tree, and perfect 
 it by grafting and pruning in a hundred ways; but he has never fancied 
 that he had the power of making a tree. How has he come to imagine 
 that he had that of making a constitution? 1° 
 
 In other words, stable constitutions are always the product of 
 growth; they do not originate in any such artificial processes as 
 Rousseau’s contract or the deliberations of the Constituent As- 
 sembly. Artificially formulated constitutions have now proved 
 themselves essentially unstable; “‘as they were without roots in the 
 country and were only placed upon the soil instead of being planted 
 there, they were carried away by the slightest breath of air.”** A 
 side reference is clearly intended to Montesquieu, whom both our 
 authors berate for trying to transport English institutions to France. 
 
 It was not only established institutions that eighteenth-century 
 philosophy presumed to question: it was established religious dogmas 
 as well. De Bonald and de Maistre are convinced that the calami- 
 ties of the French Revolution sprang quite as much from skepticism 
 in religion and ethics as from radicalism in politics; and they attack 
 the human reason on both counts, declaring that it is just as in- 
 competent to discover the truth about the Universe as it is incom- 
 
 De Bonald, Théorie du Pouvoir, Pré- "Principe constitutif de la société, 
 faces... chap. v1. 
 ™ Recherches philosophiques, chap. x1. 8 Considérations sur la France, chap. v1. 
 
 Delbos, Philosophie Francaise, 288. 14 Ibid. 
 
10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 petent to frame a scheme of government. Over against human 
 reason they set divine revelation, embodied in authoritative tradition, 
 which they trace back to a primitive Golden Age when man learned 
 from the lips of God those salutary principles which are the basis 
 of the moral and social order. ‘They arrive at this common result 
 by two somewhat different lines of reasoning. 
 
 De Bonald starts by accepting the empiricist theory of knowledge, 
 and drawing an unexpected conclusion therefrom. According to 
 the Lockian theory, all our ideas are the product either of our 
 own sense-perception or of instruction. “The moral and religious 
 ideas which some have tried to defend by calling them innate, have 
 all been taught us; hence they are not sacrosanct at all, and may 
 be freely criticized. De Bonald agrees that environment and educa- 
 tion account for all our ideas, and that our moral and religious 
 ideas, as well as all our general ideas, are of social origin and not 
 the product of observation; but he draws the conclusion that they 
 are therefore sacrosanct. “The empiricists based their liberal con- 
 clusion on the observation that moral and religious ideas vary from 
 place to place, and, hence, must be of human invention; de Bonald 
 bases his conservative conclusion on the observation that a certain 
 unity underlies all this diversity, suggesting the theory of a primi- 
 tive uniform tradition afterwards corrupted. 
 
 He establishes this theory of a primitive revelation with the 
 aid of his famous theory of language. Comparative philology 
 was just at this time bringing to light the hitherto unnoticed 
 likenesses between the different Aryan tongues, due in fact to 
 their common origin. The conclusion was irresistible: all man- 
 kind had once spoken a single language, the vehicle of a common 
 stream of tradition. If language (that is, education) is the sole 
 source of our moral and religious ideas, this original language 
 is the fountain-head of all truth—for to de Bonald, unity and in- 
 variability are signs of truth, and diversification is always corrup- 
 tion. The problem of finding the truth to-day is simply the prob- 
 lem where the original line of tradition is preserved pure and 
 unaltered. The answer is, of course, in the Jewish-Christian 
 tradition of which the Church is the custodian. 
 
 But why credit our remote ancestors with omniscience? If the 
 human race all springs from a single stock, it goes without saying 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 that there was a common language and common tradition at first; 
 but why may that language and the ideas it conveyed not have 
 been of purely human invention, and hence no vehicle of infallible 
 truth at all? That language was a human invention like printing 
 or writing was indeed the view of most eighteenth-century philoso- 
 phers. Against this view, de Bonald levels his bitterest sarcasms. 
 As if man could ever have emerged from a state of speechlessness 
 by his own efforts! As if savages could ever have invented lan- 
 guage, when the most learned grammarians cannot fully compre- 
 hend all the cunning mechanism of it, or exhaust the wealth of 
 meaning embodied in our commonest and most ancient words! 
 For, mark you, says de Bonald, the earliest languages of which we 
 have any knowledge are just as complete as the latest, in their 
 complex adaptation to all the needs of thought; and the most 
 ancient languages contain the greatest store of hidden wisdom. 
 Everything points to the theory that the original language, which 
 contained the sum of all wisdom, was taught to the first man by 
 his Creator. 
 
 Psychological considerations lead to the same conclusion with 
 even more rigorous certainty. It is a common fallacy that thought 
 without language is possible. So it is, so far as thought based upon 
 sense-images is concerned. But, as Rousseau said, ““When the im- 
 agination stops, the mind proceeds only with the aid of discourse”’; 
 which implies that thought about moral and religious verities, and 
 all things lying above the plane of the senses, is possible only when 
 our fellows have first communicated to us the materials for such 
 thought by means of language. Speech is to the faculty of learn- 
 ing such verities, what light is to the eye: without it we should 
 be incapable of thinking such thoughts, as without light we should 
 be blind. “ZL’on pense sa parole avant de parler sa pensée.” Hence 
 Wwe may see the force in Rousseau’s famous remark that “speech 
 appears to have been very necessary to establish the use of speech’’; 
 for 1f thought is in general impossible without the use of words, 
 the supposed inventors of language could never have thought of 
 the idea unless they already possessed language. Man acquires, 
 and originally acquired, the faculties of speaking and thinking only 
 by being spoken to—because “on lui avait parlé.” ‘Thanks be 
 to God for the indefinite pronoun on!” de Maistre once interjected 
 at this stage in the argument; for the climax is now at hand: 
 
| he THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Who was it who created speech and thought in primitive man by 
 first speaking to him? Why, God, of course; there was no one 
 elseito; dots LOWED, 
 
 It is a curious fact that de Maistre, who seeks to support the 
 same theory of a primitive revelation and a primitive tongue, starts. 
 out from precisely the opposite premises. Instead of accepting the 
 empiricist epistemology of Locke and Condillac, he attacks it-most 
 bitterly as the source and foundation of the political and philo- 
 sophical liberalism of the eighteenth century—which indeed it was. 
 Locke is his béte notre; with the clairvoyance of hate, he perceives. 
 what Santayana is fond of pointing out: that Locke’s psychology 
 was a “malicious psychology,” designed less to serve the cause of 
 pure science than to serve the cause of free speech and free criti- 
 cism. If man’s moral and political notions have been learned, 
 they may be unlearned; and if man created them, he may re-create 
 them. In opposition to Locke, de Maistre takes up the cudgels in 
 defense of the doctrine of innate ideas. His defense is very in- 
 genious and profound, and perhaps keeps much closer to the facts 
 of life than the somewhat ponderous and artificial theory of Kant, 
 which it much resembles. 
 
 He points out how helpless the Lockian epistemology is to deal 
 with the phenomenon of imstinct, and into what absurdities it falls 
 when it tries to handle it. Locke, he relates, was once asked by 
 Coste, the French translator of the Essay, how he would answer 
 the objection that if a chicken flees from a hawk without ever 
 having met one before, many human actions may also be accounted 
 for by innate tendencies antecedent to all experience. At this 
 Locke got angry, and replied brusquely, “I did not write my book 
 to explain the actions of beasts.” ‘“Supiter, tu te faches, tu as donc 
 tort!” exults de Maistre. In truth, Locke had reason to be vexed 
 at the question. Had he answered consistently with his theory, he 
 would have had to give some such absurd response as Condillac 
 
 actually did give: 
 
 The beast will flee because he has seen others devoured. . . . With 
 regard to animals which have not seen their fellows devoured, one may 
 with good reason believe that their mothers must from the first have 
 urged them to flee.?5 
 
 15 . * + . . 
 Essai sur Porigine des connaissances humaines, sec. 11, chap. 1v. 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 Nothing can be clearer, on the contrary, says de Maistre, than 
 that the factor of instinct is always to be reckoned with, side by 
 side with the factor of experience (if experience be defined as the 
 combined influence of environment and education), and that the 
 total knowledge which the beast or the man gets as he passes through 
 life varies even more with the innate instinct factor than with the - 
 experience factor. “Take as a test case, he suggests, a situation 
 where a man and a beast have an experience together: let us say, 
 a man and his dog witnessing a public execution: 
 
 When the executioner lifts his arm [says de Maistre] the animal, if 
 he is near, may jump aside for fear the blow is intended for him; if he 
 sees blood, he may quiver, but no more than at the butcher’s. There his 
 knowledge stops, and all the efforts of his intelligent instructors, em- 
 ployed incessantly for centuries and centuries would never carry him 
 beyond that; the ideas of morality, sovereignty, crime, justice, public 
 authority, etc., which are attached to this sad spectacle, are non-existent 
 for him. All the signs of these ideas surround him, touch him, press: 
 upon him, so to speak; but in vain, for no sign can exist where the idea 
 does not preéxist. . . . Who will dare say to you that a volcano, a water- 
 spout, an earth quake, etc., are not for me precisely what the execution 
 is for my dog? I understand about these phenomena what I am de- 
 signed (dois) to understand; that is, all that is in relation with my innate 
 ideas which constitute my status as aman. The rest is a closed book.1® 
 
 Having established the all-important réle of innate instinct in 
 the knowing process, de Maistre proceeds to assert the superiority 
 of instinctive knowledge or “intuition” to artificial knowledge or 
 science, arrived at by a process of discursive reasoning. Even in 
 the realm of science, he points out, discoveries are not made by 
 any such cautious, ponderous process of exhaustive induction as 
 Francis Bacon describes; they are the result of sudden flashes of 
 insight. Not Bacon, but men like Kepler and Galileo are the real 
 founders of modern science. It is absurd of Bacon to discourage 
 conjecture: “‘As if man were not condemned to conjecture un- 
 ceasingly! as if one could take a step in the sciences without con- 
 jecturing! as if, in fine, the art of conjecturing were not the most 
 distinctive characteristic of the man of genius in every field!”’?” 
 Especially in the realm of morals and religion is this the case; 
 
 ° Soirées de St.-Pétersbourg, 1842 edi- 
 
 ™ Philosophie de Bacon, chap.1, 34-35. 
 tion, Vol. I, 5th Conversation, 287, 288. 
 
14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 there, the instincts of the race, embodied in tradition and custom, 
 are far more worthy of trust than the reasonings of philosophers— 
 as the French Revolution has proved. 
 
 But if instinct and intuition are sources of truth, why should 
 not the individual be permitted to criticize tradition? If the 
 rationalistic philosopher is to be muzzled, should not the prophet 
 and the genius be left free? and may we not expect new light 
 from them in the sphere of religion and morals, as well as in 
 science? Here is a real inconsequence in de Maistre’s thinking, 
 which springs from his effort to effect a synthesis between two 
 inconsistent philosophies, traditionalism and mysticism. It has 
 frequently been pointed out that, so far as his doctrine of intuition 
 is concerned, de Maistre is heavily indebted to Saint-Martin, the 
 eighteenth-century theosophist and illuminé. Now Saint-Martin 
 believed in the immediate apprehension of truth in the religious 
 sphere, through mystic illumination, which made authoritative 
 tradition and all other second-hand knowledge unnecessary. Here 
 de Maistre parts company with Saint-Martin. Neither mystic in- 
 sight nor reason, but authority, is to him “‘the motive of decision 
 which ought to precede all others.”** Why? Because the age of 
 inspiration was at the beginning of history, before man’s sin had 
 corrupted his instincts. “To-day, man is a fallen creature, to whom 
 occasional sporadic flashes of insight come, to remind him of his 
 former state of perfect beatific vision, but condemned for the most 
 part to plod along with the aid of discursive reason, taking as the 
 chief guide of life that body of tradition which has come down to 
 him from a happier epoch. | 
 
 It will be observed that de Maistre’s account of the origin of 
 tradition is somewhat different from de Bonald’s. The original 
 deposit of truth was not dictated to man by God, and passed on 
 by word of mouth (thus forever remaining in the class of hearsay 
 information); but, on the contrary, it was intuitively apprehended. 
 The Golden Age was an age when man was immediately conscious 
 of God, and perceived all truth at a glance, without the necessity 
 of reasoning about it. De Maistre argues that men’s knowledge 
 in the antediluvian period must have been stupendous, in order to 
 draw down upon them such a stupendous punishment as the Flood; 
 
 18 ae : 
 Soirées, I, 2nd Entretien, 132. 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 for moral responsibility is directly proportional to knowledge. 
 Again, all the ancients have the tradition of a Golden Age; and 
 archaeology is making us acquainted with the wisdom of the Etrus- 
 cans and the Egyptians. ‘The Orient seems to have been the theatre 
 of this earliest civilization, and it is thus a significant fact that 
 Orientals have shown so little aptitude for our Western sciences, 
 based as they are so largely upon discursive reasoning. “One 
 would say that they still remember primitive science and the era 
 of intuition.” 
 
 The theory of language has an important place in de Maistre’s 
 argument, as in de Bonald’s. He expresses regret that we do not 
 have more nearly complete knowledge of the languages of savages; 
 he believes they would reveal unexpected traces of the primitive 
 unity of tongues. But the savages are not to be described as primi- 
 tive people; they are rather to be thought of as degenerates. “‘It is 
 the last degree of degeneration (abrutissement) that Rousseau and 
 his kin call the state of nature.”’ Hence their languages are rem- 
 nants and not rudiments of more developed tongues. Following up 
 the vague traces of unity discoverable in even these degenerate 
 tongues, and setting them alongside the more impressive evidences 
 of an original unity underlying all the languages of the civilized 
 peoples, both ancient and modern, we shall be able to make a col- 
 lection of truly primitive words—words not only common to all 
 languages, but full of a mysterious wisdom, often quite foreign to 
 the people who used the word! 
 
 The farther one goes back [says de Maistre] toward those times of 
 ignorance and barbarism which saw the birth of the languages, the more 
 logic and profundity one will find in the formation of words; and... 
 this talent disappears by a contrary gradation as one comes back toward 
 the epochs of civilization and science.** 
 
 The word-making powers of the men of de Maistre’s Golden 
 Age were as instinctive as their other powers; language originated 
 not by a long process of laborious “invention” but by a sudden and 
 spontaneous outburst, under the influence of the divine Word. 
 The growth of language is a natural social process, like the growth 
 
  Soirées, II, 95. *1 Thid., 118. 
 » Thid., 100. 
 
16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 of political constitutions. De Maistre shows a somewhat amusing 
 antipathy for scientific terms and other invented words, parallel 
 to his antipathy for invented constitutions. 
 
 On the whole, it must be said that de Maistre’s views, as regards 
 the origin of language, traditions, and institutions, and as regards 
 the theory of knowledge, are much more plausible than de Bonald’s. 
 The latter felt the influence of the former, and in his Législation 
 primitive he at length came out in favor of the existence of innate 
 ideas;** but it must be pointed out that he thus seriously weakened 
 Traditionalism as an argument for political absolutism and theoc- 
 racy, for he was making a concession to the spontaneity of the 
 individual. De Maistre in turn seemed to feel the weakness in his 
 position, and came more and more to combine his form of the 
 argument for a primitive revelation with the Bonaldian form.” 
 Thus an ambiguity was introduced into the Traditionalist position; 
 it may mean either the necessity of accepting tradition blindly, or 
 the superiority of intuition over reason. In the former case, it is 
 a powerful argument for political and religious autocracy; but it 
 is a harder position to maintain. In the latter case, it is an easier 
 position to maintain, but it has democratic implications. We shall 
 see some of these implications becoming explicit in Lamennais, 
 Ballanche, and Bautain. 
 
 II 
 
 CATHOLIC THOUGHT IN FRANCE UNDER THE RESTORATION: 
 ‘THE LIBERALIZING OF TRADITIONALISM 
 
 ‘The chief works of de Bonald and of de Maistre appeared not 
 during the Empire, but during the early years of the Restoration. 
 It was then that their influence began to be felt; for all Europe 
 was swept by a wave of political and religious reaction, and clutched 
 eagerly at their theories to justify itself. But side by side with 
 these bitterly reactionary writings appeared writings of another 
 temper, coming from a younger and more forward-looking gen- 
 eration, repeating much the same doctrines, but in a more moderate 
 
 For de Maistre’s acknowledgement * For a case in point, see sbid., I, 105- 
 
 of this change in de Bonald’s attitude, 106. 
 see ibid., I, 149, note 2. 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 and conciliatory tone. The most noteworthy of these younger 
 writers were Lamennais and Ballanche. 
 
 Not that the initial impression they created was one of modera- 
 tion or conciliation! Never was such a bomb-shell hurled by the 
 theocratic party into the camp of the enemy as when the first volume 
 of Lamennais’s Essai sur DPindifférence en matiére de religion 
 appeared in 1818! Coming at a time when the Catholic clergy 
 seemed sunk in intellectual torpor, this vigorous book, written by 
 an obscure Breton priest, created a most startling impression. 
 
 One hundred fourteen years [writes Lacordaire] had passed over the 
 tomb of Bossuet; seventy-six over that of Massillon. For seventy-six 
 years, then, 0 Catholic priest in France had obtained renown as a writer 
 or as @ great man. . . . Enthusiasm and gratitude knew no bounds; truth 
 had been waiting so long for a champion! In a single day, M. de la 
 Mennais, unknown yesterday, found himself invested with the mantle 
 ( puissance) of Bossuet.** 
 
 Frayssinous, then in the midst of his second series of conferences, 
 perceived that a greater than he was at hand. ‘‘He must increase 
 and I must decrease,” he is reported to have said. De Bonald 
 and de Maistre sought to ally themselves with Lamennais, and 
 collaborated with him in the Conservateur. The fame of the 
 Essai spread all over the Continent; a little later, it was recounted 
 that Pope Leo XII had set up just two objects on the wall of his 
 cabinet, opposite the crucifix: the image of the Holy Virgin, and 
 the portrait of Lamennais! 
 
 What was the argument which created so much stir? It may 
 be summed up in the striking phrase with which the second chapter 
 opens: “QOne finds Religion near the cradle of all peoples, as one 
 finds Philosophy near their tomb.” The principle of Religion, 
 dependence upon and subjection to a higher power, is at the founda- 
 tion of every stable social order; the principle of Philosophy, the 
 self-sufficiency of the individual reason, is the very essence of 
 anarchy. Hence, whenever the influence of Religion is weakened 
 by the fatal admission of the principle of free discussion, the seeds 
 of the destruction of society are sown, since the willingness to sub- 
 
 "4 Considérations sur la systéme de M. 
 de la Mennais, 35. 
 
18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 mit to authority is sure to diminish and disappear. Once grant 
 this, and you must embrace Ultramontane Catholicism; for, if 
 you believe in the social utility of religion and yet do not believe 
 in its truth, you are sure to destroy its social utility. The people 
 soon detect the hypocrisy of those rulers who attempt to impose 
 a faith they do not sincerely feel. If, therefore, both rulers and 
 people must be sincerely religious if society is not to perish, what 
 then? ‘They can embrace neither natural religion nor Protestant- 
 ism, for both admit the destructive principle of free discussion. 
 Therefore they must submit themselves to the supreme spiritual 
 authority of the Pope. And, as Lamennais himself later summed 
 up the remainder of the argument, 
 
 Whoever separates himself from the Catholic Church is necessarily 
 either a heretic, a deist, or an atheist. . . . The heretic, the deist, and 
 the atheist, starting from a common principle, the sovereignty of the 
 human reason, suppose that every man, all faith and authority set aside, 
 must find the truth by his unaided reason, or, what is the same thing, 
 with the aid of Scripture interpreted by the unaided reason. . . . This 
 principle necessarily leads the consistent heretic to deism, the deist to 
 atheism, the atheist to absolute scepticism.”° 
 
 The epistemological part of the argument, here hinted at, was 
 not completely worked out in the first volume, which stressed the 
 argument from social utility. 
 
 / 
 
 Europe [says Lacordaire] was waiting for the continuation of the 
 work.—The author had as yet merely established the importance and 
 necessity of faith. . . . What was the authority that must regulate the 
 human reason? .. . After two years of expectation, the second volume 
 of the Essai was published. Nothing could depict the surprise it pro- 
 duced. From the heights of the classic defence of the faith, M. de la 
 Mennais had descended to the arid discussions of philosophy. The 
 
 solution he proposed violently divided men’s minds.*° 
 
 A storm of criticism arose both from the freethinkers and from 
 the theologians; but de Bonald wrote Lamennais to “let all those 
 frogs croak,” de Maistre advised him not to take the trouble to reply, 
 and a multitude of young priests embraced the new doctrine en- 
 thusiastically, as a sort of gospel. It was current talk that only 
 
 25 , ° 
 Défence de Essai, chap. x. *® Loc. cit. 
 
INTRODUCTION “19 
 
 the opposition of the French Government robbed him of being 
 awarded the red hat.” 
 
 In this second volume, Lamennais attacks all philosophers, even 
 religious philosophers, who “claim that each man, considered in- 
 dividually and without relation to his fellows, may find certitude 
 in himself.”°* Passing in review all the chief theories of knowl- 
 edge—empiricism, idealism, and rationalism or dogmatism—he 
 urges that neither the sense-perceptions nor the “internal impres- 
 sions’ nor the.reasonings of the individual in his solitude, apart 
 from the confirmatory testimony of his fellows, can lead to cer- 
 titude. All individualistic theories of knowledge, as a matter of 
 fact, lead to absolute skepticism, as might be expected; for the 
 whole process of abstracting oneself from society and tradition of 
 which Descartes’ philosophical self-discipline is the classic example, 
 is essentially absurd and unnatural. Philosophy’s whole method of 
 truth-seeking is wrong, thinks Lamennais; and so he passes a sweep- 
 ing condemnation on all philosophy. ‘“The object of philosophy is 
 the quest of truth, and almost all the errors which are in the world, 
 
 and especially the most dangerous ones, are born of this vain 
 
 quest.”’*° 
 
 But though philosophy logically leads to skepticism, we are not 
 
 skeptics. 
 
 Nature does not permit it; she forces us to have faith [says Lamennais]. 
 Man is in a state of natural impotence to demonstrate any truth fully, 
 and an equal impotence to refuse to admit certain truths... all the 
 truths necessary to our conservation, all the truths whereon the ordinary 
 intercourse of life and the practice of the indispensable arts and crafts 
 are founded. We believe invincibly that there exist bodies endowed 
 with certain properties, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that when we 
 put seed in the ground it will render a harvest. . . . Try to deny the 
 rightfulness of this faith and you prove it by denying it, since to deny it 
 you would have to speak, and consequently believe in speech, believe in 
 its linkage with our thought and the thought of others, believe in your 
 own existence and the existence of other men, etc., etc.°° 
 
 Here, thinks Lamennais, in this irresistible and almost instinctive 
 
 * Ferraz, Traditionalisme et Ultramon- ” Défence, chap. 11, opening sentence. 
 tanisme, 209-210. ° Essai, II, 83, 84. 
 * Essai, I, 91, 92. 
 
20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 tendency to believe certain things—-many of them unprovable—is 
 a source of knowledge far more reliable than either reason or the 
 senses. It is a tendency, be it noted, which does not vary from 
 individual to individual, but is inherent in man as man, and can- 
 not be destroyed without destroying the human intelligence, and 
 life itself. May we not rightly assume that it is rooted in the 
 fact that each creature is equipped, in the very moment of its crea- 
 tion, with the knowledge of certain primal truths, without which 
 it could not exist? ‘“The primal truths it has received constituting 
 its life,” says Lamennais, “‘it is as impossible for it not to admit 
 them or not to believe in them, as not to have been created; and, 
 if it could conquer this vital faith, it would possess the power of 
 sel f-annihilation.””** 
 
 But how are we to recognize these primal truths which we can- 
 not help believing? how distinguish them from the fantasies of 
 the individual reason? In a word, by the criterion of universality 
 or common consent. “Since there is no intellectual life possible 
 without the knowledge of these truths,’ says Lamennais, “they 
 should be found in all intelligences, and are to be recognized by 
 this characteristic of universality.”°** After all, when you come 
 to think it over, common consent, or social corroboration, is the 
 test we all apply when we are seeking to distinguish between hallu- 
 cinations and matters of fact. .Insanity consists precisely in the 
 rejection of this social test of truth, and the persistent clinging to 
 individual impressions and notions which are not shared by our 
 fellows. When, therefore, you wish to test the truth of a given 
 belief, do not reason about it, or attempt to test 1t in your own 
 private experience, but consult the testimony of your fellows. If 
 they unanimously agree, then you will have reached the highest 
 possible degree of certainty with regard to that belief. If the 
 individual human reason is untrustworthy, the general, collective, 
 universal human reason is not. What all men irresistibly believe, 
 is certainly true, because divinely implanted in their very natures. 
 
 What of the truth of the Christian religion and the authority 
 of the Catholic Church, when tested by this standard of universal 
 acceptance and common consent? Here the doctrine of Lamen- 
 
 * Défence, chap. x. ® Ibid. 
 
INTRODUCTION nA! 
 
 nais allies itself with the Traditionalist scheme, but emphasizes 
 certain considerations which had only been hinted at by de Bonald 
 and de Maistre.** As his predecessors had argued from the exist- 
 ence of parallel words in all tongues to the existence of a primitive 
 universal tongue, Lamennais argues from the many similarities 
 which can be traced between all religions to the existence of a 
 primitive universal religion, of which all religions are more or 
 less degenerate forms. De Maistre had said, ‘The ancient tradi- 
 tions are all true; the whole of paganism is only a system of truths 
 which it suffices to set in their place.” Lamennais works this out 
 at length, finding parallels to Christianity everywhere. 
 
 That there can be but one true religion, and that this religion 
 is indispensable to salvation, is evident @ priori from the definition 
 of religion: the ensemble of the relations which exist between 
 God and man, between Creator and creature. These relations are 
 necessary, hence there can be but one true conception of them; 
 they are constitutive of our nature, hence any departure from the 
 one true religion means eventual destruction. Breaking of rela- 
 tions with the physical world means physical death; breaking of 
 relations with society, and through society with God, means moral 
 death. 
 
 But which is the true religion? As we have shown, it cannot 
 be discerned by the individual reason—which at once eliminates 
 natural religion—but only by the authority of the universal con- 
 sent of mankind. Where shall we look for it except in the Catholic 
 Church? Surely not in the Protestant sects, which are only 
 branches of the Catholic Church, blasted by the ravages of indi- 
 vidual reason. Not in Judaism either; for apart from certain 
 universally accepted principles common to all religion, it is marked 
 by an abundance of special rites and customs which have never 
 had more than a local significance. Not in the ethnic faiths; they 
 are to be regarded as variant and more or less degenerate forms of 
 the one true religion. Lamennais takes great pains to minimize 
 the differences between Catholicism and paganism. Paganism is 
 not a unified system like Catholicism, and hence is somewhat de- 
 
 * Besides the influence of the two great briand, and that of the Scotch realism 
 Traditionalists, there is clearly to be seen _ popularized by Royer-Collard. 
 in Lamennais the influence of Chateau- 
 
wie THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 generate; but it is unjust to call it polytheistic or idolatrous. “The 
 worship of lesser “gods” is not inconsistent with the worship of a 
 supreme God—witness the primacy of Zeus—but is merely a cor- 
 ruption of the doctrine of the Mediator. What we call idolatry, 
 says Lamennais, was simply “the worship of good and evil spirits 
 and the worship of men distinguished by striking qualities or 
 venerated for their good deeds; that is, at bottom, the worship of 
 angels and the worship of saints.” As for the Oriental religions, 
 there are to be discerned in all of them the same fundamental 
 doctrines. The Brahm of the Hindus, the Tao of the Chinese, 
 the Knef of the Egyptians, all represent a supreme God identical 
 with the Christian God. Belief in immortality, in the moral law, 
 in the Fall, in the Incarnation, in the efficacity of worship and 
 sacrifice, are universally found. ‘The true and universal religion 
 is what, therefore? Not any one religion, but the universal ele- 
 ment in all religions, the universal faith of the human species, 
 which is found in a fragmentary form in all places and all times, 
 but has been called Christianity since Christ came in the flesh. 
 The authority of the Catholic Church rests upon the fact that it is 
 the heir of all human tradition, and teaches a completely compre- 
 hensive and universal faith. “The universal human reason speaks 
 through the Pope.** How plausible this contention is, may perhaps 
 be indicated by the recent remark of a Protestant student of com- 
 parative religion: that Catholicism has absorbed so many diverse 
 elements in its long development that it has become the epitome of 
 the whole history of religions, from primitive folk-religion up.” 
 ‘The reader may perhaps observe that although this argument is 
 used to support the authority of the Pope and in general that of 
 the Powers that Be, it is susceptible of being given quite a different 
 twist. For, if all authority rests in the last analysis upon that of 
 the universal human reason, the authority of kings and prelates, 
 being only a delegated authority, may be disputed when it chances 
 to come into conflict with “common sense” or “public opinion.” 
 Lamennais did not yet draw these consequences from his position; 
 but his enemies perceived them, and he himself was destined to 
 ** For this whole doctrine see the Essai, * Heiler, Wesen des Katholizismus. 
 
 Part III, chap. vii1; Part IV, chaps. 11 
 and tv. 
 
INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 draw them not many years later, when changed political circum- 
 stances and the condemnation of Rome brought him into conflict 
 with both kings and prelates as a champion of humanity and democ- 
 racy. Even in the £ssaz, a certain democratic flavor may be de- 
 tected in those passages where he contrasts the soundness of the 
 religious instincts of the people with the corruption and skepticism 
 of the ruling classes, and points out that the disintegration of the 
 social order usually proceeds from the top down.** And from 
 still another point of view the Essai seems to contain the seeds of 
 the dissolution of absolutism: it is admitted that the universal re- 
 ligion, one in its essence, has taken different forms in different 
 times and places. If that is so, may it not be expected to take new 
 forms in the future, and may not the effort to maintain an un- 
 yielding conservatism in religion and politics be a mistake? That 
 Traditionalism, a philosophy designed to bolster up theocracy and 
 monarchy, could thus turn inside out and become the charter of 
 liberalism, is a striking proof of its instability and ambiguity as a 
 system. The well-known fact that Auguste Comte was largely 
 indebted to the Traditionalists for some of his most characteristic 
 ideas—among them that of the “Religion of Humanity’—is a 
 token of the same sort. 
 
 In the same year (1818), when Lamennais first burst into 
 prominence, there appeared a more modest work which received 
 comparatively little attention, but which is decidedly symptomatic 
 of what we have called the “‘iberalizing of Traditionalism.” It 
 was entitled “An Essay on Social Institutions in their Relations 
 with the New Ideas,” and was written by Pierre-Simon Ballanche, 
 an invalid recluse given to the cultivation of literature and philoso- 
 phy. He had been among those who had hoped much of the 
 French Revolution; and even though his experiences at the siege 
 of Lyons, his native city, had bitterly disillusioned him, he had not 
 ceased to believe in the possibility of progress. De Maistre’s 
 Considérations sur la France had convinced him of the folly of 
 the attempt to build a new social order over-night; but he still 
 cherished the hope that liberty and equality might be approached 
 by a process of gradual transformation. During the Empire, this 
 
 ®° See especially various phrases in chap. peuple résiste longtemps 4 influence des 
 1: “Plus attaché 4 ses croyances ... le classes supérieures,” etc. 
 
24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 hope lay dormant; and he sought consolation in the field of litera- 
 ture. Here he produced some minor works, both theoretic and 
 creative, which mark him as one of the pioneers of French Roman- 
 ticism. A gentle sentimentality, caught from Rousseau and 
 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and from certain mystical authors as 
 well, is his prevailing tone in literature and philosophy. The 
 Restoration, with its stable government and liberal charter, realized 
 his ideal, and aroused in him the ambition to attempt a reconcilia- 
 tion of liberty and authority, stability and progress. Accordingly, 
 in the book already referred to, he undertakes to sketch the history 
 of mankind from this liberal-conservative point of view. 
 
 Ballanche agrees with de Maistre in his doctrine of a primitive 
 age of intuition, when divine truth was revealed to our first ances- 
 tors and embodied in the traditions of the race; but he does not 
 think the passing of the age of intuition and the coming of the 
 age of reason any more to be regretted than the passing of child- 
 hood and the coming of manhood. ‘The truth which our ancestors 
 only dimly divined, we may more and more fully come to under- 
 stand. In the childhood of the race, when tradition was still oral, 
 it was doubtless necessary to keep it severely guarded from the 
 ever-present danger of alteration, in the possession of a priestly 
 caste; but the invention of writing obviated this difficulty, and the 
 invention of printing has so multiplied the facilities for intercourse 
 that the danger of error maintaining itself uncontradicted has be- 
 come greatly lessened. ‘The fact that the authority of the guardians 
 of tradition has become divided and diminished is therefore not to 
 be deplored; the people as a whole will ultimately become fit to be 
 its guardian. Ballanche does not mean to imply that perfect free- 
 dom of discussion is desirable. Certain things like honor, patriot- 
 ism, family loyalty, the duty of the individual to serve society, and 
 finally the essential doctrines of religion, are not to be discussed 
 as freely as more secular themes. “Social doctrines,” he says, ‘can 
 never be exposed in their complete nakedness. The statue of Isis 
 was covered with a triple veil: the first was raised by the neophytes; 
 the second, by the priests of the sanctuary; but the third was sacred 
 for all.”*’ Reverence for tradition is right, but tradition itself 
 progresses like the society of which it is the life. 
 
 7 Op. cit., chap. 1, 21. 
 
INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 In thus making room in his philosophy for social and intellectual 
 progress, Ballanche was stretching the framework of ‘Traditional- 
 ism to the breaking-point. “To de Bonald and de Maistre, and to 
 Lamennais in his earlier writings, the very notion of progress is 
 anathema. ‘Io attempt to improve the social order is to find fault 
 with the divine ordinances; to attempt to improve upon the wis- 
 dom of the ancients and the teachings of the Church is both foolish 
 and impious. When, therefore, we find a Catholic layman like 
 Ballanche maintaining that war and capital punishment are both 
 destined to disappear with the growth of popular intelligence and 
 humanitarian feeling; still more, when we find him maintaining 
 in his later work, the Palingénésie Sociale, that the dogmas of 
 religion are themselves subject to the law of progress—the doctrine 
 of eternal punishment, he believes, is destined eventually to be 
 repudiated by the Church—we may reasonably infer from all this 
 that new tendencies are afoot in Catholic circles, which will 
 eventually express themselves in a totally new philosophy. 
 
 III 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL SITUATION IN FRANCE IN 
 1833: rHeE DECLINE OF [TRADITIONALISM AND THE 
 RisE oF LIBERAL CATHOLICISM 
 
 The Restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 had marked a further 
 stage in the external rehabilitation of Catholicism begun by 
 Napoleon. Under the rule of His Most Christian Majesty Louis 
 XVIII, there had been consummated a solemn union of Throne 
 and Altar, this time on a basis of complete mutuality. The prel- 
 ates of the Church gave their unqualified support to the policies 
 of the government, defending them against all the attacks of the 
 Opposition parties; the government, in return, used its authority 
 to carry out the will of the Church—enforcing the observance of 
 Sunday, punishing acts of “sacrilege,” and suspending university 
 professors who expressed unorthodox opinions. Catholicism thus 
 became almost inextricably associated in the public mind with 
 political Conservatism and Legitimism. ‘The Traditionalists did 
 much to confirm this impression, for their defense of Catholicism 
 
26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 was an integral part of their defense of the whole Old Régime. 
 De Bonald himself was no mere theoretician. As a member of 
 the peerage, he voted for the laws suspending the liberty of the 
 press and punishing seditious utterances with deportation; he re- 
 peatedly opposed the teaching even of reading and writing to the 
 common people, on the grounds that the extension of education 
 would endanger social stability. Is it any wonder that the resent- 
 ment of the people was kindled against the Church as well as 
 against the State, and that the Revolution of 1830 overturned the 
 Altar with the Throne?** Is it any wonder that Traditionalism 
 as a method of defending the Catholic Church became increasingly 
 out of date after 1830? 
 
 For three years after the revolution, says Foisset,*? no priest 
 durst appear on the street in clerical garb. “The humiliation of 
 Catholicism seemed as complete as it had been in 1799. But this 
 time the Church showed an unexpected ability to adjust herself to 
 the new situation. Disappointed in the attempt to impose religion 
 upon the French people by force, she undertook the more Christian 
 enterprise of winning them to it by persuasion; and, as a preliminary 
 thereto, she changed her political and philosophical creed, abjuring 
 absolutism and obscurantism, and espousing more liberal and 
 progressive views. 
 
 This change of creed, so far as it really occurred, was not a 
 hypocritical act of expediency; it was brought about by a little 
 group of ardent enthusiasts who had already, before the Revolution, 
 been chafing at the false position in which the Church was placed 
 by her alliance with the State. At their head stood the Abbé de 
 Lamennais himself, who had been going through a rapid process 
 of evolution in his political thinking since the publication of the 
 F’ssai, An Ultramontanist from the start, his primary loyalty was 
 always to religious not to civil authority; and he could not but feel 
 that religion was debased when used by the State for political ends. 
 The ruling classes were not sincerely religious, he perceived; they 
 professed and imposed religion for motives of expediency, but in 
 
 * The pillaging of the Church of St.- sufficiently indicated the temper of the 
 Germain !’Auxerrois, opposite the Louvre, _ people. 
 during the brief period of the Revolution, Vie de Lacordaire, 1, 24. See the 
 whole introductory chapter. 
 
INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 their hearts they were unbelievers, and their unbelief flowed down, 
 in spite of all laws against heresy, through the whole system of 
 public instruction. ‘‘Society,” he charged, in a book published in 
 1826,*° ‘is governed by a systematic atheism; religion is now 
 simply a thing some one administers. It figures in the budget on 
 the same plane with fine arts, theatres, and studs for horse-breed- 
 ing.” The only way to save the youth, said Lamennais, was to 
 take education out of the hands of the State and put it into the 
 hands of the Church. Pending legislation of this sort, there was 
 no resort but to send the children to the petits séminaires intended 
 to give primary education to young candidates for the priesthood, 
 and later to the Jesuit colleges, or anywhere rather than to the 
 University. Great was Lamennais’s indignation when, in 1828, 
 the Martignac ministry published ordinances imposing the Uni- 
 versity régime upon the Jesuit colleges, and restricting the number 
 of pupils to be admitted to the petits séminaires. “The next year he 
 published a book entitled Des Progrés de la Révolution et de la 
 Guerre contre PE glise, in which he demands “liberty” in the field 
 of education—“liberty,” a new war-cry on Catholic lips! To be 
 sure, he takes great pains to distinguish his attitude from that of 
 the out-and-out liberals who stood for the ideals of the French 
 Revolution; and he says that in the early period of human history, 
 when tradition had not yet suffered corruption, it was proper to 
 deny the right of liberty of discussion; but “when a split already 
 exists, when beliefs are divided, and innumerable opinions have 
 succeeded the ancient faith, then unity can be reborn only at the 
 issue of a free combat.” As Catholics, he says, we can associate 
 neither with the liberals nor with the conservatives; we form a 
 group by ourselves, and need to become self-conscious, and to 
 strengthen our intellectual position by a revival of higher education 
 for the clergy, who are only too rightfully accused of being behind 
 the times. This book became the charter of French Liberal 
 Catholicism. 
 
 It is permissible to question the sincerity of a liberalism so ob- 
 viously based upon expediency. It should be said, however, that 
 Lamennais’s political evolution did not stop here, and that associa- 
 
 “De la Religion considérée dans ses 
 rapports avec Vordre politique et civil. 
 
28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 tion with more thorough-going lberals rapidly changed his attitude. 
 Foremost among those who thus influenced him were a brilliant 
 young priest named Lacordaire, and a young nobleman, the Comte 
 de Montalembert. Lacordaire was so disgusted with the reaction- 
 ary tendencies of the French clergy that he thought of emigrating 
 to America, and it was only because Lamennais’s sudden conversion 
 to liberalism gave him new hope that he decided to remain.** 
 Montalembert was the leader of a group of young Catholics who 
 were imbued with revolutionary ideas, and were on intimate terms 
 with members of the Liberal party. If Lamennais was interested 
 in nothing more than liberty for the’ Church, they were sincerely 
 interested in liberty for all. “These three men became the chief 
 collaborators in a Liberal Catholic periodical known as L’Avenir, 
 which began to appear shortly after the revolution of 1830, and 
 which raised a tremendous storm of mingled applause and dissent. 
 
 To analyze the political doctrines of this periodical, or to follow 
 the fortunes of its editors, does not come within our province. 
 Suffice it to say that, if the impetuous Lamennais felt compelled 
 to cut himself off from the Church on account of the stubborn 
 opposition he encountered, the movement of thought which he 
 initiated survived his excommunication. Lacordaire and Montal- 
 embert, ably seconded by men like Ozanam, Maret, and the Vicomte 
 de Melun, succeeded so well in convincing the people that Christ- 
 ianity went hand in hand with liberty and democracy, that in 1848 
 the revolutionaries regarded the clergy as their natural allies, and 
 many black-robed figures were to be seen in the Constituant 
 Assembly. L’Ere Nouvelle, published during the Second Republic 
 by Lacordaire, Ozanam, and Maret, repeated the success of 
 L’ Avenir, and seemed indeed to be a harbinger of a new era when 
 Catholicism should be completely reconciled with modern social 
 and political ideals.*” Engulfed for a time in the wave of reaction 
 that inundated France during the period of the Second Empire, the 
 Liberal Catholic movement still persisted as an undercurrent, and 
 sprang once more into prominence late in the century, when Leo 
 
 * Lacordaire’s temper may be sufficient- “On the social program of the Liberal 
 ly indicated by a bom mot of his which Catholics of ?48, and the reasons for its 
 his enemies were fond of quoting against failure, see Catholicism and the Second 
 him: “I hope to die a penitent Christian French Republic, by Ross Collins, Col- 
 and an impenitent liberal.” umbia University Press, 1923. 
 
INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 XIII began to show democratic sympathies. On its social and 
 political side, Liberal Catholicism is still very much alive—witness 
 M. Marc Sangnier and the Ligue Nationale de la Démocratie— 
 and this is certainly one of the reasons why Catholicism, however 
 it may be scorned by the intellectuals, is so deeply rooted to-day in 
 the affections of the common people of France. 
 
 When Lacordaire spoke of himself as a “liberal,” he meant 
 primarily that he was a political liberal. In general, the Liberal 
 Catholics of *30 and 748, like their modern descendants, had very 
 little theological liberalism about them. ‘Theological and political 
 liberalism do not always go together, as every New Englander 
 knows. The man who is strongly influenced by modern social 
 ideals may be very little influenced by modern science and philoso- 
 phy, and vice versa. Yet there were a few of the Liberal Catholics, 
 such as Maret, who were liberal in both senses—Lamennais himself, 
 after his separation from the Church, became a theological radical 
 as well as a political revolutionary—and there were still others who, 
 while only mildly interested in the political program of their asso- 
 ciates, were vitally concerned with the problem of restating the 
 Catholic faith in terms acceptable to the intelligentsia. It is upon 
 this small but most significant group of theological liberals that 
 We are to center our attention. ‘Their effort was, in brief, to 
 bring the defense of the faith up to date by adjusting it to the 
 new philosophical situation which had developed since 1800. If 
 we are to understand their program, we must first understand that 
 situation. 
 
 In 1800, the prevailing philosophical tendency in France, out- 
 side the Church, was the “‘Sensualism” of Condillac, which, in the 
 hands of Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and others, had taken on a 
 strongly materialistic tinge. In the presence of this philosophy, 
 Christian apologists naturally conceived their task to be either to 
 defend spiritualism against materialism (as Frayssinous did), or to 
 wage war upon philosophy in general, denying its right to exist 
 (as the Traditionalists did), or to appeal to the heart from the 
 decision of the head (as did Chateaubriand). 
 
 Very early in the century, however, a defection took place from 
 the ranks of the school of Condillac, which marked the beginning 
 of a general reaction against eighteenth-century philosophy—a re- 
 
30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 action as complete and dramatic as any which is recorded in the 
 history of modern philosophy. Laromiguiére began the defection 
 by making a sort of Kantian distinction between sensations and 
 ideas, the latter constituting the form of experience, the former 
 only its matter. Maine de Biran, one of the ablest of the followers 
 of Condillac, passed over by a series of cautious steps, each based 
 on more careful psychological analysis than the last, to a thorough- 
 going idealism. Even Cabanis, in his Lettre sur les causes finales, 
 made concessions fatal to materialism. 
 
 In its divided state, the school of Condillac could offer no 
 effective resistance to the vigorous attacks which Royer-Collard, 
 who became professor at the Sorbonne in 1809, at once began to 
 make upon it in behalf of the Scotch realistic philosophy. Still less 
 could it withstand the flood of German influence which began to 
 stream in as soon as peace was restored to Europe. Mme. de 
 Staél’s De ? Allemagne, suppressed in 1810, appeared in 1814, and 
 made a great impression. Victor Cousin, after following Royer- 
 Collard for a time, made a trip to Germany, and became an ardent 
 devotee of German Idealism. At the period we are considering 
 (1833), the Eclecticism of Cousin was all the rage. Its only 
 serious rival was the social philosophy of Saint-Simon. Both these 
 philosophies were religious, not to say theological, in tone. Saint- 
 Simon heralded the coming of a “new Christianity”; Cousin seemed 
 continually trying to go the theologians one better: as one wag 
 expressed it, when the theologians spoke of the Holy Trinity, Cousin 
 always spoke of the Most.Holy Trinity. For the moment, then, 
 philosophy was the friend, not the enemy of religion.” 
 
 Had the Catholics but realized it, their task was now much 
 simplified: they had no longer to defend spiritualism against ma- 
 terialism, or theism against atheism; they had only to defend 
 Catholic Christianity as the highest type of religion. It was the 
 Golden Age of Romanticism in France; Victor Hugo had just 
 produced his first dramas and George Sand her first novels. A 
 spirit of ardent if somewhat sentimental idealism pervaded the 
 
 “A less positively friendly philosophy ence to his name. Damiron, in the 1835 
 was that of Auguste Comte, then in its edition of his Essai, added a couple of 
 first phase. But, strange to say, one may paragraphs on Comte, but treated him as 
 search the philosophical literature of the a typical Saint-Simonian! 
 period through, and find hardly a refer- 
 
INTRODUCTION 31 
 
 youth. They were much given to introspection, to brooding over 
 the problem of human destiny, and speculating about the Key to 
 the Great Mystery. The mal de siécle often expressed itself in 
 the form of a yearning after the Infinite, and a sense of dissatis- 
 faction with all things finite. “The besoin de croire, the need to 
 believe, in order to reach a state of mental peace and moral power, 
 was pretty universally recognized; and the relativism of the earlier 
 part of the century had given way to the conviction that absolute 
 truth existed, and might be found. ‘The great question was merely: 
 “Where is absolute truth to be found?” Was it to be found in 
 one specific religion, like Christianity, or was it revealed, in various 
 stages of development, in all religions and all philosophies, marching 
 on toward a final synthesis which one might already glimpse? 
 Was Christianity final, or was it but a passing form of the absolute 
 religion? 
 
 For the most part, the Catholic clergy did little to satisfy the 
 religious hunger of the youth. ‘They could not understand it; the 
 whole world of thought from which it sprang was foreign to 
 them. At the seminaries, philosophy was still discussed in Scholastic 
 Latin; and thought had not moved since the days of Bossuet, when 
 a certain tinge of Cartesian rationalism had been imparted to French 
 Scholasticism. The younger clergy were most of them Tradition- 
 alists of one sort or another; they cherished the Traditionalist 
 prejudice against all philosophy. 
 
 The religious periodicals did show a decided renewal of interest 
 in intellectual problems. The Annales de philosophie chrétienne, 
 founded in 1830 by Augustin Bonnetty, and the Revue Européenne, 
 founded a year later, contained many able articles; but the Tra- 
 ditionalist hypothesis of a primitive revelation filled the whole hori- 
 zon. ‘“‘Are Champollion’s discoveries in Egypt likely to confirm 
 the truth of the Biblical account of the Exodus? What have geol- 
 ogy and comparative philology to say in confirmation of the Book 
 of Genesis and the theory of a single original tradition? What is 
 the bearing of comparative religion upon the Primitive Revelation 
 theory? What light does more recent history cast on the civilizing 
 role of religion, and the destructive effect of skepticism?” Such 
 questions as these are the constant themes of discussion. One might 
 say that the historical approach dominated the whole apologetical 
 enterprise. 
 
32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 But where was the philosopher who could speak to the youth in 
 their own language; who could meet the Eclectic philosophers on 
 their own ground, and work out a Christian system that should 
 be comparable with their own? Where was the man both modern 
 enough and philosophical enough and Christian enough to do it? 
 Mer. Frayssinous had now retreated into obscurity, discredited be- 
 cause of his alliance with the Government of Louis XVIII and 
 Charles X. If his second series of Conférences (1814-1822) 
 had already seemed out of date by reason of the changed phil- 
 osophical situation, what could be expected of him now?  Bal- 
 lanche, like de Bonald, de Maistre, and Chateaubriand, was an old 
 man; and his theories had little appeal to the new generation. 
 Lamennais, in his seclusion at La Chénaie, surrounded by a little 
 group of disciples and friends, was reported to be working on just 
 such a system as was required; but the Esquisse dune Philosophie 
 did not appear until some years after its author’s separation from 
 the Church, and proved to be pantheistic rather than Christian. 
 
 It was from Strasbourg, instead, that the new philosophical leader 
 was destined to issue his manifesto. It came in the year 1833, in 
 the shape of a trenchant essay On the Teaching of Philosophy in 
 France in the. Nineteenth Century, by the Abbé Bautain, Father 
 Superior of the Petit Séminaire at Strasbourg, and professor of 
 philosophy in the University. In this essay, all the chief phil- 
 osophical tendencies of the century were described, analyzed, and 
 sharply criticized with a firmness of touch that could come only 
 of intimate acquaintance with the doctrines in question, and seemed 
 hardly to be expected of a priest. ‘The school of Condillac, the 
 Scotch school, and the Eclectic school, were all characterized, and 
 dismissed with a negative verdict; but the author was just as severe 
 —perhaps a trifle more severe—in his strictures upon the loose- 
 knit thinking of Lamennais, and, above all, upon the arid Schol- 
 asticism of the seminaries. In place of all these, he proposed to 
 develop a new Christian philosophy more in harmony with the 
 interests and longings of the modern man. ‘The book aroused 
 great interest all over the Continent. 
 
 The following year, Bautain again attracted much attention by 
 his Reflections on the Institution of the Religious Conférences at 
 Paris, The conferences in question were the Conférences of 
 
INTRODUCTION 33 
 
 Notre-Dame, soon to be made famous by the genius of Lacordaire. 
 Mer. Quélen, Archbishop of Paris, had recently been approached 
 by Frédéric Ozanam with a petition bearing the signatures of 
 several hundred Parisian students, who asked that arrangements 
 be made for a series of addresses designed to meet the intellectual 
 problems of the younger generation more directly and frankly than 
 was the custom. ‘The students ventured to suggest the names of 
 two men whom they thought capable of giving such a series of 
 addresses: Lacordaire and Bautain.** Mer. Quélen announced 
 that their request would be granted at the coming Lenten season; 
 he himself would inaugurate the series. One fancies that the 
 pleasure of the students at the granting of their request was some- 
 what dampened by the prospect of having to listen to the Arch- 
 bishop: he was a Legitimist of the old school, and wholly out of 
 sympathy with the Liberal Catholic movement. Bautain, at any 
 rate, felt that the ecclesiastical authorities were in danger of fail- 
 ing to meet the real needs of the students; and so, in a series of 
 brilliant articles in the Univers Religieux, he described the student 
 mind as it really was, and pointed out the folly of attempting to 
 approach young Romanticists and young pantheists with a super- 
 annuated apologetic designed to meet the difficulties of eighteenth- 
 century materialists and atheists. 
 
 The young men of to-day are not atheists, he insists. They 
 will admit that without God “nothing is explicable in the universe. 
 . . . There is neither science, nor ethics, nor society possible with- 
 out that principle.” Do not suppose, however, that they mean by 
 this what would have been meant in the eighteenth century. These 
 young men are neither theists nor deists, nor yet pantheists in the 
 Spinozistic sense; they are idealistic pantheists, after the German 
 style, believing in a “God who lives in Nature and in man, who 
 is their principle and substance, who posits and preserves them 
 both, by his development and his manifestation.” With them, the 
 old arguments aimed against materialism are out of place; 
 
 they are nearer [says Bautain] to an excess of spiritualism in speculation. 
 They almost doubt the existence of matter, and you will greatly oblige 
 them by furnishing them with good reasons for granting it. . . . As for 
 
 “De Régny, L’Abbé Bautain, 192-195. 
 
34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 the immortality of the soul, soyez tranquille: they grant it to the extent 
 of confusing it with eternity, and man lacks little of being God for 
 them. It is the same with free-will, which we have tried to reinstate, 
 in opposition to fatalism, by so many reasonings. They grant it, they 
 insist upon it to the point of independence, only too happy if you 
 succeed in convincing them that human free-will is not autonomy. 
 
 [Do not argue with them about the necessity of revelation; they ‘ad 
 revelation everywhere. If you try to prove the Incarnation to them, 
 they protest] that one incarnation is not enough; that they admit ten, 
 twenty, thirty of them like the Hindus; and that even, to look at it 
 philosophically, the life of man and of the world is one continuous. 
 incarnation of divinity. . . . In a word, the disposition of the French 
 youth is not so much to reject religion as to admit all the religions, 
 Christianity along with the rest, so as to work them all over in the alembic 
 of criticism .. . to shape little by little with the materials furnished 
 by mankind the great structure of a philosophical religion . . . or rather 
 
 to create the system of true philosophy, which will enable the peoples 
 of the future to dispense with all religion! *° 
 
 Who was this young Abbé, with the air of a trained philosopher, 
 and so intimately acquainted with the student mind? | There were 
 doubtless many who asked themselves that question, as they read 
 these articles. Some, indeed, seemed to feel that he was trying 
 to read a lesson to the Archbishop,*® and asked who he was to 
 attempt to dictate to his superiors. Others, noting how he assailed 
 with equal vehemence all the prevailing philosophical tendencies, 
 asked in some alarm who this sceptic in the bosom of the Church 
 might be—this destructive critic, who dared to lay a profane hand 
 upon the time-honored scholastic system itself. It was known 
 that on a recent trip to Paris he had been received ‘“‘with kindness 
 and favor mingled with reserve” by Mgr. Quélen; that Victor 
 Cousin had offered him a chair in the Faculty at the Sorbonne, 
 which he had refused; that he had greatly impressed the Parisian 
 students with a series of addresses at the FEglise Saint-Roch.“" 
 Rumor, too, wove about his figure a certain glamor of romance. 
 It was said that he was fabulously learned, and a doctor in all the 
 five Faculties; that Hegel had pronounced him a greater con- 
 structive thinker than Cousin; that he was under the influence of 
 an Alsatian saint, prophetess, and savant, Mlle. Humann, and a 
 
 *® Réflexions, 29-34. “ Thid., 192-195. 
 “De Régny, L’Abbé Bautain, 195. 
 
INTRODUCTION 35 
 
 member of her esoteric band of mystic enthusiasts; that he was 
 planning to drive the scholastic philosophy from all the seminaries 
 of France, and replace it with his own philosophy; that although 
 he had bitter antagonists among the clergy, who openly accused 
 him of heresy, he was protected and assured of ecclesiastical ad- 
 vancement by powerful friends in high political position.*® 
 
 How much there was in these rumors, and what manner of man 
 it was who inspired them, we shall shortly inquire; but before we 
 turn our attention to the Abbé Bautain and his philosophy, it will 
 be necessary for us to glance a moment at the chief tendencies 
 of Catholic thought in Germany at this period. It was from 
 Strasbourg that this new philosopher hailed; and nothing that hails 
 from Strasbourg can be understood in terms of French antecedents 
 alone. Were we to forget this fact, we should be tempted to look 
 upon Bautain as a Carlylian hero, bursting in upon the scene like 
 a bolt from the blue, and altering the course of French Catholic 
 thought by sheer force of genius. Something indeed does seem 
 to burst in at this point and divert the stream of French Catholic 
 thought; Bautain’s appearance marks the beginning of a new and 
 distinctive tendency, which continues down to our day; but it would 
 be wrong to represent our philosopher in the guise of an intellectual 
 Hercules, diverting the river of thought single-handed. We shall 
 have a more just appreciation of his undoubted originality if 
 we recognize at the start that his philosophy owes quite as much 
 to German Romanticism as it does to French ‘Traditionalism. 
 Through Bautain,*® the stream of German Catholic thought, which 
 had been following its own separate course and developing charac- 
 teristics of its own since the beginning of the century, was blended 
 and Humann, minister of finance, brother 
 
 of Mlle. Humann. 
 “T say “through Bautain,” because he 
 
 “For some of these rumors and in- 
 sinuations, see Campaux, Le philosophe 
 de Strasbourg: Etude sur ?Abbé Bautain 
 
 et son école, Nancy, 1876, 36, 41, 42. 
 See also the anonymous book, De len- 
 seignement philosophique de M. DPAbbé 
 Bautain, Paris, 1834, 630. Bautain held 
 three doctorates, not five: doctor és 
 lettres, 1816; doctor of medicine, 1826; 
 doctor of theology, 1835 (honorary de- 
 gree from Tiibingen). The Hegel anec- 
 dote is given later. The powerful 
 friends referred to are Guizot, Cousin, 
 
 was the first distinguished French Catho- 
 lic thinker to be deeply influenced by . 
 German Catholic thought; but of course 
 his writings were not the sole avenue 
 through which German influences came 
 into French Catholic thought at this 
 period. The Revue Européenne frequently 
 published articles by Baader and other Ger- 
 man Catholic thinkers, and had a regular 
 staff correspondent stationed at Munich. 
 
36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 once more with the stream of French Catholic thought, and out 
 of the confluence of these two streams there issued a new phil- 
 osophical tendency, which, like all things Alsatian, seemed a bit 
 strange and foreign both to the French and to the Germans. 
 
 IV 
 
 Marin CurRENTS IN GERMAN CaTHOLIc THouGHT, 1800-1833" 
 
 The disesteem into which not only Catholicism, but religion in 
 general, had fallen at the beginning of the nineteenth century had 
 been no. less noticeable in Germany than in France. When 
 Schleiermacher, the father of liberal Protestant theology, published 
 his famous Speeches on Religion in 1799, he addressed them to 
 
 “the cultured among her despisers’;°* and he was forced to spar 
 
 skilfully for an opening in order to gain a hearing at all: 
 
 It may be an unexpected and even a marvellous undertaking [he began] 
 that any one should still venture to demand . . . attention for a subject 
 so entirely neglected. . . . Now especially the life of cultivated people 
 is far from anything that might bear even a resemblance to religion. . . 
 There was a time when you held it a mark of special courage to cast off 
 partially the restraints of inherited dogma. You still were ready to 
 discuss particular subjects, though it were only to efface one of those 
 notions. Such a figure as religion moving gracefully, adorned in elo- 
 quence, still pleased you, if only that you wished to maintain in the 
 gentler sex a certain feeling for sacred things. But that time is long 
 past. Piety is now no more to be spoken of. . . . I can link the interest 
 I require of you to nothing but your contempt. I will ask you, there- 
 fore, just to be well informed and thorough-going in your contempt.®” 
 
 When religion was an object of contempt, Catholicism, @ fortiori, 
 was beneath contempt. It was a-matter agreed upon among all 
 educated men, says Goyau, that the Catholic idea was “sterile” 
 and “superannuated”’: 
 
 Their common arrogance with respect to the old religion [he says] was 
 all the more striking because there was nothing affected or purposely 
 
 See references to Werner, Schmid, * Reden iiber die Religion an die Ge- 
 Goyau, Lichtenberger, and Vermeil, in 4ildeten unter ihren Verdchtern. 
 Bibliography, Part I, sections 1 and 3. * QOman’s translation, London, 1893, 1, 
 
 rR 
 
INTRODUCTION ou 
 
 insolent about it: they were quite sincere in attributing to the Roman 
 Church the same place in the real world which it held in their own 
 esteem; they spoke of it not exactly as a hostile force, but rather as an 
 archaism. ‘“Che Church of Rome,” said Herder, “is now but an ancient 
 ruin, into which henceforth no new life can come.’* 
 
 In the face of this widespread attitude, the Catholic clergy had 
 themselves developed a sort of inferiority complex. Apologetically 
 pruning and expurgating the teachings of the Church, so as to make 
 them as little offensive as possible to the spirit of the Enlightenment, 
 they had ended by rationalizing away all that was distinctive in 
 their faith. In the catechisms of the day, Christianity was pre- 
 sented as “‘a sort of superior ethics, practically independent of 
 
 dogma.’””* 
 
 From the pulpit [said Staudenmaier] there still descended words, but 
 not words of life. The priest had become an apostle of useful informa- 
 tion; the texts concerned even the cultivation of potatoes, trees, meadows, 
 grape alcohol. People left church full of stories warning them against 
 drunkenness . . . telling how what had been taken for ghosts was noth- 
 ing but a lot of freshly washed blankets spread out in the moonlight, 
 forgotten by the maid; but they were empty of what they needed for 
 the virtuous and Christian life, empty of that which leads heavenward.*° 
 
 The story of the gradual revival of religion in Germany in 
 the early nineteenth century presents many parallels to the Catholic 
 renaissance in France, already described. Just as in France, it was 
 the laity, not the clergy, who gave the initial push that started the 
 religious landslide. Just as in France, it was the esthetic appeal 
 a@ la Chateaubriand which first overcame the indifference of the 
 German public and aroused their interest in religion. Just as in 
 France, the movement started as something amorphous, something 
 utterly unsectarian, something opposed to all set creeds and external 
 codes of morality, but became rapidly Christian, and specifically 
 Catholic—a phenomenon doubly astounding in the land of Luther. 
 
 The contrast appears, however, when we note that the religious 
 movement became consciously and technically philosophical in 
 
 SGoyau, L’Allemagne religieuse. Le % Lauchert, Franz Anton Staudenmaier, 
 
 Catholicisme, 1, 161. Freiburg, 1901, 27. 
 4 Thid., 162. 
 
38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Germany much sooner than it did in France, and that it was not 
 compromised, as in France, by being bound up with the reactionary 
 movement in politics. “his latter statement needs qualification, of 
 course. “The wave of political reaction which swept over Europe 
 after 1815 undoubtedly worked in favor of Catholicism in Ger- 
 many, as it did everywhere; and many of the leaders of the 
 Catholic revival were at the same time ardent supporters of the 
 Holy Alliance in its policy of suppression. Géorres, the founder 
 of the Munich school, was a Jacobin in his youth—editor of a 
 revolutionary sheet in Coblentz—and his conversion to Catholicism 
 was in the first instance a conversion to political conservatism. 
 In his Munich period, he poured forth a flood of ridicule and 
 abuse upon. religious and political liberalism alike, in his Historisch- 
 politische Blatter. It has even been claimed that he never became 
 a sincere Catholic, but that, like the present-day “atheist Catholics” 
 of the Action Francaise, he favored Catholicism for purely politi- 
 cal reasons.°° However that may be, it should be insisted upon 
 that men of Gorres’ type played no such leading part in the Catho- 
 lic revival in Germany as did de Bonald and de Maistre in France. 
 Not politicians and publicists, but philosophers, played the leading 
 role in Germany. We may, in fact, dismiss the influence of © 
 political reaction with this brief mention, and risk the generaliza- 
 tion that the religious renaissance in Germany was due to the rise 
 of Romanticism.”* 
 
 Now the Romantic movement had three chief aspects: esthetic, 
 religious, philosophical. In its esthetic aspect, it was a revolt 
 against classicism in literature, art, and music; an outburst of 
 impatience with set forms, sharp contours, classic restraint; a riot 
 of emotionalism and individualism succeeding upon an age of 
 conventionalism; expressing itself in warm colors, rich harmonies, 
 odd and unusual diction; a revival of interest in the literature and 
 art of the Middle Ages, whose mixture of the sublime, the gro- 
 tesque, the mysterious, the miraculous, and the chivalrous was 
 strangely alluring to the imagination of a sophisticated and dis- 
 illusioned generation. In its religious aspect, Romanticism was a 
 
  Lichtenberger, Histoire des idées re- and occultism helped in his conversion. 
 ligieuses en Allemagne, III, 379. The ™ Goyau, of. cit., Bk. II, chap. 1, “Ro- 
 judgment is unfair. Gdérres’ mysticism mantisme et Catholicisme.” 
 
INTRODUCTION 39 
 
 revolt against the cold moralism and rationalism of eighteenth- 
 century orthodoxy and eighteenth-century “natural religion”; a 
 sudden victory of the religion of feeling over that “religion within 
 the bounds of mere reason”’* which Kant had so ably expounded; 
 a revival of mediaeval mysticism and mediaeval occultism. In its 
 philosophical form, Romanticism was a revolt against the ration- 
 alistic epistemology and mechanistic cosmology of the eighteenth 
 century; it set faith and intuition over against reason, and claimed, 
 with Pascal, that “‘the heart has reasons that the reason knows not 
 of”; it rejected the concept of mechanism, and universalized the 
 concept of organism. It went back for sustenance and inspiration 
 to the great monistic, idealistic, and pantheistic systems of the 
 past—neo-Platonism, Spinozism, and Jacob Boehme’s mystic the- 
 osophy—for in all these systems it glimpsed the great Idea of 
 which all the dazzling philosophical speculations of the period, 
 from Goethe to Hegel, are but amplifications: the idea that the 
 universe is a living Organism, a manifold Whole, developing in 
 Nature and in History. 
 
 It will be seen that, in each of its three forms, Romanticism 
 was favorable to religion in general and Catholicism in particular; 
 yet in each case it held a hidden menace for the Catholic faith, 
 if Catholicism were to accept too uncritically the aid of this new 
 and unexpected ally. Romanticism might feel a certain admira- 
 tion for Catholicism, it might even submit to baptism and formally 
 embrace the faith; but it was not Catholic at heart. It wanted 
 religion for purposes of its own, not religion for religion’s sake: 
 it was in love with the gorgeous appurtenances of stately worship; 
 it enjoyed the religious thrill as a new and altogether exquisite 
 sensation; it taught itself to believe the dogmas of the Church, 
 because without a certain degree of belief the religious thrill was 
 not forthcoming—but it never took its religion in real, deadly 
 earnest. 
 
 This is particularly true of esthetic Romanticism. If we 
 examine the motives which led to the veritable epidemic of con- 
 versions to Catholicism which broke out among the German Iiterati 
 in the early nineteenth century, we shall find that the esthetic 
 
 ® Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen des blossen Vernunft. 
 
40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 motive predominates. “Lhe Catholic movement among them coin- 
 cided precisely with the reaction against Hellenism and _neo- 
 classicism in favor of Christian painting, architecture, and litera- 
 ture. “The neo-classicist view of Christian art and literature might 
 be summed up in the words of Herder: “Among the bones of 
 martyrs, the sound of bells and organs, censers, and prayers for 
 indulgence, no Muse resides.” ‘The reaction toward Catholicism 
 among the German Jiterati dates from the moment when the un- 
 fairness of this judgment began to be appreciated. First came the. 
 publication in 1805, of Arnim and Brentano’s” great collection of 
 mediaeval Volkslieder, entitled Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which 
 inspired Eichendorff, La Motte-Fouqué, and others to return to 
 mediaeval sources for poetic themes. At about the same time the 
 brothers Boisserée began to make their famous collection of 
 mediaeval painting and sculpture.” Then, in 1808, Friedrich 
 Schlegel astonished all his friends by embracing the Catholic faith. 
 The Boisserées, with whom he was personally acquainted, had 
 convinced him of the superiority of Christian art over Greek art; 
 his own Oriental studies had convinced him that Oriental literature 
 in general, and the Bible in particular, had in it a “sense of the 
 infinite” lacking in Greek literature. In his History of Ancient 
 and Modern Literature, published in 1812, he presented the Bible 
 as “‘a source of poetry and art which should be for our time what 
 Homer had been for antiquity.” 
 
 While public taste in Germany was thus gradually overcoming 
 its distaste for Christian art and literature, a parallel movement 
 was taking place in the German art-colony at Rome, hitherto the 
 citadel of neo-classicism. “There, under the leadership of Fredrich 
 Overbeck, a group of revolters, popularly dubbed the “Nazarenes,” 
 arose, who denounced classic art as frigid and conventional, and 
 extolled the spontaneity and fervid sincerity of Giotto and Fra 
 Angelico. From admiring the genius of the great Italian painters, 
 they were soon led to envy their faith. Without religion, they 
 felt, such art was impossible; if they were to paint like Giotto 
 they must believe as he did. As Overbeck put it himself, “Only 
 the unceasing prayer of the heart is capable of maintaining the 
 
 ® Brentano was later converted to © Now in the Munich Pinacothek. 
 Catholicism. ™ See Goyau, op. cit., I, 183-191. 
 
INTRODUCTION 4] 
 
 enthusiasm of the artist. . . . Christian art means nothing but the 
 full and appropriate expression . . . of a living faith, with which 
 the artist must be full; and the aim of Christian art can be only 
 to awake and sustain that faith in others, or to gain hearts to the 
 truth through beauty.” 
 
 ‘These words of Overbeck clearly indicate the motives which 
 led multitudes of young Romanticists to the Catholic faith. They 
 felt the need of some religion, because they felt religion would 
 supply the enthusiasm without which artistic creativity is impossible. 
 Protestantism, with its stark, bare churches, and its dour depreciation 
 of the esthetic side of life, was out of the question; Catholicism, 
 with its architecture and stately ritual, drew them with a strange 
 fascination. Even Novalis, whose background was severely Prot- 
 estant, wrote a series of Hymns to the Virgin, and dreamed of a 
 new religion in which Catholicism and Protestantism should be 
 reconciled. It is obvious that the Catholicism of these young 
 esthetes was in many cases only skin-deep. Led “to the truth 
 through beauty,” they interpreted “the truth” to suit themselves. 
 Mediaeval Catholicism attracted them less because it was Christian 
 than because it was Latin or Teutonic. In church, their glance 
 rested not upon the tortured face of the Christ upon the Crucifix, 
 but upon the serene countenance of some Italian Madonna, or the 
 grinning visage of some dwarfish monster, peeping from beneath 
 the pulpit-stair like the genius of the Teutonic races. Suffering, 
 sacrifice, and penance were foreign terms to them; their real 
 religion, had they avowed it, was the cult of self-expression, self- 
 development, and “union with the Infinite’—a cult whose origin, 
 as we shall see, was largely extra-ecclesiastical. 
 
 What we have called the “religious” aspect of Romanticism had 
 its antecedents in a revival of mysticism which began toward the 
 end of the eighteenth century. We are accustomed to think of 
 the eighteenth century as a period when rationalism and moralism 
 held sway; but in every rationalistic period there can be traced an 
 undercurrent or counter-tendency of religious emotionalism and 
 anti-intellectualism, showing that the starved and outraged instincts 
 
 ® This is precisely the idea conveyed in the Nazarenes, see Goyau, op. cit., I, 228- 
 
 his famous painting “The Triumph of 245. 
 Religion in the Arts.”” On Overbeck and 
 
42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 are still operative in all their force, waiting only for the moment 
 when their suppressed energies shall accumulate to the exploding- 
 point. So, in the very midst of the eighteenth century, we find 
 little circles of congenial spirits gathering here and there in Ger- 
 many to foster 1n one another the flame of mystic piety, and bid 
 common defiance to the chilly atmosphere of their century. Some 
 of these circles, such as the Pietistic circles founded much earlier 
 by Spener and Francke, or the famous community at Herrnhut 
 founded by Zinzendorf, were characterized by a somewhat narrow 
 and fanatical piety, and lacked the broad cosmopolitanism which 
 we associate with Romanticism. Smaller, but more significant 
 from our point of view, were the esoteric groups of admirers 
 gathered about such outstanding figures as Oetinger (1702-1782), 
 Hamann (1730-1788), Jung-Stilling (1740-1817), the Princess 
 Gallitzin (1748-1806), Matthias Claudius (1740-1815), and 
 Father Sailer (1751-1832). ‘These esoteric circles were charac- 
 terized by a breadth of opinion that made it possible for Catholics, 
 Jews, and free-thinkers to remain the closest of friends; by a type 
 of piety which harked back to the classical mystics for its inspira- 
 tion; and by an interest in the occult and the marvellous, most 
 unusual at that period in cultivated society. Eliminate commer- 
 cialism and the “cult of success” from contemporary ‘New 
 Thought,” compound it with Spiritualism and Theosophy, and you 
 will have a fair idea of the atmosphere of these mystic circles. 
 Then add to the influence of these mystics the influence of Jean- 
 Jacques Rousseau and his “religion of feeling,” and you will 
 understand what the word “religion” meant to those of the Ro- 
 manticists who professed to be religious. 
 
 It is not hard to see why mysticism and the “religion of feeling” 
 played into the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The 
 classical Christian mystics are most of them regularly canonized 
 saints of the Roman Church, and mystic piety has always thrived 
 better within the monastery than amongst the Protestant sects, 
 where it has often had to struggle for its life against the rational- 
 istic spirit of disputation and inquiry. Yet, on the other hand, | 
 Romantic mysticism was only accidentally Catholic; and, in many 
 of its aspects, it was open to grave suspicion from the Catholic 
 point of view. It drew its inspiration not only from the orthodox 
 
INTRODUCTION 43 
 
 mystics, but from Jewish, Hindu, and even Swedenborgian sources, 
 and it fraternized scandalously with certain self-styled “prophets” 
 who, though outside the pale of the Church, claimed impiously to 
 have immediate insight into things divine 
 to be feared in mystics. 3 
 
 
 
 a presumption always 
 Worst of all, it was infected with the 
 spirit of Rousseau; and, in its tendency to identify the experience 
 of the divine with the experience of deep emotion, it was often 
 led to deify the grossest of our animal instincts because of the 
 flood of emotion they release when stimulated. <A type of piety 
 that smacked of Goethe and Jean-Paul could not but be suspect 
 in the eyes of the Church—especially when it was associated with 
 wild theosophical speculations. 
 
 It is a bit difficult to dissociate the religious from the philosophi- 
 cal aspect of Romanticism; for it was precisely in the mystic circles 
 to which we have alluded, that the Romanticist philosophy®* was 
 first elaborated. Some of these mystics, to be sure—especially 
 Catholic mystics like the Princess Gallitzin—were primarily inter- 
 ested in “practical mysticism,” or the culture of the devotional life; 
 but there were others who felt it necessary to defend their right 
 to be religious by attacking current rationalism and materialism, 
 and setting up a mystic philosophy or theosophy instead. “Typical 
 of these more philosophical mystics is Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, 
 called “the magician of the South.”°* A Protestant pastor, re- 
 spected for his noble character and zeal in the cure of souls, but 
 suspected for his extravagant theosophical speculations; a savant, 
 versed in mathematics, natural philosophy, anatomy, and meta- 
 physics; the translator, and for a time, the exponent of Sweden- 
 borg; the popularizer of Jacob Boehme—altogether, he is a most 
 interesting figure. Trained in the Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy, 
 he early reacted against its rationalism, and set out on a life-long 
 search for direct and intuitive knowledge of the divine. He cul- 
 
 
 
 tivated the acquaintance of all 
 
 ®The reader is warned that, when I 
 speak of the “Romanticist Philosophy,” 
 I refer not only to the philosophy of the 
 Romanticists in the narrow sense (men 
 like Schleiermacher, the Schlegels, and 
 Novalis) but also to the common under- 
 lying concepts and tendencies of the 
 whole period of the rise of post-Kantian 
 
 who claimed such knowledge— 
 
 Idealism. This use of the term is quite 
 common in French philosophical writings. 
 Cf. Bréhier’s use of it in his admirable 
 little book on La Philosophie Allemande 
 (Collection Payot). 
 
 *On Oetinger, see Lichtenberger, of. 
 cit., I, 256-267; see also his fascinating 
 Selbsthiographie. 
 
44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Pietists, physicians and alchemists, learned Jews with their Cabal- 
 istic lore, simple peasants like Marcus Volker, who claimed to 
 possess cognitio centralis, mystics of all sorts, however unorthodox. 
 Not a systematic philosopher himself, he nevertheless set in motion 
 a hundred currents of thought which later combined to form the 
 Romantic philosophy. Through him the influence of Jacob 
 Boehme became a part of the Romantic movement, an influence 
 which can be traced in all the systems of the day, including the 
 Hegelian system itself. 
 
 Philosophical Romanticism, as we have said, had two chief 
 tenets: the epistemological primacy of faith and intuition, and the 
 organic nature of the cosmos. Both these doctrines may be found 
 in the writings of Oetinger; but it remained for later and greater 
 philosophers to work them out in detail. “The Romantic view of 
 faith and intuition was most completely and profoundly stated by 
 Jacobi; the Romantic view of the cosmos, by Goethe, Schleier- 
 macher, and Schelling. 
 
 Jacobi’s philosophy developed out of a criticism of Kant’s Kritik 
 der Reinen Vernunft. "The logical outcome of Kant’s position, 
 says Jacobi, is complete solipsism; “‘pure reason” has no right to 
 infer the existence of any Thing-in-itself. What then? Are we 
 to decide to become skeptics? Not so, says Jacobi: we have an 
 immediate certainty of the existence of an external world; if reason 
 cannot prove it, so much the worse for reason! As a matter of 
 fact, all rational knowledge is second-hand knowledge; for all 
 proof rests back upon assumptions and intuitions which need no 
 proof. Reason alone gives us an abstract, subjectivistic, deter- 
 ministic view of things; the real world, the world where man is 
 free and God reigns, is accessible only to a higher faculty than 
 reason, which Jacobi in his earlier writings frankly calls faith. 
 
 Jacobi was a Romanticist in his epistemology only. Monism 
 and pantheism were anathema to him. Spinoza’s pantheism, with 
 its absolute determinism, seemed to him to be the classical example 
 of what the rationalistic “‘method of demonstration” logically leads 
 to. Strangely enough, however, Jacobi was destined to play a 
 
 ® Later he confused the issue by call- Understanding (Verstand). See McGif- 
 ing it Reason (Vernunft) and distin-  fert, Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, 
 guishing it from discursive reasoning or 114-121. 
 
INTRODUCTION 45 
 
 leading role, against his will, in the repopularizing of Spinoza. 
 His book on Spinoza’s system,”* although full of hostile criticism, 
 did much to awaken interest in the great Jewish philosopher. His 
 famous conversation with Lessing, from,whom he drew the avowal 
 that he was a convinced disciple of Spinoza, caused a veritable 
 furore in the learned world when it was published. From this 
 time on, the influence of Spinozism grew apace among the Ro- 
 manticists—although it was a “‘transmogrified” Spinozism which 
 its own author might not have recognized. Professor McGiffert 
 has pointed out that Herder’s little book called Gott, published in 
 1787, was the prime source from which the Romanticists drew their 
 interpretation of Spinoza. “Reading him in the light of the 
 philosophy of Leibnitz, who substituted force for substance and 
 thus broke the old dualism of thought and extension, Herder was 
 able,” says McGiffert, “to preserve the monism of Spinoza’s system 
 without sacrificing spiritual idealism or the reality of human indi- 
 87 Thus reinterpreted, Spinozism became an appropriate 
 framework into which the new scientific ideas of electrical force 
 (Galvani) and vital force (Cuvier and the biological “vitalists’’ ) 
 could be fitted. Partly under the influence of Herder’s Gott, and 
 partly under the influence of his own scientific researches, the poet 
 Goethe evolved his magnificent picture of a living, growing, 
 organic universe, in which nothing is inert, and nothing merely 
 mechanical, but all is athrill with hidden vital force. ‘This splen- 
 did Weltanschauung—which Goethe identified with Spinoza’s— 
 exercised a profound influence upon all the philosophy of the 
 Romantic epoch. We are accustomed to think that Goethe put 
 into the language of poetic vision ideas which he borrowed from 
 
 viduality. 
 
 the great philosophers of his generation; it is more likely that they 
 attempted to rationalize and justify, in dull and ponderous prose, 
 the intuitions that they got from him. 
 
 It should be evident at a glance that philosophical Romanticism 
 was a most dangerous ally for Roman Catholicism to adopt—more 
 dangerous, on the whole, than either esthetic or religious Roman- 
 ticism. On the epistemological side, Romanticism tended, to be 
 sure, to circumvent the attacks of eighteenth-century rationalism 
 
 © Uecher die Lehre des Spinoza, pub- Op. cit., 191; cf. his article in the 
 lished 1785. Hibbert Journal for July, 1905. 
 
46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 upon Christian theology; but it did so only by abandoning rational 
 argument altogether, and granting Kant’s contention that the rea- 
 son is Incompetent in the noumenal realm. It was as hostile to 
 Scholastic rationalism as to Voltairean rationalism; and by appeal- 
 ing to immediate intuition it undermined authority, revelation, and 
 dogma as well as reason. On the cosmological side, Romanticism 
 put an end to eighteenth-century materialism and mechanism; but 
 it led to pantheism. ‘The task of the German Catholic philosophers 
 and theologians was a difficult one: to utilize what was acceptable 
 in the Romanticist philosophy as a means of combatting the anti- 
 religious philosophy of the eighteenth century, while rejecting those 
 aspects of Romanticism which were imperilling the Catholic faith. 
 ‘This task they undertook with unequal success, but with uncommon 
 vigor. 
 
 At the period we are considering (1833), there were three main 
 currents in German Catholic thought: “the rationalism of the 
 eighteenth century, then in a state of decadence, Romantic neo- 
 mysticism in full bloom, and new-style ultramontanism, fostered 
 by Belgian and French propaganda, spread by the Jesuits from 
 1814 on.?°* The “rationalistic’? tendency (whose rationalism 
 was considerably modified by the influence of Kant) was pre- 
 dominant at Freiburg and Bonn; the Romanticist tendency, at 
 Munich, and to a lesser extent at Tiibingen and Vienna; the “ultra- 
 montanist” tendency (whose philosophy was neo-scholastic), at 
 Mayence and Strasbourg. 
 
 The rationalistic tendency in Gant Catholic thought at this 
 period is best represented by Georg Hermes (1775-1831), pro- 
 fessor in the Faculty of Catholic Theology at Bonn University.® 
 Hermes professes to start his investigations into the truth of the 
 Christian religion in a state of complete doubt—not merely pro- 
 visional or hypothetical doubt, like that of Descartes, but real doubt. 
 Any other attitude would be unethical: 
 
 We ought not to wish anything to be true [he says], or, in other 
 words, we ought to be without bias. We ought, during investigation, to 
 detach ourselves in theory from all systems of theology and religion, in 
 
 Vermeil, J. A. Moehler et Pécole 6-12; Werner, Gesch. der Katholischen 
 catholique de Tubingue. Theologie, 405 ff, 423 ff. 
 ® On Hermes, see Goyau, op. cit., II, 
 
INTRODUCTION 47 
 
 so far as we have not recognized them to be certainly true; they should 
 all be equally valid and equally inadequate in our eyes.’° 
 
 Hermes proposes, then, to construct a system of true religious ideas 
 by first arriving ata few primary and necessary rational certainties, 
 and then deducing their consequences. ‘The result, oddly enough, 
 turns out to be a somewhat amputated and rationalized version of 
 Catholic theology. 
 
 This undoubtedly sounds “rationalistic”’; but the rationalism of 
 Hermes differs widely from the rationalism of Descartes and the 
 Aufklérung. When he says that “reason” is capable of proving 
 the existence of God and the truth of the Christian religion, he 
 means, not the “pure” or “‘speculative” reason, but the “practical” 
 reason of Kant. With a “philosophy of concepts” he will have 
 nothing to do; and for this reason he attacks the Scholastic phil- 
 osophers with great vehemence. ‘The ultimate judge, both in 
 morals and in theology, is conscience. Just as the truth of the 
 Ten Commandments rests upon the fact that the “categorical im- 
 perative” confirms them, so the assurance of God’s existence rests 
 upon the fact that it is a necessary postulate of the practical reason. 
 Moreover, conscience assures us that in creating the world, God 
 acted with our good in mind, and not just for His own glory; that 
 would have been egoistic, and conscience condemns egoism. If 
 Hermes appears to rest his case on “reason,” it is because he dis- 
 tinguishes between reason and understanding, Vernunft and Ver- 
 stand, as Kant—and Jacobi—had done before him. Whether he 
 takes Vernunft in a purely Kantian sense, or whether he stretches 
 it to include “faith,” or intuition, as Jacobi did, is rather hard to 
 determine. 
 
 Apart from the possible influence of Jacobi, Hermes shows not 
 a trace of Romanticism. Although he was a contemporary of 
 Schelling, his works might have been written in the latter part 
 of the eighteenth century. At the period we are discussing, his 
 influence was very great. Even the formal condemnation of 
 “Hermesianism”’ by the Pope in 1835 failed to dampen the ardor 
 of his enthusiastic followers; and they continued (with the backing 
 of the Prussian government) to defend his views for some years. 
 
 ™ Goyau, loc. cit. 
 
48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 At one remove from the tationalism of Hermes is the remarkable 
 philosophical system of Anton Giinther (1783-1863), a Viennese 
 priest. Like Hermes, he seeks a foundation for his philosophy that 
 is beyond the reach of doubt, and he finds it, lke Descartes, in 
 self-consciousness. “The J is the only mouwmenon with which I am 
 acquainted; all other objects in my world are mere phenomena. I 
 have a real idea of myself; I have only concepts of other objects.” 
 If, therefore, I am to have a true idea of the World, I must ex- 
 amine it where it impinges upon my own consciousness, and see it, 
 as It were, from within. ‘The first important fact which I note, is 
 that I, the knowing and willing Subject, am limited by an Object 
 which is at the same time foreign to me, and my own—my body, 
 with its sense-organs and sensual appetites. If, then, I am to take 
 myself as the microcosm which reveals the nature of the macro- 
 cosm—and if I do not do so, I am compelled to substitute concepts 
 for real zdeas—I must conclude that the World, like myself, is 
 composed of three substances: Spirit, Nature, and their synthesis 
 in consciousness. I must conclude that there is no absolutely dead 
 matter, but that Nature, seen from within, would everywhere re- 
 veal that same vital urge, that same striving for self-development, 
 which I find in my own physical organism and animal instincts. 
 I must conclude, finally, that the World, although three in sub- 
 stance, is one in form; for my body and spirit are united “formally” 
 in my consciousness. But the World itself is not the ultimate 
 Being; it is as finite, dependent, and imperfect as I am. It de- 
 mands as its Urgrund an infinite, independent, perfect Being, God. 
 God’s nature can be inferred from the World’s, as the World’s can 
 be inferred from mine—not by direct analogy, however, but by 
 inverse analogy. The World is der contraponirte Gott. The 
 World is one in form and three in substance; God is one in sub- 
 stance and three in form: Subject, Object, and their unity; 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” 
 
 Giinther’s system was characterized by his opponents as “dual- 
 istic.” It is indeed full of sharp contrasts: “idea” and “‘concept,” 
 
 ™ The distinction between Idée (ideelles 7 On Giinther, see Schmid, Wissen- 
 Denken) and Begriff, corresponding to  schaftliche Richtungen, 7-12; Werner, 
 Vernunft and Verstand, was already made op. cit., 452-463. 
 by Hermes. 
 
INTRODUCTION 49 
 
 “spirit” and “nature,” divine Spirit and human spirit, God and the 
 Weltkreatur, stand sharply opposed to one another. We are nearer 
 to Kant, with his “two worlds,’ than to Schelling with his 
 Identitatslehre. ‘This tendency to dualism sprang largely from 
 Giinther’s fear of pantheism. He felt that the Romanticist ten- 
 dency to soften the contrasts between God and man, God and 
 the world, would be the death of religion; and he fought Romantic 
 monism with all his might. Nevertheless, in his whole philosophy 
 of Nature, the influence of the Romantic concept of organism 1s 
 evident; and, under the influence of this same concept, he was led, 
 by the criticism of his pantheizing opponents, to blur some of his 
 sharpest distinctions. There is, he admitted, but one Absolute Be- 
 ing, God. If we assert that the World is independent of God, 
 we do not mean that it exists in and through itself (durch sich), 
 but only that it has a life of its own, by and for itself (fiir sich). 
 It is not separate from God guoad substantiam, but only quoad 
 phaenomenon. ‘Thus, after starting with Descartes, Giinther ended 
 at a point none too remote from contemporary Idealism. He was 
 known among his many admirers, not altogether inappropriately, 
 aemethes Catholic, Hecel,7 
 
 The school of Bonn and the school of Vienna represent the 
 declining influence of the Enlightenment. Even in them, the in- 
 fluence of Romanticism can be traced here and there; but, if we 
 wish to see the full effect of Romanticism upon German Catholic 
 thought, we shall have to turn our attention to the school of 
 Munich. 
 
 “Munich,” says Goyau, “thanks to Schelling and thanks to 
 Baader, was the only capital city in Germany where philosophical 
 speculation passed as an auxiliary of the Roman faith.”"* Not 
 that these two men created the “school of Munich”; they were 
 only two stars in the galaxy of celebrities that Joseph Gérres had 
 gathered about his “Round Table”: Brentano and the brothers 
 Boisserée, Romanticists of the esthetic type; Windischmann, 
 Déllinger, and other scholarly professors; Gérres himself, and 
 other noted publicists; “literary men, artists, jurists, theologians, 
 Romanticists of yesterday and parliamentarians of to-morrow el- 
 
 FOS. crip 11, 35. 
 
50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 bowed each other and associated with each other there for over 
 twenty years.”"* The reputation of the school of Munich was 
 European; one always made it a point to pass through Munich 
 when returning from Rome. Lamennais, Cardinal Wiseman, and 
 many other eminent foreigners graced the Round ‘Table with their 
 presence for longer or shorter periods. Nevertheless, without 
 Baader and Schelling, the School of Munich would have lost more 
 than half its lustre. In their brilliant and daring speculations, 
 the Romantic tendency in Catholic thought, nowhere more domi- 
 nant than at Munich, found its complete and most untrammelled 
 expression. . 
 
 Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841) belongs to that group 
 of cosmopolitan mystics out of which what we have called the 
 “religious Romanticism” of the latter part of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury took its rise. Odectinger and Saint-Martin influenced him 
 deeply; Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme were his favorite au- 
 thors. Although a Catholic by training and preference, he had 
 read far less of the Fathers and the Scholastics than of Medicine, 
 chemistry, modern philosophy, and Cabalistic lore. He spent some 
 years in a series of futile negotiations with certain Russian high 
 officials, looking towards the reunion of the Eastern and Western 
 Churches; he hoped that the reconciliation of Catholicism and 
 Protestantism might eventually be effected; and, although he died 
 a Catholic, he sacrificed his popularity in the last years of his life 
 by inveighing against the “dictatorship of the Papacy,” which 
 seemed to him to be the great obstacle to Church unity. Essentially 
 a moderate and a liberal, he was equally opposed to “‘Revolution” 
 and to “Stagnation,” in the political as well as in the religious 
 sphere; he looked upon the Encyclopedists and the Jesuits with 
 equal abomination. ‘To reconcile politics with religion, religion 
 with science, reason with faith, freedom with authority, pantheism 
 with theism, naturalism with supernaturalism—these were a few 
 of his ambitions. 
 
 Baader’s system—for he had a clear, consistent system, in spite 
 of the fact that he left behind him nothing but scattered essays 
 and oracular aphorisms’’—has been described as Relative Super- 
 
 4 Op. cit., II, 89. lished by his pupil Hoffman, Leipzig, 
 "His works were collected and pub- 1851. 
 
INTRODUCTION 51 
 
 naturalism. ‘The term is exact."® Reality, according to Baader, 
 is arranged in a series of “regions” or “circles,” which stand. to 
 one another in a relation of “higher” to “lower,” or, more graphi- 
 cally, are included one within the other like a series of concentric 
 circles. Each one of these regions draws its life from the next 
 above, and its nourishment from the next below; each is “super- 
 natural” and mysterious when viewed from below, but natural 
 and comprehensible when viewed from above. "Thus man is a 
 supernatural being to the animals, but the animals are quite com- 
 prehensible to man, for their narrower circle of life is included 
 in his wider. The widest and highest region, the all-inclusive 
 sphere, is that of the Divine Life, from which all life is derived. 
 This region is supernatural to us, as our human region is super- 
 natural to all lower regions. 
 
 Ideally, each creature stands in an “‘organic” or “dynamic” rela- 
 tion of free and docile subordination to the Divine Life as it flows 
 down from the superior regions. When it thus opens itself re- 
 ceptively to superior influences, a germ of higher life is awakened 
 within it, and begins to push up blindly toward a higher region, 
 like a seedling quickened by the rays of the sun. This is its second 
 or supernatural birth. But this higher life of harmony with the 
 Divine is possible only through self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness; 
 and the universal law of polarity always makes it possible that the 
 creature may affirm itself instead of denying itself, may attempt 
 to live by its own powers instead of relating itself to higher powers, 
 and so cut itself off from its Creator. Not that it is possible to 
 live apart from God! Whether we will or no, we are governed 
 by His laws; but we may choose between love and coercion, betwéen 
 an organic and a mechanical relation to our Creator. Once fallen 
 out of organic into mechanical relations, our plight is serious indeed. 
 The moral law becomes to us something external and coercitive, 
 like Kant’s Categorical Imperative—which Baader called an “Ethic 
 for Devils.”"” The whole supernatural realm becomes to us a 
 closed book. Even inferior Nature comes to be conceived me- 
 chanically, and her hidden life-forces, which reveal themselves only 
 
 He himself preferred the term trasted with the “Deism” of Kant and 
 
 spiritual-realen Theismus, which he con- the “Pantheism” of Hegel. 
 ™ Baader, Werke, I, 55. 
 
x2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 to the view from inward out, are overlooked. Nothing can remedy 
 this state of blindness, isolation, and exaggerated subjectivity but 
 a genuine incursion of redemptive love from a higher region. 
 Even so, the process of redemption is tragic: it involves the death 
 of the old life, which, breaking up and dissolving in its own fires, 
 and passing through a crisis such as that which creates water out 
 of hydrogen and oxygen, thus at last becomes ductile and malleable 
 material for the divine Artist.‘° In losing its old life, it finds its 
 true self; for Baader’s God, unlike the Absolute of Schelling’s 
 earlier philosophy, is no all-consuming One who “eats up his crea- 
 tures”; they find their true individuality only in Him.” ‘Thus 
 are pantheism and theism reconciled: by avoiding the sharp dual- 
 ism of the older theism while retaining the transcendence of God 
 and the free individuality of man, for which the older pantheism 
 had no room. Divide Spinoza by Descartes, Hegel by Kant, or 
 Schelling by Giinther, and the quotient is Baader. 
 
 Baader’s theory of knowledge is of a piece with his cosmology. 
 As our life and health depend upon our maintaining organic rela- 
 tions with the Life-Giver, so our intellectual health depends upon 
 our maintaining organic relations with the object to be known. 
 Knowing is an act of the whole nature, intellect, feeling, and will; 
 a merely intellectual type of knowledge implies mechanical, non- 
 organic relations between subject and object. In the perfect act 
 of knowledge, there is a complete union of subject and object; 
 Baader frequently compares it to sexual intercourse. Without the 
 experience of God, without more or less complete union with God, 
 there is therefore no knowledge of God. All rationalistic argu- 
 ments which, like Giinther’s or Descartes’, attempt to infer the 
 existence of God from the existence of something else, are doomed 
 to failure. How can one “know God without God”? The real 
 proof of God’s existence lies in the fact that some men are already 
 living a supernatural life of heavenly harmony, quickened and 
 sustained from above, and all have moments of awe and self- 
 loathing when, in spite of themselves, they vaguely perceive that 
 they are in rapport with a higher realm, where their true happiness 
 lies. 
 
 ® Baader, Werke, II, 283, note. ™ Tbid., III, 285. 
 
INTRODUCTION 53 
 
 Baader does not attempt to give any rational proof of the truth 
 of his philosophy; that would be contrary to his principles. “All 
 science,” he says, “forms a circle, whose two extremities are united, 
 so that it is impossible to perceive where: they are joined.”*® No 
 one criterion of truth is therefore possible; the parts of the system 
 mutually confirm each other. ‘There are in reality three great 
 criteria of truth, which must sustain one another: the immediate 
 testimony of God to the soul of the mystic, the verdict of social 
 authority or “common sense,” and the conclusions of individual 
 reason. God is infallible in himself; but the man who fanatically 
 trusts his mystic intuitions, without checking them up with the 
 findings of reason and common sense, is apt to go astray. God’s 
 truth comes through society; he who falls out of organic relations 
 with society, falls out of relation with God. 
 cally related to God—this means the Christian church, which is a 
 social body reconciled to God through Christ—has a communicated 
 infallibility. The individual, in so far as he codrdinates himself 
 with such a society, has a conditional infallibility; his reason can 
 be trusted. Knowledge is born of the intercourse of the individual 
 mind with the social mind. Society, as the “male” principle in the 
 generation of knowledge, necessarily has the initiative; but it must 
 not ‘“‘rape” the individual reason. A philosophy based on individual 
 reasoning alone, on the other hand, is no better than masturbation. 
 Not the blind submission of the individual to society, but the “free 
 coordination” of his private judgment with social authority is the 
 way to infallible certitude. Freedom and authority, Voltaire and 
 Lamennais, are thus reconciled.** 
 
 The philosophy of the school of Munich is usually described as 
 “Neo-Schellingian.” Schelling was of course the most famous 
 of the philosophers who lent their aid to the Catholic Renaissance 
 in Bavaria; but his influence must be regarded as secondary to 
 Baader’s. Baader’s philosophy was worked out completely as early 
 as 1809, when he published his remarkable Beitrage zur dyna- 
 
 Society, when organi- 
 
 cit., 16-43; Werner, op. cit., 443-452; 
 
 This paragraph is based on two 
 and Volume I of Baader’s Werke, which 
 
 articles by E. Jourdain in the Revue 
 
 Européenne, III, 65 ff, 182 ff, on Baad- 
 er’s philosophy. 
 
 * On Baader’s philosophy, see Vermeil, 
 op. cit., 20, 21, 122-125; Schmidt, op. 
 
 contains his most characteristic writings, 
 and a good Introduction by his pupil 
 Hoffmann. 
 
54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 mischen Philosophie im Gegensatze der Mechanischen. Schelling 
 never influenced him except as a horrible example; on the contrary, 
 it was under Baader’s influence that Schelling evolved, in his later 
 years, to a semi-Catholic position, and came to join the school of 
 Munich. Baader was never satisfied with Schelling’s philosophy, 
 even in its latest form; he used to refer to it as a “pantheistic 
 
 82 Tf we are to name the most 
 
 ragout with Christian sauce. 
 powerful exponent of philosophical Romanticism in the history of 
 German Catholic thought, we must undoubtedly point to Franz 
 Baader. It is hard to overestimate the extent of his influence; its 
 scope was international. At the period we are considering, the 
 Revue Européenne had for several years been endeavoring to ac- 
 quaint the French public with his teachings; and its Munich corre- 
 spondent, Jourdain, introduced an article on Baader’s theory of 
 certitude with the remark that this theory was “at the same time 
 that of almost all the learned Catholics in Germany.” ** 
 
 To complete our picture of the philosophical situation in Ger- 
 many in 1833, we need only refer briefly to two other schools, 
 the school of Tiibingen and the school of Mayence. 
 
 At Tiibingen, located near the center of Catholic Germany, the 
 influence of Hermes and Giinther mingled with that of Baader, 
 and Rationalism struggled with Romanticism; but, on the whole, 
 it was Romanticism that prevailed. Staudenmaier and Kuhn, the 
 Tiibingen philosophers, share with Giinther a certain alarm at the 
 pantheistic leanings of the Munich school; but they are much more 
 severe in their criticisms of Hermes and Giinther than in their 
 criticisms of Baader; and the Romanticist conception of organism 
 pervades all their teaching. The Tiibingen school was not so 
 much interested in philosophical speculation for its own sake as was 
 the Munich school; its greatest figure was not a philosopher, but 
 a historian and theologian: Johann Adam Moehler, author of the 
 famous Symbolik.** None the less, it played a most important 
 part in the diffusion of philosophical Romanticism; for it applied 
 the Romanticist ideas of organism and development specifically and 
 in detail to the Catholic Church and the dogmas of the Catholic 
 
 2 Goyau, II, 82. shortly before his death in 1838; but his 
 3 Revue Européenne, I, 304. life was given to the upbuilding of the 
 “* Moehler was transferred to Munich  ‘Tiibingen school. 
 
INTRODUCTION a5 
 
 faith. It was largely from the iibingen theologians that the 
 Catholic “Modernists” got their notion of the “evolution of dogma” 
 and of the Church as a developing organism.*° 
 
 ‘The school of Mayence represents a tendency radically different 
 from all the preceding. Its two founders, Colmar and Lieber- 
 mann, were Alsatians who had been driven from Strasbourg by 
 the French Revolution. Educated by the Jesuits, like all the 
 Strasbourg clergy, they imparted to the school of Mayence a strong 
 ultramontanist tinge, quite unique in Germany. Whereas the 
 Rationalist and Romanticist schools of Bonn, Vienna, Munich, and 
 Tiibingen were at one in their contempt of mediaeval scholasticism, 
 the school of Mayence was strictly and aggressively scholastic, and 
 opposed to all speculative innovations. “The Institutiones Theo- 
 logicae of Liebermann, the most famous work produced by the 
 school, was admirably clear as a text-book, so that it rapidly came 
 into use in many countries; but it was totally and deliberately 
 void of all originality. If the school of Mayence had any sym- 
 pathy at all with contemporary philosophy, it was with French 
 Traditionalism, and not with any of the schools of German 
 philosophy, Catholic or non-Catholic. 
 
 Shortly before Bautain sprang into prominence at Strasbourg, 
 the surviving leaders of. the school of Mayence, Liebermann and 
 his pupil Raess, had been driven out of Germany by the hostility 
 of the Hessian government, which had founded a rival, anti-papal 
 faculty of Catholic theology at Giessen. Returning to Alsace they 
 proceeded to imprint upon the instruction at the Grand Séminaire 
 at Strasbourg and the “Petite Sorbonne”*® at Molsheim the same 
 rigid scholastic discipline which had characterized the instruction 
 at Mayence. At the University of Strasbourg, the influence of 
 Kantianism, Idealism, and Romanticism was all-controlling; in 
 the Seminary at Strasbourg, mediaeval scholasticism reigned su- 
 preme. ‘This is the situation which must be visualized if we are 
 to understand the sudden popularity which Bautain achieved when 
 he interpreted Catholicism to the Strasbourg youth in terms of 
 Romanticism, and his sudden downfall when he attacked scholas- 
 ticism and came into-conflict with the Grand Séminaire. 
 
 ® Vermeil, op. cit., 120-125, 451-473, at Molsheim in 1830, and superior of the 
 and passim. Grand Séminaire in 1831—just in time 
 * Raess became director of the School to make trouble for Bautain. 
 
CHAPTER WL 
 
 LOUIS BAUTAIN: THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT 
 SOUL 
 
 OUIS-EUGENE-MARIE BAUTAIN was born at Paris on the seven- 
 teenth of February, 1796. He was brought up a good 
 Catholic, and always retained a vivid memory of the pious 
 old serving-maid who taught him to pray, the white-haired priest 
 who heard his first confession, and his own ecstatic feelings on the 
 occasion of his first communion.’ Like many another youth of his 
 generation, however, he was gradually weaned away from religion 
 in the course of his education. | 
 
 Alas! [says Bautain] The fervor of that first communion cooled little 
 by little, when the tumult of the senses began... . . The coarse voice of 
 my animal nature drowned out the soft voice of my spiritual nature; and, 
 when Reason came upon the scene with its pretentions of judging every- 
 thing and explaining everything, it did not fail to take the side of the 
 flesh. . . . I passed over into the camp of philosophy to enjoy complete 
 liberty; hitherto I had been a believer; now I took pride in becoming a 
 freethinker.” 
 
 It was at the Ecole Normale, where Bautain matriculated in 
 1813, that he came under influences that led him definitely “over 
 into the camp of philosophy.” His interests at first seem to have 
 been literary rather than philosophical;* but there was at the Ecole 
 Normale a young instructor named Victor Cousin, just beginning 
 his brilliant career as a teacher, and full of a magnetic enthusiasm 
 that attracted all the students to his lectures. Foremost among 
 the students who clustered about Cousin were two whose names 
 afterwards became well-known in French philosophical circles: 
 
 ' Bautain, Les choses de Pautre monde: * This literary bent remained; he was 
 journal dun philosophe, 8-9. (Abbrev.: always the orator and the stylist as well 
 Choses.) DeRégny certifies that this and as the thinker. Witness his remarkable 
 many other passages of this partly ficti- book on L’Art de parler en public, still 
 
 tious work are really autobiographical. used by many teachers of public speaking. 
 2 ) 
 Les choses de lautre monde, 9; quot- 
 ed by de Régny, 13. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 57 
 
 Jouffroy and Damiren. Bautain was their intimate friend; they 
 went, says M. Campaux, by the name of “the three inseparables.””* - 
 All three, it would seem, went through some such crisis of religious 
 Skepticism as that which Jouffroy experienced, and which he has 
 described with bitter poignancy in “Comsent les dogmes finissent.” 
 From that time on, they looked to philosophy to fill the place left 
 vacant by the destruction of religious faith, and pursued their phil- 
 osophical studies with a truly religious passion. 
 
 We must not suppose that Bautain, in ceasing to be a Catholic, 
 became either an ethical individualist or a materialist in meta- 
 physics. Such views were not likely to develop under the teaching 
 of Cousin. 
 of his youthful philosophical tendencies from his thesis for the 
 degree of Agrégé in Philosophy, defended in August, 1816, and 
 still preserved in the files of the Ecole Normale. It is entitled 
 De idealismo et phaenomenismo, in eo quod pertinet ad existentiam 
 
 We may, as a matter of fact, form a very exact notion 
 
 substantiae spiritualis, and aims to prove that the Lockian and 
 Kantian epistemologies both lead inevitably to skepticism concern- 
 ing not only the existence of an external world, but the existence 
 of the Self as well—a skepticism from which there is no escape 
 save through some such doctrine of common-sense knowledge, in- 
 tuition, or “faith,” as was then taught in Scotland by Reid and 
 Stewart, and in Germany by Merian and Ancillon.’ Bautain 
 supports his contention with a painstaking review of English phil- 
 osophy from Locke to Dugald Stewart, and German philosophy 
 from Kant through Fichte, Schelling, and the Berlin Academists, 
 in their bearing upon the problem of the existence of the Self—a 
 Theresissor 
 
 course, little originality or spontaneity in a dissertation of this 
 
 very good piece of work for a youth of twenty. 
 
 sort; and, in the main, it serves only to show us how completely 
 
 “This friendship was never entirely is traced in the Choses de Vautre monde 
 
 broken, though Bautain’s conversion 
 naturally established a barrier. I find in 
 a report of one of Bautain’s sermons in 
 the Univers Religieux for Apr. 29, 1840, 
 the information that “MM. Jouffroy, 
 Damiron, and other notables, political 
 and scientific, were observed in the 
 audience.” The fictitious philosopher 
 whose gradual conversion to Catholicism 
 
 (Bautain’s last work) is undoubtedly 
 meant to be Damiron. Evidently Bau- 
 tain never ceased to hope that his old 
 friends might be won over to the Catho- 
 lic faith. 
 
 ° Followers of Jacobi and the Berlin 
 Academy. See Erdmann, Gesch. der Phil.,, 
 Index. 
 
58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 the Scottish realism of Reid and Stewart, lately introduced into 
 France by Royer-Collard, had come to dominate the Ecole Normale. 
 At the very end, however, there creeps in a note of dissatisfaction, 
 indicating a craving for a more daringly speculative metaphysic 
 than the Scottish method of exact psychological observation made 
 possible: 
 
 But this observation, so laborious and so difficult—what does it reveal 
 to us? Judgments, notions, opinions of our mind, natural prejudices 
 whereby we are compelled to believe in the existence of that which we 
 cannot see. I certainly know that I exist. But who am I? What is 
 my nature? What is my origin? For what purpose was I born? 
 Whence came I; where am I; whither am I being whirled away? Ex- 
 perience has no answer to these questions, which nevertheless incessantly 
 tempt and trouble the human mind. . . . Before us, as we are admitted 
 to the world of the unseen, no torch is glowing but the dim torch of 
 reason; we walk along a steep and slippery path. Most often we are 
 ready to fall with weariness, and yet we are never satisfied; often we 
 are driven to despair, but never to boredom.—Despair is, in fact, the only 
 repose of the metaphysician.—Yet if some flickering light shows itself in 
 the distance, we rise up and press on again in that quest which is imposed 
 upon us by the human nature of the human mind, which always tries 
 to bring its knowledge up to the level of its faith. Strange indeed 1s 
 the condition of men, who forever seek to know what it is not given 
 them to know, and who have the firmest faith in those things of which 
 they are necessarily ignorant. (Pars seconda, peroration.) 
 
 There is something more than florid rhetoric here; there is an 
 angoisse métaphysique, a quenchless thirst for ultimates and abso- 
 lutes, with which only certain religious souls are tormented. Hap- 
 less youth, to have turned to philosophy to slake such a thirst! Can 
 we not already foresee the issue of his impassioned quest for Truth? 
 Obviously, the Scottish philosophy, with its cautious affirmation of 
 belief in a Self and in an external world, will not long content 
 him. He will have certitude concerning the ultimate mysteries of 
 existence—a certitude as immediate and irresistible as that which 
 assures him of his own existence. And if the Scottish philosophers 
 are right in saying that so elementary a fact as his own existence 
 can in no wise be established by reason, but only by an exercise 
 of faith—what then? For some men, the conclusion would be 
 that, in ultimate questions of metaphysics, we must be content with 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 59 
 
 probabilities, and so, why rack our brains over essentially insoluble 
 problems? For certain sensitive minds, however, these ultimate 
 problems are the all-important ones, and uncertainty with respect 
 to them is simply unbearable. What happens in such a mind when, 
 weary with fruitless searching, it permits itself to dwell on the 
 Church of Rome and her claim of absolute certitude, we know 
 from Newman’s Apologia. So it was to be with Bautain. For 
 a little while he was to hold aloft the “dim torch of reason,” and 
 persevere in his hopeless endeavor to find religious certainty by the 
 methods of philosophy; eventually he would be glad enough to 
 take up again the torch of faith which he had flung down. 
 
 On his graduation from the Ecole Normale, Bautain was at 
 once appointed to teach philosophy at the Collége Royal, Strasbourg, 
 where he took up his duties in October, 1816. His success as a 
 teacher was such that he was invited a year later—at the ripe age 
 of twenty-one!—to conduct a course in philosophy at the Uni- 
 versity. “From the very start,” says M. Campaux, “he acquitted 
 himself with honor, and obtained at once such a success with the 
 youth of Strasbourg as was hitherto unheard-of. All those who 
 heard him were carried away, and rivalled each other in pressing 
 around the desk of the young orator.” With his “piercing and 
 powerful glance, giving a remarkable impression of resolution and 
 will, something at once imposing and attractive,” he combined a 
 fluency of diction and a facility in the exposition of the most ab- 
 struse ideas which quite enthralled his auditors. “Good fortune 
 brings responsibilities, as he knew; and he used to prepare each of 
 his lectures as a general prepares his manoeuvres on the eve of a 
 battle. He gave back to the public in zeal, in work, in pains, all 
 that the public gave him in the shape of attention, friendliness, 
 and favor.”’® 
 
 Victor Cousin was of course delighted at the brilliant opening 
 of his young protégé’s career, and, recognizing in him a capacity 
 for systematic speculation lacking in himself, looked upon him 
 as one of the most promising of the future leaders of the Eclectic 
 school. After Bautain’s first year of teaching at the University, 
 Cousin invited him to spend the vacation with him, touring in 
 
 * Campaux, I, quoted by de Régny, 11, 
 Vaan Co 
 
60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Germany and interviewing the leading philosophers. Hegel, whom 
 they met on this tour, is said to have remarked brusquely to Cousin, 
 as the visitors were departing, “Monsieur, give up the thought of 
 creating a system; leave that task to your young friend.””’ 
 
 Contact with German thought introduced a new phase in Bau- 
 tain’s philosophical development, as it did in Cousin’s. He took 
 up the study of the post-Kantian Idealists with new interest and 
 respect. Fichte’s works fascinated him; they turned his attention 
 to ethical and political questions, and made him more of a liberal 
 and a free-thinker than ever before. On his return from Ger- 
 many, he undertook to give a course in Morale transcendentale, 
 based squarely upon Fichte’s Sittenlehre. We are indebted to 
 Charles Boersch, editor of the Revue d’Alsace, for a summary of 
 the views expressed by Bautain in this course.” I quote at some 
 length; for it was in conscious opposition to this philosophy of 
 liberty, reason, and ‘‘absolute spontaneity,’ that his own system 
 later took shape, after his conversion to Catholicism. It is im- 
 possible to understand the Catholic phase of his intellectual evolu- 
 tion except in contrast with this brief but enthusiastic Fichtean phase. 
 
 M. Bautain [writes Boersch] then became in his lectures the reflection 
 of the political passions which were agitating France. Bolder than M. 
 Cousin, he did not stop at Kant, or at the Constituant Assembly and its 
 hopes of reform. He identified himself with Fichte, with the wild and 
 inexorable genius of the Convention; he lifted up the will upon a 
 pedestal: he became . . . the apostle of the human will, in which he 
 saw, like Fichte, the source of all dignity and all moral grandeur; he 
 made it man’s glory to accept no yoke, to put into all his acts that inde- 
 pendence of the will which ought to rule his thoughts. 
 
 It is this independence of the will, M. Bautain then used to say, which 
 makes the moral goodness of an action. . . . Pure liberty is thus the 
 goal of all human life. This liberty is an ideal revealed by the reason. 
 It is a transcendental idea which has not its type in the phenomenal 
 world; for without us, we meet only necessity, and within us, we find 
 only a will subjected by its present state to the influence of a hostile 
 
 ' Laissez ce soin & votre jeune homme. tation of these views, and accuses him— 
 Quoted on the authority of the Abbé most unjustly—of trimming his sails to 
 Walther by Campaux, II, 41. the political winds. Boersch, who was 
 
 8 jig . 
 
 Revue @ Alsace, 2me Série, I, 339 et himself a political radical, may perhaps 
 seq. (année 1837). Boersch expresses exaggerate slightly the revolutionary im- 
 his regret at Bautain’s subsequent recan- plications of Bautain’s ethical teachings. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 61 
 
 Nature, and free only in certain moments. It is to realize this ideal 
 that man should continually strain on, and thus the whole of moral 
 science is contained in these words: Man, act in conformity with thy 
 reason, which reveals to thee thy liberty; or, in other words, Man, work 
 out thy liberty, make thyself free... .° | 
 
 The psychology of M. Bautain was then in perfect harmony with 
 his ethics. . . . The will found its law in itself, in itself alone: the 
 reason in its turn ought to be an autonomous power, the fairest apanage 
 of man; it too ought to serve as pivot for all psychology, as the will 
 served as pivot for ethics. . . . The reason, M. Bautain used to say, in 
 its strict acceptance, does not signify the sum of the intellectual faculties; 
 neither is it reasoning or the faculty of deducing or inducing: it is the 
 power by which man’s mind communicates with Being; that is, with 
 what is in itself, with the Absolute.?° 
 
 A great, a noble apanage did M. Bautain then see in the human 
 reason! Brilliant its privilege: to commune with the Absolute, to see 
 God face to face, to contemplate him in his essence, to comprehend him 
 by its own force, its own capacity, without any superior direct revelation, 
 without incarnation. And what need had it of religious authority, . 
 since itself had grandeur enough, divine elements enough, to raise itself 
 to God, creative power enough to reveal to man the ideal of liberty? 
 
 That was a period of greatness and enthusiasm for M. Bautain. It 
 was a noble mission which he accomplished, to awaken in men’s souls the 
 feeling of independence, to inspire the youth with that consciousness of 
 human dignity, and the power of the will, which makes them conceive 
 great designs and accomplish great tasks. Surrounded by the sympathy 
 of a numerous audience, he reflected in his doctrines the popular tendency ° 
 of the epoch; he was the philosophical mouth-piece of that movement 
 of reaction against the Restoration, and his teaching was a battering-ram 
 which was beating a breach in the stil] unsteady power of the Bourbons. 
 
 ( 
 Boersch’s report of Bautain’s liberal tendencies at this period is 
 
 confirmed by a quotation—probably from this same course in T'an- 
 scendental Ethics, though misdated 1820—which js preserved in 
 
 the Archives of the Bishopric of Strasbourg among the papers col- 
 lected by Bautain’s enemies: 
 
 There are in the nation two powers, one absolute and one relative. 
 The first is the reason, the second is the will. The nation is its own 
 sovereign when . . . the executive function (force public) is exercised 
 only in the direction dictated by reason. . . . But when it no longer 
 follows reason, when it tends to impair liberty, obedience is no longer 
 
 ° Lecons dictées de philosophie morale, shad) 38 28: 
 8§ 25 et 26. Année 1818. 
 
62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 obligatory, for it is obligatory only towards legitimate authority, that is, 
 towards that which is in conformity with reason.** 
 
 The corollaries of this are said to be “the inviolability of indi- 
 vidual liberty,” including liberty “of property, of thought, of in- 
 dustry, of opinion and of conscience,” and the “equality of the 
 members” of society. The extract closes with quotations from 
 Plato, Cicero, and other “‘old revolutionaries.” The copyist adds 
 that he was credibly informed by M. G——, who sent him the 
 quotation, that it was for these opinions that Bautain was suspended 
 from his functions in 1822, by order of the government—although, 
 as we shall see, other reasons for the suspension were alleged at 
 the time. 
 
 We cannot be sure as to Bautain’s attitude toward the Church 
 at this period; but it seems probable that he was in a state of 
 complete alienation from her authority and from most of her 
 teachings. When he was graduated from normal school, he must 
 still have felt certain recurrent regrets at having lost the maternal 
 guidance of the Church in matters of opinion, for he had none 
 too much confidence in the “‘dim torch” of the human reason, to 
 whose guidance he had so lately entrusted himself; but now that 
 German Idealism had removed his agnosticism by teaching him to 
 see in the reason a transcendental faculty, capable of piercing to 
 the core of all life’s ultimate mysteries, he definitely turned his 
 back on the Church, cast away religious faith as a useless crutch, 
 and, rejoicing with all the exuberance of youth in his new-found 
 freedom, set out to solve the riddle of the universe alone. May 
 we not see a reflection of Bautain’s own views at this stage in his 
 development in those which he ascribes to his fictitious philosopher 
 in the Choses de Pautre monde? Speaking of religion, he says: 
 
 It was a realm apart where there was nothing of interest to us, in the 
 first place because, in it, reason was dominated by faith and did not 
 enjoy its right of liberty, and in the second place because the intuition 
 
 “ FB,B1. The letters FB (Fonds Bau- library of the Collége de Juilly, near 
 tain) refer to Bautain’s manuscript re- Meaux. FB,U and FB,V1 to V10 (the 
 mains, as catalogued by Professor Bau- most important Ms. courses) belong to 
 din. FB,A to FB,E will be found in the the Congrégation des Dames de St.-Louis, 
 Archives of the Bishopric of Strasbourg. at Juilly. 
 
 FB,H to FB,Q will be found in the 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 63 
 
 of the idea of the Absolute lifted us far above the obscurity of belief, 
 useful only to those who were incapable of climbing the heights of 
 knowledge . . . faith keeping them in a perpetual state of tutelage, in 
 a sort of childhood. I continued in that attitude for a number of 
 years, filled with the importance and superiority of the sort of caste to 
 which I belonged, and working day and night to render myself worthy 
 
 Ohuiteeavue es 
 
 This Promethean phase in Bautain’s development was destined 
 to be of short duration. In March, 1819, while still engaged in 
 lecturing upon Transcendental Ethics, he met with a sudden inter- 
 ruption in his brilliant career. Intoxicated with his success, stimu- 
 lated by the plaudits of his auditors, he had given himself fever- 
 ishly to the work of preparing his lectures and perfecting their 
 literary form. To penetrate ever more deeply into the thought 
 of the German philosophers whom he had taken as his masters, and 
 then to explain and illustrate their ideas with French lucidity, in- 
 volved a good deal of mental strain, which eventually undermined 
 his health. One day, in the very midst of a lecture, his mind 
 suddenly became a blank; and after attempting vainly to pick up 
 the thread of his discourse, he was forced to stammer an apology 
 and leave the room. For months afterward, he remained in a 
 state of nervous exhaustion, a prey to melancholia. In October, 
 he attempted to resume his lectures, but broke down again after 
 a month. Plagued with indigestion and insomnia, dragging him- 
 self feebly along like an old man, he was a pathetic figure. His 
 mental state became desperate; let him describe it himself: 
 
 Unable to work any more, incapable of thinking and consequently of 
 talking, falling back at the least effort upon himself, in whom he now 
 found only impotence and vacancy, having no longer the plaudits of men 
 and the clamor of popularity to sustain him, he felt himself fainting in 
 body and soul . . . he thought that his life on earth was at an end, and 
 he had the criminal thought of breaking off its thread. Poor philosopher! 
 For, as you see, all his learning had not taught him how to endure 
 sickness, or misfortune; and, in his youthful pride, he imagined he had 
 nothing more to do here below, since he could no longer shine! Poor 
 philosopher, who arrogated to himself the right of destroying his ex- 
 istence, as if he were the author of it, or as if he were responsible to 
 no one for the post at which he had been placed! But the characteristic 
 
 2 Op. cit., 9-10. 
 
64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 of all non-Christian philosophy is the pretention to autonomy, to inde- 
 pendence; and at that time I considered myself a philosopher and was 
 not a Christian.’® 
 
 It is quite possible that Bautain’s career might indeed have ended 
 in suicide, if he had not chanced to meet at Baden, where he had 
 gone for his health in the summer of 1820, a remarkable woman 
 who was to exercise a decisive influence upon all the rest of his 
 life: Louise Humann, sister of Georges Humann, and niece of 
 the celebrated Mgr. Colmar, Archbishop of Mayence. 
 
 Mlle. Humann was already known to Bautain by reputation, as 
 a woman who presented a most extraordinary combination of 
 devoutness and learning. Under her uncle’s tuition, she had 
 cultivated the most various types of science, from philology to 
 experimental chemistry; but she had made a special study of the 
 contemporary German philosophers, whose works she had analyzed 
 and criticized with care, in little note-books intended only for her 
 own perusal. She was, in short, as Eugene Baudin puts it, “an 
 Alsatian Mme. de Staél.’’™* 
 
 It was Mlle. Humann’s knowledge of German philosophy which 
 first attracted Bautain to her—that, and that alone. Feminine 
 charm she had none; she was then fifty-four, and had never been 
 good-looking.” Even her reputation for erudition was a ques- 
 tionable asset; Bautain expected, as he says, to find her “a sort of 
 bas-bleu,’ and was in no wise pleased at the prospect. But the 
 woman to whom he was introduced turned out to be “‘a very simple 
 person, very dignified in her manners, talking but little, always 
 calmly, without any pretentiousness but with much sense and pre- 
 cision”; and when the conversation drifted to German philosophy, 
 Bautain was ready to admit that he had met his equal. 
 
 The fact is . . . [says Bautain] that I had never met any woman or 
 any person who talked upon it more pertinently or more clearly... . 
 She had come in touch with the principal writers of that period, or had 
 
 ®De Régny, 17-18. This and the I refer, for convenience, to his citations 
 
 following quotations dealing with Bau- 
 tain’s conversion are all drawn from 
 Bautain’s own most interesting account 
 of his conversion, in La Chrétienne de 
 mos jours, Vol. II, Letter 15. Since de 
 Régny quotes practically the entire letter, 
 
 instead of to the original source. 
 
 “4 Touis Bautain, le philosophe de 
 Strasbourg, 8. (Abbrev., Baudin, I.) 
 
 * Her portrait is reproduced in Une 
 Francaise d’Alsace: Mlle. Louise Hu- 
 mann, by Fliche, 2nd ed., 1921. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 65 
 
 read their works—and not superficially, as women usually read, and even 
 many men, but with pen in hand to itemize their thoughts and if need 
 be to develop and rectify them. . . . It was a treasure I had discovered; 
 and I was all the more pleased at it because the last straw that completed 
 the ruination of my health had been the study of this philosophy in the 
 original texts, which I had great difficulty in understanding. I could 
 no longer read, but I could listen, and I found a living book, which 
 gave me the *éswmé of many. others, with the added advantage of the 
 clearness of the French tongue and the charm of a friendly voice.'® 
 
 The acquaintance thus begun in Baden was renewed in Stras- 
 bourg. Mlle. Humann had just recently returned to the city of 
 her birth, after spending many years in Mayence with Mer. Col- 
 mar. ‘The death of her tutor and friend and spiritual guide had 
 now cast her adrift, at a time of life when it is hard to form new 
 attachments and take up new tasks. Lonely, hungering for in- 
 tellectual companionship, feeling a bitter sense of her uselessness 
 and longing for some mission to fulfil, she found a veritable 
 
 
 
 answer to prayer in the opportunity to mother and befriend—and, 
 qui sait? perhaps convert—the unhappy young philosopher. As for 
 Bautain, the conversations which he had at Mlle. Humann’s each 
 evening gave him a new interest in life, and literally restored him 
 to health. In less time than one would have believed possible, 
 Bautain was lecturing again at the University, guided in his reading, 
 and more and more in his thinking, by Mlle. Humann. 
 
 The course of lectures which Bautain first undertook was on a 
 new subject for him: Aesthetics. “The truth is, he was too un- 
 settled in his thinking to undertake to lecture on Ethics or 
 Metaphysics. His former philosophy had definitively gone by the 
 board; it had failed to give him any help in his hour of need, and, 
 to him, that was the most convincing proof of its falsity. To 
 Bautain, philosophy always meant philosophy of life. No longer 
 could he exalt the powers of the human reason, the autonomy of 
 the will, and the rights of the individual: the nightmare of 
 melancholia had destroyed his confidence in the natural capacities 
 of man; and, if he was in the future to find anything on which 
 to base his thinking and rest his confidence, it must be something 
 surer than his own uncertain reason, something steadier than his 
 own wavering will. 
 
 * De Régny, 53-54. 
 
66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 He was probably wholly in the dark as to what the new basis 
 of his philosophy was to be. Some time during this crucial year he 
 must have returned from the study of the post-Kantian idealists 
 to the study of Kant himself; for all his subsequent writings take 
 the main results of the Krittk der Reinen Vernunft for granted, 
 as final and unimpeachable. ‘That the human reason is metaphysi- 
 cally impotent, that it is incapable of acquiring, by its own powers, 
 any valid knowledge of things-in-themselves, of ultimate realities 
 —this proposition became henceforth the cornerstone of all his 
 thinking. This implies not only the rejection of speculative ideal- 
 ism, with its easy identification of the real and the rational, but 
 also the rejection of the scholastic philosophy, with its rationalistic 
 arguments for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. 
 If the ultimate mysteries of life can be penetrated at all—such 
 seems to have been the conclusion to which he came at this tme— 
 it must be by some faculty other than the reason. Whether there 
 existed such a faculty, he may well have doubted, for a while. 
 He was always of the opinion that the Kritsk der Praktischen 
 Vernunft was a clumsy and unsuccessful attempt to repair the 
 damage done by the Kritsh der Reinen Vernunft; the upshot of 
 the Critical Philosophy was absolute skepticism: ultimate reality 
 was unknowable.** Whether Bautain actually became for a time 
 a complete skeptic—a terrible cul-de-sac for a man with his hunger 
 for ultimates and absolutes—or whether he began to glimpse the 
 solution as soon as he fully perceived the difficulty, we do not know. 
 We know only that he went through a severe mental struggle, 
 from which he emerged—thanks to Mlle. Humann—a firm be- 
 liever in the doctrines of the Catholic faith. 
 
 For some time Bautain, too proud to burden another with his 
 woes, tried to conceal his philosophical difficulties from his friend; 
 but at length, during a sudden fit of mental depression, he made 
 a clean breast to her of all his mental misgivings, and all his 
 physical distress, as well. He confessed that his lonely life was 
 becoming unbearable to him; she invited him to take all his meals 
 at her house, and treated him thenceforth as a member of the 
 family. From this time on, their conversations turned more and 
 
 ™ See the answer to the fourth charge  tain’s Lettre a Mgr. Lepappe de Tréwern, 
 (the charge of being a Kantian) in Bau- évéque de Strasbourg. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 67 
 
 more upon religious themes; and Bautain found, to his surprise, 
 that, quite without argumentation, simply by the naive and modest 
 expression of her religious intuitions, Mlle. Humann was able to 
 suggest solutions to problems which had tormented him all his life. 
 
 Even today [writes Bautain] after all these years, I] cannot wonder 
 enough at the gentleness with which she put up with my youthful im- 
 patience and my philosophical sallies, letting me speak at my leisure, and 
 then taking up the question in her own fashion. . . . Her gentleness, 
 which never contradicted me directly, but which regained all its advan- 
 tages when it came her turn to expound, had much more influence over 
 my mind than all the argumentations of controversy; and when, having 
 spoken at length, I listened in my turn, I almost always ended, some- 
 times without realizing it, by being of her opinion. . . . So, when I had 
 worked off my youthful fire and emptied my philosophical sack—which 
 was very soon—lI came to listen more than I talked; and, almost without 
 noticing it, the professor became the disciple.*§ 
 
 It was not long before Bautain’s philosophical scorn of religious 
 dogmas—which he had long regarded as mere “‘sensible forms or 
 degenerate symbols of absolute truth”’°—began to melt away. As 
 Mlle. Humann talked, and as he read the Scriptures under her 
 guidance, 
 
 I soon acquired the conviction [he says] through the insight of my 
 intelligence, through the clear ideas of my mind, through a loftier 
 contemplation of Nature, which appeared to me like the glorious symbol 
 of a higher world; through the simpler and more satisfying explanation 
 of the great problems of human life, to which I saw no solution until 
 then . . . I acquired the conviction, I say, that Christian doctrine is 
 
 philosophy’s crown, or, if you will, her last word. . . . How I had 
 been led to this conviction, in truth, I could not tell in detail. But at 
 any rate I had arrived there . . . led by the luminous and affectionate 
 
 words of my good angel, who, without ever imposing anything upon me 
 
 . simply answered my needs as fast as they made themselves mani- 
 fest. . . . Never was a man’s liberty more fully respected, and never, 
 too, was it more fully conquered.”° 
 
 From theory to practice was another long step. Bautain real- 
 ized perfectly well that the Christian philosophy he had adopted 
 
 * De Régny, 59. ” Thid., 60-61. 
 * Ibid., 58. 
 
68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 “was not a philosophy like any other, and that no progress is to. 
 be made in it unless deeds are joined to ideas to realize and confirm 
 them.” Nevertheless, he found prayer and confession bitter pills 
 for his pride to swallow; and at least once broke into open revolt 
 as he felt the net of ecclesiastical control closing about him. Mlle. 
 Humann’s tact saw him through every crisis. 
 
 It was Bautain’s first prayer that marked the most decisive step 
 of all. He was disposed to dispute the efficacy and utility of prayer. 
 She refused to discuss the matter with him, smilingly reminding 
 him that he was a philosopher, and would be sure to worst her in 
 an argument. Prayer was efficacious; she affirmed that on the basis 
 of her own experience, which was perhaps a bit of evidence de- 
 serving to be weighed—but he was not far enough advanced for 
 the subject of prayer to open up properly for him, as yet. 
 
 Her patience disconcerted me [says Bautain]; ... by the strange 
 contradictory tendency of our nature, I began to desire what she would 
 not explain to me—still less impose upon me—and I was impelled to 
 try it just because I was thought incapable of it. That very evening, 
 I searched my memory for the prayers of my childhood ... and... 
 after saying a Pater and an Ave, I invoked the Unknown God, like the 
 Athenians in St. Paul’s day, asking him with all my heart for his light, 
 that I might know him, and his grace, that I might love and serve him. 
 The next day, I returned triumphant to madame Louise,*? telling her 
 that I had prayed, and that the feeling of peace and trust it had left 
 with me had persuaded me that prayer was good for something. Since 
 that moment, I have not left off.°? 
 
 This crucial step taken, it was henceforth impossible for Bautain 
 to turn back; logic and conscience both urged him on. Mlle. 
 Humann did not press him; ‘God has his good time,” she would 
 say. Almost two years elapsed between Bautain’s first meeting 
 with her and the event which definitely marked his conversion to 
 the Catholic faith: his first confession, made to a venerable priest 
 at Einsiedeln. 
 
 The circumstances of this conversion—the total lack of argu- 
 mentation, the large réle played by vague intuitions and unconscious 
 
 1A pseudonym for Mlle. Humann, in the account from which we have been 
 
 whose identity Bautain does not reveal quoting. 
 
 = De Régny, 64-65. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 69 
 
 personal influence, the impossibility of summing up in any distinct 
 chain of reasoning the startling change of convictions which he 
 experienced—these circumstances powerfully influenced Bautain’s 
 whole theory of the nature of religious ‘truth, and of the proper 
 relations of reason and faith in Christian apologetics. They serve 
 to “explain up to a certain point” (as de Régny justly remarks) 
 “the repugnance which M. Bautain henceforth showed for purely 
 rational proofs of the truth.”** ‘Thus, at least indirectly, through 
 her part in Bautain’s conversion, Mlle. Humann may be said to 
 have exercised a controlling influence over all his subsequent think- 
 ing. But her influence was also direct; she was a philosopher as 
 well as a Christian, and changed the current of his thinking as 
 decisively as she changed the current of his life. If we are to 
 understand his philosophical evolution, we must know something 
 of the philosophical tendencies which she represented. 
 
 One would like to know the ideas of this singular woman more 
 in detail. Unfortunately, she had a firm conviction that a woman 
 should never publish a book, and ordered all her manuscripts to be 
 burned when she died. Only a few scattered fragments of. her 
 writings survive. These few are sufficient, however, to reveal the 
 main tendencies of her thinking. 
 
 First of all, it is clear that she was a mystic—not merely a 
 theoretical mystic, like Plotinus, convinced of the superiority of 
 intuition to discursive reason, but a practical mystic, like St. ‘Theresa, 
 convinced that she was herself in frequent and immediate touch 
 with the divine. ‘‘Monseigneur Colmar,” we are told, “thought 
 he discerned in her a soul illumined by a supernatural light, and 
 was therefore wont to take her advice in every serious crisis.”** 
 That she was herself confident of her powers is evident from the 
 following phrases which occur in her diary: 
 
 . the beams of light which He sends me almost daily like my daily 
 
 teats ot 
 . . . pour into me Thy light in proportion as Thou shalt render me 
 
 susceptible to it, and let me make it my own only in so far as it shall be 
 needful to those to whom Thou shalt desire to communicate it by my 
 instrumentality... . 
 
 3 Tbid., 70. 4 Thid., 49, note 1. 
 
70 THE PHILOSOPHY ‘OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Nature has lifted her veil, and has showed herself in her simplicity 
 town “eyes acs 
 
 To-day I tore up a lot more of my papers, and I was strongly tempted 
 to burn them all, to confine myself henceforth to whatever the light 
 from on high shall deign to communicate to me immediately. . . .”° 
 
 It is in the light of her mysticism that Mlle. Humann’s criticism 
 of the contemporary German philosophers is to be appreciated — 
 
 these system-builders, these modern masters of philosophy, who attempt to 
 build a science with what they call their chiaroscuro, that is, their natural 
 light. . . . They talk of man, pretending to talk of him as psycholo- 
 gists, and they know neither the origin, nor the necessary law, nor the 
 end of man. They talk of God, and perhaps they have never opened 
 their souls to receive and taste his divine activity; they know not what 
 it is to love Him; it is with difficulty that they believe He exists; .. . 
 they do not suspect that religion is divine and as ancient as the world, 
 since it is the bond which unites man to God, the living rapport between 
 God and man. And how should they understand anything about this 
 rapport since they know neither God nor man? *® 
 
 I have italicized the key-sentence. It is evident that, for Mlle. 
 Humann, as for all the Christian mystics, the knowledge of ulti- 
 mate reality is impossible without the immediate experience of 
 Ultimate Reality—an experience that is not merely intellectual, 
 but emotional and moral as well, and an experience attainable only 
 by the pure and the humbly receptive soul. This principle of 
 Mlle. Humann’s became a cornerstone of the philosophy of her 
 disciple. 
 
 Another /eit-motiv in Bautain’s philosophy which we find also 
 in Mlle. Humann’s, is the rule of spiritual law in the natural world: 
 
 It is impossible [she writes] to make a serious study of natural objects, 
 and of the physical world and its laws, without discovering at every 
 moment wonderful analogies between this world and the sacred Truths 
 which Religion teaches.‘ 
 
 This is not nature-mysticism in the Wordsworthian sense. Nature 
 is not the garment of God; it is a sphere of corruption and un- 
 
 * Fliche, Mlle. Louise Humann, 76-78. *" Thid., 126. 
 * Thid.. 127-128. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL rie 
 
 reality, by comparison with the realm of pure and changeless Being 
 from which it fell. 
 
 The Christian [writes Mlle. Humann] who believes with greater 
 certainty and confidence in things invisible than in those which fall 
 within the domain of the senses . . . sees in Nature only a restless agent 
 which makes and unmakes, which produces and destroys, and in the 
 world only a passing show, wherein there is nothing stable and permanent, 
 nothing true and subsistent except the pure light and life which are 
 of God.”® 
 
 It is clear from these passages, and others like them, that the 
 general stream of thought with which Mlle. Humann brought 
 Bautain in contact was the ancient tradition of Christian mysticism, 
 which goes back through Boehme, Eckhart, and Scotus Erigena 
 to pseudo-Dionysius and the Alexandrian fathers—and through 
 them, finally, to Philo and the Platonic tradition. Mingled with 
 theosophic, occultistic, and Cabalistic tendencies, this ancient mysti- 
 cal tradition was just then exerting a most powerful influence upon 
 all the philosophers of France and Germany. It was mediated 
 partly by the philosophy of Jacob Boehme, which enjoyed an 
 unheard-of popularity throughout the epoch of Romanticism, and 
 partly by more classical sources such as neo-Platonism. Sound 
 deeply enough in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, Schleier- 
 macher, or even Hegel, and you will strike mysticism; but far 
 more mystical than the philosophy of such men was the popular 
 philosophy of the day—and it was from this secondary stratum, I 
 should say, the stratum represented by men like Jacobi in Prot- 
 estant circles and men like Franz Baader in Catholic circles, that 
 Mlle. Humann drew her leading ideas. 
 
 I mention Jacobi and Baader because their influence upon Bautain 
 (via Mlle. Humann) is clear and undeniable. From Jacobi must 
 have come Bautain’s conception of faith as a cognitive faculty; 
 from Baader, his conception of the analogy between cognition and 
 biological reproduction. But Jacobi and Baader were representa- 
 tives of a very wide-spread movement of thought. In an article 
 on Baader in the Revue Européenne at about this time,” the 
 remark is made that Baader’s theory of certitude “is at the same 
 
 * Ibid., 128-129. ® Revue Européenne, 1, 298, et seg. 
 
72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 time that of almost all the Catholic savants of Germany”; while 
 Baron Bunsen, in a letter preserved in the Fonds Bautain, observes 
 that Bautain’s anti-intellectualism is “almost general in our German 
 schools, especially that of Schelling and that of Baader.’*° An 
 investigation of this whole movement of thought** would cast much 
 light upon the unavowed presuppositions of German idealism. 
 
 But to return to the story of Bautain’s development—the years 
 1820 to 1822, as we have seen, witnessed a gradual change in 
 his whole intellectual and moral attitude. It is interesting to trace 
 the steps in this change. First of all, when still unconverted, he 
 undertook, at Mlle. Humann’s suggestion, to make a French trans- 
 lation of Krummacher’s Paradles,’? a children’s book in which 
 analogies between natural phenomena and religious ideas are poet- 
 ically traced. Next, we find him exchanging his course on Aes- 
 thetics, at Easter, 1821, for a course in Psychology, “whose principal 
 data,” as de Régny informs us, “were suggested by Mlle. Humann.” 
 Then, for the academic year 1821-22, he boldly chose Metaphysics 
 for his field; and his auditors were soon aware that a radical change 
 had taken place in his point of view. 
 
 Discussion over this course became quite hot. ‘The political 
 radicals and the rationalists were scandalized to find him exalting 
 duty and faith in place of liberty and reason; the Protestants at 
 once detected a Catholic drift; the Catholics themselves were a bit 
 alarmed at the violence of his attacks upon the reason, which 
 savored of skepticism. Slanderous tongues, as M. Campaux re- 
 ports,°* proceeded to garble the professor’s teachings: he had said, 
 “God does not exist; he is”; and his critics, suppressing the second 
 half of the sentence, loudly accused him of atheism. Bautain 
 meanwhile went his way, calm in his new-found faith. Seeking 
 
 8° FB,K, Cahier I, 11-12. That Baad- (Vols. I, II, III, & IX) concurrently 
 
 er’s opinions were well known to Bautain 
 is proved by the following remark in a 
 letter to Prince Mestchersky (FB,K, 
 Cahier II, 17): “I think him sincerely 
 Christian at heart, but perhaps too much 
 carried away with the ideas of Saint- 
 Martin and of Jacob Boehme. He would 
 have much more influence if he wrote 
 more clearly. But his style is désolant.” 
 A series of articles by and about Baader 
 was running in the Revue Européenne 
 
 with Bautain’s first articles. 
 
 * A very good brief sketch of this move- 
 ment of thought is to be found in the 
 introduction to Vermeil’s J. A. Moehler 
 et Pécole catholique de Tubingue, Paris, 
 1913. 
 
 *’ Published 1821; ran through 7 edi- 
 tions; later editions contained additional 
 parables by Bautain. 
 
 See de Régny, 75-76. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL ae 
 
 to enrich his store of empirical data, and to find new evidences 
 of spiritual law in the natural world, he entered the medical school 
 at Easter, 1822, while still continuing to teach at the University 
 and the Collége Royal. 
 
 Toward the end of the academic year, the much-discussed course 
 in Metaphysics was suddenly interrupted. M. Budan de Saint- 
 Laurent, inspector general of the University, was sent from Paris 
 by the Government to investigate Bautain’s teaching. After 
 listening to one of Bautain’s lectures, he caused a sensation among 
 the auditors by rising in his place and publicly denouncing the 
 professor, on the ground that in maintaining the impotence of the 
 reason he was undermining religion and morals. Later in the 
 summer—just after making the general confession which completed 
 his union with the Catholic Church—Bautain received word that 
 he had been suspended from his functions in consequence of his 
 irreligious teaching! ‘Certainly,’ says Baudin, “the suspicious 
 Restoration displayed in this instance as clumsy and maladroit a 
 hand as one might wish. In striking simultaneously at Bautain 
 and at his friends, Jouffroy and Damiron, it was making martyrs 
 for Eclecticism; and to cap the climax, it was reckoning among 
 its adherents the philosopher who was getting ready to combat it.”** 
 It seems likely that the alleged reason for Bautain’s suspension was 
 only a pretext; his real offense lay in his former championship of 
 liberty and equality. 
 
 Bautain’s suspension was the occasion of a letter to the Rector 
 of the Academy, in which he reaffirmed the main teachings of his 
 Metaphysics course,*” defending himself against the charge of 
 skepticism and urging that it was unbelievers and Protestants who 
 had most reason to take umbrage at his teachings. In this letter, 
 the outline of his whole system already appears; one may con- 
 fidently say that, at this early date, July 1, 1822, not two years 
 after his meeting with Mlle. Humann, his intellectual evolution 
 was complete, and his philosophical system was already conceived 
 in its definitive form, which not even the violence of ecclesiastical 
 controversy was ever able seriously to alter. Certain passages in this 
 letter form an almost indispensable introduction to his philosophy. 
 
 * Baudin, I. preserved in Ms. (FB,V1). It is the 
 The syllabus of this course has been chief source for Bautain’s Metaphysics. 
 
74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 “My teaching,” says Bautain,"® “whose form may appear novel, 
 is simply Platonism purified by the light of Christianity.” Its novel 
 form is chiefly due to the fact that there are two well-marked 
 tendencies among his auditors, with which he has constantly to 
 reckon: Kantianism and Protestantism. 
 
 The system of Kant [he says] has brought back many minds from: 
 gross materialism, not to faith or revelation, but to the conviction that 
 reason could know nothing above the world of the senses, and to the 
 despair of ever lifting themselves by its aid into the higher world. ‘That 
 is the upshot of Kant’s Critigue of Pure Reason. Hs antinomies or con- 
 tradictory arguments prove in a very powerful fashion that the human 
 reason can demonstrate the pro and com with equal success so far as 
 ultimate questions are concerned; . . . that there is therefore no sufficient 
 reason, no solid ground, either for affirming or for denying that which 
 cannot be perceived by the senses; and that thus indifferentism in things 
 metaphysical and divine is the part of the sage. 
 
 This decision of the Critical Philosophy puts an end to all dispute; but 
 its consequence is that he who talks of invisible and supernatural things 
 can be only a dreamer, since he occupies himself with objects imper- 
 ceptible to the senses and undemonstrable by the reason, or else an esprit 
 
 faible, a partisan of obscurantism, floundering to no purpose in the dark- 
 ness of faith.*" 
 
 Combine with this critical tendency the Protestant tendency, to 
 rationalize the dogmas of religion, and one may imagine, says 
 Bautain, the difficulty of talking at all to such an audience upon 
 the subject of Metaphysics—“‘that is to say, concerning objects 
 which cannot be perceived by the senses, and which nevertheless 
 are the basis and reason of all that exists.” However, he deter- 
 mined to attack his subject, and to do it in such a fashion as to 
 show its vital human importance, being convinced from experience 
 that the discussion “fof the possible and the impossible, of the 
 necessary and the contingent, . . . of cause and effect,” and such- 
 like abstractions, is perfectly fruitless, if not worse than fruitless, 
 where matters of such high import are concerned. ‘‘What good is 
 learning, if it does not make better men!”*® 
 
 The truth which makes better men is found most clearly in 
 the Gospels; but of course the direct exposition of Gospel truth 
 
 * Fonds Bautain, U13. * Thidi,/3: 
 7 FB, U2. 
 
THE, ODYSSEY OF AN. ARDENT -SOUL 75 
 
 would hardly be classed as philosophy, “since this word signifies 
 in our day something quite different from the love of wisdom.” 
 
 I therefore [says Bautain] announced Plato as my chosen master; 
 I expounded his teaching, as far as I could, in terms of the pure forms 
 of mathematics; I made the light of the Gospel dominate the spirit and 
 form of my course, and, without my speaking positively of the funda- 
 mental dogmas of Christianity, they became evident through the facts 
 of Nature and its laws,*® 
 
 Christian in spirit and purpose, Platonic in its positive teachings, 
 Kantian in its negative teachings—that is perhaps the simplest 
 formula for Bautain’s philosophy. We may well postpone our 
 study of its positive and constructive side, since it never came under 
 discussion during Bautain’s lifetime, and, save by his close disciples, 
 was never understood. Suffice it to say that the central principle 
 of his constructive philosophy can be exactly defined in terms of 
 his new attitude toward life. Before his conversion, he had been 
 self-reliant, independent, a believer in the absolute spontaneity of 
 the human will and reason; now he was humble, respectful to 
 tradition and authority, conscious of his dependence upon powers 
 outside of himself for guidance and enlightenment, and for life 
 itself. He justifies this new attitude of his—surely a typically 
 Catholic attitude—by adducing facts from every realm of nature 
 and from the moral life of man to prove that passivity, receptivity, 
 submissiveness, dependence, are everywhere the necessary conditions 
 for the healthy growth of all finite creatures, and for the attain- 
 ment of such limited freedom, spontaneity, and intelligence as is 
 within the reach of man. But we cannot postpone altogether our 
 discussion of the negative, Kantian, anti-intellectualistic side of 
 Bautain’s philosophy; for all the outstanding events in his career, 
 from now on, hinge upon it in one way or another. 
 
 As we have seen, Bautain accepts Kant’s verdict, that the human 
 reason is incapable of attaining to the knowledge of metaphysical 
 ultimates. He goes farther: he applies this general verdict to the 
 specific case of the traditional rational arguments for the existence 
 of God, and, like Kant, pronounces them all invalid. 
 
 © Thid., 4. 
 
76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 God, I told them, cannot be demonstrated by the reason; for there 
 are but three ways of demonstrating a truth: equation, deduction, and 
 induction. By egwation one determines an unknown term by a known 
 term which is its equal, and to which one compares it. Well, “What 
 is equal to God?” . . . With what term shall we compare Him who 
 is above all terms? By deduction, one affirms the particular by showing 
 it to be included in the general, in a higher term. What is that term 
 which is higher than God? What shall be the premise of that deduction 
 whose conclusion is to be God? By izduction one forms the general 
 out of the particular; but the general is not the universal, and one does 
 not make the Infinite out of the finite. Now, God is the Universal, 
 the Infinite, the Absolute. Can reason then conceive him and embrace 
 Him? Show me a process of reasoning which does not come under one 
 of these categories.*° 
 
 It was quite natural, he admits, for the inspector-general to 
 suppose that teaching of this sort tended to undermine religious 
 faith. Seeing the rational proofs of the existence of God disputed, 
 and supposing that religious faith was based upon these proofs, he 
 was quite logically led to ask, in a tone of indignation, what a 
 man in the grip of despair or of passion might not do, if these 
 bases of the faith were removed. But to this question—so nearly 
 touching his own case—Bautain has ready a vigorous reply: 
 
 ¢ 
 ' 
 
 I do not think that a passionate or wretched man can be calmed or 
 consoled by arguments. Syllogisms have no power against the soul’s 
 distress and the heart’s agitations. Something loftier and deeper is 
 needed: faith in God, the feeling of His activity within us and His 
 providence over us, surrender to the higher Will—none of them things 
 that reasoning will ever give.*? 
 
 The truth is that an altogether exaggerated importance has been 
 ascribed to the traditional arguments for the existence of God. 
 They are supposed to be convincing to unbelievers; whereas they 
 never convince anybody who is not already convinced. Nay, more: 
 it is possible to believe firmly in God while rejecting all rational 
 arguments; and it is possible to lose all vital faith in God in the 
 very act of proving His existence—or rather, the existence of a 
 philosophical abstraction that goes by His name! 
 
 © FB,U8. “ Thid., 9. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 77 
 
 Yes, Monsieur, I have taught and I still teach that the human reason 
 is not the judge of these things; that they are beyond its sphere and its 
 range; that there is not a rational proof of the existence of God to which 
 an equally cogent disproof cannot be opposed; and that all this polemic 
 loads the mind without touching the heart, fills the memory without 
 giving nourishment to the soul, makes man proud in his own conceit, 
 and finally hardens him. When we speak of God, the question is not 
 to prove that it is impossible He should not exist; the problem is to make 
 men feel that He exists. . . . When a man knows God only through 
 speculation, he becomes capable of disputing about God, but his will is 
 not made better thereby.*? 
 
 But if the knowledge of God (and other metaphysical ultimates ) 
 is not to be gained by reasoning, how is it to be gained? When 
 we accept the negative verdict of the Critical Philosophy, are we 
 not doomed to skepticism? No, says Bautain. The Critical 
 Philosophy simply closes one possible road to the knowledge of 
 God; it shows that by the path of reason neither proof nor disproof 
 of His existence is to be found. What then? Having found that 
 rational arguments cancel each other and give us a sum of zero, 
 we have simply to abandon the path of reason and try another way 
 of reaching our objective: the way of self-mortification, of faith, 
 of feeling, of immediate insight. 
 
 First of all, self-mortification. ‘There are certain moral quali- 
 fications for metaphysical research: “Blessed are the pure in heart, 
 for they shall see God.” ‘This truth is Platonic as well as Christ- 
 ian; Plato is at one with the Fathers in insisting upon ascetic 
 purification as an essential part of the training of the philosopher. 
 
 Then, faith. Every science, remarks Bautain, is dogmatic at 
 its point of departure; it takes all its fundamental concepts and 
 first principles on faith. Hence metaphysics, the science of 
 sciences, must also be dogmatic; it must postulate the existence of 
 God, the Universal Being, or it will never get on, any more than 
 logic would get on if the principles of rationality were called in 
 question, or physics, if the existence of forces were to be denied. 
 
 None of these sciences demonstrates, nor caz it demonstrate, the verid- 
 ical nature of its object except by its evolution, progression, and de- 
 velopment. Centre, unity, reason, force, are terms which represent the 
 
 “ Ibid., 6. 
 
78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Idea of which the science and the doctrine are the development. No 
 physics, no logic, no mathematics would be possible for one who refused 
 to adhere to these names or terms. Similarly, no metaphysic is possible 
 for one who refuses to recognize the name of Being, or the reality of 
 His existence.*” 
 
 Religious faith, however, is more than the provisional acceptance 
 of terms, axioms, and postulates, to be tested by their ““develop- 
 ments.” It is a feeling, says Bautain, a feeling for the truth, a 
 quivering of the heart at the dimly felt presence of a supersensible 
 reality. Every man has among his innate tendencies the capacity 
 to react with a specific emotional thrill when the idea of God is 
 presented to his attention. If he is receptive, if he does not 
 insulate himself from reality by exalting himself as an autonomous 
 being, endowed with absolute spontaneity, then sooner or later, 
 directly or indirectly, the divine presence will manifest itself to 
 him, producing in him a feeling which is implicitly an act of 
 cognition, a religious thrill which is at the same time nascent 
 knowledge of God. It is usually human teaching, or the sight of 
 the majesty of the visible world of Nature, which first awakens 
 this feeling; but man and Nature only mediately reveal a Reality 
 which may be immediately experienced. This is the “true demon- 
 stration” of the existence of God: ‘this demonstration of Himself 
 which He makes by His action upon our hearts, and by the mediating 
 action of Nature upon us.”’** 
 
 Finally, zmsight. If reason can tell us nothing about the super- 
 sensible world, if it can cognize only sensible things and relations 
 between them, this does not mean that we can have no clear knowl- 
 edge of ultimate realities. Blind faith and purblind feeling must 
 be our guides at first; but for the pure in heart, faith always leads 
 to sight at last, and the idea of God, conceived at the moment of 
 the heart’s first spontaneous reaction, unfolds into a veritable science 
 of God. “Taste, says Bautain; “then only [will you] see how 
 gracious the Lord is.”*? In other words, knowledge of God is 
 possible, but only for religious souls, who are willing at first to 
 take his existence on faith, as they take the existence of other minds. 
 
 © FR, US. * Ibid., 6. 
 med fT aie 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL ve 
 
 Religious experience furnishes the indispensable data for religious 
 knowledge. 
 
 I thought therefore [concludes Bautain] thet in our day it was necessary 
 to follow a different road, in order to give my young men a complete 
 conviction of [the reality of] God. I spoke to their hearts more than 
 to their reason. I did not prove God to them by arguments; but I made 
 known His name to them, and I tried to reawaken their feelings. I 
 showed them the divine activity working upon them from the moment 
 of their birth, seeking to penetrate their heart. . .. 1 had the joy of 
 seeing my words take effect, and the seed take root in the soil which 
 has been allotted to me. Doubts were dissipated, and a sweet and simple 
 faith scattered the clouds of reason. 
 
 My method seems to me, moreover, to be in harmony with religious 
 teaching. We find in the Gospel neither system, nor theory, nor syl- 
 logism, nor argumentation. . . . We do not find that the apostles used 
 syllogisms to support what they proclaimed. . . . The Spirit does not 
 dispute, nor does it cry aloud in the streets and the market-places; it 
 gently steals into men’s souls like a soft breath. It is thus, also, that 
 ministers of the Gospel teach God to the children. They are not plied 
 with syllogisms and arguments; they would not be capable of under- 
 standing them—and nevertheless they feel God, they believe in Him, 
 and the virtues proper to their age . . . prove the reality of their faith. 
 It is possible then to believe in God without physical, moral, or meta- 
 physical arguments,*® 
 
 This letter, as we have said, marks the culmination of Bautain’s 
 intellectual evolution; all his fundamental ideas appear in it. It 
 should be added, however, that they are not yet clearly formulated 
 or widely applied. As Bautain would say, the Idea had not yet 
 fully evolved; it remained in the realm of Metaphysics, and had 
 not yet descended into the realms of Cosmology, Ethics, and 
 Politics. In all these fields—not to speak of Logic, Biology, 
 Psychology, Pedagogy, and Philology (!)—it was to manifest itself 
 during the next few years. 
 
 We are in fact approaching the most fruitful period in Bautain’s 
 life: the period of the founding of the “Strasbourg school,” and 
 of the growing fame of the “Strasbourg Philosophy.” It begins 
 with his suspension, in 1822, and ends with the issuing, in 1834, 
 of the Bishop’s Avertissement condemning his philosophy. 
 
 ae (SRM ob 
 
80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 The attempt of the Government to suppress Bautain’s teaching 
 was actually the means of widening and deepening its influence. 
 Certain of his former students came to him and asked for private 
 instruction. Acceding to their request, he opened an informal 
 class in Philosophy at Mlle. Humann’s house in the Rue de la 
 Toussaint. The project had a startling success. A motley group 
 of “French, Germans, English, Russians; Catholics, Protestants, 
 Greek schismatics, and Jews’’*’ was soon to be seen flocking’ regu- 
 larly to Mlle. Humann’s to sit at the feet of the new prophet. 
 
 It was, in fact, in the réle of prophet that Bautain now appeared. 
 Stripping away all academic formalities, he preached his new 
 philosophy. as a sort of Gospel, which could solve the perplexities 
 and warm the hearts of all the youth. Many were repelled by 
 his teaching; the group never became large; but those who remained 
 became genuine disciples, or at least prospective disciples, hanging 
 upon every word that fell from the Master’s lips. 
 
 The phenomenon was not uncommon in that age of Romanti- 
 cism. The idea of the inspired genius, charged with a message 
 from Heaven, was not confined to Christian circles. “The solemn 
 egotism of Victor Hugo, delivering himself of oracular utterances 
 to a hushed circle of reverent admirers, was characteristic of the 
 epoch.** It was a generation afflicted with mal de siécle; and the 
 one hope which relieved the Romantic melancholy then so assidu- 
 ously cultivated by the well-bred youth was the hope that some 
 inspired prophet and leader might at any moment arise. Wherever 
 a word of calm assurance was spoken, there were those who were 
 ready to accept it with implicit faith. Franz Baader had his circle 
 of admirers; so had Lamennais; but nowhere was there a more 
 worshipful band than this which gathered about Louis Bautain and 
 Mlle. Humann—St. Augustine and his mother Monica, as many 
 called them*“— in the little house on the Rue de la Toussaint. 
 
 As in every band of disciples, there was an inner group which 
 lived on terms of peculiar intimacy with the Master, and with his 
 
 “De Régny, 88. 
 
 Hugo once, it is said, announced to 
 his disciples that he believed in God. 
 Silence followed the utterance; the poet 
 continued to ruminate, with his chin in 
 his beard. “Merveil!” whispered a young 
 
 woman, with a look of awe upon her 
 countenance: “a God who believes in 
 God!” 
 
 ” Others, less respectfully, referred to 
 Bautain as “the new Pythagoras.” (Ens. 
 Phil. B, 631-634.) 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 81 
 
 “spiritual mother.”’ In the early days of the “Strasbourg School,” 
 this group consisted of four young men: Adolphe Carl (Mlle. 
 Humann’s nephew) and—curiously enough—three young Jews, 
 Theodore Ratisbonne, Isadore Goschler, and Jules Lewel (or 
 Lével). It was during the gradual conversion of these three young 
 Jews to the Catholic faith that the letters were written which later 
 were collected and published under the name of Philosophie du 
 Christianisme’°—the classical source for the doctrines of the School, 
 and by all odds the most fascinating work which Bautain ever 
 produced. ‘The title of it may seem a bit pretentious, for a col- 
 lection of letters; but it is really quite exact, for a complete 
 Christian philosophy of religion is developed, bit by bit, as the 
 correspondence proceeds. Asa matter of fact, the letters were not 
 occasional at all; the five parties to the discussion saw each other 
 practically every day. ‘They were simply following a not uncom- 
 mon convention of the age of Romanticism, and conversing on 
 paper—feeling freer under those circumstances to disembosom 
 themselves to one another. Each takes a pen name; Bautain is 
 “the Master”; Carl is “Adolphe”; Ratisbonne is ‘‘Adéodat’’; 
 Goschler, “Julien”; Lewel, “Eudore.” The three Jews reveal their 
 religious aspirations and perplexities; the Master calmly expounds 
 the Truth, meeting each objection as it arises, showing no proselyt- 
 ing zeal and merely urging them to be true to the faith of their 
 fathers and the aspirations of their own hearts; Adolphe acts as 
 intermediary, presenting the objections of the Jews to the Master, 
 and showing how the Master’s replies meet the objections. In the 
 end, persuasion is complete: Ratisbonne, Goschler, and Lewel all 
 come to regard Christianity as the crown of Judaism, and, to the 
 consternation of their relatives, openly embrace the Catholic faith. 
 Thus the New Apologetics won its first triumph. 
 
 The Philosophy of Christianity was not published at this time; 
 the letters seemed too sacredly private for publication, and it was 
 only the heat of controversy and the threatened dissolution of the 
 Strasbourg School which induced Bautain to lay them before the 
 world.** During this same period, however, he was publishing 
 
 © Abbrev.: P&il. Chr. form. For complete list of Bautain’s 
 *In 1835. A few selected passages published works, see de Régny, 476. 
 were published in 1830, in pamphlet 
 
82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 several works which mark significant stages in the development of 
 his philosophical system. In 1825, he published a slim volume of 
 aphorisms and short essays, setting forth some of his leading ideas 
 in popular style.°* In 1826, on finishing his medical course, he 
 presented as his thesis for the degree of Doctor of Medicine a 
 fragment of a philosophy of nature, Propositions générales sur la 
 vie, in which the fundamental idea of his philosophy, life as con- 
 ditional spontaneity, receives exact biological formulation.** On 
 the basis of this biological formula, a genetic psychology is worked 
 out, designed to serve as a foundation for a philosophy of education, 
 a theory of knowledge, and a metaphysic—all to the great mystifi- 
 In 1827 appeared his brilliant 
 Discours sur la morale de PEvangile comparée a la’ morale des 
 philosophes, which was awarded a gold medal by the Société 
 Académique de la Marne.** Here the genetic psychology worked 
 out in the Propositions is made the basis of a classification and 
 critique of some of the leading ethical systems—each corresponding 
 
 cation of the examining committee! 
 
 to one of the stages in the process of mental development, which 
 culminates in the Christian stage. Finally—to complete our pic- 
 ture of Bautain’s multiform activities at this most fertile period 
 in his career—in his lectures at the University, where he had been 
 reinstated in 1824, he was developing a complete philosophy, which 
 he intended to publish later in systematic form. He offered a 
 new course on Logic in 1824; on Ethics in 1825; on Anthropology 
 (including Psychology) in 1826-27. 
 
 Meanwhile, the other members of the School of Strasbourg had 
 been applying the principles of the Master’s philosophy in other 
 fields. Adolphe Carl won a prize in 1824 with an essay on the 
 question whether rhetoric or logic should come first in public 
 education. “The reader may not perceive that this is the question 
 whether faith precedes reason in another form; but Carl perceived 
 it, and made the essay the occasion of a new application of the 
 
 “Variétés Philosophiques, Strasbourg, 
 Silbermann, 1825. Abbrev.: Variétés. 
 
 by subjectivating the objective and by 
 objectivating the subjective.” (33). I 
 
 <Man lives only by intussusception 
 of the life which surrounds and _ pene- 
 trates him, and by exposition, emission, 
 or radiation of the life he receives and 
 has received. In other terms, man lives, 
 in his soul, in his mind, and in his body, 
 
 shall give a good deal of attention to 
 
 the Propositions in chapter 11. Abbrev.: 
 Props. 
 
 ™ Strasbourg, Février, 1827. Abbrev.: 
 Mor. Ev. P. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 83 
 
 Strasbourg Philosophy. In 1827, he published two theses on The 
 Origin and Nature of Language and Articulate Language, which 
 are our chief sources for the linguistic philosophy of the school; 
 and in 1828, having finished a course jn medicine, in emulation 
 of the Master, he published a thesis entitled Du matérialisme en 
 médecine, in which he defended medical science against the charge 
 of materialism, and sketched an idealistic theory of mind and body 
 reminiscent of the Propositions sur la vie. Ratisbonne and Gosch- 
 ler were meanwhile pursuing legal studies; their theses, on Les 
 obligations qui naissent du mariage and La puissance paternelle, 
 were both strongly imbued with the principles of the school.” 
 Later, during the transition period before their definitive conver- 
 sion, they carried on a remarkable work of reorganization and 
 reform in the Jewish schools of Strasbourg, applying the Bautainian 
 philosophy to the problem of moral and religious education. The 
 principles on which they proceeded are admirably stated in a 
 pamphlet of Ratisbonne’s, published in 1828: Essai sur Péducation 
 morale.’° This educational reform movement among the Stras- 
 bourg Jews long outlasted the conversion of its two leaders. 
 
 It is conceivable that Bautain might have gone on thus, tranquilly 
 and unofficially exerting his influence upon the youth of Strasbourg, 
 and contributing through his lectures and writings to the general 
 movement of French thought. If he had done so, we should 
 undoubtedly have had from his pen a more nearly complete and 
 a better balanced system of philosophy than that which he actually 
 left behind him. As a private individual, he might have. been 
 allowed a degree of latitude in philosophical speculation not per- 
 mitted to a priest. As in the case of men like de Maistre and 
 Ballanche, the Church would have been too grateful for the 
 genuinely religious and Catholic tendency of his thinking to be 
 querulous about matters of detail; a layman might be excused for 
 theological inaccuracies on the ground of ignorance.”’ 
 
 But instead of choosing the path of prudence and tranquillity, 
 
 All three theses published, Silber- exercises no control over lay opinion. 
 
 mann, 1827, 1828. 
 
 Strasbourg, Février, 1828. Crowned 
 by the Strasbourg Society of Arts and 
 Sciences. 
 
 * This is not to say that the Church 
 
 Augustin Bonnetty, editor of the Annales 
 de Philosophie Chrétienne, was forced to 
 sign a paper in 1855 recanting certain 
 anti-intellectualist views borrowed from 
 Bautain. (De Régny, chap. xxi.) 
 
84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Bautain deliberately chose, with a courage that one cannot but 
 admire, to risk the rocks and shoals of an ecclesiastical career. The 
 purity and nobility of his motives cannot be questioned. He was 
 convinced that the Catholic faith was the great panacea for the 
 spiritual cravings and moral ills of his generation. His philosophy 
 had been the means of winning a considerable group of uncom- 
 monly brilliant young men to the Catholic faith. Had he the. 
 right to hide his candle under a bushel? Might it not be that if 
 the Church were to adopt his method of presenting the faith, the 
 whole intellectual aristocracy of France could be reclaimed for 
 Christianity? But this would require a sweeping reform in the 
 whole method of teaching philosophy in the ecclesiastical schools; 
 and only a priest could initiate such a reform. Hence, resisting 
 all the entreaties and warnings of his academic associates, he applied 
 for ordination. 
 
 Bautain cherished no illusions as to the difficulties he was likely 
 to encounter in attempting to reform the teaching of philosophy 
 in the Church. In a letter to Riambourg, after stating that he 
 had entered the Church because “in my profound conviction, there 
 is no salvation for mankind and in particular for the present 
 century and for our nation, except in her,” he continues as follows: 
 
 When I entered her doors, I was not ignorant of all that lay ahead 
 of me there: I knew that the narrowest Rationalism was devastating her 
 and drying up her vital sap—and certainly, after drinking the cup of 
 Rationalism down to the dregs in philosophy, I was not going to seek it 
 in theology, I was not going to caress it and praise it. On the contrary, 
 I was going to combat it by all the means God gave me, because I am 
 firmly convinced that it is the greatest plague of ecclesiastical instruction.*® 
 
 Controversy and strife awaited him; he knew that from the start. 
 So did Mlle. Humann. When he communicated to her his decision 
 to enter the priesthood, 
 
 she appeared [says Bautain] neither surprised nor overjoyed. “I expected 
 it,” she said to me; ... “1 am more moved than I can tell you; for 
 if I hope much, I also fear much. We will consult God together.” 
 Some days afterward we went to a sanctuary which was celebrated in 
 that region, where we received the Sacrament with this intent; and 
 
  FB,K, Cahier Il, 18; Cf. ibid., Cahier I, 15-18, Letter to Guizot. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 85 
 
 when I asked her on our return what God had put into her heart con- 
 cerning me, she answered me simply with this word of St. Paul: “I will 
 show him what he will have to suffer for my name’s sake.’’®® 
 
 Bautain’s intention to enter the priesthood had to be deferred 
 for a short time, for he had no mind to have his schemes of reform 
 blocked at the start by falling into the hands of unsympathetic 
 superiors. ‘Ah, if there were a bishop who understood my posi- 
 tion!” he would sigh. What was his delight when he heard that 
 Mgr. Lepappe de Trévern, a prelate interested in the promotion 
 of higher education among the clergy, had been appointed Bishop 
 of Strasbourg. Bautain went to his new Bishop at once and told 
 him frankly that, though he and his whole band of disciples felt 
 strongly drawn to the priesthood, they had no sympathy with the 
 prevalent mode of instruction at the Grand Séminaire de Strasbourg, 
 and “if it were absolutely necessary to pass through that gate, they 
 would give up entering the clergy.” Monseigneur was not 
 shocked; he agreed that ecclesiastical studies were in a deplorable 
 state of degeneration, and mentioned that he was hoping to found 
 a Maison de Hautes Etudes Ecclésiastiques at Molsheim. If M. 
 Bautain and his young followers wished to train themselves for 
 the priesthood, they might go there. The Bishop’s suggestion was 
 seized at once; the first pupil to be admitted to the new school was 
 Goschler, who fled there late in 1827 after breaking all ties with 
 his parents and with the Synagogue. For him, and for Lewel 
 and Ratisbonne, whose break with their kin came a few months 
 later, Mgr. de Trévern prescribed a severe course of theological 
 studies; but Bautain and Carl, who presented themselves at Mol- 
 sheim in August, 1828, received the tonsure and the minor orders 
 on the third day after their arrival, were ordained sub-deacons on 
 the fourth day, and then, after a two months’ retreat under the 
 direction of an old priest, were excused from further studies on 
 the ground that they were already sufficiently prepared. November 
 saw Bautain preaching, while still a deacon, at the church of Saint- 
 Pierre-le-Jeune, near Mlle. Humann’s. His success was immedi- 
 ate; the city was profoundly stirred. Ordained a priest in Decem- 
 ber, he was soon called to preach at the Cathedral; the Bishop, 
 
 ® De Régny, 147. 
 
86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 pleased at the results, bestowed upon him the title of Honorary 
 Canon. 
 
 Meanwhile, the little ‘Society’ at Mlle. Humann’s grew and 
 thrived. New recruits were added to the circle, among them 
 Alphonse Gratry, destined to be the most famous of Bautain’s 
 pupils; new conversions took place, among them that of Jules 
 Lewel’s brother Nestor. In 1830, the Bishop gave the Society a 
 most signal token of his confidence: he gave over to it the com- 
 plete control of the Petit Séminaire, which had to be reorganized 
 on account of the changes introduced by the Revolution of July. 
 Now, it seemed, Bautain was in a position to begin the reform of 
 ecclesiastical education of which he had dreamed. If he had not 
 control of the Grand Séminaire, where theological instruction was 
 given, he had control of the school where young aspirants to the 
 priesthood had their whole mental outlook determined. It would 
 be hard for the Grand Séminaire to undo what the Petit Séminaire 
 had done. The enthusiasm of the band rose high at this great 
 opportunity. They applied themselves to the task of reorganizing 
 the studies at the Little Seminary with such vigor that all Stras- 
 bourg was soon impressed with the results attained. Then came 
 a chance to extend the reform to new spheres. In 1829, Isidore 
 Goschler had been called to Besancon to become professor of 
 philosophy in the Collége. In 1832, Cardinal de Rohan invited 
 him to take charge of the organization of a Maison des Hautes 
 Etudes at Besancon, similar to the one at Molsheim. With him 
 went Henri de Bonnechose, a talented young lawyer whom he 
 had recently led to join Bautain’s band. 
 
 Mlle. Humann saw with great joy these signs of the growing 
 influence of her spiritual children; but looking forward to a day 
 when the bond of common loyalty to her would be removed, and 
 when the very success of the band might lead to the scattering of 
 its members to various positions of authority, and so dissipate its 
 influence, she urged that the Messieurs de Saint-Louis, as they had 
 come to be called,” should bind themselves together, not exactly 
 into a religious order or community, but into a sort of spiritual 
 
 From the Eglise St.-Louis, to whose mann and Louis Bautain (not to mention 
 parish the Petit Séminaire appertained; Mgr. Colmar) had St. Louis for their 
 also from the fact that both Louise Hu- patron saint. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 87 
 
 family. Accordingly, on March 16, 1832, the brothers all signed 
 a Pacte de famille, drawn up by their spiritual mother, pledging 
 themselves, among other things, to live together, as far as possible, 
 and to hold all goods in common; “to recognize and respect the 
 hierarchical order which God by his calling had established amongst 
 the brothers” (meaning that Bautain, who was first called, was 
 always to be obeyed as the “elder brother”); and “never to court 
 voluntarily, by any act or word, any promotion or advancement 
 whatsoever in the Church.”** Thus bound together by a free 
 promise of mutual loyalty and affection, it was hoped that the 
 band might survive the shock of Mlle. Humann’s death, and 
 weather all the unknown rocks and shoals that lay ahead. ‘The 
 precaution, as it proved, was not unnecessary! 
 
 We have now returned to the point in Bautain’s career at which 
 we first made his acquaintance: the years 1833 and 1834. During 
 these years he reached the high-water mark of his fame and in- 
 fluence. In 1833 his essay On the Teaching of Philosophy in 
 France in the Nineteenth Century brought him into international 
 prominence, and his philosophy began to be discussed in all the 
 religious periodicals. “The students at Paris, as we have seen, 
 coupled his name with that of Lacordaire, in asking for a new 
 type of preaching at Notre Dame. ‘The star of Lamennais was 
 waning, blood-red, in the West; all eyes turned to this new star 
 that was rising in the East. For the moment, it seemed that Bau- 
 tain had all France at his feet, listening for his new Evangel, so 
 confidently promised but as yet so imperfectly developed in his 
 fragmentary writings. For the moment, his dream of rejuvenating 
 the whole intellectual life of the Church, and restating Catholic 
 philosophy in a shape adapted to the needs of the age, seemed 
 possible of realization. “Théodule Foisset had already pointed to 
 the school of Strasbourg as the “foremost” example of the vitality 
 and progressiveness of Catholic thought, and the best refutation of 
 the charge that Catholicism appealed only to the ignorant.*? Now 
 he trumphantly announced that the man of the hour had come, 
 and was ready to speak: | 
 
 At last M. Bautain has called to mind the hopes which were built 
 
 @ Rev. Europ., V1, 33-34. © Thid. 
 
88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 upon him toward 1829, when M. Cousin used to say to him, “My task 
 is to write the history of philosophy, but you will create a philosophy.” 
 A large number of Catholics (and this fact is personally known to the 
 author of this article) have been pressing him urgently for a long time 
 to publish a résumé of his lectures. He is about to yield to their en- 
 treaties. . . . You see, we have not here the commonplaces of the 
 preacher. Neither have we the burning invective of the Essai de Pin- 
 différence.°* We have a man who has lived with his century, who 
 knows it of long acquaintance, and who tells it what it is, without bitter- 
 ness; so that one has only to look within oneself a moment, and con- 
 sult one’s own observations, in order to cry out, as before a speaking 
 likeness, ‘“That’s it, to be sure!” 
 
 What Bautain’s influence might have been, had he published 
 his lecture courses just at this moment, it is hard to calculate. 
 They would certainly have been read with the greatest avidity. 
 If he had realized how soon the pall of disfavor and oblivion was 
 to shut down upon him, he would surely have occupied himself 
 otherwise, in those crucial years of 1833 and 1834, than with 
 the writing of two or three controversial pamphlets that only 
 helped to precipitate the storm of hostility. It must be said that, 
 for a would-be reformer, he showed little tact. He seemed to 
 feel that before he could lay the details of his constructive system 
 before the public, he must first complete the work of demolishing 
 everything else in sight. “There was not one important school of 
 thought that he did not attack. For his former associates, the 
 Eclectics, he showed no mercy; Victor Cousin was cut to the 
 quick. For the time-honored Scholastic arguments in defense of 
 Christianity he had only ridicule; the cry of “heresy” began to 
 arise from the seminaries. For the school of Lamennais, to which 
 most of the progressive young priests still belonged, he showed no 
 sympathy at all; and the mercilessness with which he exposed the 
 fallacies of the “common-sense” philosophy thus alienated from 
 him the liberal group which might have been expected to support 
 him. : 
 
 The first rumbles of the gathering storm began to be heard 
 even before the publication of the essay “On the Teaching of 
 
 ® The reference is to Lamennais’s * Rev. Europ., VI, 154, 155. 
 Essai de Vindifférence en matiére de 
 religion. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 89 
 
 Philosophy in France.” At Strasbourg, complaints began to be 
 sent to the Bishop about the teaching of Philosophy at the Petit 
 Séminaire. ‘The teaching was in French instead of Latin; the 
 traditional text-books were not used;. logical disputations were 
 omitted. Monseigneur ordered the use of the classical Philosophie 
 de Lyon,* and the resumption of Latin disputations. At Besancon, 
 Goschler found himself faced with the opposition of both teachers 
 and students, in spite of the Cardinal. ‘The teachers resented his 
 attacks upon Scholasticism; the students, his attacks upon Lamen- 
 nais. A revolt of the students took place one day, obviously with 
 the connivance of some of the faculty; and at the death of the 
 Cardinal in February, 1833, Goschler and Bonnechose returned 
 to Strasbourg. Letters accusing them of heresy were sent to the 
 Bishop of Strasbourg, and to Rome. When Bautain went to Paris 
 later in the year, he was conscious that hostile influences had been 
 at work there too. . 
 
 The £ssay itself brought forth many unfriendly comments. An 
 anonymous follower of Lamennais, after taking a trip to Stras- 
 bourg in order to spy upon the professor in the class-room and 
 get incriminating evidence if possible, published a hastily-written 
 book against him—650 pages of acid but often telling criticism, 
 mingled with scurrilous personal abuse. This was the only shot 
 that came from the camp of Lamennais; but from the camp of 
 the Scholastics there came continuous rounds of artillery. The 
 Ami de la religion, a prominent Catholic periodical, showed itself 
 hostile to Bautain from the moment the Essay appeared; and, from 
 that time on, published a series of short editorials and long articles 
 against him. The most powerful of these articles seem to have 
 emanated from the Grand Séminaire at Strasbourg, where, as we 
 have seen, a Neo-Scholastic movement of real acumen and dis- 
 crimination was going on, under the leadership of Raess and 
 Liebermann. ‘To them, the somewhat vague Romanticism of 
 Bautain and his school seemed nothing but intellectual slovenliness, 
 tending to blur all the firm outlines of theological thinking and 
 to introduce endless errors under cover of darkness. Above all, 
 
 © Institutiones philosophicae, auctori- 
 tate D.D. Archiépiscopi Lugdunensis, 
 1792. Ascribed to Father Valla. 
 
90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 his attack upon the rational proofs of religion seemed to them to 
 be dangerous in the extreme; for they were not ready like him 
 to appeal to intuition, and mistrusted the scientific analogies by 
 which he sought to show the accord of the divine and natural orders. 
 
 It was the influence of the Grand Séminaire, seconded by that 
 of the Strasbourg clergy, who disliked the clannishness of the 
 Messteurs de St.-Louis, and envied their success, which gradually 
 alienated the Bishop’s regard for Bautain. At first he contented 
 himself with opposing Bautain’s anti-intellectualism, in public and 
 private discussion. Bautain, always keen for an argument on this 
 question, gave him as good as he sent. ‘Then, becoming alarmed 
 at certain theological consequences of Bautain’s philosophy, he 
 drew up six questions and demanded specific answers to them. 
 Bautain complied—at length. ‘Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, 
 in September, 1834, the Bishop broke off what looked like a 
 friendly philosophical discussion and issued an Avertissement to all 
 the clergy of the diocese, warning them against the dangerous 
 heresies contained in Bautain’s teachings. Copies were sent to 
 Rome, and to all the bishops of France. Three weeks later the 
 Messieurs de St.-Louis were ordered to leave the Petit Séminaire, 
 and deprived of the right to preach. 
 
 A controversy thus began which held public attention for six 
 long years. Rome acknowledged receipt of the Avertissement, but 
 judiciously refrained from making definite pronouncement on the 
 merits of the question at issue. Hence Bautain did not feel called 
 upon to submit, and continued the debate. 
 
 Then [as Professor Baudin picturesquely describes it] one saw Stras- 
 bourg divide into two camps, where there were terribly extemporaneous 
 theologians and philosophers in abundance, and these not the least ardent. 
 The newspapers intervened, of course; pamphlets multiplied; and the 
 debate spread to wider and wider circles. Bautain had little success in 
 France, where people have too much of an esteem for Reason to listen 
 willingly when she is slandered. In Germany, the Tiibingen faculty, 
 with the celebrated Moehler, came out in his fayor, and sent him a 
 Doctor’s diploma in Theology. The Bonn faculty, on the contrary, 
 with Hermes, came out against him. And the whole of Christian Europe, 
 Protestant as well as Catholic, kept its eyes attentively fixed upon 
 Strasbourg and its philosopher.*® 
 
  Baudin, I, 22. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 91 
 
 The mention of Hermes perhaps suggests the reason why Rome 
 remained neutral in the affaire Bautain. Professor Hermes of 
 Bonn had been maintaining a thorough-going rationalism; accord- 
 ing to him, all the truths of religion are such that, when one tries 
 the experiment of Cartesian doubt upon them, they reaffirm them- 
 selves by the unaided light of reason. He had thus been led to 
 rationalize the Catholic faith to such an extent that in his system 
 the traditional doctrines were hardly recognizable. The Avertisse- 
 ment of Mgr. de ‘T'révern came to Rome just when the writings 
 of Hermes were being examined there; they were officially con- 
 demned in 1835, despite long-continued protests on the part of 
 his many followers.°’ ‘This condemnation gave Bautain a distinct 
 tactical advantage. He accused his opponents, who maintained the 
 powers of the reason against his attacks, of falling into Hermesian- 
 ism; which put them in a very delicate situation.°* If Rome were 
 to condemn Bautain and uphold the Bishop, it could do so only by 
 carefully distinguishing between the illegitimate rationalism of 
 Hermes and the legitimate rationalism of the Bishop. This was 
 not easy to do; for the extreme anti-intellectualism of Bautain had 
 provoked an equally extreme rationalism in the Bishop, and there 
 was to be witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of an ecclesiastic 
 exalting Reason above Faith, while endeavoring to demolish the 
 position of a philosopher who exalted Faith above Reason! Add 
 to this the fact that the Bishop was a Gallican, while Bautain was 
 a loyal Ultramontanist, and it becomes perfectly comprehensible 
 that the Holy See should have refrained for six years from all 
 intervention in the dispute. 
 
 During the heat of the controversy, Bautain published his 
 Philosophie du Christianisme, with an impressive Introduction by 
 Bonnechose, and full accounts by Ratisbonne, Goschler, and Lewel, 
 of the circumstances of their conversions. His object was to give 
 concrete proof of the legitimacy and effectiveness of his non- 
 argumentative apologetic, by showing how it satisfied the question- 
 ings and religious longings of these typical young Romanticists. 
 
 Hermes had died in 1831; but his 8% One of Hermes’ followers actually 
 teachings continued to exercise a con- wrote a book aiming to prove the identity 
 trolling influence at Bonn. of Hermes?’ position with that of the 
 
 Bishop. (See de Régny, 236.) 
 
Oz THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 The Bishop countered by appointing a committee of professors 
 from the Grand Séminaire, to pronounce upon the orthodoxy of 
 the Philosophie du Christianisme, and other published works of 
 Bautain—a committee which in due time, reported that in Bau- 
 tain’s writings “not a dogma, not a mystery is presented in its 
 purity, without some admixture of error.”°? Meanwhile, the 
 Messieurs de St.-Lowis, deprived of their ecclesiastical functions, 
 occupied themselves with the founding of a whole series of primary 
 and secondary schools, where their pedagogical principles were 
 worked out even more consistently than at the Petit Séminaire. 
 
 The general impression among the French Catholics was that 
 each of the parties in the controversy was contending for a vital 
 principle. Accordingly, various friendly mediators offered their 
 services—among them Mgr. Donnet, Bishop Coadjutor of Nancy, 
 and M. Choppin d’Arnouville, prefect of the Lower Rhine. 
 Several times Bautain and his followers signed propositions which 
 seemed to settle everything amicably; but each time the Bishop, 
 seeking to force a more abject and humiliating surrender, made 
 some unreasonable modification in the formula of submission or 
 some impossible demand which opened the breach once more. On 
 one occasion, a formula of complete submission had been signed, 
 and congratulations were pouring in upon Bautain for his ex- 
 emplary behavior, when a Protestant paper, twitting him on having 
 sacrificed his principles, called forth from Bonnechose an inju- 
 dicious letter in which he maintained that nothing essential had 
 been sacrificed—which of course provoked a new outburst of wrath 
 on the part of the Bishop. 
 
 Finally, on the advice of Lacordaire, who had heard from 
 authoritative sources that Bautain’s books seemed likely to be put 
 on the /ndex, Bautain and Bonnechose set out for Rome to lay 
 their case before the Pope. ‘They were kindly received, for their 
 attitude was humble and respectful; and the examination of the 
 Philosophie du Christianisme—which was, in fact, already before 
 the Congregation of the Index—was, at Bautain’s request, con- 
 fided to an Italian prelate, Cardinal Mezzofante. Months passed, 
 and no decision was reached. Finally, Bautain and Bonnechose 
 
 ® Rapport 4 Mgr. PEvéque de Stras- tain. Publié par ordre de Sa Grandeur. 
 bourg sur les écrits de M. PAbbé Bau- Strasbourg, 1838. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 93 
 
 signed a blanket agreement, pledging themselves in advance to 
 submit to whatever decision might be rendered. The examination 
 of the book was then handed over to the noted theologian Perrone, 
 who had already had several friendly discussions with Bautain. 
 The Pope gave them his Apostolic Benediction, and they departed, 
 hopeful, but still doubtful of their. fate. They had occupied 
 themselves during their sojourn in Rome by consulting many 
 theologians on the orthodoxy of their position; and it seems clear 
 that Bautain had come to recognize the extreme and paradoxical 
 nature of many of his views. He had been made to feel his 
 temerity in writing upon semi-theological themes without ever 
 having had a thorough course in theology; and his mystic certitude 
 of the truth of his philosophy had been sadly shaken. He went 
 to Rome still believing he was an inspired genius; he came back 
 conscious of his fallibility and doubtful of his most cherished ideas. 
 
 Returning to Strasbourg in this chastened mood, he found the 
 Bishop exhausted by the controversy, and disposed to settle the 
 matter by appointing a Coadjutor to whom the whole settlement 
 could be left. For a time, it looked as if it might be made easy 
 for Bautain to’submit, for his friend the Abbé Affre was proposed 
 as Coadjutor; but Affre was made Archbishop of Paris, and Bautain 
 found himself, instead, in the hands of his chief opponent, the 
 Abbé Raess. “There was nothing to do but to sign Raess’s severe 
 - formula of recantation with as much grace as possible. “The whole 
 band subscribed to the formula on September 8, 1840. Thus ended 
 the controversy, and thus ended Bautain’s attempt to reform the 
 teaching of philosophy in the Catholic seminaries. 
 
 Since Bautain owes his somewhat dubious fame among Catholics 
 to the fact that his name is attached to certain heretical propositions, 
 we may as well give this formula of recantation. It consists of 
 six propositions, corresponding almost exactly with the six questions 
 cited in the Avertissement. The Bishop’s original position is re- 
 affirmed without compromise, save that, in the first proposition, the 
 emphatic word alone is omitted after the word reasoning. 
 
 1. Reasoning can prove with certitude the existence of God and the 
 infinity of his perfections. Faith is a heavenly gift which presupposes 
 revelation; it cannot properly therefore be appealed to in proving the 
 existence of God to an atheist. 
 
94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 2. The divinity of the Mosaic revelation is proved with certitude 
 by the oral and written tradition of the Synagogue and of Christianity. 
 
 3. The proof drawn from the miracles of Jesus Christ, obvious and 
 striking to those who were eye-witnesses, has wot lost its force, with its 
 éclat, for subsequent generations. . . . 
 
 4. One has no right to expect an unbeliever to admit the resurrection 
 of our divine Saviour, before furnishing him with certain proofs thereof ; 
 and these proofs are deduced by reasoning. 
 
 5. In these various questions reason precedes faith, and should lead 
 us to it. 
 
 6. However enfeebled and darkened our reason may have become 
 through original sin, it retains enough clearness and force to guide us 
 with certitude to the existence of God, to the revelation made to the 
 Jews by Moses, and to that made to the Christians by our adorable 
 God-man.*° 
 
 ‘The reader will note that all the heresies recanted under these 
 six heads can be reduced to one: the effort to displace the old 
 apologetic, based upon miracle, prophecy, oral and written testi- 
 mony, and other forms of external evidence, and to replace it by 
 an apologetic in which the constant appeal is to experience, and 
 in which the skeptic is invited to believe nothing which he cannot 
 personally verify. As Moehler puts it in his letter to Bautain, 
 
 You are making war upon a Theology whose characteristic mark I 
 might describe as the search for external demonstrations; upon a Theology 
 which furnishes a mass of proofs, but does not acquaint one with the 
 thing itself which is to be proved, . . . and is capable rather of hanging 
 Christianity externally on a man, than of transforming the man himself 
 into a Christian. . . . In contrast with such an art of external propping 
 up, which does not enter into the living spirit of the Gospel, you are 
 endeavoring to let it unfold itself, and thus establish itself through its 
 own strength, convinced that when set upon its own feet it will best 
 demonstrate its invincible strength and eternal power to the unprejudiced 
 mind, through the organic unfolding of its divine content. . . . Since 
 it has a vital relationship to our spirit, nothing proves the truth so well as 
 the truth itself; whereas the use of proofs which lie without and beside 
 the truth is just for that reason not properly adapted to bring spirit, 
 heart, and mind to a decision for the truth, to bring the divine Word 
 
 ™De Régny, 288-289. See also Den- sion, based not on the authentic proposi- 
 zinger’s Enchiridion, which, as de Régny tions of 1840, but upon the propositions 
 points out, gives a slightly different ver- which were subscribed to in 1835. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 95 
 
 into our own inner soul as a fruitful seed and at once to call forth a vital 
 conviction. “2 
 
 This is indeed a serious heresy. It was a sure instinct which led 
 the Bishop to single out this aspect of Bautain’s teaching for his 
 condemnation; for Bautain was undoubtedly, in just this aspect of 
 his philosophy, a Modernist before the Modernists. His objection 
 to the Scholastic apologetic is precisely the objection which Auguste 
 Sabatier and other Protestant Modernists urge against the Old 
 Theology: that it depends on extrinsic instead of intrinsic evidence 
 to prove the validity of its dogmas.’* Opposition to the Scholastic 
 method was of course Bautain’s chief offence. Nothing is said 
 of this offence in the formula of 1840; but when Augustin 
 Bonnetty later took up Bautain’s accusations against the Scholastics, 
 he was required to recant.”* 
 
 It may be asked how Bautain could possibly subscribe to proposi- 
 tions which ran so completely counter to his whole life’s enterprise. 
 To non-Catholics, an act of this sort is always a mystery; and it 
 is always a matter of curiosity to know by what process of reasoning 
 a man comes to justify in his own eyes the acceptance of such a 
 crushing humiliation. In Bautain’s case, the motives are fairly 
 evident. In the first place, humility was the very corner-stone 
 of his philosophy. Since his conversion, the very notion of the 
 “autonomy” of the individual reason and conscience was anathema 
 to him. Note the words with which he concluded his Letter to 
 the Rector in 1822. After saying that he had set forth his teach- 
 
 ings with “complete conviction” of their truth, he adds: 
 
 But I do not forget that I have superiors, and that the Christian’s first 
 duty is deference to authority. If therefore the competent authority, 
 after examining my paragraphs, which I am ready to submit to its in- 
 spection, declares my teaching harmful, and forbids me to continue it, I 
 shall subscribe unreservedly to its judgment, and shall follow only that 
 method and line of work which it is pleased to prescribe for me.” 
 
 ™™Moehler, J. A., Schriften und 8 See the formula, quoted by de Régny, 
 Aufsdtze, ed. Déllinger, Regensburg, 396-397. 
 1839, II, 142-143. ce RD, Ue 13, 
 
 ™ Cf. the well-known Introduction to 
 his Religions of Authority and the Re- 
 ligion of the Spirit. 
 
96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 If so complete a submission was due to civil authority, what was 
 due to the authority of the Church? 
 
 In the second place, however, Bautain had now come to mistrust 
 his own philosophy to some extent-—particularly the anti-intellect- 
 ualistic aspect of it—and, conceiving that these propositions were 
 directed against this aspect of his teaching, he was really willing to 
 make recantation. He had been upheld in his attitude of rebellion 
 against Episcopal authority by the belief that the Bishop’s views 
 were heretical, and his own views had the weight of the Church’s 
 authority on their side; but now that the Church had failed to 
 sustain him, he was willing to go more than half-way in atoning 
 for his error. In later years, he never lost an opportunity of 
 acknowledging his mistake. Once, in the midst of an oration in 
 Ste.-Geneviéve before a brilliant Parisian audience, he went out 
 of his way to allude to his former errors: 
 
 In order to give a wider range to the Word of God, I was led to 
 weaken the validity of the human reason; and, to make an end of 
 rationalism at a stroke, I menaced the very life of the reason, like those 
 imprudent physicians who risk killing the patient by attacking the disease 
 too violently. Yes, if I sinned then, I sinned through excess of faith; 
 but the Church, always wise, because she is assisted by the divine Spirit, 
 approves no excess, not even those which appear to be profitable to her.”° 
 
 Finally, it can hardly be denied that Bautain signed the formula 
 with some mental reservations—a procedure not confined to Catho- 
 lic circles. He felt—and not without reason—that the controversy 
 had largely been based upon a misunderstanding of his real position; 
 and so, in disavowing certain somewhat unfortunate expressions, 
 he was not really disavowing his main contention. He cherished 
 for many years, as his manuscript notes show, the hope of writing 
 a Critique of the Reason which should supersede Kant’s. In it he 
 hoped to set forth all his essential ideas concerning faith and 
 reason, while keeping within the bounds of the propositions he had 
 signed. A Scholastic, used to making fine distinctions, might have 
 succeeded in this; but Bautain was trained to the flowing, oratorical 
 style of the Eclectics, and could not think in cramped quarters. 
 ‘Years afterwards, however, he wrote a letter hailing with pleasure 
 
 ™ De Régny, 381. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL oF 
 
 the attempt of Professors Ubaghs and Laforét of Louvain to state 
 a position similar to his own. He thanks them for calling attention 
 to the real issue, which, he insists, is not the logical question of the 
 “scope and range of the natural reason,” but the psychological 
 question of the “primitive development of reason and of the ac- 
 quisition of knowledge.” Logically, no doubt, reason is prior to 
 faith; but psychologically, he insists, reason is posterior in order 
 of genesis, both in the individual and in the race. He regrets that 
 he never could get his adversaries to discuss that issue: 
 
 They always spoke of the wwaided reason (Ja raison seule) reduced to 
 its unaided natural powers; and they understood by that a completely 
 developed reason, in full possession of itself, aided by all the means of 
 human science, civilization, and tradition. I then asked, but in vain, 
 what you have asked with better results: How did the natural reason 
 develop? And, if it is certain that it has not within itself the initiative 
 to function, and needed an external fillip to start the primitive motion 
 of its faculties and the formation of knowledge, can it be said that it 
 ever was unaided, and that by itself, unaided, it has produced all its 
 products? . .. That is the truly philosophical question which out-tops 
 the former question, and which alone is capable, . . . if properly solved, 
 of completely undermining Rationalism’s doctrine of the absolute and 
 entirely independent: spontaneity of the human mind."° 
 
 ‘This was Bautain’s last contribution to the controversy over reason 
 and faith. “The views of Ubaghs and Laforét were tolerated for 
 a while; but at length they, too, had to recant. Fideism became a 
 heresy, and Bautain was designated as its chief protagonist. 
 
 The rest of Bautain’s life is a story of constant frustration and 
 gathering obscurity. Mlle. Humann, his good angel, had died 
 during the heat of the controversy; and, after her death, it became 
 increasingly difficult to hold the band together. Bautain, it must 
 be admitted, was too imperious and autocratic to make an ideal 
 leader of men. Once the truth of his philosophy had been thrown 
 in doubt by the Church, his followers began to chafe under his 
 rule; and it was only the explicit vow of obedience in the “Family 
 Pact” which kept some of them loyal to him. In 1841, they all 
 left Strasbourg, having bought the College of Juilly, near Paris, 
 
 where they hoped to carry on their educational projects on a larger 
 
 * Letter to Ubaghs, quoted by de Régny, 420-421. 
 
98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 scale. For a time, Bautain’s hopes ran high; but the enterprise 
 eventually failed on account of the defection, one after another, 
 of most of the band. Gratry, who had never signed the “Family 
 Pact,” did not emigrate to Juilly in the first place. He became 
 famous as a philosopher, but took care not to emphasize the fact 
 that his philosophy was largely borrowed from Bautain. Ratis- 
 bonne became the founder of the “Priests of Our Lady of Zion,” 
 a now famous order for the conversion of the Jews. He found 
 it convenient to forget, so far as possible, that he had ever been 
 associated with Bautain, and looked upon the whole period of his 
 discipleship to the now discredited philosopher as a blot on his 
 career. He even tried to dissuade de Régny from writing the life 
 of Bautain, intimating that he had made an ass of himself and 
 had better be consigned to oblivion.’ Bonnechose, deputed to 
 carry on a special mission at St.-Louis-des-Francais in Rome, was 
 gradually drawn away from the band, and forged a career of his 
 own. He, too, became alienated from Bautain, who found it 
 difficult to forgive his defection. When he became Cardinal, 
 Bautain wrote him a reproachful letter, ironically congratulating 
 him on having at last reached the top of that hill which they used 
 to climb together daily, to plead their case at Rome, saying “Ascend- 
 amus iterum.?'*  Bautain himself always remained at the foot of 
 the hill, rejecting all ecclesiastical preferments. 
 
 It is not unlikely that external influences had a share in breaking 
 up the band. Father Rozaven, writing to Mgr. de Trévern from 
 Rome shortly before Bautain and Bonnechose left for Strasbourg, 
 assured him that the kind reception accorded to the two pilgrims 
 did not imply approval of their opinions, or of their ambition to 
 found an order. He urges the Bishop, “above all,” to see that 
 they do not succeed in forming the “society” they propose, or 
 rather in maintaining what already exists. He has heard, he says, 
 “that when they have won an adherent they take great care to 
 isolate him from the company of those who do not share their 
 sentiments. Presumption,” he adds, “has been in all times the 
 
 great rock on which neophytes strike; ... having enjoyed some 
 
 ™ See his letter to de Régny in Pére Paris, 1897. It is a very scurrilous 
 Ingold’s collection of unedited letters, letter, and reflects no credit on its writer. 
 L’Abbé Bautain et ses disciples, reprinted This letter is also in Pére Ingold’s 
 
 from Miscellanea Alsatica, Colmar and _ collection. 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 99 
 
 consideration before their conversion, they easily persuade them- 
 selves that they should be listened to like oracles.””® Was Father 
 Rozaven speaking semi-officially, or merely voicing the views of 
 the faction at Rome that was opposed to Bautain? It is not for 
 us to thread the intricacies of ecclesiastical politics, but it is not 
 improbable that Bautain’s failure in his life-work was at least partly 
 due to Rome’s proverbial suspicion of ‘‘neophytes.”°° Newman 
 and Tyrrell encountered similar obstacles. Whatever the cause, 
 the fact is that Bautain died a disappointed man. 
 
 Perhaps the cruellest disappointment which fell to his lot was 
 the collapse of public interest in his philosophy. In 1834, when 
 it was rumored that he was about to begin to publish his system, 
 all France was a-tiptoe with excitement; but when, in 1839, the 
 first volumes appeared, containing a general introduction to 
 philosophy and a lengthy treatise on Experimental Psychology,” 
 they got a very luke-warm reception; and his Moral Philosophy,*’ 
 which appeared in 1842, was hardly noticed at all. When the 
 taint of heresy becomes fastened to the name of a Catholic phil- 
 osopher, cen est fait de lui! ‘The Abbé became conscious that 
 he and his philosophy already belonged to the past. He never 
 published any more of his system. 
 
 After one has learned to love the fire, dash, and enthusiasm of 
 Bautain’s earlier writings, his later philosophical works make rather 
 melancholy reading. From 1853-1863, he lectured on Moral 
 Theology at»the Sorbonne, and all his lectures eventually found 
 their way into print; but there is little of great significance in any 
 of these volumes.** ‘They are nothing but Bautain’s earlier ethical 
 works, revised in a spirit of sober conservatism, all originality of 
 thought and expression being carefully eliminated in the interest 
 
 ™ Lettres Inédites du P. Rozaven, S.J., with new title, L’Esprit humain et ses 
 sur les erreurs de M. Bautain. Publiés  facultés. 
 
 par A. M. P. Ingold, Paris, 1902. ®2 Philosophie morale, Paris, 1842. 
 © A suspicion in no wise unjustified, if (Abbrev.: Phil. Mor.) 
 the prevention of change be the main Ta Morale de PEvangile comparée 
 
 object. Consider the changes introduced aux divers systémes de Morale, Paris, 
 
 into Christian theology by converted 1855; Philosophie des lois, Paris, 1860; 
 
 philosophers like Justin Martyr, August- La conscience, Paris, 1861; Manuel de 
 
 ine, and some of the Alexandrian fathers!  philosophie morale, Paris, 1866. The 
 "= Philosophie. Psychologie Expérimen-  first-named volume is by far the best. 
 
 tale, Strasbourg, Paris, 1839. (Abbrev.: (Abbrev.: Mor. Ev. D.). 
 
 Psych. Exp.) New edition, Paris, 1859, 
 
100 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 of orthodoxy. Result: a series of quite harmless but relatively 
 uninteresting volumes. “The same might be said of the only work 
 which he published during this period on his favorite topic of 
 epistemology: the conférences philosophiques read before the Cercle 
 Catholique in 1842-43,** and later published in résumé. In these 
 conférences he maintains a doctrine of the limitations of the reason 
 very similar to his earlier doctrine; but he leans so hard at every 
 step upon St. Thomas (or at least the neo-Platonic element in St. 
 Thomas) that the argument limps badly, and has almost the air 
 of acommentary. ““What a pity,” one is tempted to exclaim, “that 
 so keen an intellect should be thus shackled and crippled!” 
 
 It would be a mistake, however, to think of Bautain as a 
 prisoner chafing in captivity. For him, true liberty was to be 
 found only in loyal obedience to authority; and the yoke of in- 
 tellectual bondage never galled his shoulders, for he was convinced 
 that the pathway to truth leads through the gateway of humility. 
 This attitude came out most impressively in his Notre-Dame con- 
 férences on Religion and Liberty,*’ delivered in 1848, and inter- 
 rupted by the outbreak of the Revolution. It was just at this 
 time that Pius LX, the “liberal Pope”—not yet disillusioned and 
 embittered—was inspiring many to hope for the reconciliation of 
 Catholicism and democracy. Bautain, in these addresses, acts as 
 the spokesman for the Catholic Liberals of France. He maintains 
 that the Church, far from being the enemy of liberty, is the seed- 
 plot wherein all the liberties, civil and political, have grown up; 
 he eulogizes O’Connell as the living exemplar of the union of 
 religion and liberty; he insists that the best way to promote liberty 
 is to get men to submit to the authority of the Church, since it is 
 submission to the Church’s authority which produces virtue, and 
 the greatest degree of liberty is possible only when men are virtu- 
 ous. ‘This volume is a real contribution to our understanding of 
 Bautain’s philosophy, since it applies his central principle, life as 
 conditional spontaneity, to the field of politics, where we are all 
 at home, and so makes the meaning of that principle transparently 
 clear. 
 
 *4 Abbrev.: Cerc. Cath. 2nd ed. with supplementary essay, Paris, 
 De la religion et de la liberté con- 1865. 
 siderées dans leur rapports, Paris, 1848; 
 
THE ODYSSEY OF AN ARDENT SOUL 101 
 
 We have said that Bautain died a disappointed man. All his 
 most cherished plans miscarried; all his most cherished ideas failed 
 to meet with approval. We must not suppose, however, that he 
 died an unhappy man. If he failed as a philosophical reformer, 
 he succeeded as a preacher and spiritual advisor, particularly with 
 the educated classes. As he advanced in years, he devoted himself 
 more and more to quiet study and meditation, and found great 
 satisfaction in contemplating the mysteries of the faith. Books 
 of sermons, meditations, letters of advice to people in various 
 stations of life, came from his pen in considerable number, and 
 won popularity. His book on The Art of Public Speaking had a 
 prodigious success.°° Most important of all, he cultivated a spirit 
 of Christian resignation, and learned to look upon success and 
 failure with equanimity. Only a few weeks before his death in 
 1867, he completed a beautiful little book which may be considered 
 his philosophical will and testament: Choses d’autre monde: 
 journal dun philosophe, recueilli et publié par PAbbé Bautain.™ 
 Here the whole gamut of Christian ideas is once more reviewed, 
 as in the Philosophie du Christianisme; but all the extreme views 
 which gave rise to controversy are now mellowed and softened. 
 From a literary point of view, the book is his masterpiece; the 
 story of the conversion of the fictitious philosopher, depicted in 
 his diary, holds one’s interest from start to finish; and if not 
 philosophically, is at least psychologically convincing. An atmos- 
 phere of calm certitude and perfect trust pervades its pages, showing 
 that, in spite of a stormy passage, Bautain had reached his soul’s 
 haven, and had found in the Catholic faith those ultimates and 
 absolutes for which, from his youth, he had had so unquenchable 
 a thirst. 
 
 ® See de Régny’s bibliography for these by a member of the N. Y. bar. Repub- 
 minor works. An Eng. trans. of the lished, Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 
 Art de parler en public was published by 1873. 
 Scribner, N. Y., 1859: The Art of Ex- * Published posthumously, Paris, Hach- 
 tempore Speaking. ‘Hints for the pulpit,  ette, 1868. 
 the senate, and the bar. With additions 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 BAUTAIN AS A PANVITALIST 
 
 EGEL and Cousin both recognized in Bautain a capacity 
 H for system-building which aroused their expectations. If, 
 after his conversion to Catholicism, reverence for tradi- 
 tion and authority tended to set limits to his speculative imagination, 
 
 a remarkable unity nevertheless pervades his whole philosophy. It 
 was his conscious aim to reduce all his teaching to a simple formula: 
 
 All human knowledge [he. says] ought . .. to be capable of being 
 reduced to a single idea, as the universe depends upon a single Being. 
 . . . He only knows well, who sees what he knows as a unity and at a 
 glance, who seizes all the parts in their general relations and all the 
 relations in a single view. 
 
 Each separate science should have its zdée-mére, its generating idea, 
 according to Bautain, as each chapter and paragraph in a book 
 should have its leading thought; and all these generating ideas 
 must in their turn be brought into unity with one another, if the 
 ideal of philosophy is to be reached. 
 
 To a considerable extent Bautain achieved his ideal. 
 
 M. Bautain seems to have persuaded himself [complained Father 
 Rozaven]| that, in the idea of Christianity as he has formulated it for 
 himself, the whole of theology was contained, and that, without studying 
 details, he could deduce therefrom all the dogmas. He has not com- 
 prehended that, in the exposition of these dogmas there are modes of 
 expression adopted by the Church, from which it is not permissible to 
 depart.” 
 
 The same tendency here alluded to pervades all Bautain’s philoso- 
 phy. Not Schelling himself is bolder than Bautain in his systematic 
 development of an idea through analogy and deduction. It is 
 possible to discover in his teaching not only certain fundamental 
 
 * Psych. Exp., II, 153. * Lettres Inédites du P. Rozaven, S. J., 
 3rd letter. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 103 
 
 metaphysical ideas and ethical ideas, which permit one to sum up 
 his, metaphysics and ethics in brief, but also certain ideas which 
 run through his philosophy as a whole, and are applied simultane- 
 ously, by a process of bold analogical reasoning, to metaphysics 
 and philosophy, epistemology and politics, logic and pedagogy, 
 ethics and mathematics. They are so fundamental that they per- 
 vade all his critique of contemporary philosophy and his conception 
 of the history of philosophy; so that an exposition of them is an 
 essential prerequisite to the understanding of even his most occa- 
 sional writings. Perhaps it was the failure to grasp these central 
 concepts that led to his too hasty condemnation. He presented his 
 conclusions to the public before explaining his premises; if he had 
 followed the reverse order, the effect might have been different. 
 We shall not imitate his unfortunate, butt-end-foremost order of 
 exposition, but shall begin at once with his “generating ideas.” 
 
 ‘The most fundamental of all Bautain’s ideas is the idea of life 
 as a conditionally spontaneous process of va-et-vient in which the 
 reaction of the subject is dependent upon the action of the object, 
 and in which the subject, stimulated by the object, develops by 
 continuous intussusception and polarization. 
 
 It cannot be too strongly emphasized that, while the central 
 idea in Bautain’s system is a biological idea, his chief interest is 
 not biological but moral and religious; that is to say, the moral 
 and religious consequences which he appears to deduce from the 
 biological formula for life really preceded that formula in the 
 development of his philosophy, and helped determine its selection. 
 He proved his corollaries by means of his theorem; but he was 
 already passionately devoted to his corollaries before he found his 
 theorem. We may say, then, that in a certain sense the funda- 
 mental idea in his philosophy is not the idea of Life, but a moral 
 and religious idea conceived as the result of a profound reaction 
 against German Idealism in general and Fichte in particular. It 
 will be remembered that Bautain’s nervous break-down, the first 
 step in his conversion, took place in the midst of his course on 
 Transcendental Ethics, in which he was developing a doctrine of 
 liberty as the goal of moral effort, in obvious imitation of Fichte’s 
 Sittenlehre. He was maintaining, as we have seen, the dignity of 
 the human individual, whose will, identical with the divine Will, 
 
104 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 was its own law, whose reason could recognize ultimate truth 
 because it had created it. If we grant, with Fichte himself, that 
 a man tends to be an “idealist” or a “dogmatist,” and to emphasize 
 the subjective or the objective element in experience, according as 
 the feeling of self-dependence and activity or that of dependence 
 and passivity has the upper hand, then we may say that Bautain’s 
 nervous break-down, by casting him suddenly from a mood of 
 Fichtean self-dependence into a mood of helplessness, in which 
 he groped about pathetically for external aid and light from above, 
 thereby pitched him from idealism into dogmatism, and made it 
 necessary for him to find a new philosophical formula to contrast 
 with the Fichtean formula, and fit his new condition.° 
 
 Behind the Fichtean ethics and epistemology, and behind the 
 whole philosophy of German Romanticism, there lurks that con- 
 ception of an irresistible life-force, spontaneously gushing up both 
 in Nature and in man, to which a modern Romanticist has given 
 the name of the é/an vital. Its ethical corollary, the idea that 
 within the Ego pulsate forces which cannot, ought not, be re- 
 strained by any external barrier or external authority, and that the 
 way of life is the way of free self-expression, is a theme that 
 forever recurs in the literature of Romanticism, from Rousseau 
 and Goethe to Stirner and Nietzsche. As a protest against the 
 mechanical conception of Nature, the Romantic conception of 
 Nature as animate and organic appealed strongly to Bautain; and 
 to this extent he always remained a Romanticist; but the ethical 
 consequences of the Romantic conception of the life-force (indi- 
 vidualism and moral autonomy) were now revolting to him. And 
 so it came to him as a veritable revelation when Mlle. Humann 
 suggested to him* that if he were to study medicine he would 
 discover that life is not “pure activity” at all, but a response to 
 
 Cf. Ferraz, 319-320. “It was during 
 his illness that he lost that confidence and 
 pride of life which is the making of 
 independent investigators and_ philoso- 
 phers. He fell into that state of pros- 
 tration and discouragement which the 
 
 oneself a power and a point d’appui 
 which one does not find within... . 
 Faith took the place of reason with him; 
 religion, of philosophy.” 
 
 *The idea of “life? appears in the 
 Cours de Métaphysique of 1822, written 
 
 founder of the Society of Jesus demanded 
 of those whom he wished to lead back 
 to religion, and which implies, together 
 with the consciousness of one’s own 
 weakness, the need of finding outside of 
 
 before Bautain had taken up medicine; 
 also in the Variétés Philosophiques, 1823. 
 I infer that he got it from Mlle. Hu- 
 mann. His medical studies only ampli- 
 fied and enriched the conception. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 105 
 
 external stimuli; that consequently, the subject depends upon the 
 object, and the creature upon the Creator—with the ethical corollary 
 that humility and not pride, submissiveness and not independence, 
 receptive faith and not rationalistic speculation, are appropriate for 
 man in view of his very nature. With this clue in hand, and 
 guided by the conviction that natural law is the same in the ethical 
 and biological realms—that the conditions of life in the physical 
 sense are also the conditions of life in the spiritual sense—Bautain 
 applied himself ardently to the study of anatomy and physiology, 
 and worked out as his doctor’s thesis, a series of Propositions 
 générales sur la vie which became the basis of his whole philosophy. 
 We shall examine this little book carefully, in view of its funda- 
 mental importance. 
 
 Bautain begins the main body of his thesis with some proposi- 
 tions “‘on life in general.”’ Here we see at once the points of 
 contact and contrast between his conception and that of the 
 Romantic school: 
 
 Life [he states] is the active and absolute principle of all that exists; 
 and the principle is known only by its manifestation. Now the manifes- 
 tation of life is movement, development, creation. It issued from a 
 single foyer [center or focal point], from Being, the source of all life, 
 who radiates it out of Himself.® It is determined, or posited, in forms, 
 and the posited form is what we call existence. 
 
 This does not sound very different from the Romantic concep- 
 tion of a life-force, welling up in all creation. But Bautain 
 immediately makes it plain that life, for him, does not well up 
 from below of itself; it must be called forth by stimulation from 
 above, as vegetation is called forth from the fecund earth by the 
 fecundating rays of the sun. ‘The creation of individual entities, 
 as he describes it, is not the result of the self-diversification of a 
 single force, bursting up like molten lava and working against no 
 
 * it is the result of a union of 
 
 obstacle but its own solidification; 
 two principles, one active and one passive—and the passive principle 
 
 is the subjective one. 
 
 *Pp. 7-10. the Bergsonian élan than the simile of 
 ®°The gender is of course (intention- the fountain impeded by its falling drops, 
 ally) ambiguous in French. for no external force like gravitation 
 
 This, I think, is a better simile for enters in to complicate the picture. 
 
106 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 If we. examine the conditions of the generation of each indi- 
 vidual existence, he says, we shall at once perceive that it is the 
 result of the interaction of an “agent in full enjoyment of life” 
 and a “‘form or capacity of life, a germ analogous to the agent in 
 nature,” residing in “‘an already developed existence, a forme mére.” 
 Generalizing, we may say that every existence is the product of 
 a male, objective, or active principle, the universal /ife, and a 
 female, subjective, or passive principle, the universal beimg or 
 substance. 
 
 These two principles are found in every living creature, though in 
 diverse proportions. . . . In some, being embraces life, as if to retain 
 it within; in others, life seems to triumph over being and dominate it. 
 This is the basis of sex. ‘The two terms necessary for the production of 
 a third, being types and organs of the two constitutive principles of al! 
 existence, are to each other as the principles they represent. One is 
 always relatively active, the other relatively passive. 
 
 The passive agent bears “the base, the plasm (Plastique), and 
 furnishes a “place” for the generative act; the active agent is 
 “the organ of life and the.bearer of all its virtues.” 
 
 At the instant when passive and active unite, the life-giving ray or 
 the virtue of life reaches the foyer of the mother-form and triumphs 
 over its concentration; the conception or intussusception of life takes 
 places... 
 
 Objective life is in all the universe the principe principiant, or, if you 
 will, the original stimulus, and at the same time the aliment, of every 
 subjective life; and life, one in its essence, gives or communicates itself: 
 Materially, through the active or the father in the act of generation; 
 physically, through physical light dispersed in the air, and through all 
 the forms and all the agents of nature which serve as its vehicles: it is 
 intellectually or mentally communicated through human speech, through 
 the breath and the light of the intelligence, and it is psychically trans- 
 mitted by the Word and the Spirit.8 
 
 Thus, each individual entity, if we conceive it to be potentially 
 present in the germ from which it is destined to spring, is absolutely 
 dependent upon external aid for admission into the realm of exist- 
 ence. As Bautain puts it elsewhere, 
 
 * All quotations so far are from pp. 7-9. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 107 
 
 each birth, each production, is the result of a struggle, a triumph, of 
 light and life. . . . In all the realm of nature, life is at first enchained 
 in matter, oppressed and as it were stifled by it. The spark does not 
 fly from the pebble unless it is struck. . . .. The life of the vegetable is 
 enclosed in the hard shell of the seed. . . . But if the envelope is not 
 broken, the germ remains inert and the life captive. It is the same 
 with animal life: it sleeps in its germ, in the womb of unfecundated 
 matter; fecundation is a liberating act that breaks its chains, tears it out 
 of its inertia, and drags it out of itself.® 
 
 But though it belongs to the objective principle to take the initia- 
 tive, life can neither begin nor be maintained unless the subjective 
 principle reacts. “The germ must perform the vital act of “radia- 
 tion, the issuing from itself to respond to the stimulating ray, to 
 seize it and become identical with it.” Once this initial reaction 
 has occurred, 
 
 the va-et-vient of life, its movement in opposite directions within a 
 single form, has begun and will continue through all the duration of 
 that form—the objective life incessantly pouring or plunging itself into 
 the subjective foyer, and the latter reacting to it. . . . It is upon the 
 perfect harmony of this double movement in a single form that the 
 duration of that form and the perfection of its life depend; and the 
 preponderance of one or the other of the two principles in their simul- 
 
 taneous act determines the periodic phases of this form in the duration of 
 its existence.!® 
 
 The process of life, says Bautain, is identical in all parts of the 
 universe, in the world as a whole, in the organism as a whole, and 
 in each separate organ; “it is the same in the atom and the organic 
 molecule, the same in heaven and earth.”*? We shall see later 
 how he attempts to apply the laws of life to inorganic nature. The 
 bulk of this thesis, however, is occupied with the study of the life- 
 process as it appears In man. 
 
 Even here, “life” is a rather broad concept, for a human being 
 is not a purely physiological entity. ‘The human personality is a 
 living soul, manifesting itself through an intelligent mind and 
 clothed with an organized body.” It includes ‘“‘(1) the human 
 essence (étre); (2) the pure existence of the essence in its mental 
 
 ’ Psych. Exp., 1, 95-96. ™ Tbid. 
  Props., 10. 
 
108 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 form; and (3) the organic envelope, which is at once the product 
 and the container of the two antecedent terms.” This is not to 
 say that man is composed of three independent elements; life in 
 him is one: “It is the life of the soul which manifests itself 
 through the mind and the intelligence, and it is again this life 
 which expresses itself by way of the mind through the organic 
 functions and free movements of the body.” The essence, exist- 
 ence, and organism (soul, mind, body) of man are to each other 
 “‘as center, radius, and sphere, or as point, line, and body. ‘To 
 abstract . . . one or another of these terms is to cut up the idea 
 of man, and not to see him in his unity and his integrity.” Hence, 
 in analyzing the development of man’s physical life, we are simul- 
 taneously studying the development of his mental and spiritual life: 
 “In naming the existence, one implies the essence, since the essence 
 is the absolute condition of the existence; in speaking of the solid, 
 one implies the line and the point, since there is no solid without 
 extremes and without line.” 
 
 It must not be forgotten that life is, properly speaking, the 
 attribute of the soul or essence of the man. It is this which 
 constitutes the foyer or vital center in the egg out of which springs 
 the initial reaction to the life-giving sperm. ‘““The corporeal form 
 appears first to us who are located outside, and who see only the 
 outside of the form;” it develops first, because corporeal stimuli 
 come first. Later comes the awakening of the mind under the 
 influence of mental stimulation in the shape of speech, and last of 
 all the clear awakening of the soul under the influence of the 
 
 Divine Word. 
 
 It is always the same man, the same soul, the same being, only at 
 such and such a stage in his development. . . . All the forms of our 
 personality, and thus the organic form itself, are therefore the product 
 of the foyer of the soul, influenced by life under one or another form; 
 and Stahl was right in saying that it is the soul which made, and at 
 each instant makes, its body.?” 
 
 The unity of the laws of life appears as we consider the progres- 
 sive stages in the history of a human life: generation, the develop- 
 ment of the embryo, the growth of the body and the development 
 
 Props, 11-12. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 109 
 
 of self-consciousness in childhood, the ripening of physical, mental, 
 and spiritual development in the prime of life, and finally death 
 itself, in which the laws of life find perhaps their clearest ex- 
 emplification. 
 
 (1). Generation. Receptivity the fundamental law of life. 
 
 “Man exists potentially in his father and his mother before 
 being conceived and engendered as a personal existence.” Bautain 
 is not a Platonist at this point; each process of generation results 
 in a new existence, a new individual, “destined to enjoy for himself 
 the general heritage of life.” 
 
 Father and mother are the immediate agents in the creative 
 process, but the ultimate cause of each man’s existence is the inter- 
 action of the two universal principles, objective Life and subjective 
 
 Being: 
 
 Whence comes the being or the base of the new human individual? 
 From the mother. And the mother—whence did she receive it? One 
 must necessarily ascend to a first source of all being, to a Being of Beings, 
 to Him Who Is. Whence comes the life, the vital spirit, which animates 
 the germ? ... From the father. But the father—whence did he re- 
 ceive life? One must necessarily ascend from generation to generation, 
 to a primal source of life, a primordial life, to Him who is Life itself 
 and Truth. The mother no more creates the being of the child than 
 the father creates its life; they both communicate what they have re- 
 ceived, they posit externally what they bore within them. Generation 
 is but transmission, and that is why the parents are but the depositaries 
 and not the proprietors of their children.?* 
 
 In this, the first stage of the life-process, there appears a funda- 
 mental law which holds equally true of all the later stages: the 
 law that life can neither begin nor continue without receptivity; 
 that self-sufficiency and the pretention to autonomy mean sterility 
 
 and death. 
 
 By the act of fecundation, the life, of which the sperm is the vehicle, 
 penetrates the maternal fluid, and impregnating with its virtue the germ 
 dissolved in the fluid, it works a separation between what receives the 
 fecundation, becomes alive, and is destined to pass into the light, and 
 that which does not receive it and thus remains in inertia and in darkness. 
 
 8 Tbid., 13. 
 
110 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 The plastic or alkaline fluid thus impregnated becomes mother-water, and 
 this water holds in solution, mutually embraced, being and life, plasm 
 and spirit, germ and sperm, or again alkali and acid.*4 
 
 The ethical and theological analogies which Bautain here has in 
 -mind should be sufficiently plain to the reader. If man is to obey 
 the laws of life, his attitude must be one of humility and faith, 
 not pride and skepticism. What may not be so evident is the fact 
 that, in the last sentence quoted, a thorough-going Panpsychism is 
 implied. ‘The position is taken that the laws of the organic world 
 govern the inorganic world as well, without serious alteration: the 
 reaction of an alkali to an acid is identical with that of a living 
 germ to a living sperm. We shall return later to this important 
 point. 
 
 (2). Development of the embryo. Materialization of the vital 
 principle by a process of polarization. Sex. 
 
 The human embryo, according to Bautain, originates in what 
 he calls (by analogy with the process of crystallization) a “saline 
 point” in the fecundated bubble of mother-water. ‘This original 
 saline point is ‘fone, simple, indestructible, without dimensions” like 
 the mathematical point.*” It becomes visible through a process of 
 precipitation: a part of the mother-water being drawn to the 
 circumference of the egg and evaporated, the remainder becomes 
 super-saturated, and precipitates itself at the saline point. ‘hen, 
 under the influence of “‘the objective life which penetrates it 
 through the maternal form,” the saline point becomes a “Salient 
 point” (punctum saliens), and “spurts up” toward the objective life- 
 force which stimulates it, while at the same time “the center of 
 the mother-form attracts to itself the vital spirit by a reaction 
 equal to the action of the superior life which draws it on high.””® 
 
 Here appears for the first time the great law of polarization. 
 Every living thing has its center of indifference, and its axis with 
 two poles, one directed toward the stimulating life-force, the other 
 toward the mother-form. In the seedling, they appear as seed, 
 plantule, and radicule; in the human embryo, as heart, head, and 
 abdomen, connected by an invisible axis whose visible “image” is 
 
  Props., 17. 6 Thid., 20. 
 8 7:4, 18-19. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 111 
 
 the backbone. ‘This axis, says Bautain, is the first realization of 
 the living center, the first expression of its potentiality; and it is 
 around that axis that all the organs are to be grouped. Through 
 it the wital process will set in, in the organism.*’ Next, the process 
 of polarization begins in a direction at right angles to the original 
 axis; the direction of the diameter is marked out. Intersecting, 
 the axis and diameter give the four right angles or the cross, the 
 necessary foundation of every existence. 
 
 Life in all realms [concludes Bautain] is organized by the universal 
 law of polarization. An existence, whatever it may be, always issues 
 originally from a center or foyer, which bears within it the potentiality 
 of its development. When this center is fecundated or stimulated to 
 issue from itself, it radiates and tends to posit externally the sphere of 
 its vitality or its living form.?® 
 
 Bautain seems to have watched the initial stages of embryonic 
 development with the most intense interest; for there, before his 
 eyes, the invisible vital principle was beginning to spin itself a body 
 as a spider spins its web: 
 
 First a reddish point appears in the center of the embryo, and from 
 that point emanate rays, reddish also, in all directions; the beatings and 
 pulsations which can already be noticed leave no doubt but that the 
 central point is the heart, and its rays the blood-vessels. At about the 
 end of the first month, the head outlines itself, very large at first in 
 comparison with the rest of the body, and in the head appear two black 
 points which are the eyes.’® 
 
 The vital impulse thus gradually materializes itself, taking on first 
 a liquid, then a solid form. ‘The blood is the primal source of the 
 whole organism; it “contains within it,” says Bautain, “the plasm 
 of the future organs, and, through it, this plasm is to be determined 
 and organized.*° The blood-vessels develop out of the blood by 
 “coagulation.” ‘They represent “the first paths which the subjective 
 life traced for itself, and which, materialized by the plastic capacity, 
 have become arteries and veins.”** The nerves later develop out 
 of the nervous fluid by a similar process of “‘congelation.” As 
 ™ bid., 17. ” Props., 35. 
 
 * Psych. Exp., 1, 303. Sader Rye 
 ® Thid. 
 
112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 for the chief organs of the body, they develop out of the blood by 
 a regular application of the law of polarization. The heart is 
 the foyer of the whole organism. Its upper, active, or “north” 
 pole is the brain, which is the product of the most volatile part of 
 the blood, “the animal spirit itself coagulated and fixed.” (Its 
 “south” pole is found in the abdomen.) ‘The brain, once posited, 
 begins to polarize itself in its turn: its foyer is the medulla ob- 
 longata; its north pole appears in the organs of sight; its south 
 pole, or root, is the spinal cord, from which the rootlets of the 
 nervous system spring forth; its diameters, finally, are the ears. 
 
 The order of embryonic development is of the utmost signifi- 
 cance to Bautain. “That which appears later, he feels, must always 
 be considered the tool or instrument of that which has already 
 appeared; and, in general, a pole is always the servant of its foyer, 
 while the north pole of the axis stands higher in “hierarchical 
 dignity” than the south pole, and the poles of the diameter, though 
 equal to each other, are more “passive” than either of the poles of 
 the axis. According to this principle, not only is the body as a 
 whole the instrument of the vital principle, but the parts of the 
 body (together with the corresponding faculties of the soul) stand 
 in an instrumental relation one to another. The heart and the 
 circulatory system appear first of all; the brain and the nervous 
 system appear to develop from the heart by a process of polarization. 
 This means that the brain is an instrument or weapon thrown out, 
 as it were, by the heart and the vital principle in their effort to 
 express themselves and find their way in a material environment. 
 The epistemological corollary is obvious: intellection, which corre- 
 sponds to the brain and nervous system, is less fundamental than 
 volition and emotion, which correspond to the heart and circulatory 
 system; therefore the will gets us in touch with reality in a more 
 fundamental way than does its tool, the intellect. Truly, Pascal 
 was right in asserting that “the heart has reasons that the reason 
 knows not of”! According to the same principle, the senses are 
 to be regarded as the mere tools of the brain and the intellect, 
 thrown out in the effort to know; and those senses which develop 
 earliest (the sense of sight, for instance) have a greater hierarchical 
 dignity than those which develop later. 
 
 All this—substituting ontogenesis for phylogenesis—sounds sur- 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 113 
 
 prisingly like Bergson. In Bautain, as in Bergson, we have a 
 “descent of spirit into matter,” a self-materialization of spirit. 
 Bergson might well borrow Bautain’s phraseology, and speak of 
 matter as “coagulated” spirit; Bautain would have been grateful 
 for Bergson’s word “canalization” to describe the process by which 
 the élan vital carves its way through its own coagulated mass, and 
 so makes itself blood vessels, nerves, etc. The eye evolves as 
 a result of the impulse to see; the brain evolves as a tool of the 
 life-principle, and a tool of secondary importance, at that: so both 
 Bergson and Bautain would say. There is an important difference, 
 however, as we have already pointed out: for Bergson and the 
 Romanticists in general, life evolves spontaneously and “from be- 
 low,” while for Bautain its spontaneity is only potential, and is 
 conditioned strictly by external stimuli which, as it were, draw it 
 out from above. For Bergson, life gushes up like a natural geyser, 
 unsolicited. For Bautain, it “spurts up,” like a rocket, in quite 
 a Bergsonian fashion; but the touching-off of the rocket is an ab- 
 solutely essential part of the picture. 
 
 In the case of embryonic development, this external solicitation 
 is far from evident. It looks as though the process were proceed- 
 ing under its own steam, without any aid from an external life- 
 force. ‘This is an illusion, however, according to Bautain; the 
 stimulus of the “objective life” is as essential to the development 
 of the embryo as is the stimulus of sunlight to the development of 
 the seed before it bursts through the soil; but in both cases the 
 stimulus is transmitted—in the case of the embryo, through the 
 mother, who “attenuates the objective action, too strong for the 
 frail constitution of her fruit.” It is also through her, he adds, 
 that the embryo “reacts toward the objective life.” 
 
 Already in the embryonic stage the first “‘specific determination” 
 of the coming individuality has become evident: sex. “Sex,” says 
 Bautain, “is the expression of a disproportion between the form™ 
 and the life in the same individual.”’* Femininity is form that 
 is alive, but not saturated with life, and hence craves saturation. 
 Masculinity is superabundance of life, in too restricted a form, 
 
  Props., 26-27. * Props., 23. 
 * Form vs. life — being vs. life. 
 
114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 and hence seeks to communicate itself. Woman is -++soul,—mind, 
 
 +body; man is —soul,-+-mind,—body. 
 
 Man is in general more active than passive; he feels less keenly, less 
 deeply, less centrally than woman. His will is much more apt to posit 
 itself externally with a view to dominate, than to retire within itself 
 (se recueillir) in order to enjoy; he is in all his personality more ex- 
 pressive than impressionable.”° 
 
 The significance of sex for Bautain is very profound; with 
 Plato”® and Freud, he is willing to say that sex-need is 
 
 the source of all human activity, whatever its object or its form may be, 
 whether the man or woman, according to the degree of his development 
 feels more particularly what he lacks in the soul, in the mind, or in the 
 
 body, and whether he seeks it in a psychical, intellectual, or physical 
 manner.”" 
 
 Feeling the need of what he lacks before he is able to know it, the 
 individual bestirs himself to find it. “Hence the uneasiness which 
 troubles the human being from his mother’s womb, which leads 
 him to detach himself from her, and seek outside that which will 
 complete and harmonize him in his nature.** The ultimate mean- 
 ing of sex-need is spiritual, since the sexes only imperfectly sym- 
 bolize the two universal principles of Being and Life: 
 
 It is for humanity in its present state the need of the objective uni- 
 versal Life. It is, in the soul, soul-hunger, desire for life. It is, in 
 the mind, mental thirst, need of light, knowledge, the word, instruction.” 
 
 Bautain does not specifically call the principles of Life and Being 
 the Male and Female principles of the universe; but some of his 
 disciples did not hesitate to do so. In a manuscript of the Abbé 
 Carl which I found” at Juilly, there occurs in the midst of endless 
 Cabalistic and Neo-Pythagorean computations the following curious 
 bit of speculation: | 
 
 *® Props., 25. *® Ibid., 24-25. 
 
 *®He refers specifically (p. 25) to With the aid of M. VPAbbé Laber- 
 Aristophanes’? speech in the Symposium. thonniére and M. le supérieur Sabatier, 
 
 * Props., 25. whom I have to thank for a very pleas- 
 
 * Ibid., 24. ant day spent at the old school. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 0 6 
 
 Mary is the first passive, the passive par excellence, the universal 
 passive. 
 
 From this point of view she is the relative 1, as God the Father is the 
 absolute 1 in the active order. : 
 
 This relative 1 gives birth to God the Word (le Verbe-Dieu) as the 
 absolute 1 engenders God the Word. 
 
 It is 2 under this aspect, and from its union with the fruit of its 
 womb issue all the gifts which the Holy Spirit pours out upon the 
 creatures. Ihe Word is its source; Mary is its dispenser. 
 
 Mary thus has for her number 1-+-2--3=6; and by the very fact that 
 Mary is the refiection of the Most Holy Trinity, she is the ideal of the 
 whole creation, and every regular ternary reproduces the 6 which gives 
 it birth. 
 
 3x4: the creation in its relation to deity=12.—6x4: the creation in 
 its relation to Mary=24. ‘Two apocalyptic numbers. 
 
 I would not have the reader take this as a typical excerpt from 
 the writings of the “Strasbourg school.” ‘The Abbé Carl was a 
 gentle and lovable soul, not notable for intellectual vigor. Still, 
 he reflects tendencies which can be found in Bautain—Pythagorean 
 tendencies, and above all the tendency to universalize the sex- 
 principle. For this latter tendency he was much cniticized; in 
 fact, he was accused of downright indecency. ‘What, after all,” 
 cries Bautain’s Mennaisian opponent, “‘is a philosophy where it is 
 continually a question of gestation, embryo, and accouchement, and 
 where nothing can be accomplished without the aid of the mid- 
 wife!”**  Bautain answered to one of these critics, reasonably 
 enough, that young men are bound to learn the facts of sex in one 
 way or another, and had best do so in a serious and scientific atmos- 
 phere: “Is it not better to explain all that to them scientifically, 
 and . . . obtain a double advantage: on the one hand, enlighten 
 their intelligence by deepening their knowledge of the facts of 
 nature, and on the other hand, associate the memory of these things 
 in their minds with serious thoughts, having something solemn 
 about them?”*? Bautain was nothing if he was not a profound 
 psychologist and a skillful educator. 
 
 (3). Childhood. The chief organic functions in their rela- 
 
 tion to the organism and to the life-process in general. 
 
 "De Venseignement philosophique de * Letter to the Abbé Mougenot, FB,K, 
 M. VAbbé Bautain, 644. (Ens. Phil. B.) Cahier I, 11-12. 
 
116 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 The child is primarily a little animal; so the study of his de- 
 velopment is, in the main, simply the study of the development of 
 the main organic functions. In this chapter, accordingly, we find 
 the clearest biological formulae for the life-process in general: 
 
 Life is one in the universe; it is the objective, universal Life; it is 
 one in each creature, one in its activity, which is a simultaneous exit and 
 entrance; and all the vital functions are but drisements, refracted rays of 
 this activity. Man lives only by intus-susception of the life which sur- 
 rounds and penetrates him, and by ex-position, emission or radiation of 
 the life he receives and has received. In other terms, man lives, in his 
 soul, in his mind and in his body by subjectivating the objective and by 
 objectivating the subjective.** 
 
 The vital act or process has its explanation in the identification of the 
 two principles which constitute the individuality, the indivisible duality, 
 of each existence. . . . This double tendency realizes itself in two 
 movements in inverse direction which occur simultaneously. ... To 
 live is, for the creature, to be stimulated by life; it is to receive it, . . 
 react simultaneously toward it; then emit it, transmit it to other forms, 
 exchange it continually for new inspirations and communications of life.** 
 
 The only difference between the process as it appears in the 
 embryo and in the child is that the stimulating and self-imparting 
 activity of the universal Life reaches the child directly in air, light, 
 and food, and no longer by the mediation of the mother. In- 
 tellectually and spiritually, however, he still needs mediators. 
 
 All the organic functions reveal the same life-process. Nutrition 
 is first stimulation, then assimilation; then appears “the need of 
 opposing functions and movements by which the organism or a 
 given organ tends to discharge itself, project outwardly from itself 
 either the superabundance of what has been introduced into it, or 
 the dross of the assimilative process.”*’ Reproduction begins with 
 the discharge of the surplus life of the male and its reception by 
 the female; “and later must she not reject and expel that which 
 she has received and absorbed?”**® Finally, the general function 
 of relation (rapport), which includes all the various reactions of 
 the organism to the environment, is obviously a process of va-et-vient 
 between us and the beings which surround us. It is first “‘a rela- 
 tion of those beings to us, whereby they act upon us”; then “‘we 
 
  Props., 32-33. * Tbid., 32. © Ibid. * Thid. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST LilZ 
 
 receive in our sensitive center their impressions and assimilate them 
 by our sensations, our conceptions”; finally it appears as “our rela- 
 tion to the external beings, whereby we react towards them, and 
 dominate them in our turn by the power of our will, our mind, our 
 senses, and our organs,””*’ 
 
 The same process appears in each organ, and the organism as 
 a whole. It appears in “the systole and diastole of the heart,” in 
 “nervous eradiation and inradiation,” in the “‘secretion and excre- 
 tion of the glands,” in the “extension and contraction of the 
 muscles.” Everything, “even to the expansion and concentration 
 of the least organic molecule,” reveals “this double movement by 
 which life is simultaneously received and restored.”** The intel- 
 lectual and moral life proceeds on this plan. The whole organism 
 
 in short 
 
 is a single system, existing in its form by virtue of a single center, for 
 a single end, and in which each part is in the service of the whole, the 
 whole for the well-being of each part, and parts and whole together for 
 the life. Each organ is hence a functionary, either principal or sub- 
 ordinate, of the life, and the principal of these functionaries of the vital 
 activity are, in the child, the heart with the lungs, the brain with the 
 organs of the senses, and the stomach.” 
 
 The rest of the chapter is devoted to the description of the 
 evolution of these specific functionaries and the determination of 
 their rank in the organism. It may be summed up by saying that 
 Bautain reproduces the Platonic tripartite psychology, reversing the 
 rank of the brain and the heart, which correspond to the reason 
 and “the spirited part.” 
 
 (4). Prime of life. Intellectual and spiritual development, 
 and spiritual health. Physical, intellectual, and spiritual repro- 
 duction. 
 
 As the foetus is carried within the mother, so the embryonic 
 mind of the child is carried within the body, which is its “‘con- 
 tainer,” its “living but dark prison,”*® through which it is impressed 
 and expresses itself, as the foetus does through the mother. The 
 
 7 hid. ® Thid., 34. 
 8 Thid., 32-33. “ Ibid., 47. 
 
118 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 mind is conceived within the womb of the body when language, 
 the vehicle of thought, carries the thought of some other human 
 being to the “form of the understanding” in the child.” 
 
 The spiritual germ of this new conception is incorporated in the brain 
 of the child, . . . and the life, the generating ray which must fecundate 
 the germ, will come to him through a human agent, speaking the Verbum, 
 the word of the intelligence. . . . As soon as the child has conceived 
 the sense of the verb, that of the substantive verb To Be, the mental 
 personality of the child is settled in his corporeal form; mental concep- 
 tion is accomplished.*” 
 
 We have here an almost magical conception of the function of 
 language, and of the verb fo de in particular, which nevertheless 
 is simply a way of emphasizing the fact that mind and self-con- 
 sciousness develop only in society and by social intercourse. Once 
 conceived, says Bautain, mental man needs the word to sustain his 
 mental existence as much as physical man needs bread. The com- 
 plete acquisition of language leads to the positing of the self. The 
 child “will enter by speech and by intelligence into commerce . . . 
 with other intelligent and speaking beings, and thus learn not only 
 to distinguish his Ego from the non-Egos which surround him, but 
 also to know this Ego, and know himself in his speech.’’** 
 
 But still a third conception and gestation are necessary ere the 
 whole man is born: 
 
 Man who is soul, mind, and body, does not exist merely to live in 
 his body and for his body, nor in his body and his mind for himself and 
 his fellows. He must also live in his soul for the sake of the Being 
 who is the first source of life and of all life, and to whom finally all 
 life must be given back. .. . The germ is provided by the soul itself, 
 by the radical base of every man, already alive in his body and his mind. 
 The pure life which is destined to penetrate this germ and fecundate it, 
 will either come from the life-giving Spirit itself which “bloweth where 
 it listeth” . . . or by the word of life announced to man by the minis- 
 try of one of his fellows, who himself received the word from the 
 Spirit and lives by Its life.** 
 
 Such a minister of the word is rightly called “Father”; without his 
 
 * Props., 35. 8 Thid., 48. 
 “ Ibid., 47. “ Tbid., 49-50. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST Lip 
 
 fecundating word, the capacity for spiritual development may re- 
 main sterile, “as the egg would never have developed apart from 
 fecundation, nor the mind apart from speech.”** 
 
 Relationship with the Universal Life having once been estab- 
 lished, it must become a constant commerce if spiritual health is 
 to be maintained. As the health of the foetus depends upon its 
 union with the mother, as that of the mind depends upon constant 
 communication with other minds, so the soul’s health depends upon 
 the maintenance of a right relationship with the Source of its life. 
 
 And [he adds], if it is she, the soul, who makes her mind and her body, 
 if she makes and remakes them at every instant, and always as a function 
 of (en raison de) that which stimulates or acts upon her, shall she not 
 communicate to the mind and to the body what she is, her well-being 
 or her ill-being? And, if she can be touched, stimulated by pure Life, 
 be fecundated by It and react toward It, shall she not communicate the 
 virtue of that Life to her mind and to her body? *® 
 
 Bautain, it will be noted, is a firm believer in mental healing. As 
 he says later, “It is above all the mental and moral factor which 
 makes for what doctors call resiliency (le ressort) and which they 
 so like to find in patients.”*’ On the other hand, the “snalade 
 imaginaire” proves that the influence of mind over body may be 
 harmful as well as helpful. The spiritual man, however, is kept 
 in health “by the very fact that he lives in the bottom of his being 
 and in the whole of his being, that he is in triple relationship with 
 objective Life and draws his life from the purest source.’’** 
 
 Bautain’s doctrine of the three conceptions culminates in a 
 parallel between the men of the spirit, the men of the mind, and 
 the men of the body: 
 
 ‘These [he cries] are the men who, arrived at the autumn of their earthly 
 life, present in their person and their physiognomy that dignity, that 
 beauty of ripeness and old age which inspires at once trust and respect, 
 love and veneration. "The man who has lived more by his mind and 
 reason than by his soul, when he becomes old and infirm is irritable, 
 uneasy, impatient, regretting and praising the days that are gone, dis- 
 contented with what surrounds him; he inspires fear or compassion, 
 
 * Thid., 50. “ Thid., 58. 
 “ Thid., 49. * Thid., 59-60. 
 
120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 rather than respect or love. The animal man, old and broken, is a 
 collapsed machine, out of gear, who lies in a corner, moans, and is 
 dumb. He inspires pity and disgust.*® 
 
 But before passing to the subject of old age and death, Bautain 
 devotes a few pages to the phenomenon of reproduction, charac- 
 teristic of the prime of life. In childhood, he says, sex-need shows 
 itself in “the tendency of each human individuality to seek and 
 grasp what it lacks.””® But at adolescence man becomes specifically 
 conscious of what he lacks. His life is then superabundant at 
 both poles, brain and abdomen. Reproduction seems like a purely 
 physical process, but it should be remarked that the seminal fluid 
 has, besides its primary function, the secondary function “to flow 
 back also into the interior, pour itself into the blood, impregnating 
 it with its own virtues,” and so to produce various secondary modi- 
 fications, not least of which is the stimulation of intellectual creativ- 
 ity, or intellectual reproduction. “This work of intellectual con- 
 ception, parturition, and reproduction, is an excellent derivative 
 which, attracting life to the superior pole, and consuming it in 
 ideal products, enfeebles the animal tendency.”** Intense physical 
 activity is another means of sex sublimation; but religion is best, 
 for it develops the will, and “leads it to exercise its legitimate 
 superiority over the imagination and the senses, while at the same 
 time it gives man’s desire an ascending direction, and sets before 
 his affection a superior object.”’* Bautain is not over-ascetic; he 
 sets a very high estimate on marriage, when both parties are spiritual. 
 It is from these “‘free and chosen unions,” he says, “between two 
 human creatures animated in all their nature, each alive in all the 
 elements of his existence, that the noblest offspring comes”’*—for 
 he is inclined to believe that in the union of egg and sperm the 
 whole nature of each parent, moral and mental as well as physical, 
 fuses with that of the other. 
 
 (5). Decay and death. 
 
 What is death? [asks Bautain]. It is in general the breaking of the 
 relation between a subjective and particular center and form, and an 
 
 ” Props., 60. ? hid. 
 © Thid., 57. 8 Thid., 53. 
 5! hid. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 121 
 
 objective and general center and form. . . . To die is not therefore to 
 cease absolutely to live, still less, to cease to be; it is simply not to respond 
 any more to a given stimulus, not to react any more to a given agent. 
 . . . Human life does not die in death, any more than it is engendered 
 by generation.°* 3 
 
 Natural death like childbirth is in its outcome a triumph of life. 
 Death like birth is for man the exit from one world and the entrance 
 into another; it is also an awakening from a sympathetic slumber, a 
 dream, the ceasing to fee/ in common with and by the body, the loosing 
 of the bonds that the body imposed on the spirit, the commencement of 
 an immediate contact with a purer air, a purer light, and purer objects.” 
 
 The whole process of human development may thus be sum- 
 
 marized as follows: 
 
 In the physical birth of man, the physical life, implanted in the 
 human germ by the father, issues victorious under a material and physical 
 form from a living and dark tomb, the mother’s womb. 
 
 In mental, intellectual birth, the purer life implanted in the brain 
 and the understanding by the light and the word, issues victorious under 
 an intellectual form from a living and illumined tomb, from the brain 
 and the understanding. 
 
 In psychic birth, the soul’s life, poured into her by the breath of the 
 Spirit and the virtue of the sacred Word, issues victorious under a pure 
 and animic form from the very bosom of the human being, circum- 
 scribed by the mind and imprisoned in the body. 
 
 Finally in man’s legitimate rebirth through natural decease, in which 
 death is to be really conquered by death, the psychic and intellectual life 
 issues triumphant under the human form from the earthly form it had 
 put on and which it leaves behind, to react henceforth more purely to 
 the intelligible Light and the universal Life.*® 
 
 Here, then, in Bautain’s idea of life, we have the “mother-idea”’ 
 of his system. Concerning its centrality in his thinking we have 
 the testimony of his anonymous Mennaisian opponent: 
 
 German philosophy,’’ comparing phenomena and forcing the meaning 
 of words, reduces to a single law the law under which God has provided 
 for the perpetuation of species in the organic world and the law which 
 presides over intellectual conception. MM. Bautain makes it a universal 
 
 ™ Thid., 55-56. by Franz Baader in the Revue Euro- 
 * Thid., 60-61. péenne, I, 71 and 298; II, 192 and 338; 
 ™® Ibid., 61-62. III, 65 and 182; and especially IX, 182 
 
 ™ The reference is to articles on and ef seq. 
 
122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 law covering all existences, from the product of an arithmetical multipli- 
 cation up to the conclusion of a syllogism, from the salt which crystallizes 
 in the chemist’s vessel and the mineral which is formed in the bowels 
 of the earth up to God, the prototype and archetype of all beings. Al} 
 existence starting from a primitively existing point, two terms engender- 
 ing a third, two factors engendering a product: that is the germinative 
 point of our philosopher’s science, the foundation of all his teaching, the 
 usual theme of his lectures, the text upon which his course is a perpetual 
 commentary.°® 
 
 “Life, one in itself, one in all the universe’—such is the idea 
 that one must first grasp, if one is to comprehend Bautain’s phi- 
 losophy as a whole. ‘That we may clearly understand the absolutely 
 universal scope of this concept, it is important to stress the fact 
 that it is meant to cover not only the realm of mind, and the realm 
 of animate nature, but the realm of the “‘inanimate” and “inor- 
 ganic,” as well. 
 
 There is in the Propositions sur la vie a remarkable note” on 
 the analogy between the process of generation and the process of 
 crystallization, which I have reserved for special discussion. It 
 is apropos of the expression “‘saline point’’ as applied to the invisible 
 point about which the embryo forms itself: 
 
 I call the center of the human embryo a saline point, and I would 
 willingly call the central point of the crystallization of a salt a mineral 
 embryo. Perhaps we shall some day recognize that the formation of 
 salts and minerals, and beings called inorganic, occurs according to the 
 same law as the reproduction of beings called organic, and to which 
 alone we ascribe life, because we there see it manifest itself beneath 
 phenomena more adapted to our manner of existence. How many cen- 
 turies went by before the sex of plants, their marriage, their fecundation, 
 ‘their conception, were established? Analogies will perhaps lead some day 
 to the same result for the beings of the mineral kingdom. 
 
 The basis of every natural mineral is a salt, and every salt is an 
 alkali or plastic form, more or less saturated by an acid. ... All the 
 particles of the acid impregnate all the molecules of the alkali or other- 
 wise all the unities of the multiplier act upon all the unities of the 
 multiplicand, and from this operation results a product. . . . 
 
 How does this growth of the mineral embryo take place? Is it per- 
 fectly sure that it is by juxtaposition or aggregation? Might it not also 
 be by intussusception, by digestion and transformation, as in the other 
 
 "Ens. Phil. B., 568. ” Props., 18-19, note 5. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 123 
 
 reigns of nature? May not the center of the salt absorb and assimilate 
 the nourishment floating in the eau-mére by a mode of nutrition peculiar 
 to itself, and afterwards develop from within out what it has assimilated? 
 . . . If these masses are the product of aggregation, . . . why does one 
 molecule become the center rather than another? Why should it attract 
 instead of being attracted?—for they are all under the same conditions 
 in the midst of the eau-mére. ... 
 
 I simply set forth analogies which may help us to get an inkling of 
 the identity of the laws of reproduction in all the realms, in spite of the 
 difference of forms, instruments, and means. When we call the mineral 
 kingdom dead and inorganic, we mean, without doubt, that it does not 
 live after our fashion; that it does not fee! and act like us, by organs 
 hike curs. It remains to say what to feel and to act are, and if they 
 cannot take place where we see neither nerves nor muscles, nor fibres, 
 nor anything that resembles them. 
 
 This daring extension of the concept of life to inorganic nature 
 was the chief object of attack on the part of Bautain’s examiners 
 when he defended his thesis before the Faculty of Medecine. We 
 fortunately have a most interesting document to enlighten us on 
 the details of this dramatic confrontation of Philosophy and Science: 
 a tiny anonymous pamphlet*® issued by one of Bautain’s admirers 
 after the much-discussed examination. Bautain, it appears, was 
 “like Socrates, unable to reply to his judges”; and his anonymous 
 
 admirer feels called upon to dispel the somewhat painful impression 
 thus created. 
 
 A single word [he says] ... seems to us to explain everything; 
 that is, that the Faculty and M. Bautain had not taken their stand upon 
 the same ground: one party was on the ground of the physicists, the 
 other on that of the philosophers. . . . These sciences depend upon 
 philosophical doctrines quite different from his own. ... M. Bautain 
 said it himself in a notable way in his replies: he did not concern him- 
 self with justifying or refuting . . . the physical and physiological doc- 
 trines of our day. He contented himself with showing the analogies of 
 physical life with all life, and thus the simple probabilities with which 
 present-day physics or chemistry furnish us; as for example [here is a 
 reference to the principal objection of the examiners] the fact that the 
 metals have not been decomposed up to the present moment can be no 
 obstacle to the presentation of such analogies. 
 
 Un Mot sur la soutenance de M. 
 Bautain, Strasbourg, 1826. 
 
124 - "THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Bautain would have been delighted with the modern theory of 
 positive and negative electrons, and the decomposition of elements 
 in radioactivity ! 
 
 In Cosmology, then, Bautain is a pronounced panpsychist—or 
 at the very least, a panvitalist. All things are animate, and ani- 
 mistic terms are appropriate in describing them. Do the chemical 
 atoms “attract” and “repel” each other? Bautain suspects that 
 something quasipsychological is involved in the process, and speaks 
 of “affinity” and “antipathy.” Do table-tipping and table-tapping 
 astound the public? Bautain is not surprised. After attending a 
 few séances, he comes to the conclusion that, although these phe- 
 nomena have a certain similarity to those associated with “animal 
 magnetism,” “artificial somnambulism,” and “the peculiar motives 
 which in certain cases impel us to decide and act almost without our 
 knowledge and, as it were, in spite of ourselves,” they are more 
 probably just what they appear to be: “intellectual phenomena in 
 inorganic beings.” This, he feels, should give the final blow to 
 materialism and naturalism!°* We should note, however, that 
 Bautain’s panpsychism, unlike Paulsen’s, is not a corollary of a 
 parallelistic theory of body and mind. Bautain is a thorough-going 
 interactionist. If he looks upon the body as in some sense the 
 creation of the vital principle, he nevertheless believes in a sharp 
 dualism of soul and body. If he at times reminds us of the monism 
 of “L’Evolution Créatrice,’ he also at times reminds us of the 
 dualism of “Matiére et Mémoire.’ Of this, more anon. 
 
 We now have in our possession, in the shape of the idea of life, 
 the key which will enable us to understand and almost to predict 
 the views of our philosopher on every imaginable subject. But the 
 forms which this identical formula assumes in passing from one 
 realm of science to another are so protean, and sometimes so un- 
 expected, that we shall do well to become acquainted not only with 
 the idée-meére itself, but also with the four great idées-filles (if we 
 may coin the word) which stand just below it in hierarchical order, 
 and which act in their turn as idées-méres for the four divisions 
 
 of Bautain’s philosophy. I refer to the idea of God (or Being), 
 
 * Bautain was one of the first to take pamphlet entitled: Awis aux chrétiens sur 
 an interest in spiritualistic phenomena — les tables tournantes et parlantes, par un 
 when the craze struck Paris, about 1850. ecclésiastigue, Paris, Devarenne et Per- 
 He published his conclusions in a little  risse, 1853. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 125 
 
 the generative principle of Ontology; the idea of Nature, the 
 generative principle of Cosmology; the idea of Man, the generative 
 principle of Anthropology; and the idea of rapport, which acts as 
 generative principle for all other branches of philosophy, which 
 Bautain classes under Anthropology because they deal with man in 
 his various theoretical and practical relations. ‘The exposition of 
 these four generative ideas will therefore give:us the ground-plan 
 of his entire system. Since we have already been introduced to 
 Bautain’s cosmology, we shall begin with the idea of Nature and 
 take our leap thence into the high mysteries of Being in Itself, 
 returning soon, to avoid dizziness, to the level of the humanistic 
 sciences. 
 
 1. The idea of Nature. ‘The “nature” of an object as equiva- 
 lent to its Platonic ezdos. Nature and spirit. 
 
 There are two chief conceptions of nature, says Bautain: “For 
 the more superficial, nature is the visible form of the world and of 
 each being; for the more profound, it is the creative force that 
 animates them.”** Neither of these two conceptions wholly satis- 
 fies him, however; for neither tells us what nature is “‘in itself, in 
 its idea.” Modern physics is powerless to help us here. It talks 
 much about “forces,” “affinities,” etc., but it is obliged to take all 
 these fundamental concepts on faith as faits primitifs, “facts quite 
 as mysterious as the hooks on the atoms of Epicurus or the occult 
 qualities of the Middle Ages.”** If Philosophy suspends judgment 
 until Science settles such questions, she will remain forever in 
 suspense; for Science in our days has turned her attention from 
 these high questions, and has become “‘the servant of the body and 
 
 64 Bautain therefore goes back to a more 
 
 the servant of industry. 
 daring and less abjectly scientific philosophy, and finds in the 
 Platonic theory of ideas the clue to the nature of nature. 
 
 We know no object as it is in itself, he remarks; yet in the 
 subjective impression which it leaves upon us—an impression con- 
 ditioned by “its constitution and organization, its situation and ours, 
 
 9965 
 
 and the intervening media”®°°—we have a genuine product of the 
 
 object itself. If therefore we eliminate from our impression of 
 
 ® Psych. Exp., I, 128. al 7 Oe eee 
 ® Thid., 129. © Tbid., 132-133. 
 
126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 various objects all that is accidental and adventitious, we shall find 
 that our idea of each object is composed of three main factors: 
 an idea of its individuality; an idea of its substance, form, or 
 generic qualities; and an idea of its animating lfe-force or spint. 
 It is the second of these ideas to which we refer when we speak 
 of the nature of the object. 
 
 But [he continues] if the idea of a single form, substantial and 
 peculiar to the genus of the object, is the basis of its image in my mind, 
 as the prototype of this idea is the basis of the object which exists out- 
 side of me; if I conceive nothing in any existence which can be anterior 
 to that basis; if it is this plasm (plastique) of the object which constitutes 
 its generic characteristic, the support of its properties, the substratum of 
 its qualities, it will also be true to say that it is this, and not the palpable, 
 visible material, which constitutes the substance beneath the accident, the 
 noumenon beneath the phenomenon. The plasm of each being is its 
 extreme inwardness, the fixed, stable, indestructible substance; and the 
 extreme outwardness is the phenomenon which varies, the form which 
 perishes. This p/asem, the same in all individuals of the same genus, 
 and in which the need of life is inherent—as in every germ, in every 
 created form—this central force which so powerfully attracts the spirit 
 of life and which is the root from which the existence develops, is what 
 constitutes the mature of the thing. Physical nature, be it general or 
 particular, is therefore, in each creature, the pure form of the physical 
 life, or the capacity to attract it and receive it, joined with the power 
 of reacting towards it.®° 
 
 The world as it appears to us is therefore not Nature itself, but 
 Nature’s appearance, “‘the child of Nature by the Spirit which 
 animates it, by the life which fecundates it, . . . Nature objecti- 
 vated or made manifest.”°’ This implies that the “nature” of 
 each reality is found in two different states. In the first, it is 
 “latent, like an unlit hearth, . . . inert, motionless, fixed; it is 
 chained within itself, as if swallowed up in its own depths.”** In 
 the second state, which ensues only upon stimulation or fecundation 
 by some external life-force, it is active and actual. 
 
 The inward makes a motion to advance, progresses, passes outward; 
 . substance manifests itself as qualities, the 0umenon as phenomenon. 
 Nature then shows herself as a form which conceives, travails, brings 
 
 © Peych, Exp. I, 134-135. ® rhid., 136. 
 * Thid., 135. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 127 
 
 forth, and nourishes; as plasm, as mother, matura naturans, and she tends 
 with all her strength . . . on the one hand to attract the food which 
 she needs to sustain what she bears... and on the other hand she 
 posits it more and more outwardly, pushes it ever farther on toward 
 birth, toward the plenitude of development, to the end that... her 
 potentiality may be wholly manifested and pass into actuality.® 
 
 If, now, we ask which of these two states represents the nature 
 of the object more truly, we shall have to answer that it is freest 
 from chance, change, and corruption in the latent state, where it 
 exists timelessly and invisibly. In this invisible realm of latency 
 subsists eternally the “divine idea” of every manner of creature, 
 “the final cause of their creation and their existence.” For each 
 possible genus and species there is an idea, which unites all the 
 members of the species in an organism “in the likeness of the 
 divine Tri-unity.” Each individual creature has therefore a “‘gen- 
 eral life whereby he communicates with his generating principle 
 and with his genus,” and also a “particular life, which manifests 
 in its own way the general life with which he is animated, which 
 realizes . . . the divine idea of which he is the more or less distant 
 expression—for the succession of the generations is the development 
 of the idea of the Creator in the world, through Nature!” In 
 this teaching of Bautain’s, Platonic and Aristotelian elements are 
 mingled in a most interesting fashion with elements drawn from 
 current Romanticism. 
 
 But what is this external force—this “life” or “spirit? —which 
 calls realities from potentiality into actuality? What is spirit? 
 Here is an idea which seems to be implied in the idea of nature, 
 as one of its necessary ingredients. Until we understand what 
 spirit is, we have not fully understood what nature is. 
 
 Bautain feels that Descartes’ definition of spirit as res cogitans 
 has proved its absurdity by the consequences which have been de- 
 duced from it, chief of which is the conclusion that animals are 
 machines. ‘‘Experience and common sense,”’ says Bautain, 
 force us to recognize in animals a life analogous to man’s, thonat 
 of an inferior degree, and consequently an animal spirit which 
 animates and moves their organism, although without consciousness 
 
 ® Thid.. 136-137. ” Tbhid., 138. 
 
128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 and reflection.”"* As we have seen, he is disposed to extend the 
 
 concept beyond the animal world to the inanimate world. ‘This 
 he justifies by the remark that the qualities by which the empirical 
 school is wont to distinguish matter from spirit—extension, weight, 
 form, color, etc.—may quite possibly be purely phenomenal ex- 
 pressions of hidden causes; and these causes might well be spiritual, 
 as was urged by the Occasionalists. 
 
 In place of Descartes’ definition of spirit, Bautain puts the fol- 
 lowing: “‘the first product of a nature, the immediate result of 
 the action which fecundates it and its emergence from itself, its 
 outward positing, its ex-position.”"* If we call latent nature sub- 
 stance, we may call active nature spirit. “They correspond to being 
 and existence, plasm and life, germ and sperm, base and acid. 
 Spirit is volatile, like gas; though attached to its parent substance 
 during life, it “easily passes from one object to another, and thus 
 is variously modified.”’’* So long as its substance remains in vital 
 relation with the superior life which is its source and nutriment, 
 the spirit remains attached to the parent stem; when this relation 
 is broken, nothing perishes. ‘“The spirit persists and goes seeking a 
 new base and a new form. ‘The substance is indestructible, and 
 it awaits another fecundation, whence will issue a new spirit.” 
 The organic molecules remain, to be worked up into new organisms 
 by new spirits. Spirit, finally, is the intermediary whereby sub- 
 stances communicate with one another. Substances are impene- 
 trable monads; they “‘can no more penetrate than centers can; they 
 touch each other only by their spirit, by their form, as centers do 
 19 Spirits, on the other 
 hand, are capable of uniting with one another in more or less 
 
 by their radu, by their circumferences. 
 
 stable unions; they “interpenetrate with one another, and like rays 
 of light they meet and pass through one another without becoming 
 alloyed.’’*® 
 
 There are in the universe two kinds of spirits, corresponding to 
 
 ™ Psych. Exp., I, 141. cumstances (and they are innumerable) 
 7 Thid., 147-148. which may influence and modify its de- 
 8 Thid.. 155. ‘Hence the immense di- velopment.” Jbid., 166. 
 
 versity of spirits, each being a function ™ Thid., 168-169. 
 
 of the base or the substance from which ® Thid., 175. 
 
 it issues, the fecundating agent which Te bids A197; 
 
 develops it, and finally, of all the cir- 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 129 
 
 the two great classes of substances: heavenly and earthly, spiritual 
 and material, psychical and physical. Animals, vegetables, and 
 minerals are purely terrestrial spirits. To this class belongs the 
 Earth, our great mother. Like Fechner, Bautain believes in the 
 existence of an Earth-Spirit, child of Mother Earth, fecundated by 
 the life-giving rays of the sun. From the Earth-Spirit is derived 
 the physical life of all earth’s creatures.‘ ‘To the class of purely 
 heavenly spirits belong the angels, first creation of deity, nourished 
 by the divine Life itself. To the class of ‘‘mixed” spirits, half 
 of earth and half of heaven, half intelligent and half physical, 
 belong the World-Spirit or Macrocosm, and man, the microcosm, 
 each of them an organism in which spirit and matter, soul and 
 
 body, are strangely blended. 
 
 The worlds [concludes Bautain] are attached to one another by the 
 transmission of spirit: the divine world to the world of the intelligences 
 by the divine Spirit, the intelligible world to the terrestrial world by the 
 psychic spirit, the human spirit, acting upon the physical spirit and 
 through it upon matter, whatever the form and degree of its organiza- 
 tion may be. And spirit everywhere is life; it is the movement of 
 alternation by which it operates; it is therefore by life, and by it alone, 
 that substances may be penetrated: it is life which opens them, fecundates 
 them, develops them, and it is by life again that they communicate with 
 each other.”$ | 
 
 2. The idea of Being, or God. ‘The Trinity. Origin of the 
 world of time and space. The problem of evil and the problem 
 of redemption. 
 
 As, in the created universe, each substance issues from an in- 
 visible center, and makes itself a visible form by the great law of 
 polarization, so in the realm of ultimate reality, the realm of the 
 divine, the same law holds good; or rather, the laws which govern 
 the created universe are more or less inexact copies of the law 
 according to which the three persons of the Godhead are eternally 
 generated out of the indivisible One. For Bautain, as for Hegel, 
 the Doctrine of the Trinity is the central Christian doctrine. He 
 explains its meaning in various ways, recognizing that no one 
 
 ™ See the pamphlet, Un mot sur la “World Spirit,” see Psych. Exp., I, 185- 
 soutenance de M. Bautain, already cited. 186. 
 Cf. Psych. Exp., I, 85-86. On, the ® Psych. Exp. I, 177. 
 
130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 terrestrial analogy can possibly exhaust its celestial meaning. The 
 three persons are to each other as essence, existence, and life; or as 
 foyer, pole, and axis; or as “One and... Duality, returning 
 by a third term to Unity;”™ or, finally, as Subject, Object, and 
 Rapport. We need not dwell upon this aspect of Bautain’s phi- 
 losophy, save to point out that he differs in one important respect 
 from the Romanticists and Idealists whose views he seems to be 
 following so closely. For them, the universe itself forms one of 
 the moments in the eternal rhythm of the divine nature; God had 
 to manifest Himself in Nature and History, in order to know 
 Himself, and in order to find an object for His affections. For 
 Bautain, on the contrary, God is self-contained and self-sufficient; 
 He is Himself a sufficient object for infinite knowledge, love, and 
 activity; He is therefore in no sense dependent upon the universe, 
 and the universe is absolutely dependent upon Him. If He 
 created us, it was out of pure love, and not out of necessity.*° 
 
 To say that God “created us,” or that He created the universe 
 as we know it, is not strictly accurate. This world of time and 
 space, of mortality and suffering, is not the world that God created. 
 The true, or celestial world is perfect and changeless; it is eternally 
 conceived and generated in the womb of the divine Wisdom or 
 Understanding, forever fertilized by the influx of the divine Life 
 or Spirit. Each point on the all-embracing sphere of the divine 
 Wisdom is a potential center of life; fertilized by the divine Life, 
 It passes into eternal actuality, and becomes an immortal spirit. In 
 its potential state, the celestial world is the world of the substances, 
 the world of the Platonic reals, which subsist in the divine Under- 
 standing “as their ideas or images live, subsist, and move in our 
 understanding.” In its actualized state, the celestial world is the 
 world of the heavenly spirits or angels, each of whom manifests 
 some eternal Idea and lives by the divine Spirit. 
 
 How, then, did this terrestrial world come into existence? It 
 was the product of a Fall—a fall out of eternity into time, space, 
 and mortality; a fall whose evil consequences far outrun those of 
 
 ™ Rev. Eur., IV, 60. (De VPimpuis- © See especially Phil. Chr., Letters 18 
 sance de la raison humaine a fonder la and 19, and Choses de Vautre monde, 
 science métaphysique.) 120-140, for Bautain’s idea of the 
 
 Trinity. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST ba 
 
 Adam’s fall, which it far antedated and helped to predetermine. 
 The possibility of this fall lay in the fact that the bond which 
 eternally unites the angels to their divine Source and Goal is a 
 free bond, a bond of love and gratitude. If an angelic being is 
 grateful and wise, it will devote itself wholly to the contemplation 
 of God, and so find life and health and joy; but it may, if it will, 
 devote itself instead to self-contemplation, and attempt to be auton- 
 omous. This attempt is folly, of course, and if successful would 
 lead to utter self-destruction. In mercy, God contends with the 
 would-be suicide, and continues to sustain him in existence; He 
 prevents his destruction, but He cannot prevent his degradation 
 without violating the freedom of his will, which alone makes 
 possible his redemption. ‘Thus, the temporal and visible universe 
 in which we human beings live resulted, according to Bautain, 
 from the foolish self-will of a celestial spirit. We are all im- 
 plicated in the organism of the “World-Spirit’; our organisms 
 are parts of it; we share in its degradation, which we may help 
 either to increase or to diminish. ‘The origin of this world and 
 the origin of evil are identical—which, at a stroke, disposes of the 
 problem of evil. 
 
 “The first effect of evil,” says Bautain, “was time, which became 
 the basis and law of all the intelligences; then, space, the basis and 
 law of the phenomenal world.”** 
 
 In Bautain’s doctrine of time, there is a curious mingling of 
 Kantian and Neo-Platonic ideas. He accepts Kant’s view that 
 time, as we human beings experience it, is purely subjective. It is 
 “the form of our internal sensibility, the intuitive vision of our- 
 
 > and it comes into existence, for us, only 
 
 selves and of our state,’ 
 when we become self-conscious, and begin to distinguish our inner 
 states from the external world. Nevertheless, he feels that this 
 human and subjective experience presupposes something more ob- 
 jective and general. Man is a temporal creature not merely be- 
 cause he is conscious of the flux of his existence, but because his 
 
 existence zs in flux, even before his self-consciousness awakes. He 
 
 8! All quotations in this section are the problem of evil and the plan of 
 from FB,V2, Principes de philosophie salvation, see also the last few letters in 
 Métaphysique. On time, see chap. v of the Philosophie du Christianisme. 
 this manuscript; on space, chap. v1. On 
 
 10 
 
132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 is a product of the triumph of a “particular, centralizing force” 
 over the “spirit, or general force,” the individualization of a 
 species; and he is bound at last to redress the disturbed balance of 
 things by death, which is “the restitution of the particular to the 
 general.” In a more objective sense, then, the “time” of each 
 human being is measured out by the pendulum-swing of the oscilla- 
 tory movement of life, which fills the interval between these two 
 determining moments of birth and death. Moreover, birth and 
 death are characteristic of the whole terrestrial world, and not 
 merely of man; hence, says Bautain, “there is a general time 
 embracing all particular times, within which every temporal crea- 
 ture 1s born and dies, . . . a general rotation within which every 
 oscillation, every particular notion occurs.” This general time, 
 which is “anterior, parallel, and posterior” to the time which we 
 create for ourselves, is the creation of the ‘“‘World-Spirit,” the 
 result of the egocentric motion which he initiated when he first, 
 “attempting to triumph over the universal force, . . . posited him- 
 self as an organism, as a self, faced with a self, as a subject-object 
 or personality.” General time is “the perpetual oscillation of the 
 life of this false organism, the rotation on its own axis of a self 
 continually dying and reborn.” To use a simile of Royce’s, the 
 “‘time-span”? cf the World-Spirit includes our human time-spans 
 as a sentence includes its words or a symphony its separate melodies; 
 but this is not true of Bautain’s God, as it is of Royce’s. For God 
 and the angels, and for the human soul when it works free from 
 the dominion of the senses, there is no time. 
 
 To recapitulate in Bautain’s own words: “Evil is .. . the 
 isolation of the particular in the universal. ‘The effect of evil is 
 time, which is a product of ... the reflection and turning-back 
 of the creature upon itself; and the consequence of the effect, the 
 product of isolated reflection, time raised to the first power, time 
 ex-posed or outwardly posited, is space.” 
 
 Bautain distinguishes between size (étendue), space, and pure 
 extension. The size (i.e., the body) of each phenomenal creature, 
 is the section of space which it appropriates for itself in the course 
 of its organic development; it is bounded by its “‘poles” or “cardinal 
 points.” “Space,” says Bautain, “is the great organism [Macro- 
 cosmus| containing simultaneously every étendue, every particular 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST Hak 
 
 organism; it is bounded by the poles or cardinal points of the 
 phenomenal world.” Pure extension is “the manifestation of the 
 Infinite”; it bodies God forth as étendue bodies forth the finite 
 individual. It is identical with the divine Understanding. As 
 étendue is carved out of space, and presupposes it, so space is carved 
 out of pure extension, and presupposes it. 
 
 Besides all these, Bautain distinguishes a fourth kind of space, 
 Kantian space, which is “the form of our general external sensi- 
 bility, as time is the form of our internal sensibility.” Kantian 
 space arises in self-consciousness through contact with the Not-Self ; 
 more specifically, through the visual measuring of the distance 
 which separates me from the object which resists me. Thus, while 
 the subject creates his own time, there can be no space without an 
 object—and this applies to étendue and general space as well as 
 to particular or Kantian space. If time is the interval between 
 two vital acts of the same vital center, space is the relation between 
 two vital centers. Kantian space applies primarily to the human 
 individual; but the ““World-Spirit,” by analogy, is said to have not 
 only an organism (étendue) but an “empire,” a “space,” a “world 
 external to himself,” which is a portion of pure extension circum- 
 scribed by his visual horizon. ‘This circumscribed portion of pure 
 extension is all that gives reality to the world of time and space: 
 
 Time passes, forms change; but space, which contains time and form, 
 is immovable, imperturbable, and changes not, for it is subject to the 
 law of pure extension, the eternal Wisdom ... which gives fixity, 
 permanence, and stability to space, and which, arresting time, which is 
 only flux and vicissitude, gives it a sort of reality or present in and 
 
 through space. 
 
 Caught in this world of time and space, involved in the fate of 
 the World-Spirit, man is in imminent danger of being whirled 
 away in the flux of things; yet it is his high calling to win his way 
 up through level after level of existence, until he arrives at the 
 homeland of the soul, and becomes one with the divine Life. In 
 the first stages of his development, he lives mainly in the physical 
 world, the world of space, the world of the things that pass away. 
 Seeking to subdue this world to his will, he finds himself frustrated, 
 for this is the realm of Destiny, the realm of “rigid forms” and 
 
134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 “inflexible law.” Things attract him and lure him out of himself, 
 and then brutally contravene or ignore him; his life is one long 
 fruitless combat. Discouraged and exhausted, he then retreats 
 within himself, into the world of spirit, the world of time; and, 
 suddenly, ‘‘Destiny loses its sway over him.”’ But Stoic equanimity 
 is not the final goal of man’s pilgrimage. 
 
 His primal law [says Bautain] is love, communication, devotion to his 
 fellow-men; and that law, so sweet and so divine in itself, becomes a 
 heavy yoke for man, as soon as he isolates himself and attempts to live 
 for himself alone. But if at last he issues from himself, no longer to 
 
 . create a domain for himself in space and to enter into the agita- 
 tions of time, but to act secretly and silently like Nature, to give himself 
 like light, to devote himself like love, then he comes under the sole sway 
 of the law of pure extension, the law of the eternal Wisdom. .. . As 
 fast as the self is lost or universalized, bits of knowledge gather them- 
 selves into true science, science grows into luminous self-evidence, and 
 the love of self becomes the love of the universal—and such is the end 
 of man, towards which his whole life should be directed, and whose 
 delights he tastes, in proportion as he fixes his heart upon it and draws 
 ever nearer to it. 
 
 3. The idea of man. 
 
 We are now prepared to grasp, without much effort, the idea of 
 man. He is, as we have seen, a mixed spirit, with a double nature 
 or substance—“‘a child of Earth and of starry Heaven,” as the 
 old Orphics put it. If it be asked how a being so curiously com- 
 pounded can cohere, and how a soul and body so radically different 
 from one another can interact, the answer is simple: soul-substance 
 and corporeal substance can never directly interact, but through 
 their spirits they can both cohere and interact. Man has, in fact, 
 three spirits: an intelligent spirit or intelligence, whereby he com- 
 munes with purely intelligible realities; an animal spirit, whose 
 organs are the semses, whereby he communes with the sensible or 
 phenomenal world; and a mixed spirit, the reason, whereby he 
 combines and sifts the data furnished by the senses. “Thus com- 
 pounded, man is the epitome of the universe; and_ philosophy 
 accordingly begins with self-knowledge. 
 
 Whence came man? from below, or from above? from Nature, 
 or from God? Even in those pre-Darwinian days, the theory 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 135 
 
 was current that man had evolved from inanimate and unconscious 
 Nature. The idea of evolution, of development, is so central with 
 Bautain that we might expect him to agree with Schelling and 
 Hegel at this point; but he does not. 
 
 Abandoned to herself [he says], physical Nature turns forever in the 
 same circle; like a serpent, it coils and uncoils, shut up in a fatal sequence 
 of cause and effect in the cycle of necessity. The animals never go 
 beyond the range of their instincts; the most industrious do no better 
 to-day than six thousand years ago, and the most stupid are still at the 
 same stage. No advancement, no progress is to be discerned either in 
 the species or in the individual, If there is any amelioration in the 
 world, speaking generally, it is due to the freedom and intelligence of 
 man. . . . Without man the world would have no sense, for it would 
 have no purpose.®? 
 
 If Bautain is an evolutionist, then it is in a purely Neo-Platonic 
 sense; man can evolve because he is in a state of degradation; he 
 can rise because he has fallen. 
 
 From the idea of man there spring directly the sciences of pure 
 and experimental psychology, and, indirectly, the sciences of 
 theodicy, ethics, and logic. 
 
 Anthropology, starting with the data furnished it by ontology with 
 respect to the origin and nature of man, considers the human soul in its 
 root and in its purely spiritual development, as pure psychology; in its 
 mixed development through the body, as experimental psychology. 
 
 It explains the relation of man with his Author, as Theodicy; the 
 relation of man with his fellows in Ethics or Morals; and his relations 
 with sensible and rational things in Logic, including Epistemology.** 
 
 It remains only for us to explain the idea of relation, or rapport, 
 which is the key to the last-named sciences. 
 
 4. The idea of rapport. 
 
 As we have already seen, relation is one of the three great func- 
 tions that constitute the va-et-vient between the organism and the 
 environment—or, to maintain the proper order, between the en- 
 vironment and the organism. ‘The philosophical scope of this con- 
 
 © Psych. Exp., I, 152-153. De Régny, 309-310; cf. Psych. Exp., 
 I, 62 ef seg. 
 
136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 cept is best revealed in the elaborate “Note on the word rapport,” 
 in the introductory part of the Psychologie Expérimentale.™* In 
 it the epistemological consequences of the concept of life appear, 
 intimately bound up with various moral and political consequences; 
 for the gist of Bautain’s theory of knowledge is this: that knowl- 
 edge is only one form of the general process of action and reaction 
 between environment and organism, and a secondary form at that, 
 being subordinate to moral or voluntary activity—a thoroughgoing 
 Voluntarism, which is, at the same time, a thoroughgoing Realism, 
 for the object in the knowing process makes the first move. 
 
 “No creature,” begins Bautain, “lives by itself, or for itself.”*° 
 By the very fact that it belongs to a world, its existence depends 
 upon the reciprocal commerce of all, on the continuousness of this 
 commerce, on action and reaction between each Ego and all the 
 non-Egos. ‘This “commerce” constitutes relationship (rapport). 
 
 Every real relation presupposes two terms that are living and not 
 creatures of reason, but which exist, and which the reason is obliged to 
 admit as necessary data in order that there may be a possibility of a 
 relation: two terms distinct and opposed though not contrary to each 
 other . . . which act upon each other, and which are to one another as 
 active and passive, the one giving, the other receiving.®® 
 
 The active term—here the ethical corollaries begin to appear—has 
 authority over the passive, and gives it life and nourishment, if it 
 reacts. Among all creatures this process of action and reaction 
 is simultaneous, which causes life to circulate “in all the spheres, 
 in all the worlds, in each particular existence in the world.” ' 
 
 I say the circulation of life, for life belongs to no creature; there is but 
 one Being who has life in Himself, of Himself, by Himself, and it is 
 He who disseminates it continuously in all the creation: there is but 
 one Father.%® 
 
 Man’s physical life is dependent on a process of va-et-vient, 
 between him and the light, the air, and other physical agents; his 
 mental life, on a process of va-et-vient between him and ‘“‘the 
 
 * Psych, Exp., I, 83-91. 7 rhid., 84. 
 
 * Ibid., 83. *® Ibid. 
 * Tbid., 83-84. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST P37 
 
 word,” and other social agencies; the earth’s natural life, on a 
 process of va-et-vient between her and the sun; the earth’s culti- 
 vated life, on a process of va-et-vient between her and man’s hand 
 and mind; man’s normal life, on a process of va-et-vient between 
 him and the family or society; man’s “‘psychic” life, on a process 
 of va-et-vient between his inmost soul and the divine Life which 
 is its source. 
 
 The meaning of this in the moral and political sphere is obvious. 
 In the family and in patriarchal society, the source of authority 
 is paternity. Paternity is both human and divine. 
 
 The father transmits the life which comes originally from the source 
 of all life and transmits it according to the sacred laws of life; hence 
 the expression filial piety, to designate the free and positive reaction of 
 the son toward the father . . . whence results the union, the prosperity, 
 the stability of the family, its duration, its long life on earth. It is the 
 same with a mation, which is but a great family issued from the same 
 trunk. Its legislation is largely composed of the traditions of the an- 
 cestors, and the elders are the chiefs of the tribe.®® 
 
 In peoples, where tradition is broken, the action which commences 
 the organic relation that makes it a social body is performed by a 
 chief or leader. “It is not popular choice which makes the king. 
 . . . The populace does not say, ‘I make you king’; it says ‘Here 
 is my king.’”*° The people’s acceptance of the king’s rule, and 
 their free homage, are what establish the vital process of va-ct-vient 
 on which the people’s life and health depend. The king owes 
 justice to his people partly by virtue of his paternal relation to 
 them, partly by virtue of his filial relation to a higher Power. 
 “The authority once constituted, obedience to the laws and to the 
 government becomes obligatory for the people. It must react by 
 SUMS OMe a ns 
 In relations between individuals the same law holds good. 
 
 Of two men in present and direct relation,°? there will always be one 
 who will prevail over the other, either by force of body, or by the 
 reason, by the intelligence, by the will. The stronger will thereby be 
 
 © Thid., 87-88. attitude of the good Catholic toward the 
 ” Thid., 88. Holy See is obvious. 
 ™ Tbid., 89. The application to the Teacher and pupil, for example. 
 
138 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 the support and stay, or the oppressor of the weak; and the latter will 
 cling to his patron, or reject the oppression if he can. . . . Support, 
 benevolence and protection, on the one hand; trust, affection and grati- 
 tude on the other; this is the law . . . of justice founded in nature.*” 
 
 In the discussion of the relations of man and God, Bautain’s 
 theory of religious knowledge is clearly foreshadowed. Man’s 
 highest life is in his soul, and his soul is born and nourished by 
 the influx of the divine Life. Hence his highest duty—and high- 
 est cognitive act—is free and positive reaction thereto. “He must 
 answer with the heart, with love, to the Love which gives itself; 
 he must make a corresponding reaction to the creating and sustaining 
 action.”°* The initiative is God’s, who first loved us; man can 
 no more escape the stimulus of God’s love than he can escape from 
 
 the environing air. 
 \ 
 But [adds Bautain] he can refuse his reaction. ... In that case 
 he lives an animal and reasonable life, but he does not know psychac 
 life; he is in relation with nature and his fellows, but not with God; 
 he is as if dead, or rather he is not born into the intelligible world, and 
 his mind understands nothing of the laws of that world, of metaphysical 
 truths, of the nature of things.’ ‘The law of love applied to an invisible 
 object, to what does not fall beneath the senses, seems to him a folly, 
 or weighs upon him like a yoke. He is oppressed by it, and like the 
 poisonous plant which turns into venom the solar ray, he corrupts in 
 himself the divine gift. Hence the uneasiness, the world-weariness 
 (dégout), the kind of moral fever which torments so many young men 
 in our days.*° 
 
 Through the idea of rapport, then, the idée-mére of Bautain’s 
 system, life as conditioned spontaneity,’ descends into the phe- 
 nomenal realm and becomes a guiding principle for man in all 
 his practical relations. It may well seem that in ethics and politics 
 it is not the spontaneity of life, but its necessary conditioning by 
 external stimulation and external authority that is emphasized. 
 When we come to Bautain’s philosophy of education, however, it 
 is the other side of his life-formula that strikes our attention. As 
 
 8 Psych. Exp., I, 89-90. taneity,” as a succinct formula for Bau- 
 ™ Thid., 90. tain’s central idea, to Prof. Baudin. 
 * Italics mine. Bautain himself, while he objects to 
 Psych. Exp., I, 90-91. Fichte’s “absolute spontaneity,” coins no 
 
 *"T owe the phrase “conditioned spon- phrase to describe his own position. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 139 
 against the view of education as a sort of coin-minting or putty- 
 molding process—a view all too common among Catholic educa- 
 tors’*—Bautain upholds the view that education is essentially ‘“‘the 
 stimulation of the vital energies by means of language, the fecun- 
 dation of the germs of truth and goodness contained in the human 
 mind and heart, the intelligent culture of the human plant, the 
 most marvellous and delicate of all plants, by adapting oneself to 
 the spontaneous unfolding (jeu) of its natural laws, and never 
 violating them.’”’® In his theory of education, Bautain is almost 
 at one with Pestalozzi, Froebel, and all the great Romanticists. 
 
 It is true that Bautain insists upon the necessity of discipline, 
 arbitrary authority, and the appeal to fear in the training of young 
 children. He mocks at Rousseau’s instructor who is so afraid of 
 enslaving the will of his master. He will not explain to young 
 children the motives of his commandments; let them guess his 
 reasons if they can.’ He does not trust unregenerate human 
 nature to develop rightly without much pruning; the germs of a 
 higher moral and spiritual nature must be “grafted” upon it by 
 the educator.*** 
 
 Nevertheless, the whole aim of this course of discipline is not 
 to impose something upon the individual, but to free the hidden 
 spiritual capacities which lie dormant, incapable of releasing them- 
 selves, within the shell of his physical nature. The figure of the 
 “craft” must not be pressed: “The master may exercise his power 
 over the disciple . 
 law of another will, and if the word of the master has not in it 
 the germ of a more powerful and purer life, the graft will not 
 take.”?°? It is the natural order of the child’s development which 
 must be stimulated, directed, fortified, and perfected by instruction, 
 and each stage in this development will “indicate to us of itself the 
 subject of instruction which corresponds to it.” “The problem 
 will be solved by Nature itself.”*°* As education proceeds, love 
 
 . . but he cannot force the will to receive the 
 
 * See the analysis of Catholic educa- 
 tional theory in G. A. Coe’s Social Theory 
 of Religious Education, Part V. 
 
 ® Baudin, Louis Bautain, le philosophe 
 de Strasbourg, 23. 
 
 1 Ratisbonne, 
 morale, 5-19, 
 
 Essai sur Veducation 
 
 1 Variétés, 7-9. 
 
 aa (77 
 
 1% Carl, L’Enseignement de la rheto- 
 rique, doit-it précéder ... celui de la 
 logique? 8. 
 
140 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 takes the place of fear; insight, the place of authority. Ultimately, 
 the pupil is left face to face with the facts, in direct commerce with 
 Reality itself, and all mediate stimulating agencies, such as teachers 
 and books, are to be done away with. Modern French education, 
 with its emphasis on book-learning and quantitative memorization 
 of hearsay, with its absurd manuals of predigested knowledge for 
 the passing of the all-controlling Baccalaureate examination,*”* is 
 not education at all, properly speaking: “we read and listen more 
 than we see and feel; there is almost always a book between us and 
 the object, and we do not trouble ourselves sufficiently to verify 
 what we have read, and to check up by our experience what others 
 have sai Fullness of expertence—the whole man fully devel- 
 oped by coming into living commerce with the whole of Reality— 
 that is the goal of education for Bautain. If the life-formula 
 seems to make authority predominate at the start, it makes spon- 
 taneity and freedom predominate at the end. It is indeed Bau- 
 tain’s chief contention that liberty is only to be achieved through 
 submissiveness to authority. 
 
 It would not serve our present purpose to go farther into the 
 manifold applications of the concept of life. They are often 
 bizarre—as when he describes the generation of the circle by the 
 self-polarization of the mathematical point, or when he deduces 
 the five vowels as representing various stages in the process of the 
 “subjectivation of the objective, and the objectivation of the sub- 
 jective”; *°° and a collection of absurdities could easily be gathered 
 from his pages which would dissuade any self-respecting philo- 
 sophical student from devoting any further attention to him. 
 That, in fact, is what most of Bautain’s critics have done. But if 
 one grasps at the start his central concept of “life”—a concept, 
 be it noted, that is based upon a genuine knowledge of physiology 
 and genetic psychology—one is at last almost tempted to see sense 
 in all these absurdities, so persuasive is the eloquence with which 
 our philosopher develops the consequences of his theory. Of the 
 
 d 99105 
 
 1 See Bautain’s admirable book, L’Edu- 
 cation publique en France au XIXme 
 siécle, chap. xxvu1 and passim. 
 
 18 Psych. Exp., I, 223. 
 
 1% Thid., II, 473. “The O is the A 
 fully objectivated, as the divine Wisdom 
 
 is the manifestation of God, as the uni- 
 verse is the manifestation of the divine 
 Wisdom.” It is the upper pole of A as 
 U is its lower pole, and as E and I are its 
 diameters. 
 
BAUTAIN AS PANVITALIST 141 
 
 magical power of that eloquence, even the hostile Mennaisian bears 
 witness, in a graphic picture, drawn from the life, of our phil- 
 osopher spinning the web of his system, and catching his auditors 
 in its tenuous folds: 
 
 He loves to lead you adrift into a labyrinth of digressions, which 
 come one after another and lead you far off from the subject. ‘Thereby, 
 he strikes, he astonishes, he dizzies the imagination. . . . He works upon 
 it first by brilliant descriptions; it reacts toward him by the pleasure it 
 takes in listening to him; he continues to talk to it, he tempts it, he 
 seduces it, it begins to be moved; . . . the line of demarkation between 
 the real world and the imaginary world is gradually effaced; nuances 
 melt into one another; you seem to see, thrcugh a transparent language, 
 all the objects that are named to you; you do not perceive that each 
 object changes its form several times while you are still considering it 
 under an identical name; the magician’s wand draws you contours of an 
 admirable purity; his index finger stretches out and pursues an existence 
 escaping from a center; his eyes, attentively fixed on his finger, flash out 
 after it; your eyes follow the movement of his eyes and the direction 
 of his finger, and you believe that you are witnessing, with him, a 
 generative radiation, a creation; . . . and when, from that ecstatic state, 
 he lets you come back to yourself, you find nothing left... but a 
 dizziness of the head, an oscillatory rocking of the brain, and certain 
 discolored images, without consistency, impalpable, vaporous, and already 
 torn with a hundred rents, which vanish when you stretch out your hand 
 to clutch them.?% 
 
 Having now in hand the clue to this philosophical labyrinth, the 
 reader may be expected to find his way henceforth without difficulty. 
 
 1” Ens. Phil. B, 545-547. 
 
CHA PALE REEL 
 BAUTAIN AS A VOLUNTARIST 
 
 N spire oF Bautain’s bristling hostility to Aristotle and the 
 Scholastics, there is much in his philosophy that ought to appeal 
 strongly to the most ardent neo-Scholastic. His conception of 
 life as a passage out of potentiality into actuality at the solicitation 
 of an external stimulus is at the bottom a thoroughly Aristotelian 
 conception; and our contemporary Catholic neo-Vitalists, if they 
 returned to the study of Bautain, would undoubtedly find in him 
 a congenial spirit, capable of enlightening them on more than one 
 dificult problem. In a sense, Bautain’s is the most Catholic of 
 all philosophies; for its very corner-stone is the proposition that 
 the attitude of the Catholic when he humbles himself before 
 ecclesiastical authority is the attitude required of man by his place 
 in the universe, and the proper attitude to take in all life’s relations. 
 When we come to Bautain’s theory of knowledge, however, we 
 see the justification for the suspicion with which he has been 
 regarded by Catholics. Let us admit the worst at once: he is one 
 of the original progenitors, in France, of that voluntaristic, anti- 
 intellectualistic philosophy of religion which formed so character- 
 istic a feature of the Modernist movement of 1893-1908. Having 
 admitted the worst at the start, we are entitled to plead for a stay 
 of sentence on the part of the Catholic reader, until certain evidence 
 in mitigation of the offence has been reviewed. Meanwhile, the 
 student of the history of philosophy will be interested to find in 
 Bautain’s epistemology many anticipations of recent philosophical 
 tendencies such as pragmatism and Bergsonian intuitionism; and 
 the student of Protestant theology will be interested to note the 
 parallels between the new apologetic inaugurated by Bautain and 
 that inaugurated by Schleiermacher. 
 
 I 
 BAUTAIN’s CRITIQUE OF THE REaAson: His ANTI- 
 INTELLECTUALISM 
 It has been customary to see in Bautain simply a radical anti- 
 intellectualist, a fanatical “‘fideist,” demanding the sacrifice of the 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 143 
 
 reason upon the altar of religion, calling for blind and implicit 
 faith in an essentially irrational revelation. If this be “‘fideism,” 
 it is most unfair to make Bautain the father of it. He does indeed 
 speak of the “impotence of the reason to found a metaphysic”’’ and 
 of the necessity of “believing without seeing”’*—expressions which 
 give color to the foregoing interpretation, and which, as he often 
 frankly admitted in later hfe, were unduly disparaging to the 
 reason; but his real intent was to correct and complete the Kantian 
 critique of the reason by making a psychological study of the place 
 of reason among the human faculties, and by pointing the way 
 to a theory of religious knowledge based not on rational “‘postulates” 
 but on moral and religious experience. “Thus,” as he himself 
 says, ““we do not exclude the reason either from science or from 
 religion, but we limit its use, and that by virtue of an exact and 
 thorough critique of its nature and its capacities.” 
 
 Bautain’s new Kritik der reinen Vernunft never was completed; 
 but we may easily reproduce the main outlines of the projected 
 magnum opus by piecing together the many epistemological writings 
 which Bautain produced in his Strasbourg period. It has two parts: 
 a logical critique of the reason, in which he follows Kant; and a 
 psychological critique, in which he endeavors to supplement Kant. 
 
 We may dismiss Bautain’s logical critique of the reason with 
 a few words. ‘“‘He may be reproached,” as Ferraz justly remarks, 
 “with having reproduced in too vague and summary a fashion the 
 arguments which the German philosopher develops so firmly and 
 precisely.”* His main contentions may be reduced to two: first, 
 that the reason cannot prove its own axioms, principles, and laws; 
 second, that these same rational laws, categories, etc., which the 
 reason has to accept on trust if it is to function at all, are inap- 
 plicable in the sphere of metaphysics and theology—so much so 
 that the reason falls into hopeless antinomies when it endeavors 
 either to prove or to disprove any metaphysical or theological 
 proposition. In support of the first contention, he points to the 
 Kantian forms of the understanding, “inherent in the reason, 
 
 1Title of his article in Rev. Eur., IV, 8 Thid., 9, recto. 
 
 58 et seq. * Op. cit., 344. 
 * FB,H9, verso. 
 
144 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 essential to it,”’ and therefore not to be judged by it—unless reason 
 could somehow get outside and above itself. In support of the 
 second, he points to the famous Antinomies as conclusive proof 
 of the metaphysical impotence of the reason; to prove its theological 
 impotence, he supplements the Antinomies with a set of theological 
 puzzles of his own. | 
 
 The Law of Substance, which affirms that there is no quality without a 
 substance, is applicable only where substance manifests itself and dis- 
 tinguishes itself by qualities, by accidents. Applied to the divine 
 world, to God, it no longer has any sense, because God is He who Is, 
 and in Him there is only being and substance, and nothing accidental, 
 contingent, or phenomenal. ... It is the same with the following 
 axioms: Nothing comes from nothing; the whole is greater than the 
 part; the whole is equal to the sum of its parts.® 
 
 All such rational axioms lead to pantheism when applied to God; 
 and a rationalistic theology like Scholasticism therefore ‘“compro- 
 mises the high verities it intends to defend.’”’ 
 
 But if Bautain follows Kant too tamely and too summarily in 
 his logical critique, it is otherwise with his psychological critique. 
 Here, after all, is where his main emphasis is laid; for it is on the 
 psychological side, as he believes, that the Kantian critique needs 
 correction and supplementation. He characterizes Kant, as “a 
 powerful thinker, but a weak psychologist.”* No good psycholo- 
 gist, he urges, would ever make so sharp a distinction between the 
 theoretical and practical reason; ‘‘the human reason has never 
 actually found itself in the situation supposed by Kant.’ But 
 Kant’s worst mistake was to make reason man’s highest faculty, and 
 man’s sole cognitive faculty, whereas psychology shows that “‘man 
 is sensitive, volitional, intelligent, before he is, or can be, reasonable 
 or reasoning.”*® “The Critique of the Reason,” he concludes, “‘has 
 determined the power of the reason, but not its nature and its rank 
 in the spiritual organization of man; and that is the point at which 
 he should have started.”** Our study of Bautain’s critique of the 
 
 * Letter to Riambourg, FB,K, Cahier ° Lettre a Mgr. Lepappe, 20; cf. Mor. 
 
 Gass Ev. D., 248. 
 ° Psych. Exp., II, 363.  Variétés, 11-12. 
 * Ibid. 1 Ibid. 
 
 8 FB,V3, 18. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 145 
 
 reason will mainly consist, therefore, of a review of his genetic 
 psychology of the knowing process. Here, as we shall find, is the 
 key to his low estimate of the cognitive validity of reason, as com- 
 pared with that of intuition (“intelligence”), faith, and revelation. 
 
 1. Genetic psychology of the knowing process: priority of will 
 over intellect. 
 
 Bautain’s psychology of cognition falls into two parts. In the 
 first, he traces the evolution of the mind from the undifferentiated 
 soul, and the evolution of the various cognitive faculties and senses 
 from the undifferentiated mind. In the second, he traces the de- 
 velopment of the capacity of cognition in the child. 
 
 Now that we are familiar with the process by which the organism 
 evolves out of the vital principle, we should be prepared to under- 
 stand the process by which the cognitive faculties evolve out of the 
 soul. ‘The two processes are strictly parallel; the former is the 
 outward manifestation of the latter. 
 
 First of all, then, the genesis of the mind itself is to be sought 
 in something deeper than the mind, and prior to it in order of 
 development: the will, or the soul. As the heart “posits” the 
 brain, sending it forth like a follicle issuing from a seed, so the 
 soul puts forth the mind. The mind is, as it were, the soul’s 
 specialized function of cognition; but the soul itself was cognitive 
 before it put forth the mind; and, even after the genesis of mind, 
 the soul’s knowledge includes more than that which is conveyed to 
 it by the mind. Experience, in other words, is prior to the specific 
 function of cognition, and represents something more inclusive 
 than cognition. The foetus does not know, yet it experiences: “it 
 feels, but it is not conscious of the sensation it experiences; it does 
 not know that it feels, or what it feels.”’* Even in the adult, 
 there is a penumbra of vague experience or soul-knowledge forever 
 surrounding and far outrunning the narrow field of clear cognition. 
 
 It is well to dwell for a moment upon Bautain’s concept of 
 experience. For Locke, experience is a purely passive and intel- 
 lectual process; for Fichte, a purely active and ethical process. 
 For Bautain, experience is partly passive and partly active; for him, 
 
 ” Propositions, 28. 
 
146 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 as for Fichte, it is primarily vital and practical, and only second- 
 arily cognitive; its content consists not merely of “ideas” and 
 
 “sensations,” but also and in the first instance, of actions and 
 reactions.*® 
 ‘““Experience,” says Bautain, “is the indispensable condition of 
 
 knowledge”’;** but experience, as he describes it, begins with a 
 wholly unconscious outward motion of the spirit toward the stimu- 
 lating object. “In reacting toward the external object which im- 
 presses it, the spirit tends to issue from itself to posit itself in the 
 object, while at the same time it receives and absorbs what the 
 object posits in it.””° Only on the rebound, on the vient which 
 follows the va, does spirit catch itself in the act of communicating 
 with the object, and so become cognizant. Reflection upon ex- 
 perience, in other words, is the beginning of knowledge. 
 
 Just as the soul “‘posits’**® the mind, as an organ of cognition, 
 while yet remaining susceptible to many impressions over and above 
 those which it receives through the mind, so the mind (or “reason’” 
 or “understanding”; Bautain uses the terms interchangeably at 
 times) posits the various senses. 
 
 All sensation presupposes in the sentient subject the foyer, the sense, 
 and the organ. The foyer is the capacity in which the impressions come 
 to unite themselves, the central point where the vibrations of life resound 
 or come to their final harbor; it is what is called the sensorium commune. 
 The senses are the radii of the foyer, the conductors of the vital action; 
 the organs of external perception, all located on the surface of the body, 
 are the poles of the foyer, the extreme ends of the radii, the inter- 
 mediaries between the subjective spiritual world and the objective mate- 
 rial world, the gateways of communication between the me and the 
 physical world.*? 
 
 3 He differs from Fichte in conceiving 
 the process realistically, not idealistically. 
 The object is there before the subject, 
 and makes the first move in the process 
 of wva-et-vient which constitutes experi- 
 ence. 
 
 Psych. Exp., 1, 221. 
 
 * Ibid., 224. 
 
 * The word poser (or se poser) seems 
 to be used as a technical philosophical 
 term in Bautain’s writings, so I trans- 
 late it pretty uniformly by the philo- 
 sophical term posit; but its meaning is 
 
 vague and shifting, being much affected 
 by Bautain’s fondness for biological 
 metaphors. Here, the soul “posits”? its 
 mind as a plant “puts forth” its leaves. 
 When it is said (p. 94) that spirit issues 
 from itself to “posit itself (se poser) 
 in the object, a sexual metaphor seems 
 to be implied. More generally, the verb 
 means “to objectivate, to call into exist- 
 ence,” or simply “to lay down a proposi- 
 tion.” 
 
 ™ Psych. Exp., 1, 262-263. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 147 
 
 The senses must not be confused with the sense-organs: 
 
 Sense in itself is purely spiritual; it is a ray [rayow—ray or radius] 
 and as it were a prolation of the mind: the organ is material; it is a 
 part of the body. . . . There must be a midpoint, where organic life 
 and mind meet and interpenetrate; but it is impossible for us to apprehend 
 it by observation.*$ 
 
 The distinctness of sense from organ and the priority of the 
 former, follow from the fact that while the organ is dependent 
 upon the sense, the sensation is sometimes possible without the organ. 
 
 A dead or artificial eye, or a camera obscura, also reproduces an image, 
 but they do not see. . . . Behind the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain, 
 there is a living and active principle which has the faculty of vision, as 
 it has that of willing and feeling. 
 
 And so [he adds elsewhere] we see that the function of each sense, 
 although attached more particularly to an organ, is nevertheless not ab- 
 solutely dependent on it; for if that organ happens to be lacking, the 
 sense breaks out (se fait jour) at another point, trying to create a new 
 organ, and the mind reaches almost the same knowledge by way of an- 
 other avenue—less trustworthy and convenient to be sure, because it is 
 
 not in conformity with the natural plan of the organism.’® 
 \ 
 
 To sum up, then: the sense-organs are the material instruments 
 of the senses, which in turn are “radiations from a single center, 
 the sensorium commune, which 1s itself but a pole or secondary 
 center of the one general faculty of sensation (sensibilité).”*° By 
 the faculty of sensation, Bautain means that part of the mind 
 which is directed toward the material universe. When directed 
 intuitively toward ideas, the mind is called the intelligence, while 
 between the senses and the intelligence lies another mental faculty, 
 the reason, whose function is to work up discursively and combine 
 logically the data furnished it by them. All these mental faculties, 
 finally, are secondary functionaries of the soul, whose chief func- 
 tionary is the wi//. Certainly the “functional” point of view in 
 psychology was never pushed farther than this! 
 
 Turning now from this somewhat speculative account of the 
 “descent of spirit into matter,” we return to the world of experi- 
 
 8 Thid., 263. ° Thid. 
 * Ibid., 293 and 371. 
 
 11 
 
148 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 ence, and ask ourselves how knowledge originates and develops in 
 the individual. Here we shall be following an inverse order of 
 evolution; for the senses, which are the outer shell of the soul, are 
 the first of the soul’s capacities to pass into activity. ““Che develop- 
 ment of physical man .. . takes place in descending order,” says 
 Bautain, “‘since he goes from unity to multiplicity; that of spiritual 
 man takes place in ascending order, since he goes from multiplicity 
 to unity.”** Having watched the soul split up into faculties in 
 descending into matter, we are now to watch it unify itself as it 
 ascends out of matter. 
 
 The child’s first mental act, and the first step in each subsequent 
 act of cognition is an act of “conception,” strictly analogous to 
 physical conception. Without conception, no knowledge. Sensa- 
 tions and perceptions furnish the materials for knowledge; but, 
 until conception gathers them up into a unified representation, “into 
 a single vue @ensemble, into a sign,”** cognition cannot be said to 
 have begun. And when conception has taken place, the most sig- 
 nificant stage in conception has been passed. Conception, says 
 Bautain, is the punctum saliens of thought, the seed from which 
 all else springs. The best that reasoning can do is to develop the 
 implications which were implicit in this seed from the first, or, 
 from time to time, gather up these developments into the seed once 
 more, “again like Nature, which gathers up into the seed all the 
 results of the development of the plant.”** “The fundamental 
 condition of right knowledge,” says Bautain, “is therefore right 
 conception . . . and that is just what education, instruction, and 
 toil can never give, any more than cultivation changes the nature 
 of the seed.”** Like physical conception, intellectual conception 
 involves four. terms: 
 
 (1). A passive form or capacity fit to receive fecundation, and 
 to contain and nourish the product. 
 
 (2). Germs ready for fecundation, contained in this mother- 
 form. 
 
 (3). A fecundating agent. 
 
 (4). A reaction to the initial stimulus of the fecundating agent. 
 
 (1). A passive form—the Understanding. 
 
 * Poych. Ret, 1) 3460 0 led, oe 8 Thid. *4 Thid. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 149 
 
 By the “Understanding” Bautain means something far more | 
 
 specific than Locke’s “human understanding,” and something 
 different from the Kantian Verstand, which is identical with the 
 judgment. He means that power, inherent in the mind, which 
 Kant “has perfectly distinguished”: the Vorstellungsvermégen, or 
 capacity of “bringing back to the unity of its form all the intui- 
 tions of experience, so as to reduce them to a representative con- 
 ception, to render them comprehensible.”’? It may be called a 
 “mental matrix,” a “camera obscura,” a “living mirror of the soul.” 
 
 It is a luminous sphere in the center of which the soul, the psychic 
 eye, has its seat, which, by its glance and visual radius, itself traces the 
 boundaries of its world. The understanding is to the soul what the cir- 
 cumference is to the geometrical point: it sets a limit to its development; 
 it circumscribes its radiation.** The form of the understanding is there- 
 foresthat. ofa world... 
 
 It is a mirror with two faces; one convex, turned toward the exterior 
 world, receives sense impressions and reproduces the images of objects, 
 and in this case one may say that it spiritualizes matter, idealizes the 
 concrete, by the conceptions that it forms; the other concave, turned 
 inward toward the psychic and intelligent nature, receives impressions of 
 the things which correspond to it, and, making us conceive them as images, 
 sensualizes the spiritual and, up to a certain point, materializes the ideal.?" 
 
 (2). Germs of Knowledge, ready for fecundation. 
 
 Here Bautain touches upon the vexed question of “‘innate ideas.” 
 “There is no more an innate idea in the human understanding,” 
 he says, “than there is an innate human being in the womb of 
 woman; but in both cases there are germs awaiting fecundation in 
 order to take on life and to develop.”** ‘Thus Bautain’s theory 
 differs both from the tabula rasa theory of Locke and from the 
 theory of a “deposit of ideas, all formed, or, as it is commonly 
 expressed, engraved within our soul.”*’ It admits, for example, 
 that we all possess the germs of the knowledge of good and evil, 
 but insists that, “if a word of authority does not lay down the law 
 before us and in us, . . . the germ will remain sterile, the idea 
 
 will not form.’’®® 
 
 * Tbid., 6. 7! Psych. Exp., I, 4, 5, 9. 
 * Bautain remarks elsewhere that the wiipaaee | f. 
 
 mental powers of different men are to ” Ibid. 
 
 each other as the radii of their spheres paints 
 
 of understanding. 
 
150 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Each conception thus contains an a priori element and an a 
 posteriori element, and opens the way to two separate orders of 
 knowledge. 
 
 On the one hand, conception implies the presence in the under- 
 standing, in embryo, “before all experience,”** of “the general and 
 particular forms which are the bases of our conceptions, or other- 
 wise the germs of all knowledge.”** These include “rational 
 axioms, mathematical definitions, and those transcendental affirma- 
 tions which are marked at the very start with the character of the 
 yh aL US\ anisesa ity jewel 
 science, best illustrated by mathematics, which is completely @ priort, 
 being founded on reflection upon the “pure and general forms of 
 the development of life and the laws which preside over it, in so 
 far as these laws are inherent in our soul, in our faculties, in our 
 understanding, and consequently in all the germs which develop in 
 it.’** This type of science expresses itself “by synthetic @ priori 
 judgments, by apodictic propositions, posited on the occasion of 
 facts, but not founded on facts and not drawing their vitality 
 therefrom.””*® 
 
 universal, the infinite, the absolute. 
 
 ‘To deny such propositions or even to discuss them 
 is “to call the human reason into question; it is to take away from 
 it all means of operating and of proving anything.”*® 
 
 On the other hand, conception involves an objective stimulus, 
 and so gives rise to a posteriori or experimental sciences. It is 
 noteworthy, however, that each a posteriori science has an a@ priori 
 element in it, a “pure” or “‘transcendental” side as well as a “his- 
 torical” or “empirical” side. This @ priori element is “‘above 
 “ and “furnishes principles for reasoning,”** to dispute 
 which would be to destroy the possibility of making progress in 
 the science. “Hence the necessary @ friort judgments of the 
 theologian, the philosopher, the artist, the physicist; hence the 
 dogmas, the original definitions, the axioms, the aphorisms, the 
 higher rules of art”*°—all of which like the theorems of mathe- 
 matics are absolutely necessary, while the empirical part of science, 
 on the contrary, is always subject to revision and criticism. 
 
 discussion,’”® 
 
 
 
 * Psych. Exp., I, 13. 89 Thid. 
 Ths 11: 87 Thid., 16. 
 © Theda Lele 8 Thid. 
 *4 Thid., 14. © Ibid 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 151 
 
 (3). A fecundating agent. 
 
 In accordance with his high estimate of the dignity of the sense 
 of sight, Bautain gives to that agent which fecundates the under- 
 standing the name of light. All knowledge, all truth, even though 
 it comes through nature or through men, even though it enters 
 through the sense of hearing or the sense of taste, flows ultimately 
 from the Eternal Light whose beams are incessantly beating upon 
 us in the endeavor to communicate the Truth to us; and it does 
 not rise to the status of knowledge until it is not merely felt or 
 sensed but seen. “The prophet or genius occasionally gets an “illumi- 
 nation”: “Eternal Light, enlightening his intelligence, there pro- 
 duces those sublime conceptions which are half of heaven and 
 half of earth, and which he is obliged to express in the manner of 
 40 Most of us, however, 
 can trace the immediate paternity of our mental concepts to some 
 
 men in order to be understood of men. 
 
 natural object or some human teacher, who in this case acts as a 
 transmitting agent for the divine Light, “a delegate of Him from 
 whom all paternity in heaven and earth is derived,”** a considera- 
 tion which gives a certain sacredness to the teacher’s task. The 
 case of natural objects is not so clear as that of human teachers; it 
 is hard to see how natural objects can be conceived to impart their 
 truth actively, deliberately, insistently, to the dormant mind, as a 
 teacher does. But it must be remembered, in the first place, that 
 Bautain has a vitalistic view of Nature, and, in the second place, 
 that, like Berkeley, he sees God everywhere behind Nature, insist- 
 ently signalling to man. 
 
 (4). Reaction of the soul to the initial external stimulus. 
 
 The environment takes the initiative, to be sure, in the formation 
 of knowledge as in all the relations of life; it is the father of 
 our knowledge; but our mind is the mother thereof. Did not the 
 mind react, conception could not occur. As in the physical order, 
 mental conception often occurs when least expected; response does 
 not always ensue upon the first stimulus. 
 
 You are listening to an eloquent man, a minister of the sacred word, 
 a philosopher, a politician, an orator, a lawyer, a schoolmaster if you 
 
 @ Ibid, 0-21. Si1bid £21. 
 
152 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 will—the degree or the form matters little, so long as the word is warm, 
 vital, full of light and intelligence or full of feeling and soul—and 
 suddenly you feel yourself dominated, penetrated, moved; something 
 has entered you which has illuminated your mind or touched your heart. 
 You react instinctively, without reflection, almost unconsciously to that 
 word which draws and charms you; the ray of the Truth pierces you in 
 the midst of the floods, of light wherewith she inundates you. The germ 
 of a new idea is fecundated in your understanding; you have conceived.** 
 
 This first mental reaction of the vital principle in the child to 
 the stimulus of the environment is akin to what later becomes the 
 act of attention; but Bautain is unwilling to call it attention at this 
 stage. It is only a step removed from those blind and instinctive 
 preferential reactions which occur everywhere in the organic and 
 inorganic realms, wherever a “particular life” responds to the 
 “oeneral life’: the reaction of an animal to its prey, the reaction 
 of a seed to the sunlight, the reaction of an acid to a base—for 
 Bautain sees a certain discernment, and one might almost say a 
 choice, in chemical reactions. Attention, properly speaking, does 
 not appear until, with the development of self-consciousness in the 
 child, the stage of moral liberty and personality succeeds to that 
 of physical liberty and individuality—which, says Bautain, is “com- 
 mon to persons and things.’’** 
 
 Bautain’s account of the development of self-consciousness is 
 interesting. At first, he says, the child is “as if identified or fused 
 with his environment.”** He has not yet acquired even individual- 
 ity. ‘The consciousness of individuality, or “personal unity,” grows 
 with the consciousness of need; “‘it becomes more trenchant and 
 precise as needs multiply.”*° At this stage the child speaks of 
 himself in the third person, and “he knows himself .. . only 
 from without, by his exterior form, about as one sees oneself in 
 a mirror.”*” Animals are capable of reaching this stage. Person- 
 ality comes only with the beginning of the comprehension of 
 language. ‘““The self of the child is awakened by the opposition of 
 another self which makes itself felt in him by speech or by action.”’*” 
 Speech makes thought possible: ‘Our thoughts, our reflections, and 
 
 “ Psych. Exp., I, 24-25. * Thid., 97. 
 
 Merde ssa  Thid. 
 “ Thid., 95, “ Thid., 98. 
 
 a 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 153 
 
 all the operations they involve, are produced by the aid of the signs 
 of language. ‘That is why the child talks before thinking; for 
 it is only by hearing speech that he acquires by the hearing the 
 necessary signs for the formation and expression of his thought.”’** 
 Full-fledged self-consciousness involves a further step, reflection 
 upon one’s own thoughts, and this develops through internal con- 
 versation. 
 
 To understand oneself well, one must begin by talking to oneself. 
 Thought, however abstract it may be, is never anything but an interior 
 speech. Now, it is when the child becomes capable of thus talking to 
 himself inside, and objectifying by reflection what he feels, conceives, 
 and wills, that he acquires the consciousness of the self and of his 
 personality.*® 
 
 In the course of this evolution of self-consciousness, true 
 attention begins to manifest itself, particularly in the glance of the 
 child’s eyes. Attention, says Bautain, is “an act rather than a 
 faculty”’°—an act of the soul, which darts forth through the 
 senses like 
 
 the spider in the midst of the web she has posited by her activity, and 
 with which she has cleverly enveloped herself, extending her feet on the 
 principal radii of the circle whose center she is; so that, the least move- 
 ment of the extremities being communicated to the center, she reacts with 
 suddenness and darts to the point which has been moved.°? 
 
 She never darts to more than one point at a time; Condillac is 
 wrong in supposing that the judgment of relation is a simultaneous 
 act; it 1s successive, for the soul is caught invincibly in the web 
 of time; but the mind reduces to unity the duality of the impres- 
 sions gathered successively by the attention. 
 
 Attention is very closely allied to the will; it is “the first exer- 
 cise of moral liberty or voluntary reaction toward a certain 
 object.”°* Its vigor depends partly on the vigor of the external 
 stimulus and its suitability to the state of the organism, and partly 
 on the vigor of the will. “Obstacles, when they are not over- 
 
 whelming, excite to a high degree the reaction of the will”’’ and 
 * Thid., 99. se org oi 153 
 ® Tbhid., 100. © Tbid., 114. 
 
  Thid., 117. 8 Thid., 119. 
 
154 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 so aid attention. You may always win attention, if you speak to 
 the soul of “‘what she loves, what she desires, what she fears, what 
 she hopes.””* 
 
 Attention has three forms: external observation, reflection or 
 internal observation, and contemplation, which “‘is in the intellectual 
 order what prayer is in the moral order, an elevation of the soul 
 to God.”®? ‘The moral act must always underlie the intellectual 
 act; it is the pure in heart who see God. “Attention, in its three 
 modes, is thus in relation with the concrete or with individualities 
 through the senses, with the abstract or with generality [the world 
 of thought] by reflection, with the infinite or with universality 
 through contemplation.”°® 
 
 We have now reached the point in mental development where 
 we can begin to talk about thoughé. Sense-impressions are the raw 
 material for thought; conception puts this raw material in shape 
 to handle; attention is nascent thought; but thought does not begin 
 until self-consciousness is complete—a proposition whose converse 
 is also true. “It seems as though an act of thought were necessary 
 to constitute the self, and nevertheless, without the self already 
 posited, the act of thought appears impossible.”°’ Reason is help- 
 less to decide this question; “we must appeal to experience which 
 cuts through the difficulty with the sword of fact, while reason is 
 vainly laboring to untie it.”°* Experience shows that the first act 
 of thought is the act by which self-consciousness constitutes itself: 
 “an act of sovereignty whereby the self recognizes itself and 
 establishes itself as the center of all its operations, the substance 
 of all its modifications, the chief of all that emanates from it and 
 from the environment.” 
 
 The aim of thought is explanation. Man is the only creature 
 who demands explanations, for he alone seeks to bring all other 
 creatures under his rule by means of his intelligence. “To explain 
 nature is to form a system of concepts parallel to the system of 
 things, which man “can compose and decompose in his mind as 
 6° thus facilitating the 
 handling and mastering of nature. As to the accuracy of such 
 
 nature makes and unmakes the existences, 
 
 * Psych, Exp., I, 120. % Thid. 
 ® rhid., 129. ® Thid. 
  Thid., 130. © Ibid., 139. 
 
 * rhid.. 138. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 155 
 
 7 . . . 61 
 systems of concepts, ‘“‘experience decides more than discussion.” 
 
 “All the functions of thought reduce themselves to a single act, 
 to judge.”°’ Judgment is akin to choice; the mind, like the will, 
 acts chiefly by choosing.®* Man is “obliged to act in the midst of 
 opposing or diverse terms which dispute with each other for his 
 consent and seek his preference.”°* ‘The conscious and reflective 
 element in judgment is not the essential thing. The real reason 
 we are able to judge and discern between good and bad, beautiful 
 and ugly, etc., is that we have a sort of taste or feeling for these 
 distinctions—an évidence intuitive :°° 
 
 
 
 This feeling, this original taste, contains virtually in itself all the judg- 
 ments that we shall pass upon things; . . . consequently, all the work 
 of the mind and of speech is to explain to ourselves and to others what 
 we have felt. The mind’s reflection transforms feeling into judgment; 
 it decomposes the brute fact into its various elements, . .. then it 
 translates the result into propositions which enounce successively and in 
 order what was simultaneous and confused.®® 
 
 When the power to judge manifests itself, reason may be said 
 to have dawned. Judgment is, according to Bautain’s analysis, 
 “the simplest act of the reason.” It begins to be exercised even 
 before the child learns the use of articulate language. But reason- 
 ing, which Bautain calls “the most complex act of the reason,” is 
 impossible without a highly developed language. Induction and 
 deduction are both essentially linguistic processes; “‘it is always a 
 case of reducing several signs to a single one, which then becomes 
 a general term, or resolving a single sign into several, which are 
 to it what individuals are to the species and the genus.”* ‘To 
 explain the formation of language is therefore,” he concludes, “to 
 explain the primitive development of the reason.”®* 
 
 We shall not go into Bautain’s philosophy of language,® al- 
 
 © Ibid. * Psych. Exp., I, 141. 
 © Thid., 140. ® Thid., 163. 
 If asked how a priori judgments, © Thid., 165-166. 
 which he has declared (p. 99) to be bs at 397: 
 “absolutely necessary,” can be matters of 8 Thid., 201. 
 choice, Bautain would probably answer ® For Bautain’s philosophy of lan- 
 
 that choice is not always arbitrary. In guage, see Psych. Exp., II, 106-143. 
 the case of a priori judgments, the com- Cf. Adolph Carl’s two theses, on “The 
 pass of the human will is fixed and Origin and Nature of Human Speech,” 
 invariable; in the case of empirical judg- and “Articulate Language,” Strasbourg, 
 ments, it is apt to fluctuate. Silbermann, 1827. 
 
156 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 though he accords to it a place of great importance in his psychology 
 of cognition. On the whole, the less attention paid to it, the 
 better for our philosopher’s reputation. He has an almost Sweden- 
 borgian reverence for the divine mysteries of etymology; and he 
 is even disposed to take Plato’s “Cratylus” seriously! We may 
 sum the matter up by saying that all articulate languages are in- 
 perfect expressions of a spontaneous language common to all men, 
 and best seen in the untaught ejaculations of the child. If 
 language accomplished its ideal purpose, it would constitute a series 
 of words entirely parallel to the series of real things and events, 
 which reason could then handle as if it were dealing with the facts 
 themselves; but, unfortunately, as language becomes articulate, it 
 ceases gradually to represent the object, as it did in its spontaneous 
 stage, and comes more and more to represent the reflective reactions 
 of the subject—and reflection distorts everything. Rational dis- 
 putation is therefore apt to lead us farther and farther from the 
 truth, because of the inaccuracy of the linguistic tools with which 
 it operates. The appeal to experience from the court of reason 
 is always justifiable. 
 
 Reason’s great failing is abstraction. “It operates on the things 
 of the spirit as anatomy does on the body: it dissects, divides, de- 
 composes, and consequently it presupposes death—or it kills.” 
 Nature is alive; her primary process is typified by the development 
 of the plant from the seed; it is a progression from unity to 
 multiplicity, in which the original unity is never lost. If there- 
 fore, thought is to seize the true order of things, it ought to follow 
 the order of nature, and seize first the spirit, the life, the germina- 
 tive principle which constitutes the unity of the phenomenon under 
 investigation. It should look at things, as Bautain says, “from 
 above downward”’; or as Bergson would say, from within. Reason 
 is capable, under higher guidance, of following this logic of nature, 
 which Bautain (most misleadingly) calls analysis, or deduction; 
 but, left to itself, reason always prefers the method of synthests, of 
 induction, of aggregation and segregation. It prefers to treat things 
 not as organic wholes, but as isolated and infinitely divisible frag- 
 ments, which can be combined mechanically into a logical structure, 
 as a house is built of bricks. It looks at things “from below 
 
 ® Psych. Exp., II, 333. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST evs 
 
 upward, contrary to the natural order, and retracing, so to speak, 
 the steps by which nature posits and develops the ‘facts.”’* Reason, 
 left to itself, is therefore perpetually tending to reduce organisms 
 to mechanisms, and the whole body of natural science, which is the 
 typical product of the unaided human reason, presents a thoroughly 
 artificial view of the world, compounded, as Bautain puts it, not 
 of true ideas, but of mere notions. 
 
 If, therefore, man is able to know things as organic, living, and 
 intelligent; if he has intimations of a spiritual world behind the 
 natural; if, in spite of what his reason tells him, he refuses to see 
 in the universe a great mechanism, it implies that he possesses a 
 faculty higher than reason, responsive to deeper realities than reason 
 is cognizant of. To this faculty Bautain gives the name of 
 intelligence. If reasoning be “‘the most complex act of the mind,” 
 the exercise of the intelligence is “the purest act of the mind.” 
 
 In the earlier stages of the child’s development, intelligence is 
 not distinguishable as a distinct faculty.’” It manifests itself only 
 in certain types of attention, judgment, and reasoning. ‘The child 
 is a little animal, to whom the material world seems far more real 
 than the spiritual world. He knows about the spiritual world only 
 what his elders tell him, in the course of his moral and religious 
 instruction. Intelligence appears in him as faith—a confused 
 premonition of the truth of what his elders tell him. Faith is 
 hardly to be called knowledge; yet if the child is not taught the 
 moral law and the first principles of religion, or if he deliberately 
 rejects such teaching, his intelligence will never develop. 
 
 It is at the critical period of adolescence that the intelligence 
 develops as a separate faculty. “The adolescent is at the portal of 
 a new and larger world: “there is a new life in his inner nature, 
 a life of the heart, a life of affection which declares itself by the 
 need of loving, and a life of the intelligence which manifests 
 itself in the need of admiring.” This “need of admiring,” or 
 love of beauty, may attach itself exclusively to some human object 
 of affection, or it may lead on to a lifelong quest for “the supreme 
 and imperishable Beauty.” Still higher than the love of beauty, 
 
 " Thid., 341. cally considered,” see Psych. Exp., II, 
 ™For the following account of the §§ 158-161. 
 “development of the intelligence geneti- 
 
158 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 because still more detached from the phenomenal world, is the love 
 of truth. ‘This, too, is a characteristic adolescent phenomenon. 
 The child asks “‘why,” but is satisfied with more or less superficial 
 explanations; in the adolescent, the love of truth becomes a con- 
 suming thirst for ultimate explanation. “In all things it is pushed 
 to the infinite, and is not satisfied unless it perceives in each ques- 
 tion, in each science, the relation of the infinite to the finite and 
 the living bond that unites them.” With most men this is a passing 
 phase; but there are those who make the pursuit of Absolute Truth 
 their lifelong mission. ‘These are the “men of the infinite,” the 
 men of intelligence, the heaven-sent geniuses and prophets who 
 make up by the keenness of their intelligence for the sodden un- 
 receptiveness of the rest of us. 
 
 With the development of the intelligence, we would seem to 
 be at the end of our genetic psychology of cognition; for the 
 intelligence is the highest of the cognitive faculties. 
 
 But [says Bautain] man is not made merely to know and to admire; 
 he is above all created to love; and thus the development of his in- 
 telligence should lead to the development of his soul; truth should lead to 
 goodness, knowledge to love. He should become more enlightened only 
 to become better. It is in the sovereign Good and by love that his 
 intellectual perfection is consummated; for in the real universe the True 
 is the expression of the good, and the Beautiful, the splendor of the 
 ‘True."8 
 
 ‘There is a higher knowledge, then, than even the knowledge of 
 the intelligence: the knowledge of the heart. “That which is deep- 
 est in us responds to that which is deepest in reality; and that 
 which is deepest in us is not the mind, but the will, the heart, the 
 soul. If, then, the metaphysician is to be perfectly prepared for 
 his task, he must not only, as Plato advises, learn to love Beauty 
 through the love of beautiful objects, and rise from love of Beauty 
 to love of Truth; he must also learn, through the love of family, 
 of country, of humanity, of enemies, of all creatures great and 
 small, to love “the supreme Good who gives Himself to all and 
 excepts none.”"* If we would know, we must first love; for 
 
 “love alone unites intimately to the object,””* while cold intellectual 
 
 73 Psych. Exp., II, 407-408. 74 Thid., 409. hid, 408. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST TS? 
 
 curiosity contents itself with externals, and ill-will or impurity 
 absolutely distorts the vision. ‘The dialectic of the intelligence thus. 
 leads into the dialectic of the will; the conditions of knowledge 
 are ultimately moral. Faith, the beginning of virtue, and Love, 
 the perfection of virtue, are at the same time the beginning and 
 end of all wisdom and all knowledge. 
 
 We see, then, that one source of Bautain’s anti-intellectualism 
 is his psychological voluntarism: the doctrine of the primacy of 
 the will, and the instrumental character of the intellect. But the 
 will is not the only thing that Bautain ranks above reason; “‘intel- 
 ligence,” faith, and tradition also stand above it in his estimation. 
 We must therefore class him not only as a voluntarist, but also as 
 an intuitionist, a fideist, and a traditionalist. Our understanding 
 of his “Critique of the Reason” will not be complete until we 
 have explained each of these terms with some care. 
 
 2. Reason and intelligence: Bautain as an intuitionist. 
 
 First of all, then, the contrast between reason and intelligence 
 with which we are already familiar, implies an intuitionism similar 
 to Bergson’s. This will become abundantly clear if we pause to 
 examine Bautain’s doctrine a bit more carefully. 
 
 Intelligence, reason, and imagination are, according to Bautain, 
 the three “powers” of the mind. ‘They spring from the same 
 mind, and yet are distinct,’* for they differ according to the natures 
 from which they have issued, and the objects toward which they 
 direct their attention. Imagination is purely physical, and conveys 
 knowledge of the physical world alone; reason is an esprit mixte, 
 on the border-line between the physical and the spiritual, capable of 
 inferring the existence of the spiritual world but not capable of 
 describing it; intelligence is purely spiritual, communicating 1m- 
 mediately with the intelligible world and the divine Wisdom. The 
 imagination gives us images; the reason gives us motions; the in- 
 telligence gives us zdeas. “The reason plus the imagination—which 
 Bautain often loosely comprehends within the term “reason”— 
 can at best give us empirical knowledge, connaissance, the Platonic 
 do&a. Science, émiotyjun, the knowledge of the metaphysical world, 
 is attainable only through a higher faculty. 
 
  Thid., § 154. 
 
160 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 It is by the psychic eye that you enter into relation with the intelligible 
 light, with the spiritual world, with the Truth; and since» . . Truth 
 is the daughter of Heaven, you must lift the soul’s glance toward the 
 celestial region to find and contemplate her. In vain would you seek 
 for her through the reason, since reason is the soul directing its glance 
 toward the things of earth. . . . It sees only the shadows below, the 
 figures, or the reflections of what exists on high in idea, in truth, in 
 substance, You must not try to seek . . . the day-star on earth, or try 
 to see the earth in the sun; you must see them each in its place and in 
 their mutual relations.7” 
 
 How can one distinguish intelligence from reason, psychologi- 
 cally? By the fact that intelligence grasps truth immediately, all 
 at once, while “the action of the reason, on the contrary .. . is 
 always complex, successive, fractional; . . . its highest operation, 
 reasoning, is the sign of its imperfection, since it proceeds slowly 
 from the known to the unknown, borrowing the aid of middle 
 terms to unite extremes whose relation is not immediately seized.” 
 Boethius expressed it perfectly: “Reason is to the intelligence as 
 time is to eternity.”’” Intelligence is more similar to the senses, 
 psychologically speaking, than to the reason; it is an imterior vision. 
 
 In neither [interior nor exterior vision] is there any active reflection, 
 any admixture of thought. When I look at an object, I observe, I 
 consider, but I do not think at all; and as soon as I think, I no longer 
 see the outward object, but its image in my understanding. It is the 
 same in the contemplation of the Truth, or of an Idea; I see, I look, 
 I admire, I am penetrated by the light of the thing and feel it deliciously, 
 but I do not think; and if reflection intervenes, contemplation ceases and 
 enjoyment with it.8° 
 
 In certain cases reason acts like intelligence, as when the relation 
 between several terms is seized at a glance; but in those cases the 
 reason is evidently penetrated by the intelligence. The more 
 slowly the mind passes from one object to another by means of a 
 relation, the more rational and the less intelligent it is. Bautain 
 thus ascribes to reason a sort of twilight region of mediate knowl- 
 edge lying between two sunlit regions of immediate knowledge, 
 the region of imagination and the region of intelligence. The 
 
 ™ Pale Chrs I, 182) ™ De consolatione, lib. 5, ex prosé 4. 
 8 Psych. Exp., Il, 364. © Psych. Exp., II, 372. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 161 
 
 region of imagination is the realm of existences, of images, of 
 fleeting phenomena; the region of intelligence is the realm of the 
 divine, the realm of pure and changeless Being, where the Platonic 
 ideas descend in stately hierarchy from the idea of Being, triply 
 refracted into the ideas of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. 
 
 The historical antecedents and affinities of this distinction be- 
 tween intelligence and reason should suggest themselves at once. 
 Bautain is quite conscious of the derivation of his doctrine. He 
 refers to the similes of the twice-divided line and the cave, in 
 Plato’s Republic; to the dialectic of beauty, in the Symposium; to 
 Plotinus’s distinction®* between the eye of the body and the interior 
 eye; to St. Augustine’s distinction between intellegere and ratio- 
 cinari, reflected in the distinction between intellectus and ratio, 
 made by St. Anselm, Gerson, St. Bernard, St. Thomas, and others.*” 
 He is particularly fond, as we have seen, of Boethius’ aphorism 
 that reason is to intelligence as time is to eternity. When time 
 shall pass away, reason must vanish with the world of phenomena, 
 but intelligence shall endure forever. 
 
 In the Romantic period, this contrast of intelligence and reason 
 was everywhere afloat, in one form or another. It was one ex- 
 pression of the underlying mysticism of the times. “The matter 
 was complicated, however, by the fact that terminology was in- 
 consistent. Many who believed as firmly as Bautain in the 
 existence of a “transcendental” intuitive faculty were accustomed 
 to call it “reason” (raison, Vernunft); while they gave the name 
 of “understanding” (entendement, Verstand) to Bautain’s “rea- 
 son.” This was the form in which the doctrine was set forth by 
 the French Eclectics; and this was the form in which Coleridge, 
 influenced by Jacobi and other German Romanticists, popularized 
 it in the English-speaking world. ‘There is therefore a closer 
 affinity between Bautain and the New England Transcendentalists 
 than might appear from their terminology. “Io Emerson, as to 
 Bautain, Plato’s twice-divided line is the beginning of all philoso- 
 
 * ‘There is one important difference, however, between Bau- 
 
 phy.* 
 
 % Eun. I. Bk. VI. Summa, Q. 64, Art. 2; Q. 58, Art. 3; 
 Here are some of the exact refer- Gerson, De Mystica Theologia Specula- 
 ences he gives: Plato, Phaedo, § 27;  tiva, Consid. XI, p. 371; XXVI, p. 382. 
 Aristotle, Ethics, VI, 1; St. Augustine, 3 See the essay on Plato in Emerson’s 
 
 De Spiritu et Anima, Bk. I, Ch. 14; De Representative Men. 
 Trinitate, ch. vu, in fine; St. Thomas, 
 
162 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 tain and other Transcendentalists: they looked upon “reason”’ as 
 an innate faculty, whereby the man of genius could pierce at once 
 to the heart of reality without the aid of instruction or tradition; 
 he, too, regarded it as innate, potentially, but he insisted that it 
 would never develop except through docile assimilation of tradition. 
 
 We shall return shortly to the important question of Bautain’s 
 attitude to tradition. But meanwhile, let us note that reason and 
 intelligence are logically as well as psychologically distinguishable. 
 This comes out most clearly in Bautain’s contrast between two 
 types of logic, which he calls “analysis” and “synthesis,” but which 
 might better be called “‘the logic of organism” and “the logic of 
 mechanism,” or “the logic of intelligence” and “the logic of 
 reason.” Here once more we are reminded of Bergson. 
 
 We have already noted, in passing, Bautain’s distinction between 
 “analysis” or the “method of nature,” and “synthesis,” or “arti- 
 ficial” reasoning. Paradoxically enough, he seemed to be identify- 
 ing them with deduction and induction, respectively—and yet, as 
 we know, he heaps bitter scorn on the syllogism. As a matter of 
 fact, the identification of analysis and deduction is only a metaphor. 
 
 Truly logical deduction [says the Mennaisian] be it ever so little 
 artificial, is in his eyes but a synthesis. He will never draw you a 
 conclusion, never will he lay down a chain of reasoning, he is the sworn 
 enemy of reasoning; it is not demonstrations that he makes, but exposi- 
 tions, and so to speak, monstrations. How, to be sure, could he demon- 
 strate anything to you, starting from a principle which he admits to be 
 obscure and mysterious? He can only exhibit (montrer) to you what 
 has issued from the principle, and that at a certain distance from the 
 source.—As one gets farther and farther from the principle, he says, all 
 becomes clear.*# 
 
 This very just observation of the Mennaisian takes us straight 
 to the heart of the matter. The contrast between the two logics 
 has nothing to do with the contrast between deduction and induc- 
 tion. Neither should the words “analysis” and “synthesis” mislead 
 us. ‘They mean the precise opposites of what they naturally suggest 
 to us: “non enim analysis ea est quae naturam secat, ut partes 
 deinde componat.*> The following passage from  Bautain’s 
 manuscript Logigue should remove all possible misunderstandings: 
 
 *4 Ens. Phil. B., 515. * Gratry, de Methodis Scientiarum, 25. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 163 
 
 Condillac has well said that avalysis is the essentially natural method; 
 but Nature’s analysis is not what he describes to us. Nature’s analysis is 
 positive, because she posits externally what the principle contained within 
 it, because she de-duces and renders evident what was mysterious and 
 hidden. Condillac’s analysis is de-positive, decomposing; it destroys in- 
 stead of deducing; it dissects or chops up the unity of the form, to get 
 hold of the laws of life which move and animate it.*® 
 
 In other words, the contrast with which we have to do is simply 
 an application of the familiar Romanticist contrast between organ- 
 ism and mechanism: the true and natural logic (analysis) is the 
 logic of organism, the logic of genesis and evolution; artificial logic 
 (synthesis) is the logic of mechanism, the logic of juxtaposition 
 and construction. “To use the terminology of the Mennaisian, 
 analysis is the method of “emanation and reabsorption, exit and 
 reéntrance, extraction and reinsertion,’ while synthesis is the 
 method of “aggregation and segregation.” ‘The first of these 
 methods,” he observes, “shows us the genealogical relations, the 
 living relations, of things; the second, their collateral relations, 
 depending on their respective position, their inorganic, brute, and, 
 as it were, dead relations.”*’ Or, once more, to use Bergson’s 
 famous analogy, the logic of mechanism gives detached pictures 
 of aspects of reality, side by side on a moving-picture reel, while 
 the logic of organism gives us the living, moving reality which is 
 only approached when all these pictures are thrown in swift suc- 
 cession upon the screen. But let Bautain speak for himself: 
 
 It is this vital and natural, regular and harmonious development out 
 of a single idea that essentially distinguishes sczemce from every system of 
 connaissance. Science, like a veritable organism, is engendered and con- 
 ceived in the foyer of the spirit by intussusception, and develops out of 
 a single form as does the foetus out of a human germ, as does the oak 
 out of the acorn, the tree out of the seed. Covmnaissance is not develop- 
 mental but constructive: it is a product of art, the fruit of the artist’s 
 effort to imitate nature. It is formed by synthesis, sorting-out, aggrega- 
 tion, juxtaposition. It is, in its systematic perfection, a mechanical imi- 
 tation of science, as every work of art is an imitation of the efforts and 
 the products of Nature. But the most perfect mechanism is never more 
 than a simulacrum of organism, as the masterpiece of art is never more 
 than a dead and simulated representation of life. Organism springs from 
 
  FBB5, § 154. Ens. Phil. B., 499-500. 
 
 12 
 
164 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 a living centre; it is a spirit clad in its form, which belongs to it and 
 issues from it (sa forme a lui et de lui), while mechanism, dead in itself, 
 is only fit, by virtue of its construction, to be the object of a vital pate 
 to be regularly moved by it.®® 
 
 What this means in general may be surmised by reflecting a 
 moment upon the common characteristics of all the idealistic systems 
 of the day. “They start with “the Idea’”—something very high, 
 very divine, very vague, very dark, very deep, very mysterious. No 
 attempt is made to prove the truth of the Idea; that would be 
 superfluous. Then the Idea “unfolds,” “develops,” “manifests 
 itself” in nature and history. Somewhere in the history of its 
 development there is room to fit in every fact of science, and every 
 philosophical theory, religion, or political system that has ever 
 existed. And as it develops, behold! it becomes clear! Yea, even 
 plausible! But try to reverse the process, and proceed from the 
 developments back to the principle, and all becomes murky and 
 doubtful once more; for, as Bautain frankly admits, in the method 
 of nature the deductive movement is less difficult than the inductive. 
 
 The first is mysterious at the starting-point, and grows clearer and gains 
 in self-evidence more and more as it descends, for it is progressive—a 
 natural development of the life-principle. The second is evident at 
 the starting-point; it folds itself up and loses its self-evidence as it 
 remounts, for it is regressive—return of the life-principle.®® 
 
 The logic of Romanticism has remained for the most part 
 shrouded in protective obscurity. Essentially dogmatic, mystical, 
 and non-argumentative, it tried to conceal the fact by argumenta- 
 tive subtleties; and how well it succeeded, we may judge from the 
 ponderous tomes produced by its latest expositors. Stirling’s Secret 
 of Hegel is perhaps the classic example. It was the great merit 
 of Bautain to expound with complete frankness and naiveté the 
 principles on which most of his contemporaries were proceeding 
 without daring to admit it. While Hegel devotes many a thorny 
 page to the discussion of the proposition Being is, Bautain calmly 
 sets it up as the keystone of his logic, remarking that, as the only 
 
 absolute and universal proposition, it is ‘‘above all discussion.”®° 
 
 ® Phil. Théol. et Math., FB,V10, § 1, © FB,BS § 160. 
 note 1. ™ Ibid., §§ 77-79. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 165 
 
 Where others deduce the consequences of their lofty first principles 
 step by step, with painful logicality, Bautain simply exhibits them 
 with a wave of the hand. ‘Woe to him who tries to demonstrate! 
 It is the original vice of man. Man wishes to create science 
 instead of seeing it. Let things demonstrate themselves.”** He 
 is not even willing to define his most important terms. 
 
 Man can define in speech [he says] only what is circumscribed, deter- 
 mined by nature, or what he has himself determined according to the 
 form or extent of his mind. . . . Nothing that cannot be perceived by 
 the senses . . . can be embraced by the reason, and hence it cannot be 
 defined in speech. Thus neither the mental that is in the physical, nor 
 the psychic, much less the divine or that which partakes of the infinite, 
 can be determined or defimed. . . . Truly scientific doctrine does not 
 proceed by definitions; it proceeds by the simple setting forth of the 
 name which represents the object of the science. One defines neither 
 the mathematical point, nor arithmetical unity, nor physical force. One 
 tells, to be sure, what these things are ot; one never tells what they are.°” 
 
 The Mennaisian gives an amusing burlesque of Bautain’s tactics 
 in the classroom, which in spite of its obvious exaggeration, brings 
 out the practical consequences of this non-argumentative logic 
 most vividly: . 
 
 “Gentlemen [he makes the Master say], by means . . . of an effort 
 of induction, generalization, and reflection, I have made me a principle. 
 I have another principle which I did not create myself, but which came 
 down to me out of a higher sphere. Gentlemen, admit my principles.” 
 
 “Come [answer the pupils] review before us the series of operations 
 by which you have arrived at your empirical principle; tell us what the 
 certitude of the other rests upon.” 
 
 “That is not the question, Gentlemen. Admit my principles.” 
 
 “But we cannot reasonably admit them without knowing whether they 
 are certain.” 
 
 “Gentlemen, admit my principles, or there shall be no instruction for 
 you; you shall not get my science.” 
 
 “. . At any rate, it is sufficient for us to admit your principles as 
 hypotheses.” 
 
 “Gentlemen, one must 4e/ieve in the principle. What is necessary at 
 this point is an act of frank adherence, an act of faith pure and simple; 
 no reasoning, no discussion, no disputing.” 
 
 ™ Thid.. §§ 101-119. °° Thid.,. §§ 101-110. 
 
166 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 “But you had promised to lead us to faith by means of knowledge. 
 It is no longer the time, you said,°* to impose the truth by authority. 
 That was a bait, then, by which you were trying to allure us?” 
 
 «« . , You have had faith in physical force and the mathematical 
 point; otherwise there would have been for you neither physics nor 
 geometry. Nevertheless the mathematical point is quite absurd, rationally 
 speaking. One must therefore begin by Je/ieving in the principle of the 
 science, however obscure, however mysterious it may be. Gentlemen, it 
 is necessary to believe in my principle. . . . Gentleman, take my balm.”** 
 
 There is just one thing about this burlesque which is really unfair. 
 Bautain was willing to have his principles taken as hypotheses. 
 The faith which he demanded of his auditors at the start was not 
 the faith to which he hoped to lead them. It was no more than 
 the adoption of a provisional assumption—a practise, as he points 
 out, from which it is impossible to escape. 
 
 And if someone should come and say to us that it does not befit the 
 dignity of the philosopher to admit at the start, as a principle, a proposi- 
 tion (parole) which he has not verified, we should reply that you must 
 begin by admitting something, whatever school you belong to, and that 
 no philosophical explanation will ever be possible without some datum, 
 set up at the start, but destined to be justified by the explanation itself.*° 
 
 We have said that the logic of the intelligence might best be 
 termed “the logic of organism.” If we try to grasp the main 
 philosophical appercu which underlies the eccentricities of Bautain’s 
 logic, we shall in fact discover that it is the perception of the 
 inadequacy of modern descriptive science, with its mechanistic and 
 atomistic tendencies, to deal with living organisms. ‘The picture 
 of multitudinous billiard-balls endlessly bumping one another in 
 chains of mechanical cause and effect is quite a falsification of 
 what goes on in every organism. It is not unnatural to conclude 
 that a new type of logic is needed to deal with organisms: a logic 
 wherein the cause grows, expands, evolves, in passing into the effect; 
 a logic wherein each proposition is organically related to all the 
 rest, and helps to prove the very propositions which help to prove 
 it, as each organ in the body helps to sustain the organs which 
 help to sustain it; a logic which, instead of crawling over the 
 
 Ens. Phil. F., 76. Ens. Phil. F, 95. 
 “Ens. Phil. B, 519-525. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 167 
 
 surface of things with compass and dividers, boldly plunges to the 
 heart of things, identifies itself with the life of things, and then 
 looks toward its external starting-point through the very eyes of 
 the phenomenon it is studying; which, finally, instead of trying 
 to build the structure of metaphysics from the ground up, brick by 
 brick, out of inferences from phenomena, boldly soars into the 
 empyrean, and looking down upon phenomena from _heaven’s 
 height, describes what it sees. 
 
 If this seems fantastic—and all revolutionary proposals seem 
 fantastic at first—let us remind ourselves that the philosophy of 
 the last century has actually been based upon the principles here 
 suggested. It has been dominated by the idea of evolution. When 
 we want to explain anything, we tell its history, we treat it geneti- 
 cally; we speak of the “evolution” of planetary systems and social 
 institutions in the same breath, and our systematic philosophers, like 
 Herbert Spencer, will make us a pat formula which applies equally 
 to both. And where is the logical justification for such an evolu- 
 tionary formula? Is it not as Bautain says? ‘You must follow 
 it in its developments, in its consequences, in all its applications to 
 the life of man and of nature; and this will give you the demon- 
 stration or exposition of all that is in it, as the tree is known by 
 its fruits.”°* Judged by this test of applicability to the facts, 
 Bautain’s evolutionary formula—polarization in response to and 
 in constant dependence upon external stimulation—is fully as 
 worthy of respect as any that has been proposed. If it does violence 
 to the facts of physics, Spencer’s formula does violence to all but 
 physical phenomena, and Bergson’s formula, which, like Bautain’s, 
 is drawn from the biological realm, does violence to the facts of 
 biology themselves, in that the rdle of external stimuli is not 
 sufficiently recognized. And might we not insist, with Bautain, 
 that all of the evolutionary formulae of the century, from Fichte’s 
 and Schelling’s to Spencer’s and Bergson’s, have been the product 
 not of logical reasoning, but of intuition, of “intelligence”? 
 
 3. Reason and faith: Bautain as a fideist. 
 Bautain is most often referred to as a “fideist,”’ and his philosophy 
 
 * Thid., 82, note. 
 
168 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 goes by the name of “‘fideism.””’ ‘This is perfectly appropriate, for 
 the priority of faith is perhaps the most characteristic of his 
 teachings. He never tires of repeating that “in everything one 
 ' must begin by believing.” But fideism has become a heresy; and 
 whenever a doctrine is pronounced heretical, there ensues a curious 
 process of unconscious equivocation whereby the original doctrine 
 is made much worse than it really was. Those who feel most 
 sympathy with the doctrine in question proceed at once to distinguish 
 their own position from the heretical position; and, in so doing, 
 they caricature the heresy. This is what has happened in Bautain’s 
 case. His doctrine of the priority of faith is no doubt vulnerable 
 and open to criticism; but it is far more reasonable than it has 
 been painted. By “faith” Bautain never meant fides implicita, 
 “blind faith,” the credo quia absurdum of Tertullian. When con- 
 trasting faith with reason, he always meant one of three things: 
 willingness to make assumptions, receptivity, or dawning perception 
 of truth. 
 
 (1). Faith as willingness to make assumptions. 
 
 We need make little comment on this first meaning of faith; 
 for the Mennasian’s burlesque should have prepared us to understand 
 it. Bautain’s whole logic is one long insistence upon the necessity 
 for making assumptions, and proceeding upon unproven hypotheses. 
 ‘The axioms of rationality are not susceptible of rational proof; the 
 fundamental principles of all the sciences are unproven; the exist- 
 ence of the self must simply be accepted as a datum of experience, 
 and the existence of God, the “absolute major premise” of all 
 reasoning, cannot be proved by reasoning. Intelligence can see 
 the validity of these assumptions, and their validity can then be 
 exhibited in orderly fashion by the reason; but reason, as reason, 
 must simply take them “on faith,” believing the affirmations of the 
 intelligence, which it can neither prove nor disprove. _ 
 
 ” The “fideism” of Bautain and other independently of beliefs.” See his Pub- 
 
 Catholic thinkers should be carefully dis- 
 tinguished from the “fideism” of Eugéne 
 Ménégoz, the friend and colleague of 
 Auguste Sabatier, which consisted in the 
 doctrine that man is saved “by faith, 
 
 lications diverses sur le fidéisme, Paris, 
 Fischbacher. The two fideisms have 
 nothing in common but their anti-intel- 
 lectualism. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 169 
 (2). Faith as receptivity. 
 
 To believe, in the most general sense [says Bautain], is simply to let 
 in the truth, and react freely toward it; to believe is the essentially vital 
 act of the human creature in his present state. . . . He is in relation, 
 direct or indirect, with all the existences; he is susceptible, by virtue of 
 his organization, of being affected by them; and is in fact so affected con- 
 tinually. Their impressions stimulate his life-principle (vie) and stimu- 
 late it to react; he admits them or rejects them. . . 
 
 Having admitted an impression, experienced its impact, and reflected 
 upon it, man has again the choice between harboring it or rejecting 
 it. If he rejects it, it can obviously never develop into a clearly 
 known idea or fact; if on the other hand he accepts it, the first 
 step on the road to knowledge of the experienced object has been 
 taken—and this is belief.*° ‘Belief involves the existence of a 
 not-Self in active relation with the Self, and at the same time, 
 the intus-susception of and reflection upon the received impression, 
 in the Self.”*°° It includes three moments: In the first, “‘the 
 object acting upon me, I feel the effect of its action.” In the 
 second, “I pay attention to what I experience”—or I fail to. In 
 the third, “reflection gives me the consciousness of what I experi- 
 ence, the consciousness of the modification I am _ undergoing; 
 whence results belief in the action of an object, and the knowledge 
 of what that object is in relation to me.”?”* 
 
 You see [he concludes] that knowledge is born of belief, and never 
 
 precedes it: . . . nothing is more absurd, more contrary to the law of 
 your mind, than the pretention to know, to judge, and to reason before 
 believing. . . . It is clear that it is in default of knowledge and self- 
 
 evidence that faith is necessary. But that does not mean that the évidence 
 and the knowledge of metaphysical verities is impossible, and that faith 
 must always substitute for them. It is the way that leads to them, and 
 the way ends at the goal, where faith becomes self-evidence, knowledge, 
 absolute certitude.’°” 
 
 One might say that belief, in this sense, corresponds to the 
 physiological act of .accepting food. If a bit of food is once 
 
 ® Phil. Chr., I, 293-295. Phi Chris 1; 1295: 
 ® Bautain usually restricts the word  Tbid., 296. 
 foi to the religious field, and speaks of 102 Ibid., 296-297. 
 
 croyance elsewhere. 
 
170 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 accepted, and if the stomach does not rebel against it, it eventually 
 gets worked up into bone and muscle; but the act of acceptance, 
 depending on an instinctive perception of the fact that it meets 
 the organism’s need, is the necessary condition of its assimilation. 
 So an act of “adherence,” depending upon an instinctive perception 
 of the truth of a proposition or the presence of a reality, is the 
 necessary condition of the assimilation and eventual comprehension 
 of each bit of knowledge. ‘This is why Descartes’ “systematic 
 doubt” is so foolish: it cuts one off from so many possible sources 
 of knowledge, not only from tradition and instruction and divine 
 revelation but from the whole objective world. ‘The person who 
 insisted on knowing before believing would be like a child who 
 insisted on testing his mother’s milk before tasting it; he never 
 would get to the point of knowing at all. The child’s mind de- 
 velops only because he reacts affirmatively and trustfully to his 
 parents’ solicitations, and the pupil progresses in knowledge only 
 as he has confidence in his teacher. “It is necessary, then, in all 
 things, to begin by believing; and faith is the first condition of 
 all knowledge and all philosophy.”’*°* 
 
 (3). Faith as dawning perception of truth. 
 
 But faith is not merely the first condition of knowledge; it is 
 already knowledge; for were it not for a dim and confused 
 apprehension of the fact that “there is something here which I 
 » there would be no means of deciding 
 whether to accept or reject the supposed truth which is knocking 
 for admission. Bautain often uses faith in this sense, as equivalent 
 to dim perception of truth, a “taste” or “feeling” for the truth. 
 
 We may best bring out this third meaning of faith by comparing 
 faith with intelligence. Both are capable of getting us in cognitive 
 touch with the world of ideas. But the idea, says Bautain, is 
 sometimes “felt rather than seen”: 
 
 ought to receive as true, 
 
 j 
 The superior light, which must produce it, descends into the depths 
 
 of the soul and is absorbed there; and thus cannot be reflected in the 
 intelligence, still insufficiently developed, and therefore incapable of 
 conceiving the idea and embracing knowledge. There results what is 
 called faith, which is the root of the idea, as the idea is the principle 
 
 7 Mor. Ev. P., 57. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 171 
 
 of knowledge, as knowledge is the basis of doctrine. But let one not 
 be deceived: faith, obscure as it is on account of its depth, is intelligent; 
 it is an intelligence penetrated by the action of the truth, but which is 
 not yet conscious of itself and that which penetrates it; it is an unreflected 
 and hence less brilliant light.1°4 
 
 Indeed religious faith, as distinct from mere belief, is more 
 intelligent than the intelligence! It relates one directly to a divine 
 world of which the intelligence has only an inkling, as the reason 
 has only an inkling of the intelligible world. In faith, we have 
 a reaction of the soul to the stimulus of a rayon de Pinfini which 
 springs from the very depths of infinite Being and pierces to the 
 depths of man’s being. ‘The consciousness of the activity of this 
 stimulating ray exists only in the soul; it escapes all the secondary 
 faculties, which can neither understand nor control it. 
 
 As the brook does not flow back toward its source, so the mind cannot 
 turn back toward the psychic center from which it emanates; the move- 
 ment of life carries it ever onward; and, when it reflectively considers 
 its feeling and looks into its own depths, it inevitably produces an image 
 which veils those depths by representing them.*°* 
 
 But deep down below the mind, in the very depths of the soul, 
 faith is apprehensive of truths which it can hardly explain to the 
 mind. Faith alone clearly grasps the Christian idea of God, the 
 idea of a Triune God of Love; the other faculties can seize it 
 only in its refracted form, as the ideas of Sovereign Good, Uni- 
 versal ‘Truth, and Absolute Beauty. Faith thus opens the eye of 
 the soul to a Holy of Holies where Plato himself never penetrated. 
 
 A question of particular interest, in view of the close parallel 
 between Bautain’s theory of knowledge and what later came to be 
 called Voluntarism or Pragmatism, is the question of the relation 
 of faith to will. Here and there, one comes upon sentences in 
 Bautain that seem to foreshadow the idea of the “‘will to believe.” 
 For example, he points out that reason and intelligence, or “earthly 
 > sometimes reach a deadlock which only the 
 will can break. Reason, he says, 
 
 and heavenly reason,’ 
 
 cannot . . . be the judge, for it is implicated on both sides of the case. 
 
 ™4 Psych. Exp., I, 376-377. °° Phil. Mor., 1, 495. See also § 95. 
 
172 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 As a matter of fact, it is never reason which does decide, although it 1s 
 most often employed to proclaim and justify, like a clerk of the court 
 drawing up the arrét after the judge’s sentence. The judge of last 
 resort in man is the will, placed between two opposing worlds, and 
 destined to give itself to the one or the other . . . to perform an act 
 of liberty.?°° 
 
 In every act of intellectual judgment, he says, the decision is 
 
 due toa 
 
 mysterious and innate taste which, from the bottom of our soul, responds 
 spontaneously to all that acts upon it, which says either yes . . . or mo. 
 . . . It is therefore not from the reason, properly speaking, but from 
 the center of the human being, from that which is profoundest, most 
 mysterious in man, that judgments come. ... It is his will which 
 pronounces the yes or the mo; it alone exercises the sacred function of 
 separator, judge, sacrificer.1°* 
 
 The reader will note that, even in this form, Bautain is advocat- 
 ing neither the wager of Pascal, nor Kantian postulation, nor a 
 Pragmatic “‘venture of faith’”—sometimes described as a “leap in 
 the dark.” The will decides, on Bautain’s theory, mot because 
 practical exigencies demand a blind decision, but. because will is 
 more intelligent than either reason or intelligence. But if we 
 examine Bautain’s writings a little more carefully, we shall see 
 that faith and will, though closely connected, are not identical. 
 Faith lies even deeper than the will; it is a reaction of the un- 
 differentiated soul or life-force. 
 
 Thus [he says] although there is no faith without a certain adhesion of 
 
 the will, the will is nevertheless not the mistress of faith; it can neither 
 
 create it for itself nor stimulate the sentiments which accompany it, any 
 
 more than it can root it out or destroy it. It comes sometimes in spite 
 
 of a man, suddenly illuminating him, and all too often the guilty man 
 . would like to rid himself of its importunate light, and cannot.?°8 
 
 The will cannot determine faith; but faith can determine the 
 will; it is the most powerful of all motives. It leads to action 
 far more directly than other forms of knowledge; one will die 
 for one’s faith sooner than for one’s clear convictions. 
 
 1% Psych, Exp., 1, 217. Phil. Mor., 1, 494-495. Cf. Psych. 
 1% Variétés, 41, Exp., II, 376. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 1/3 
 
 We have dwelt upon the cognitive aspect of faith; but faith can 
 no more be classified as an act of cognition than as an act of will 
 or a stirring of the emotions. If it is any of these, it is all three. 
 Bautain speaks of it sometimes as a sentiment, but again he speaks 
 of the “sentiment which issues from it,” and declares that “it is 
 ‘Verein other 
 words, it is a total reaction of the life-principle. If upon the one 
 hand it is the beginning of knowledge, it is upon the other hand 
 the beginning of love and adoration: 
 
 at the same time a sentiment and a motive of action. 
 
 Faith is the beginning of the union of the soul with God, a union 
 whose consummation is love.’?° 
 
 Adoration is the most eminently religious fact; it is the completion 
 of the spiritual life, as faith is its beginning.*** 
 
 With such an exalted conception of faith, Bautain very naturally 
 expressed himself in sweeping terms, and roundly asserted that 
 “faith precedes reason.” We may, in fact, distinguish six senses 
 in which faith is prior to reason, according to Bautain: 
 
 (1). Logically, faith is prior to reason; for reason is obliged 
 to take all its axioms and major premises “on faith.” In every 
 discussion the reason is obliged to start with principles and axioms 
 which it has had to admit without proof.**” Faith is here taken 
 in the first sense, as ‘“‘willingness to make assumptions.” 
 
 (2). Psychologically, faith is prior to reason; for in each 
 cognitive act, the stage of rational elaboration and reflection is 
 preceded and made possible by a stage of vague knowledge or 
 pressentiment (faith in the third sense), which in turn is preceded 
 and conditioned by an act of intellectual hospitality (faith in the 
 second sense) whereby the subject exposes itself to the influence 
 of the object. 
 
 (3). Genetically and historically, faith precedes reason; for 
 the age of faith, both in the child and in the race, precedes the 
 age of reason. 
 
 (4). Metaphysically, faith is superior to reason, inasmuch as 
 faith gets one in touch with ultimate reality, whereas reason is 
 limited to the realm of phenomena. 
 
 7 Cf. Phil. Mor., 1, 494, 496, 516. Mt Thid., 508. 
 -° Phil. Mor., I, 493. 12 Avertissement, Q. 5. 
 
174 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 (5). LEpistemologically, faith is more trustworthy, less liable 
 to error, than reason, and carries with it greater certitude. We 
 shall consider this point shortly, in connection with Bautain’s theory 
 of truth and certitude. 
 
 (6). Apologetically, as a rule, faith precedes reason, in that 
 the unbeliever seldom is led to faith by disputation; on the con- 
 trary, he reaches a rational conviction of the truth of religion only 
 after he has opened his heart to the Word of the Gospel (faith 
 in the second sense) and so has arrived at a dim conviction of its 
 truth, which he can hardly explain to himself (faith in the third 
 sense ). 
 
 In spite of this sweeping assertion of the priority of faith over 
 reason, Bautain is quite willing to grant that, in its place, reason 
 is extremely important, and may even, in certain cases, “precede” 
 faith. When truth has once been apprehended by faith, it needs 
 to “eradiate in the sphere of the reason” in order to be under- 
 stood; and all systematic instruction is rational. 
 
 We have never meant [he says] to exclude reason from the considera- 
 tion of metaphysical and moral truths; we have never wished to banish 
 it either from philosophy or from theology. ‘Those who have cast re- 
 proach against us have gratuitously ascribed to us an absurdity which is 
 not of our making. It is perfectly evident that wherever man makes 
 use of his powers of thought and of speech, the reason is exercised and 
 applied. Now, how study philosophy or theology without thinking or 
 speaking! It is very evident, again, that to receive teaching or be 
 instructed, one must first be capable of understanding language, which 
 is the necessary medium of instruction; and the reasonable being who 
 makes use of his reason is the only one who can learn to understand 
 speech and utter it. So it is beyond doubt that the exercise of the 
 reason precedes all scientific teaching.1!® 
 
 Again, when the Bishop asked him whether reason did not pre- 
 cede faith “in the primary and fundamental questions,” Bautain 
 was willing to admit that faith in the specifically religious sense 
 of the word was possible only for a rational being. 
 
 Yes, reason precedes faith. . . . The use of the reason is anterior to 
 
 "3 Simple exposé, FB,H8 verso. Full prétres de son diocése. A very interest- 
 title: Simple exposé de la question entre ing document. 
 Mer. PEvéque de Strasbourg et plusieurs 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST by5 
 
 faith in the order of time; for faith comes from the hearing . . . of 
 the word, and the comprehension of the word is possible only through 
 the reason.’'* 
 
 Finally, Bautain is willing to admit that reason may precede 
 faith, in that an unbeliever may be led to religious faith by rational 
 arguments. ‘This is not the zormal order; “among true Christians 
 one believes from the first.”**? But when a man has once drifted 
 into skepticism, one may employ reasoning, in the first place, de- 
 structively, to “make him know and recognize his needs, his 
 wretchedness, his ignorance, the contradictions of his nature, the 
 impossibility of solving by reason the problem of his existence’’;*** 
 —in other words, one may attack reason with the weapons of 
 reason—and then, constructively, one may show him what an ex- 
 traordinary rational unity may be introduced into the whole body 
 of human knowledge when the fundamental truths of religion 
 are even provisionally adopted as the first principles of philosophy. 
 Bautain’s whole philosophy is in fact a vast rationalization of 
 Chnisstian theology; as his enemies put it: “that same reason so 
 unjustly despoiled of her rights in the order of natural knowledge, 
 comes and takes back the reins of empire in a higher order of 
 things, and in fact finds herself proclaimed supreme judge in mat- 
 ters of faith.”**7 It should be noted, however, that the sort of 
 logic with which Bautain attempts to convert the unbeliever is 
 always the “logic of the intelligence.” He never descends to the 
 level of the unbeliever; he never attempts to prove his main con- 
 victions. He simply asserts their truth, and then proceeds to show 
 the glorious consequences which ensue when their truth is once 
 assumed. 
 
 Bautain’s maturest convictions on the question of faith and reason 
 may be found in a manuscript essay dated 1846.*'* Here the act 
 of cognition is analyzed into three moments: a “transitive” act 
 of faith, which puts object and subject en rapport; an “identical” 
 act of knowledge, in which the dim apprehension resulting from 
 ° and, finally, 
 
 faith flares out, as it were, into blazing certitude;™ 
 
 ™4 Thid. ™8 De la Certitude, FB,V9, §§ 3-7. 
 M5 Thid., Q. 4. " “The light was shining at first out- 
 N86 Thid. side of us; we have let it in and now 
 
 "7 Rapport a Vévégque, 13. it lights us up within.” 
 
176 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 a “conjunctive” act of “reflection” or reasoning, “whereby the 
 intelligence, by virtue of acquired knowledge, seeks to obtain from 
 it new knowledge.” Reason, then, is a means of passing from 
 truth to truth, from one cognitive act to another; but at the be- 
 ginning of each act of cognition, an act of faith is necessary. Even 
 at this late date, six years after signing the general recantation of 
 1840, and two years after signing another very sweeping set of 
 propositions,'*° Bautain is as firm as ever on this point—at least 
 in his private reflections upon the subject. 
 
 The conditio sine qua non of all knowledge of the truth is therefore 
 expressed in the question, “Can you believe?” Whoever says yes, opens 
 a way for himself to arrive at knowledge; whoever says no, isolates 
 himself irrevocably from the truth. Faith is the bridge which leads 
 from the subjective to the objective. . . . Faith thus has only a moment; 
 but at the outset its necessity is absolute. . . . If man had the initiative 
 of the vital movement in himself, he might be able to begin by knowing; 
 but it is not so in the least. He must therefore believe first; he will 
 know later: and, his acquired knowledge revealing to him better yet 
 what he might know, . . . he will invoke it, seek it, attach himself to 
 it again by belief and faith when he finds it.?7? 
 
 4. Reason and revelation: Bautain as a traditionalist. 
 
 In the history of religious thought, the great enemies of tradi- 
 tionalism have been the mystics. “hey have had a perpetual tend- 
 ency to appeal from the dogmas of the past to the soul’s immediate 
 intuitions; and to dissolve all things historical into a timeless vision 
 of Eternal Truth. What need have they to be ¢#o/d the truth, to 
 be instructed in the traditions of men, to delve into musty books? 
 They see the truth, and that is enough for them. Now, no one 
 can possibly mistake the fact that Bautain is a mystic. As Pro- 
 fessor Baudin remarks, a// the intuitionisms meet in his philosophy; 
 Platonic intuition of the supersensible ideas, Malebranchian intui- 
 tion of the idea of Being, psychological intuition of inward realities, 
 moral and religious intuitions of the “heart”—and their common 
 root is mysticism, the conviction that “everything puts us in im- 
 mediate and personal communication with God, the Being of 
 
 © As a preliminary to getting Papal Mt FB.V9, $3 5-7, 
 
 approval for the Communauté de St.- 
 Louis. See de Régny, 337-338. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 177 
 
 Beings; that all our ideas come from Him, lead us back to Him, 
 and finally leave us seuwls a seul in His presence.”**” How, then, 
 is it possible for Bautain to be a traditionalist? It may sound 
 paradoxical, but I think it can be maintained that his traditionalism 
 is the logical outcome of his mysticism, and grows inevitably out 
 of his peculiar theory of innate ideas. ‘To substantiate this thesis, 
 we shall have to take a glance at his theory of revelation. 
 
 We are dealing, remember, with a contemporary of Hugo and 
 Lamartine, Schelling and the Schlegels, Emerson and Margaret 
 Fuller. It was the hey-day of the Romantic epoch, when every 
 artist was a genius, every philosopher was a seer, every reformer 
 was a prophet, and all were “‘inspired.”” Let us not be surprised, 
 then, to find that Bautain’s theory of revelation is essentially a 
 theory of inspiration, and that he draws no sharp line between the 
 natural inspiration of the poet or genius, and the supernatural 
 inspiration of the prophet or apostle. 
 
 A theory of revelation and inspiration is necessary, from Bau- 
 tain’s point of view, because of the existence of ideas. Ideas are 
 those fundamental principles and concepts which the reason can 
 neither prove nor disprove, but which it must take for granted. 
 They lie at the root of every science; and, as they descend in 
 stately hierarchy from the Idea of Being, they bind all knowledge 
 into a unified system even as God binds their prototypes, the /deals, 
 into a unified system in His mind. Now, obviously, the reason 
 never could have discovered the ideas; and yet they are current 
 in human thought, and words which represent them are current in 
 human language. How did they become current? Who dis- 
 covered them? 
 
 It is by the men of genius [says Bautain] prophets, poets, or apostles, 
 as one will have to call them by reason of their more or less pure partici- 
 pation in the spirit of God, that the life of heaven has been communicated 
 to humanity since the beginning, and that this communication is main- 
 tained and renewed across the centuries.1** 
 
 The facts to which Bautain points to justify his belief in the 
 
 2 Baudin, La philosophie de Louis Strasbourg, Nos. 1 and 2 (1921). 
 Bautain, Rev. des sciences religieuses, Abbrev.: Baudin, II. 
 8 Psych. Exp., U1, 406. 
 
178 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 possibility of extraordinary revelations are those same facts which 
 have in recent years given rise to the hypothesis of the subconscious: 
 automatisms, sudden illuminations, visions, auditions, ecstasies. He 
 assigns these mental states to what he calls “Transcendental 
 Psychology”; since they cannot be experimentally (i. e., introspec- 
 tively) studied. 
 
 The characteristic of these states [he remarks] is precisely that in them 
 man is caught away from the knowledge of himself, that he loses mo- 
 mentarily what is called “presence of mind’ or self-consciousness, and 
 thus all means of internal observation are thereby removed.*** 
 
 Bautain’s theory is that all such phenomena are due to direct 
 communication between the soul or intelligence and supersensible 
 reality, without the use of the sense-organs. “Man,” he says, “‘as 
 he appears to us, has, like all the existences belonging to the sphere 
 we inhabit, a clear side and an obscure side.” What strikes the 
 senses and is worked up by the reason belongs to the “clear” side; 
 “what passes through the sieve of our organs without affecting 
 them, what our senses cannot seize, what our reason cannot com- 
 pare, we call obscure, dark, incomprehensible, metaphysical— 
 expressions which are just about synonymous in present-day speech.” 
 
 To the reason, of course, such supersensible perceptions are a 
 stumbling-block. ‘““The reason of the learned calls these latter 
 empty or mystic dreams, products of a disordered imagination, and 
 rejects them with disdain. The reason of the ignorant and credu- 
 lous cries ‘Prodigy!’ and sees in them an exception, a deviation, or 
 suspension in what it calls the laws of the universe.” Bautain 
 regards them “neither as prodigies nor as vain imaginations, but as 
 realities which have their seat or basis in the original nature of 
 man, and their cause in the relationship in which he stands to all 
 that exists.” 
 
 Since all Nature, all Reality, is organically related, whatever 
 exists and whatever happens in any part of the Universe must cause 
 at least some slight reverberation throughout the whole. “Irritable 
 nerves sense all the mutations of the atmosphere beforehand. All 
 the great upheavals of nature act mysteriously upon man before 
 bursting out before his senses.” Such physical pressensations, as 
 
 poof." ht me ERE 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST L719 
 
 Bautain calls them, are hints of the possibility of spiritual pressenti- 
 ments, which, like them, are felt only by unusually sensitive 
 individuals. “The man of strong reasoning ability usually has an 
 “energetic will in a robust body.” His very force of concentration, 
 while it makes him capable of foresight based on observation and 
 induction, shuts out “the multiplicity of impressions which trouble 
 the reason and render the judgment uncertain or fickle.’ Im- 
 pressions which are insensible to him may be sensible to a man of 
 more nervous temperament: “Le faible pressent davantage, le fort 
 présume et préjuge mieux.” Seers, poets, and prophets are simply 
 unusually sensitive people, and their visions and mystic intuitions 
 come to them at moments of unusual sensitivity. If the ideas they 
 give to the world are divine ideas—as indeed their content often 
 proves them to be—there is at any rate nothing incomprehensible 
 about the method by which they get them.*” 
 
 By what right, argues Bautain, shall a man deny the possibility 
 of sensations, visions, auditions, etc., the like of which he has never 
 experienced? ‘They may “appear marvelous because they are not 
 ordinary or common,” but they may nevertheless be “the natural 
 consequence of the habitual or accidental mode of being of the 
 subject who experiences them,” and no more marvellous than the 
 instinctive perceptions of animals, which no human being can share. 
 A man has a right to say that a given vision or a given supersensible 
 reality is not real for him; he has a right to say it is “opposed to 
 common sense”’ to believe in it; but he has no right to pronounce 
 
 it illusory, @ priori. 
 
 For [says Bautain] he presupposes the belief that all that is possible is 
 known to him and to the generality of men, or that vulgar comprehension 
 is the measure of all that is and can be. And if our fathers had said 
 as much, where would our modern discoveries be, and where were the 
 use of all these researches and labors to exploit nature and discover new 
 truths? 126 
 
 Bautain is fully aware of the dangers that beset his position. 
 
 To admit the possibility of visions, and consequently of apparitions, of 
 extraordinary revelations, is it not [he asks] to open the door again to 
 
 “® For all quotations in last two para- soci (°F fey ATER PA 
 graphs, see Variétés, 21, 22, 26, 35-37. 
 
 18 
 
180 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 all the reveries of mysticism, to put weapons in the hands of fanaticism, 
 to reaccredit all the superstitions of the Middle Age, to return at long 
 strides toward obscurantism, and all that follows from it???" 
 
 He admits the danger—in particular, the danger of mysticism of 
 the Quietistic sort—but feels that there are at least equal dangers 
 on the other side: ‘“‘our enlightened century, as we are pleased to 
 call it, has also its superstitions; . . . reason itself is perhaps but 
 a great superstition which it will some day be necessary to purify 
 and rectify in its turn.”*** Moreover, if by “mysticism” is meant 
 the belief in realities which transcend observation and reason, then 
 science itself is full of mysticism, when it talks of forces, sub- 
 stances, qualities, space, Nature, the mathematical point, and the 
 like. To the empirical psychologist, it is “mysticism” to admit 
 the existence of a self or soul, and yet a psychology without a 
 soul is surely “quelque chose de trés mystique.’ The only philoso- 
 phy which can escape the charge of mysticism is a thoroughgoing 
 sensualism. In the eyes of Hume, both rationalists and idealists 
 are mystics. In the eyes of rationalism, Platonism is mysticism— 
 and so on. In other words, one escapes the charge of mysticism 
 only by denying the existence of any reality behind phenomena.’™ 
 
 All this simply goes to prove the possibility of revelation. ‘The 
 fact is proved, on the one hand, by the existence of the ideas, which 
 must have come from somewhere, and on the other hand, by the 
 universality of revealed religions and by the testimony of the noble 
 army of poets, prophets, geniuses, seers, and mystics, to whose awe- 
 inspiring words the heart of man instinctively reacts with an 
 acquiescent impulse. If ordinary men condemn the intuitions of 
 the mystics on the basis of their experience, “is there not the 
 experience of all these others to fight against theirs?”**° 
 
 According to their degree of susceptibility to influences from 
 the divine and intelligible worlds, men are divided into two great 
 classes, les hommes de Pinfini and les hommes du fini. The second 
 class, which is by far the larger, includes “those who have never 
 felt the sentiment de Pinfini, who have never conceived the idea 
 of it, and whose will has not been penetrated to its depths by the 
 action of God.” 
 
 17 Variétés, 32-33. ™ Mor. Ev. D., 156-166. 
 18 Ibid. 18° Thid. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 181 
 
 They have heard God spoken of, . . . but the word has struck the 
 ear, and the virtue of the name has not touched the heart... . Hence 
 they do not comprehend what they have not experienced, and all that 
 can be said to them in this connection is for them an unknown language 
 to which nothing real corresponds. . . . They are the hommes positifs 
 of the world, men of sense, of reasoning, of self-interest, of calculation. 
 ... They esteem learning for its applications to every-day life; the 
 physical and mechanical sciences are its apogee. . . . They judge the 
 arts by the same measure; the ideal is an abstraction or a revery of 
 cracked brains, it is the folly of artists. In a word, the taste for the 
 finite and the gravitation of this earth animate these men.**" 
 
 The other class, a small and select group, includes those whose 
 “first free reaction” has been a reaction of faith and love toward 
 the influences that stream down to them from the divine and 
 intelligible worlds. 
 
 Nothing terrestrial can satisfy them; they tend instinctively toward 
 the infinite, seeking it by every path, and having no taste for what does 
 not offer them its image; they feel, love, think differently from the 
 others, who do not understand them and make fun of them. There is 
 something vague, lofty, profound about them which gives them an air 
 of mystery: they seem to be under the influence of a superior force. 
 When they love, it is for eternity; for their desire does not stop with 
 the limited object which meets their glance, but attaches itself to the 
 ideal of which the reality is but a shadow. ‘Their thoughts have not 
 the savor of the things of earth; but are dominated by the transcendent 
 ideas whence they are derived; and their goal is beyond this world.1°? 
 
 Great, then, is the historic réle of genius! 
 
 These elite souls, when they obediently follow the celestial instincts 
 which urge them, are called to do great things among men; for they are 
 like reservoirs in which the divine influence is stored, into which the 
 life of heaven flows, thence to pour itself out by divers channels upon 
 humanity which it fecundates, upon the earth which it renews. ‘They 
 are . . . mirrors reflecting the eternal Light, which reflect upon the 
 world the warmth and brightness of heaven, augmenting the glory of 
 the Sun of our Spirits, and the happiness of those It bathes with Its 
 rays."°* ; 
 
 It is the Idea which makes the world march, and when it is weighted 
 
 31 Phil. Mor., 1, 525-526. 3 Psych. Exp. I, 393. 
 ent (a1 RELA 
 
182 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 down under the form, oppressed by the letter, everything remains sta~ 
 tionary, motionless, dead, in human affairs. But if there comes a new 
 outpouring of the idea, the reanimated Spirit gets the upper hand; it 
 breaks its shackles and bestirs itself to reach the new goal that it glimpses. 
 That is why the vulgar always find something unaccustomed and strange 
 in the genius. At first they make fun of him, then they wonder at him, 
 when he sets to work, and at last they fear him, because he necessarily 
 shakes so many established things, because he disturbs men’s interests and 
 passions. . . . Humanity advances to its goal only by virtue of suffering 
 and by a path of blood; genius and charity incessantly furnish victims 
 for the great expiatory sacrifice which is to reconcile earth with heaven.1** 
 
 But even the aristocracy of genius is not a homogeneous group. 
 All are inspired in a sense, but there is a difference between the 
 poet and the prophet, between the secular genius and the bearer of 
 the divine Word. 
 
 There are two principal avenues, says Bautain, by which human- 
 ity has come into possession of ideas. ‘The first avenue is the 
 “coup ad oeil or insight of genius.” “A single insight of this kind,” 
 he observes, “gives great light to humanity, because it gives us an 
 idea, and there is nothing more alive or more fruitful than the 
 idea, for science as well as for conduct.” The other avenue is 
 divine revelation in the strict sense. 
 
 From the beginning and throughout the course of the ages, God has 
 manifested himself to men. He has enlightened some of them with a 
 supernatural light; he has revealed to them the universal truths without 
 which society, science, and human life are impossible; and their task was 
 to announce them to their fellows. ‘These chosen men have thus been 
 prophets or apostles; and, like the men of genius who have been able to 
 seize certain of these truths by intellectual intuition, they have said 
 simply, positively, dogmatically, what they have seen or heard... . 
 These are the two principal means by which, in all times, men have been 
 able to arrive at the idea; and it is a great boon, when these two means 
 codperate for the same end, the greatest possible manifestation of the 
 truth, like two mirrors which augment the brilliancy of the light by 
 reciprocal reflection.?*° 
 
 Psychologically, it is a bit difficult to define the exact difference 
 between these two types of inspiration. Both are characterized by 
 the involuntary, automatic, unexpected, unreflective nature of the 
 
 ™ Psych. Exp., I, 406-407. bids 3, 1102-105: 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 183 
 
 experience. As Bautain describes the three stages in the inspiration 
 of the genius—zi/lumination, when the “superior light” floods in 
 upon the soul; conception, when the light is welcomed in, and the 
 idea is conceived; inspiration proper, which “presses him to realize 
 what he has conceived,” and keeps him in agony till the idea is 
 brought to birth—one can hardly imagine in what different terms 
 he would describe prophetic inspiration.*°° Nor is it easy to see 
 any absolute psychological distinction between the secular inspiration 
 of the genius and the types of divine revelation which Bautain 
 enumerates: “‘illuminations on the mysteries, flashes of light in the 
 midst of contemplation, the manifestation of divine ideas, the sense 
 of truth opening itself in the apostles, in the doctors of the Church, 
 insights, ecstasies, ravishments of holy souls,” and, finally, revela- 
 tions “through deep feeling and in the will,” which manifest 
 themselves in “those supernatural moments which take the soul out 
 of itself, render it capable of sacrificial love, inflame its zeal, re- 
 double its courage.”**’ If there is anything in this list which 
 clearly transcends the capacity of the secular genius, it is, apparently, 
 this last type of inspiration; and that, perhaps, makes possible a. 
 certain psychological distinction: genius and prophet have exactly 
 similar intuitions of the intelligence; but the prophet has, in addi- 
 tion, what might be called intuitions of the soul, which, though 
 they are less clear and luminous than the intuitions of the intelli- 
 gence, are much more profound. ‘The genius sees clearly; but 
 sight only reaches surfaces. “The prophet and mystic feel or taste 
 obscurely; but they are in touch with ultimate reality. In their 
 experience, that which is deepest in man, the will, meets that 
 which is deepest in reality, God’s Will, in an ineffable union of 
 love. 
 
 It would appear, then, that revelation, as Bautain conceives it, 
 is nothing external to the usual processes of cognition, but simply 
 a widening of them, in the cases of persons of exceptional sensi- 
 tivity and responsiveness. Its source is external, of course, in the 
 divine will to communicate the truth to man, and in the divine 
 light or Word which makes superior knowledge possible. As the 
 presence of the eye and the physical object are not enough to pro- 
 duce knowledge without physical light as a medium, so the presence 
 
 8° Thid.. II, 404-407. *7 Cerc. Cath., 45. 
 
184 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 of the intelligence and the intelligible object are not enough with- 
 out “the intelligible Light” as a medium.*** But, says Bautain, 
 “External revelation, the Word, is a necessary but incomplete 
 means of communicating to us the knowledge of God. Some- 
 thing more is necessary; we must feel the inward action of the 
 divinity. “Then there is no more doubt, but inmost conviction and 
 profound certitude.” 
 
 The distinction between the Light and the Word is worth dwell- 
 ing on, for it reveals the link between Revelation and Tradition 
 in Bautain’s thinking. As Revelation takes place in the mind of 
 the genius or prophet, it is Light. ‘The genius who sees has the 
 unshakable certitude of what he sees.’’*° But if that Light is to 
 pass over into the minds of other men, it must pass through the 
 medium of language: “if the eye is the organ of the immediate 
 perception of light, the ear receives it mediately.”*** The Light 
 then cloaks itself in the Word: 
 
 He announces it; he says to men, “‘Here is the truth”; and when he 
 _demonstrates it, it is by the knowledge he deduces from the idea, or by 
 the masterpiece which gives the idea its form. But, before this demon- 
 stration, he can announce it only by the word, and his word carries in it 
 its light and its virtue. Some receive it and see by it, because they be- 
 heve the genius; others understand only after the proof by works; others, 
 finally, never comprehend,’*? 
 
 The truth then, is self-evident when first revealed to the genius, 
 and again self-evident when it is accepted and tested by the common 
 man. As it comes to the common man in the shape of tradition, 
 it commends itself by its external authority; but, except for the 
 spiritually crippled, the truth will eventually come to shine by its 
 own unreflected light. 
 
 The final limit of all discussion is évidence.‘** Evidence is the judge 
 of every controversy. There are men who do not have it and cannot have 
 
 it, who are deprived of the organ of évidence; it is their misfortune.1*4 
 
 Up to this point, Bautain’s theory of revelation has been a clear 
 
 nee Phil. Chr., Letter 16. M2 Psych. Exp., I, 311. 
 ae Ens. Phil. B., 598. “8 T know of no translation of évidence 
 Psych, Exp., I, 311. less clumsy than “self-evidentness.” 
 
 “! Phil. Chr., loc. cit. “ Ens. Phil. B., 599. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 185 
 
 and consistent mysticism or illuminism, not so very different from 
 that of Emerson and other Transcendentalist and Romanticist 
 writers. Verbal tradition enters into the scheme only to convey 
 the mystic light from the inspired genius to’ posterity; the Light 
 precedes the Word. But when Bautain comes to trace the history 
 of Revelation, and the stages in its development, we suddenly feel 
 ourselves in a totally different atmosphere, and the Bonaldian in- 
 fluence is clear. 
 
 The principle of recapitulation, in which Bautain believes pro- 
 foundly, demands that the evolution of revealed ‘Truth in the race 
 shall be precisely parallel to the evolution of revealed Truth in 
 the individual. Now, no man is born a full-fledged prophet or 
 genius. He begins by assimilating truth that is handed down to 
 him by tradition, by the Word. It is only later on, as he ponders 
 upon the Word, that the Light begins to dawn. “The man who 
 grows up apart from tradition and society never develops intelli- 
 gence. Accordingly, it seems impossible to Bautain that the first 
 men can have been such an enlightened race of geniuses as de 
 Maistre, for example, describes. “They must have been children, 
 needing to be taught by the Word, as children are taught. This 
 is the reasoning which lies back of Bautain’s acceptance of the 
 Bonaldian theory of a verbal primitive revelation: 
 
 It must have been so, for the divine Word is the first condition of the 
 intellectual and moral development of mankind. . . . Hence the first 
 man had to have a teacher; he had to be spoken to, that he might speak; 
 it is God, says the Scripture, who first spoke to Adam.**° 
 
 This seems in part to reverse the relations of tradition and mystic 
 illumination. ‘The original body of revelation was not luminous 
 at all; it was given to man as hearsay knowledge. ‘The patriarchs, 
 too, were instructed by the Word, and were far from understand- 
 ing what they obediently passed on. ‘Then came the stage of the 
 written Jaw. It was only with the prophets that the Light began 
 to dawn which at last broke forth triumphantly in Christ, to be 
 forever perpetuated through the illumining gifts of the Holy 
 Spirit, working in the Church. ‘Thus, after all, tradition precedes. 
 inspiration, as faith precedes knowledge.**® 
 
 8 Cerc. Cath., 46-47. Mee bid. SIX, 
 
186 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 The Bonaldian theory of language certainly introduced much 
 confusion into Bautain’s philosophy, and one wishes he had never 
 accepted it, for he never properly harmonized it with the rest of 
 his thinking. It was one of the merits of Gratry to ignore the 
 Bonaldian element in his master’s philosophy; whereby he achieved 
 a far more consistent system than Bautain ever did. It should be 
 noted, however, that, even in his worst moments, Bautain never 
 makes Revelation a purely mechanical and verbal process. “The 
 faith which accepts the Word is never a blind faith; for Bautain, 
 unlike de Bonald, believes every normal individual has an innate 
 capacity to recognize the Truth, or at least to “‘taste” it, when it 
 is presented to him. All but the spiritually deficient or morally 
 perverse are capable of testing the truth of religious tradition for 
 themselves. To that extent, Bautain’s traditionalism is more 
 democratic than de Bonald’s, while, on the other hand, it is much 
 more aristocratic than Lamennais’s; for Bautain, unlike Lamennais, 
 is not willing to grant to all men an equal spiritual capacity, or 
 trust to a majority vote in matters of theology. Catholicism, he 
 Insists, can never accept “common consent” as the criterion of 
 Its truth: 
 
 To the eye of true faith, of that living faith to which divine Light 
 alone can give birth in the soul, the testimony of men, however numerous 
 they may be, is not worth one single divine testimony, as all human 
 reasonings are nothing before a manifestation of the Spirit of God.147 
 
 The real inner consistency between Bautain’s traditionalism and 
 his intuitionism has never been properly grasped. One of the most 
 intelligent of his critics, Ferraz, complains that Bautain’s tradition- 
 alism simply destroys his intuitionism. 
 
 One would suppose, to listen to Bautain, that God cannot act directly 
 (seul) and inwardly upon us, and that, in order to speak effectively to 
 our inner ear, He needs to have some one speak to us at the same time 
 from the outside. It is the ancient doctrine of the Logos and the Majitre 
 intérieur ruined by the recent theory of language; it is Platonism and 
 Augustinianism alloyed with Bonaldism.?48 
 
 ™ Letter on Common Sense, Rev. Eur., 8 Ferraz, op. cit., 338. 
 VI, 656. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 187 
 
 Now, Ferraz has detected the historical antecedents of Bautain’s 
 theory with admirable perspicacity; but he has utterly failed to 
 understand the theory itself. Bautain’s whole theory of revelation 
 is based upon the possibility of direct and immediate communication 
 between what is inmost in man and what is inmost in Reality. He 
 objects strenuously to any form of traditionalism which, like 
 Lamennais’s “‘incessantly interposing a human authority between 
 man and the facts, shuts him off from access to them.’”’* He 
 addresses his teaching precisely to those who “wish évidence and not 
 authority, who wish to see the truth for themselves and not receive 
 it on the testimony of another.”*°° He emphasizes the importance 
 of language and tradition for just two reasons: first, because the 
 individual’s powers of cognition develop only in society, by contact 
 with the social concepts embodied in language; and secondly, be- 
 cause men’s cognitive powers are not equally developed, so that 
 the average man must bow to the superior insight of genius. Both 
 of these reasons carry us back once more to Bautain’s general 
 formula for the life-process; for they remind us once more that 
 each individual creature develops his capacities only when he exposes 
 himself to the stimulating influence of other creatures in a more 
 advanced stage of development. Man is an étre enseigné; if he 
 refuses to avail himself of the experience of his predecessors, he 
 will never be wise; if he is unwilling to see through the eyes of 
 those who see more clearly than himself, he will never learn to 
 see for himself at all; if he will know God directly, he must 
 first know Him indirectly. 
 
 All this, as we said at the start, is of a piece with Bautain’s 
 theory of innate ideas. If Bautain had maintained the tabula rasa 
 theory of the infant mind, he might have been led (like de Bonald) 
 to a purely externalistic and mechanical theory of revelation. If, 
 on the other hand, he had maintained that the child possesses certain 
 ideas, full-fledged, prior to all experience, he could not have been 
 a traditionalist at all. But since he maintained a more reasonable 
 theory than either of these—the theory, namely, that the child is 
 born with certain innate capacities, which develop only through 
 social intercourse—he was led to assign to tradition a most impor- 
 tant role, which nevertheless is transitory: the role of the peda- 
 
 “Ens. Phil. F., \wii et seg. © Tbid., \xii. 
 
188 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 gogue, who stands between the child and the facts not to conceal 
 but to reveal, and who steps aside when mediation is no longer 
 
 necessary. 
 
 What then is the final upshot of Bautain’s critique of the reason? 
 To answer that question, we shall need to distinguish between 
 several different senses in which Bautain uses the word “reason.” 
 He is, in fact, not altogether clear or consistent in his terminology 
 at this point; and this was undoubtedly one reason why his con- 
 troversy with the Bishop got nowhere. 
 
 (1). Reason as equivalent to reasoning. 
 
 This definition was forced upon Bautain by the Bishop’s first 
 question: “Do you think that reasoning alone is not sufficient to 
 prove with certitude the existence of the Creator, and the infinity 
 of his perfections:” Understanding this in the light of his 
 psychology, Bautain of course returned an emphatic negative. 
 How, for a fact, can the reasoning process “alone” establish any- 
 thing at all, if it is true, as Bautain insists, that the reasoning 
 process rests back upon the judging process and the conceiving 
 process, which in turn rest back upon the data furnished by the 
 senses? Contact with reality must precede the reasoning process, 
 if knowledge is to be gained through it. Logic alone, working 
 in vacuo, has nothing cognitive about it. ‘‘Reason alone, by reason- 
 ing alone’”—that is, induction and deduction divorced from per- 
 ception and judgment—how could reason, so defined, be conceived 
 to establish the existence of anything? Logic is not an existential 
 science; the syllogism is not an instrument of discovery. It is 
 like the carpenter’s square, an “instrument for verifying the cor- 
 rectness of a construction already made.” 
 
 The use of the square presupposes plan, law, and materials; the use of 
 the syllogism presupposes the axiom, and fully formed images, concepts, 
 and notions. ‘The square gives neither plan nor materials; the syllogism 
 gives neither idea nor concept of any reality, nor the objectivity of what 
 exists in nature outside of the mind. Both simply show the just or false 
 relations between two positions or propositions set over against each other, 
 or following one from the other.*51 
 
 1 Variétés, 16. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 189 
 
 (2). Reason as equivalent to discursive thought, or reasoning 
 applied to the data of the five senses. 
 
 This is the definition which the Mennaisian critic accepts as a 
 basis of discussion. 
 
 By reason, M. Bautain understands that active faculty by which we 
 combine ideas, think, judge, reason, make abstractions, and generalize. 
 We adopt that word, in a much broader sense, for the faculty of knowing, 
 the intelligence under all its forms, whether M. Bautain calls it mind, 
 understanding, reason, or intelligence.” 
 
 Most of Bautain’s opponents probably supposed him to be attack- 
 ing reason in this broader sense when he was really attacking only 
 discursive reason. His distinction between intelligence and reason 
 passed unobserved. As we have seen, his critique of discursive 
 reason insists upon its incurable tendency to reduce concrete and 
 organic reality to a series of disconnected abstractions. Kant’s 
 judgment of it was quite correct; it is a purely phenomenal and 
 subjective faculty, and its views of reality are simply convenient 
 points of view. 
 
 The legitimate sovereignty of the reason does not therefore extend 
 beyond its own horizon, beyond its own limits, or the ideal world it 
 creates for itself, by means of the materials it receives from without. 
 Its empire is subjective, and in no wise objective. It has no more right 
 to command another reason than it has to command nature.’** 
 
 If, therefore, we can escape from the phenomenal world, it is 
 only by virtue of a superior faculty, the intelligence, which seizes 
 at a glance the genetic order and nature of things. Unless reason 
 accepts all its major premises, with unquestioning docility, on the 
 authority of this higher faculty, it always goes astray. 
 
 (3). Reason as equivalent to mind. 
 
 The two definitions already given are the only ones which 
 Bautain commonly employs. He is accustomed to slip back and 
 forth between them, in a somewhat disconcerting manner, as the 
 exigencies of the argument require. But it will help us to com- 
 plete our summary of his critique of the reason if we temporarily 
 
 w Ens. Phil. B., 482. "8 Variétés, 14. 
 
190 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 adopt the Mennaisian’s definition of reason, as equivalent to mind 
 in the most general sense, including sensation, conception, judgment, 
 reasoning, and intelligence. Supposing that the Bishop had asked 
 Bautain whether “reason alone,” so defined, was capable of proving 
 the existence of God and the infinitude of His perfections, what 
 would have been his reply? I have not the slightest doubt that 
 he would still have replied in the negative; for in his view even 
 the intelligence is not man’s highest cognitive faculty. Mind is 
 but a secondary function of the will or the soul; and if the 
 intelligence is cognizant of the existence of God, it is not capable 
 of plumbing the depths of His nature and the “infinitude of His 
 perfections.” Only by faith, by the soul’s loving reaction to the 
 Eternal Love, is the true God known; the ‘‘God” who lies at the 
 end of a rational argument is an empty abstraction, and even the 
 God of Plato, intuitively grasped by the insight of genius, is a cold 
 Ideal. Yes, in another sense, even the soul, “‘alone,” cannot know 
 God. “Alone,” man is helpless. Take him apart from his en- 
 vironment, apart from society, apart from Nature, apart from the 
 stimulating influences which God rains down upon him continually, 
 and, just in proportion as he relies upon his own “absolute spon- 
 taneity” and shuts himself up to these external stimuli, he becomes 
 incapable of real knowledge. 
 
 ‘To sum up: neither reasoning “alone,” nor discursive thought 
 ‘“falone,” nor mind “‘alone,”? nor the whole soul of man, so far as 
 it remains “alone,” can know or do anything at all. The preten- 
 sion to independence and autonomy is folly; the path to true 
 knowledge is the path of dependence, of receptivity, of faith and 
 docility. ‘This is the central idea of Bautain’s philosophy; is it 
 any wonder that the Bishop’s question aroused his ire? 
 
 r¢ 
 
 II 
 BAUTAIN’s THEORY OF TRUTH AND CERTITUDE: 
 His SEMI-PRAGMATISM 
 
 It was Lamennais who had made the subject of “certitude” the 
 storm center of philosophical discussion among French Catholics. 
 ‘The acrimoniousness of the discussion was in part due to a con- 
 fusion of terms. To say that the common consent of mankind 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 191 
 
 was the “criterion of certitude” might mean either that it was the 
 best and most certain test of objective truth, or that it gave the 
 greatest subjective feeling of certitude. Lamennais believed him- 
 self to be proving the former when he was only proving the latter. 
 
 Bautain, while not always free from a similar confusion of 
 terms, at least made a conscious effort to avoid it. ‘“‘Certitude,” 
 as he defines it, “‘is absolutely subjective”; it is “the end and final 
 outcome of all logical operations,”*** a “firm assurance that we 
 have the truth,” a state of “calm and full security” ensuing upon 
 a period of action and reaction between “truth” and “the intelli- 
 gence.”**® It is, to be sure, a state which cannot be defined with- 
 out including “‘the clear consciousness . . . that it is really the 
 truth to which we are attached, and that we run no risk of de- 
 ceiving ourselves”;*°® but, when speaking of certitude in the ob- 
 jective sense, Bautain usually prefers to speak of “truth.” We 
 may therefore divide our discussion of his theory of truth into 
 three main sections: the meaning of truth; the psychology of 
 certitude; and the criterion of truth. 
 
 1. The meaning of truth. 
 
 What is truth? Does it exist independently of man’s mind, 
 or does it not? One might expect Bautain to be a relativist, for in 
 his method of testing truth, as we shall see in a moment, he is very 
 much of a pragmatist; but we cannot too strongly emphasize the 
 fact that in his theory of the mature of truth he has not the slightest 
 tincture of pragmatic relativism. Like Professor Royce, he might 
 call himself an “absolute” pragmatist. Though he holds truth to 
 be found through the will, and tested by its practical consequences, 
 he nevertheless insists that truth is really found, and not made. 
 
 In defining truth, one is first faced with the problem of differ- 
 entiating “truth” from “being” or “reality.” “Can one legiti- 
 mately identify reality with truth,” asks Bautain, “‘and affirm 
 purely and simply that what is, is true?”*°’ Obviously not, for 
 truth implies relation of being with intelligence, as light implies 
 relation of the luminous object with a seeing eye; and truth would 
 
 4 Ens. Phil. B., 608. 7 FB,V9, Sur la Verité. All the fol- 
 5 FB,V9, §§ 1 and 2, De la Certitude. lowing quotations are from the same 
 Ibid. source. The essay is brief; and I have 
 
 reproduced the whole of it, in substance. 
 
192 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 as surely cease to exist, if intelligence vanished, as light would, if 
 all the existences on the globe were blind. Reality apart from its 
 relation to intelligent beings can no more be called true than reality 
 apart from its relation to beings endowed with “taste” and “‘feel- 
 ing” can be called good. “Being, the true, and the good, are 
 identical in substance, but different in their relation.” | 
 
 But this does not mean that truth exists only in men’s minds! 
 
 All truth is . . . independent of the caprices and imaginations of 
 man, superior to the arbitrary combinations of the reason; and it is a 
 fatal mistake to believe that one cannot find truth except in human 
 
 speech or thought. 
 
 It is the divine intelligence which gives things their truth, as it 
 originally gave them their reality: ““The different existences in 
 their diverse relations are like the words and propositions of a 
 sublime discourse pronounced by God.” Every reality corresponds 
 to a thought in God’s mind, which “makes it what it is”; and its 
 truth in this higher sense, is its degree of correspondence with the 
 divine ideal. When things become evil they become “false” in 
 this sense. 
 
 What really is, has therefore more truth than a logical proposition can 
 have, and the truth of the thought as it faces the reality can only be 
 conceived as truth by participation. 
 
 ‘The phenomenal world which lies between the divine intelligence 
 and the human intelligence thus has “truth” in different senses by 
 virtue of its double relation to mind. Bautain compares it to “a 
 magnificent edifice, whose plan was traced by a skilful architect, 
 and which others later come to admire and study to comprehend its 
 ensemble, its ordonnance, its purpose, its proportions,” or to “a stone 
 chiselled by an artist, which leaves its imprint upon all sorts of 
 materials,” by looking at which one can “understand the thought 
 
 which inspired the artist at the moment when he was handling 
 the chisel.” 
 
 It is pure idea at the beginning [he says] in the architect or the artist; 
 it is again idea in those who contemplate the imprints or the edifice: 
 between these two ideas stands the reality, which takes its origin from 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 193 
 
 the first, which gives birth to the second. Its relation to the first is 
 
 necessary; that is, it exists only by and for that idea... . Its relation 
 to the second is fortuitous and accidental; that is, it subsists and remains 
 the same whether it is understood or is not understood. . . . Thus sub- 
 
 stantial, ideal, real, logical, and spoken truth are the five degrees of the 
 manifestation of the true, or the revelations in the order of nature of 
 
 the absolute Truth who is God. 
 
 Substantial truth is God’s self-knowledge; with Him, at least, 
 reality and truth, knower and known, are one. Ideal truth is the 
 perfect correspondence between the ideal world and the divine 
 Mind; real truth is the degree of correspondence between the 
 objects of the phenomenal world and the divine ideals which they 
 ought to copy. Logical truth is measured by the degree of corre- 
 spondence between man’s thought and the phenomena it attempts 
 to describe; spoken truth, finally, is measured by the degree of 
 correspondence between man’s speech and his thought. 
 
 2. The psychology of certitude. 
 
 How can mere mortals ever be certaim that their copies of objec- 
 tive truth are correct? Is it not almost inexplicable that certitude, 
 as a psychological state, should exist at all? Yes, says Bautain, it 
 is very strange; and we shall never understand it unless we admit 
 that man has something within him which he uses as an infallible 
 criterion of truth. 
 
 What is this subjective “principle of certitude”? It is, says 
 Bautain, “the need which man ‘has of the truth, of ight, without 
 7188 This need is at once 
 practical and theoretical, and so when it feels itself satisfied, the 
 certitude which expresses this satisfaction is at once practical and 
 theoretical: “‘a conviction carried to the point of excluding doubt 
 entirely and compelling at once the complete adherence of the mind 
 and the firm assent of the will.”*” A certitude which one is not 
 ready to live by and die for is no true certitude. From the sub- 
 jective point of view, then, truth is what satisfies my eed of truth, 
 
 which he cannot live a truly human life. 
 
 the need which shows itself in “the instinct for knowledge or 
 curiosity, innate in man.”*®° 
 
 The subjective principle of certitude is at the same time very 
 
 18 Ens. Phil. B., 609. wer Tid: 1 Thid., 609-610. 
 
194 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 peremptory in its authority for the individual, and very inadequate 
 as a social authority, for it is inward and indescribable. 
 
 This principle is the most positive and certain thing in you; it is the 
 condition of all your knowledge, the condition even of your existence, 
 as a reasonable creature. . . . The principle of certitude and certitude 
 itself are within you; they are subjective; no one can be certain for you, 
 any more than you can impose your certitude on another. What answers 
 to this principle, what provokes its development, is the’ truths) 1a ttane 
 always the true outside of you, answering to the need of the true within 
 you. It is the principle of certitude innate in each man, which . . . has 
 its seat in the soul, in the very root of our existence. It is imprinted 
 upon us as a divine stamp, as a permanent testimony, as the soul of the 
 truth; it is the living and incontestable proof of the intimate relation in 
 which man stands to the truth; for, how should he beg for it if he did 
 not feel the need of it? How should he recognize it? How should 
 he say “That is true!” if he had not within him the prototype of the 
 truths 764 
 
 Perhaps the nature of this mysterious principle may become 
 plainer if we follow Bautain’s account of the relation between 
 faith and certitude. It is by virtue of the presence of this innate 
 principle, he says, that the initial act of belief which welcomes the 
 truth from afar off is possible. 
 
 It is in no wise through lack of certitude that man is obliged to believe; 
 it is on the contrary by virtue of the principle of certitude which is 
 innate in him that he feels the need of believing, has the power to believe, 
 is predisposed to believe, and does believe.1®? 
 
 On the other hand, certitude never becomes complete while 
 faith wavers. 
 
 Positive certitude, developed and determined, always varies with the 
 degree of adhesion to the interior or exterior word, the degree of 
 conscience intime and faith. . . . Thus it is that certitude is at once the 
 
 foundation and the perfection, the first principle and the crown of 
 taith.s"* 
 
 Apparently, the principle of certitude lies even deeper in the 
 soul than does faith itself—and that is very deep indeed! 
 
 
 
 1% Phil. Chr., 1, 297-298. 8 Thid., 299. 
 18 Tbid., 297. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 195 
 
 In his epistemological works Bautain does not make plain the 
 exact nature of that “‘need”’ to which the truth is the complement. 
 He speaks of “innate ideas,” potential in the understanding, waiting 
 to be fertilized by contact with the ideals of which they are the 
 imprints, and of which the fully developed ideas are the copies; 
 and we may presume that these innate ideas are a part, or aspect, 
 or outcropping, of the “principle of certitude.” But we must go 
 to his “Moral Philosophy” to discover the real secret. “There, in 
 an eloquent passage, he speaks of the besoin radical of the will, 
 which only the Infinite can satisfy, and which proves that the 
 Infinite has formed it for Itself. 
 
 In the chain of Creation, each creature “draws its nourishment 
 from the order of things with which it is most clearly connected, 
 or from the element from which it springs.” If, therefore, we 
 know that for which the creature hungers, we know whence it is 
 sprung. Now the soul of man, as well as his body, has an insatiable 
 hunger for nourishment—the will is that hunger***—and nothing 
 finite can satisfy it. Ennui results when it tries to feed upon the 
 finite; it “gnaws and devours the mind, as inanition undermines 
 and consumes the body.”** 
 
 All the desires of man aspire, therefore, toward the infinite by some 
 path, by some means of art, of knowledge, of justice, of piety, of love. 
 If then the soul can live upon nothing but the infinite, if the infinite 
 alone can satisfy her and sate her hunger, it is because it is analogous to 
 her nature, it is because it is her principium, and that is why she naturally 
 tends to return to it.7®® 
 
 God is the only food that can satisfy the soul; and whenever a 
 durable satisfaction comes to man in this world it is because he has 
 found some reflection of the divine Beauty, some fragment of the 
 divine Truth, some hint of the divine Goodness. 
 
 Since the will is “the natural chief of our faculties,” since “we 
 think because we wish to think,””**’ the satisfaction that accompanies 
 all contact with the divine is primarily a satisfaction of the will; 
 but this satisfaction has an intellectual as well as a moral import. 
 
 pumsstcasecer.. J, 47. “Elle. [la * Tbid., 1, 61. See the whole passage, 
 volonté] est la faim de létre et de la * Phil. Mor., I, 58-59. 
 vie.” ee dar rb RCW 
 
 14 
 
196 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 By the will, man “‘communicates with the very source of his being, 
 receiving by that avenue impressions, inspirations, impulses, often 
 inexplicable to the reason, and which justify themselves only by 
 the event.”*** ‘The satisfaction of the need of the mind which 
 proves the presence of Truth is hardly to be distinguished at its 
 source from the satisfaction of the will which proves the presence 
 of the Good; both blend in the soul’s satisfaction, which proves 
 the presence of its celestial Mate. Moral conscience and intel- 
 lectual conscience (the principle of certitude) are one and the same 
 thing. ‘The innate ideas themselves would seem to be a sort of 
 soul-hunger, which only their proper nutriment can sate. The 
 more an idea satisfies my desires, the more certain I] feel of its 
 truth. 
 
 If the soul’s desire is the subjective factor which contributes to 
 produce the feeling of certitude, the objective factor is simply the 
 object of cognition itself. “he degree of certitude, accordingly, 
 varies with the nature of the object with which the soul is in 
 commerce. Physical certitude results when physical phenomena 
 impinge, as it were, upon the retina of. the soul, and is based on 
 “the consciousness of the effects that these phenomena produce in 
 us or upon us.” It is a low order of certitude, since physical 
 phenomena have only a low grade of reality, and satisfy the soul’s 
 hunger only temporarily. Metaphysical certitude, on the other 
 hand, is perfect certitude, since it is based on the union of the 
 soul with ultimate realities, which completely satisfy its hunger. 
 Rational certitude, which results from the soul’s commerce with 
 other human beings, and is reached either by weighing evidence 
 or by heeding the authority of others, would, one might suppose, 
 rank midway between physical and metaphysical certitude; but in- 
 stead, it ranks below them. ‘That is because certitude varies with 
 another factor, the factor of zmmediacy. It is greatest when the 
 subject is face to face with the object, in a relation of action and 
 reaction. Rational knowledge is at best second-hand knowledge, 
 experience reflected-upon, and the testimony of others is third-hand 
 knowledge. It is for this reason that Lamennais’s “common con- 
 sent” is such an extraordinarily poor “criterion of certitude.” 
 Whether a physical or a metaphysical object is in question, one 
 
 %8 Phil. Mor., 1, 54. 1® Phil. Chr., I, 300. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 197 
 
 moment of direct experience of the object will do more to convince 
 me of its reality than all the testimony in the world: 
 
 “The whole of mankind,” said M. Bautain ew pleine séance, “might 
 come and afhrm to me that my conviction, my certitude, was false. I 
 should not give in. My certitude is certitude, and nothing can shake it; 
 no testimony can either produce or destroy that profound conviction 
 which constitutes certitude. Would it follow that the whole human 
 species was mad? . . . (No answer to this question except a gesture of 
 ignorance or resignation). But, if 7 am mad, what good will the testi- 
 mony of mankind do me? ”??° 
 
 3. The criterion of truth: Bautain and William James. 
 
 So far, we have been dealing with certitude as a mental state. 
 We have indeed discovered that it varies with the degree of objec- 
 tive Truth which the object under consideration embodies; but can 
 we say that the converse is true, and that the accuracy of a propo- 
 sition varies strictly in proportion to the degree of confidence it 
 inspires in me? 
 
 Well, Bautain comes pretty near to saying just that. His ulti- 
 mate criterion of the truth is the inward testimony of the innate 
 sense for the truth, which he calls sometimes the sens intime, some- 
 times the “conscience,” sometimes the ‘‘need to believe,” and some- 
 times “common sense,” (in conscious contrast with Lamennais’s 
 “common sense,” which meant common consent). All men have 
 this sense; those in whom it is not developed, miss the truth; those 
 in whom it is developed—or rather developing, for truth-seeking is 
 a never-ending process—find the truth just in proportion to their 
 degree of development. 
 
 A fatal error of M. de Lamennais and of many other philosophers 
 [says Bautain] is to believe that there is a criterion of Truth so clear, 
 infallible, universal, that one has only to present it, and all men will 
 be forced to admit it. Such is not the way of things. God has made 
 men free, and in all that they knowingly do, their will has its part. No 
 one can be forced to believe, or to admit a given truth.” 
 
 In other words, every man has his own criterion of truth; “man 
 
 ™° Ens. Phil. B., 610-611. On physi- Essay de la Certitude, FB,V9. 
 cal, metaphysical, and rational certitude, *7 Letter to the Abbé Freschard, FB,K, 
 see Phil. Chr., I, Letter 21, andthe Cahier I, 1-2. 
 
198 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 is the measure of all things.” Does this reduce us to relativism?! 
 No, for the Truth is unchangeable, and every man has a soul- 
 hunger which only the Truth will satisfy; but it is only gradually 
 that a man learns what it is that he wants. Error sours eventually 
 on every man’s stomach; but it is only through long-continued 
 commerce with the ‘Truth that one learns to discern it before 
 tasting it. 
 
 If no universal criterion of truth exists, neither does any external 
 criterion of truth exist. No authority, however weighty, no 
 rational or logical test, however successful, can distinguish truth 
 from error, ‘Truth bears testimony to itself, and all other evidence 
 is superfluous. Bautain is emphatic and eloquent on this point. I 
 transcribe only two out of many passages: 
 
 Where are we if we demand a criterion of self-evidentness? How 
 do you distinguish daylight from darkness? Do you also need a criterion 
 of day and night?—But there are also “false dawns.”—-Whatever you 
 do, you cannot dissipate error except by the exposition of the truth; you 
 cannot banish the darkness except by the light.” 
 
 For what is there that is clearer than the truth? Is a criterion needed 
 . . . for love and friendship? Does not the truth shine brilliantly 
 enough by its own light? Do not the affections—love, friendship—feel 
 each other? When the soul is united in its depths (par le fond) to the 
 pure truth, when two souls are in intimate union and act upon each 
 other, what more is needed? 178 
 
 “Vous avex raison, docteur Pangloss!” is the Mennaisian’s com- 
 ment on the above. “All is for the best in the best of possible 
 worlds, from which error is banished, where no false friends are 
 met, and where no false lovers have ever been seen!” The 
 possibility of error would indeed seem to be a problem for Bautain; 
 but he has his solution ready: 
 
 It has been said that semtiment intime deceives us, that it is the source 
 of the gravest errors, in religion as in philosophy. . . . Feeling, as feel- 
 ing, and in its native purity, never deceives, any more than sensation 
 does. Nothing on the eed is more certain for man than what he 
 
 experiences in his inner self (for intérieur). . And the proof of it 
 is in the approbation and the condemnation 5 the conscience. . . . But 
 “22nd Letter to Ferry, FB,K, Cahier “8 Ens. Phil. B., 621. 
 
 18. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 199 
 
 when he sets himself to reflecting upon what he feels, in order to give 
 an account of it to himself, when he tries to know his momentary 
 modifications and modes of being, then his reason mingles its operations 
 with that of the truth; it neutralizes it, obscures it, and ruins its effects 
 by reasonings founded on principles drawn from its own depths, and 
 it is then that private or individual sense is substituted for common 
 sense—that is, for the need and feeling for the truth, common to all 
 men,"‘* 
 
 We have here an appeal to immediate experience as the criterion 
 of truth which irresistibly reminds one of the pragmatic empiricism 
 of William James. ‘The parallel can be carried out in some detail; 
 in fact, I can think of no better way of explaining the meaning 
 of Bautain’s criterion of truth than by comparing it with James’s.*” 
 
 Take, first of all, James’s familiar proposition that the “truth” 
 of an idea is the experience to which it “leads,” the empirical “‘cash 
 value” it is capable of rendering up; that there is no more validity 
 in each “concept” than there is in its corresponding “percept.” 
 Bautain has an exactly similar theory. ‘The first step in the know- 
 ing process, as he continually insists, is the learning of social con- 
 cepts, “faith in the word”; at this stage we “taste” the truth rather 
 than “‘see”’ it, and its validity is more subjective than objective; we 
 
 ™% Thid., 618-619. 
 
 %®8 1 do not, of course, mean to imply 
 that James would sponsor all the appli- 
 cations that Bautain makes of the prag- 
 matic principle. Neither do I mean to 
 imply that Bautain is a “pragmatist” in 
 any thorough-going sense. In fact, if 
 the word be taken in the narrow sense 
 which seems to be gaining ground in 
 this country—if the naturalistic pragma- 
 tism of John Dewey be taken as the 
 typical form of pragmatism—then it 
 would be absurd to call any Catholic a 
 pragmatist, or even a “semi-pragmatist.” 
 It seems to me, however, that the French 
 do well to use the word pragmatism, 
 like the word romanticism (p. 43 supra, 
 footnote 63), in a broader sense, to in- 
 clude several affiliated movements—in 
 this case, to include all forms of volun- 
 tarism which appeal to the practical con- 
 sequences of ideas (either scientific or 
 religious) as a test of their truth. This 
 broader sense of the word is needed, if 
 we are to grant the right of many 
 
 American religious thinkers, such as Pro- 
 fessor Lyman of Union Theological 
 Seminary, to continue to call themselves 
 Pragmatists, while differing widely from 
 the position of Professor Dewey. For 
 this wider use of the word in France, 
 see Berthelot’s Un Romantisme Utilitaire, 
 Leclére’s Pragmatisme, Modernisme, 
 Protestantisme, and other books men- 
 tioned in the bibliography. For its wider 
 use in American religious thought, see 
 E. W. Lyman’s Theology and Human 
 Problems: A Comparative Study of Ab- 
 solute Idealism and Pragmatism as In- 
 terpretors of Religion, N. Y., 1910, 40- 
 58, 91-93, 121 et seg. 150-160. Cf. 
 Father Tyrrell, Through Scylla and 
 Charybdis, London, 1907, chapter vir on 
 “Pragmatism.” The Catholic Modernists 
 were frequently accused of being Prag- 
 matists. All I claim for Bautain is that, 
 on certain specific points, his position 
 resembles that of James and other recog- 
 nized Pragmatists. 
 
200 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 accept it because it tastes good to us, and answers to our need.**® 
 But knowledge is not really reached until “taste” gives way to 
 “sight,” till mediate experience gives way to immediate experience. 
 Belief and faith, which correspond to physical and metaphysical 
 reality, are the pillar of fire and of cloud, “half obscure, half 
 luminous,” which leads to the promised land of self-evidence. It 
 is the “leading” of ideas, in other words, which gives them their 
 truth. The purpose of all instruction about an object, which is 
 verbal and so by faith, 1s 
 
 to lead us gradually to the self-evidence (évidence) of that object, by’ 
 rendering us capable of seeing it for ourselves, and perceiving all that 
 was told us about it. He who does not reach this vision of the object 
 has not well understood the doctrine; he does not know. . . . It is the 
 vision [percept] of the truth which in the last resort gives authority to 
 the word [concept] of instruction.*’” 
 
 The nature of the validating percept of course varies with the 
 nature of the object. For natural objects, sense-perception, espec- 
 ially sight-touch perception, is the goal. A single museum is worth 
 a whole city of libraries. Rational entities are not objects at all, 
 one can never reach “vision” of them. Vision must come before 
 and after the work of the reason, if reason is to reach valid results. 
 
 Every rational demonstration necessarily starts from self-evidence; it 
 is only on that condition that it obtains it in the conclusion. ‘Thus 
 reasoning is but a passage from self-evidence to self-evidence; deduction 
 is the transportation or communication of light from one clear proposition 
 to another that was not clear.1%8 
 
 Intelligible objects are never truly known except by the insight 
 of genius. When genius has once “enounced” the idea of the 
 object, “some receive it and see by it,” and the fact that it leads 
 them to vision is the test of its truth. Those who are not willing 
 to receive it “on faith” and try it out, of course never reach the 
 knowledge of the intelligible object to which it corresponds. 
 Finally, when we come to the realm of the divine, we are in some 
 difficulty with our test, for the beatific vision of God is reserved 
 
 ™% See Psych. Exp., I, § 50. ™8 Thid., 310. 
 ™ Psych. Exp., I, 310, 312. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 201 
 
 for the next world; but, even in this life, faith may lead us in the 
 direction of the beatific vision; and there are certain holy men to 
 whom the “gift of knowledge,” one of the “gifts of the Holy 
 Spirit,” is granted, rendering them “capable not only of believing 
 in eternal truth, but of understanding it,” and having “the évidence 
 of it up to a certain point.”*” 
 
 Meanwhile, for the rank and file of us, according to Bautain, 
 a test of theological truth is available which again reminds one of 
 William James: it is true, if it answers to our practical needs; 
 if it “tastes” good, and does us good. ‘Truth, he says, sometimes 
 “justifies itself practically (par le fait) more than by demonstra- 
 tion.” One takes it on faith, and then there arises ‘an enjoyment, 
 when the object pleases,” or “the restoration of the vital energies 
 (réparation de la vie), when it nourishes.” ‘Truth has a “savor 
 which recreates and fortifies”; and one can acquire and cultivate a 
 discriminating taste for religious truth just as one can acquire and 
 cultivate a taste for the beautiful in art or literature, or “‘a certain 
 taste for the good, which, put in relation with something morally 
 good, gives him an agreeable emotion, a savor of justice or of 
 virtue, and at the same time a feeling of power, and a certain 
 stimulus which impels the will toward well-doing.” This culti- 
 vated taste is wisdom; wisdom gets us in touch with deeper realities 
 than knowledge can ever reach in this life.**° 
 
 A final point of contact between Bautain and James: they both 
 appeal to “‘future experience,” and “the way things work.” ‘The 
 pragmatic test of truth is, in fact, a test that never can be applied 
 at the moment of decision. If I am to “taste” a supposed truth 
 and test it by the way it “works” upon my system, I must first 
 swallow it by faith; and if it proves to be a poisonous error, the 
 discovery comes too late to do me any good. 
 
 The “test of works” is frequently alluded to by Bautain; and 
 he never fails to point out the element of risk which it involves: 
 
 Unfortunately, when the facts speak and decide, it is too late to go 
 back. ‘The consequences are posited and must take their course; it 
 remains only to submit to them, profiting by their instructions for an- 
 other occasion—and happy those who profit by them! One becomes 
 
 ™ Cerc. Cath., 58-59. Bautain is less * For all the above quotations, see 
 cautiously mystical in his earlier works. Psych. Exp., I, § 49, pp. 323-327 
 
202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 wise in this world only at his own risk and peril. The experience of 
 the fathers is almost always wasted for the children.*** 
 
 One is obliged to let them commit the faults that one foresees, that 
 they may acquire by experience the conviction of their error. ‘That is 
 why talent, learning, genius even, cannot take the place of experience, 
 of the practical knowledge of life.’*? 
 
 Bautain’s pragmatism is not undiscriminating. The test of 
 works, he admits, is not necessary in a “science of pure reasoning,” 
 like mathematics; “but,” he insists, “where facts are concerned, 
 the test of experience is necessary; the thought cannot be finally 
 judged except by the realization of its consequences.”*** Still more 
 noteworthy is the care with which he discriminates between the 
 sort of “‘workings” or “consequences” by which a religious verity 
 is to be tested and those by which other kinds of truth are to be 
 tested. Pragmatists have commonly been unconscious of the 
 variety of meanings concealed beneath the ambiguity of these terms. 
 We commend the following passage, therefore, to the reader’s 
 attention; for we feel that the pragmatic criterion of truth was 
 never better stated: 
 
 It is by practice that systems and reasonings are tested, as the tree is 
 judged by its fruits: in things religious and moral by one’s conscience 
 and by one’s acts; in natural things by common sense and utility; in the 
 arts by taste and the feeling for the beautiful; in social institutions by 
 the well-being or malaise of the peoples.*8 
 
 This test [Bautain admits] is dangerous for him who attempts to 
 make it and for all who take part in it. How many systems have we 
 not seen appear and disappear! They try themselves in the real world; 
 if they have not in them the requirements of the truth, they do not hold; 
 for things do not happen in the real order as they do in our under- 
 standings, where all sorts of chimeras may find room. Thus were judged 
 those moral, political, and religious doctrines of the eighteenth century 
 which the reason, left to herself, attempted, in her pride and in her 
 great confidence in her own savoir-faire, to substitute for the Christian 
 verities. [So also has Saint-Simonism recently been judged.] So long 
 as it remained in the realm of speculation and between the covers of 
 books, the discussion was warm; ... but when it came down into the 
 field of reality, . . . it killed itself in trying to establish itself. . . . 
 
 Let the applications and the practical outworkings appear [he con- 
 
 1 Psych. Exp., I, 139-140. 88 Thid., 351. 
 me Thid-y 352. 4 Thid., 349-350. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 203 
 
 cludes]; let them come, and the event will decide. What is useful will 
 remain after a certain oscillation; what is false or vain will be carried 
 away by the river of time, which rolls oblivion in its waves,'®® 
 
 The test here proposed is a more objective test than that of “Does 
 it please me?” or “Does it help me?” ‘There has always, in fact, 
 been confusion among pragmatists as to whether “‘Does it work?” 
 means “Does it work for me?” or “Does it work in the world of 
 nature and history, in the long run?” Yet, granting that Bautain 
 is here reaching out toward a more objective form of pragmatism, 
 the fact remains that the subjective test is the ultimate one. ‘“The 
 facts” and “future experience” can “decide” only in the sense that 
 they turn out as I wish, or against my wishes. ‘The final test is, 
 “Does this supposed truth lead to results favorable to me?” 
 
 The authority to which Bautain appeals as a court of last resort, 
 then, is a purely individual and subjective authority. What, then, 
 becomes of the authority of the Church! For a Catholic, that is 
 a most crucial question. Bautain attacks it fearlessly, and, I should 
 think, in a manner that ought to satisfy the most zealous of his 
 brethren. In brief, he maintains that the objective authority of 
 the Church is as necessary as the subjective authority of the intel- 
 lectual conscience; that there is perfect harmony between them; 
 that this harmony can already be perceived in the large, but that 
 in matters of detail, in our present imperfect state, there is often 
 a clash of the two authorities, in which case it is our duty to trust 
 the authority of the Church, and wait for faith to lead us to further 
 light. ) 
 
 But is it not strange to haul in an “objective” authority, when 
 our “subjective” authority speaks so clearly and infallibly? No! 
 for without an objective authority of some sort, our subjective 
 authority would do us no good at all. It is a purely formal au- 
 thority; it can recognize the truth, but it cannot direct us to the 
 truth. It knows what to approve and what to reject when they 
 are set objectively before it, so as to stimulate it and set it in 
 operation; but until then (i.e., before the decision, before the 
 judgment) it does not know its own mind at all. Man needs a 
 material authority “to show him objectively and thus more clearly 
 
 288 Thid., 351-352. 
 
204 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 what he has in his depths.”**® He needs a mirror, as it were, to 
 
 show him his own mind. Bautain’s contention is precisely parallel 
 to Royce’s contention, in the Philosophy of Loyalty: that although 
 “my duty is simply my own will brought to my clear self-conscious- 
 ness,” nevertheless, “left to myself alone, I can never find out 
 what my will is’; and I get a will of my own “only through 
 social training.”?**" 
 
 It is impossible to understand the role of the authority of the 
 Church in leading man to the truth without first considering the 
 role of society and tradition. Man owes to society, says Bautain, 
 three things: language, which “lights the torch of the intelligence” 
 in him; a ¢redition, including both universal truths and historic 
 facts; and finally “a certain rectitude of judgment, which develops 
 through the commerce of men and which becomes a faculty to 
 discern the true, a sense for the true.” “Thus even the subjective 
 criterion of truth in its developed form is a social creation. 
 
 What society offers us is plainly not a formal test of truth, but 
 a material standard, consisting of “acquired truths.” As mankind 
 develops in relation with its environment, it “enters into possession 
 of a treasure of truths,” which “‘is transmitted from age to age,” 
 and “goes on purifying itself with the course of the centuries” 
 inasmuch as “‘the common sense of the new generations, as they 
 appear, tests what the ancients transmit to them.” ‘The authority 
 of social tradition is thus very great indeed, in spite of the fact 
 that it is not infallible, and in spite of the fact that we are in 
 duty bound to use our subjective criterion to sift out the human 
 element in tradition from the divine. In any event, it is indis- 
 pensable; “there is no other means which can take the place of 
 this to transmit to us the first spiritual stimulus and the capacity 
 for speech, as there is none other to maintain and continue the 
 intellectual and moral progress of humanity across the centuries.” 
 
 It is only when the subjective testimony of the inner sense and 
 the innate ideas chimes in with the testimony of tradition that the 
 conception and birth of a true idea really-takes place. When we 
 discover this correspondence between truth within us, and truth 
 without, it “augments . . . that primitive light which we bore 
 
 88 Phil. Chr., I, 306. *7 1. Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty, 
 24-38. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 205 
 
 within us, and gives it a new brilliancy.” It is in fact artificial 
 to separate the various means of knowledge from one another. 
 “What we have just distinguished in theory is one in itself, and is 
 not separated in reality.” ‘The moral, intellectual, and animal 
 life is a single life, the life of man.” And so each time man 
 discovers a truth, be it physical, moral, or metaphysical, the testi- 
 mony of nature and the senses, the testimony of society and 
 tradition, and the testimony of the inner consciousness all must 
 collaborate, as the will, the intellect, and the senszbilité all collabo- 
 rate. Neither physical certitude, rational (“moral’’) certitude, nor 
 metaphysical certitude is possible by itself, apart from the others.*** 
 
 We are now in a position to see why the authority of the Church 
 is legitimate. It is legitimate in the same sense in which the 
 authority of society and the testimony of Nature are legitimate— 
 as a means to otherwise inaccessible truth. 
 
 But why always the Church, or rather the churchman, between the 
 dogma and me, between the Scriptures and me, between the Truth and 
 me? Ask also, if you please, why the mother and her care between the 
 world and the infant, why the master and his word between knowledge 
 and the disciple, why the magistrate between the law and the citizen, 
 why the air and the atmosphere between the sun and you. . . . We are 
 born soul-blind, and it is hardly the part of the man born blind to say, 
 “Get out of my light”!*® 
 
 ‘The Church is, in short, at the same time the custodian of that 
 line of tradition to which alone our inner consciousness can assent 
 with utter abandon, and the organ of society by and in which 
 alone we can be educated to respond to the deepest realities. 
 
 In the first place, then, the authority of the Church is infallible 
 because the power of the Scriptures over man’s heart, when once 
 his heart is opened to their influence, is irresistible. ‘There is no 
 compelling all men to recognize this authority; even the authority 
 of Christ found more to reject than to accept it; but he who is 
 spiritually sensitive will “receive with joy the word of the doctrine, 
 as answering to the desire of his heart, the need of his intelligence, 
 as enlarging and strengthening the circle of his reason.”*°° To 
 
 8 For all the quotations above, see ee Ph CAars eliieteleo 
 de la Certitude, 32-48. mr Tbide is 11; 
 
206 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 such an one, no further evidence is necessary; to all others, it 
 is useless. 
 
 This is why I see no more necessity to prove it rationally than there 
 would be to demonstrate the existence of the sun, either to a man who 
 enjoys sight, or to one who is deprived of it. He who sees clearly has 
 no need of my reasonings, and they will never give sight to him who 
 does not see it.*®* 
 
 Of course, once the individual makes the initial surrender to the 
 divine authority of the Word, the regulative and educative func- 
 tions of the Church come into play, and he is no more master of 
 himself. Why should he wish to be? Has he not convinced 
 himself that he is dealing with the depositary of divine Truth 
 itself? Once he has reached this position, he is reconciled to the 
 fact that many things remain incomprehensible to him both in 
 the Scriptures and in the discipline of the Church, for he knows 
 that “they contain the true doctrine of progress” in which is con- 
 tained the compendium of all the truths that men can grasp at 
 all stages of their development. 
 
 The passage of man here below is a path of faith and progress, of 
 work and hope: his first duty is adherence to the Word which is an- 
 nounced to him; his first virtue is submission from the heart to the 
 authority of that Word. The veil will fall at the end, and then we 
 shall see the truth of that in which we have believed.’? 
 
 In that faith, the good Catholic will submit even his inmost 
 feelings to the criticism and correction of the Church, confident 
 that she knows best, and he will come to see her wisdom. 
 
 Bautain’s criterion of truth is therefore a double one; or rather, 
 the real criterion is the consciousness of the concord of the two 
 criteria. One of Bautain’s critics very acutely picks out the fol- 
 lowing passage’’* as the core of his teaching: 
 
 These two revelations [conscience and Scripture] justify each other, 
 then; they show by their accord that the Being who spoke on Mt. Sinai 
 for the instruction of all men is the same as He who speaks in the 
 conscience of each man. 
 
 *1 2nd Letter to Ferry, FB,K, Cahier et Phil. Che, T,531t 
 Trani 3 Thid., 306. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 207 
 
 The critic finds this a too subjective criterion: 
 
 The identity of the dictates of conscience, of the law written in the 
 heart of man, with the dictates of the positive law; that is what, according 
 to him, guarantees to us the intrinsic truth of the positive law.1*4 
 
 Perhaps we shall have to agree that Bautain has not escaped 
 from the subjectivism which is characteristic of mystics; it is to 
 the consciousness of the concord between his objective and sub- 
 jective criteria, that he appeals in the last resort. 
 
 I doubt if Bautain ever completely harmonized his two criteria. 
 In his earlier years, he was so sure of the accord between his 
 philosophy and Christian truth that he walked continually in the 
 light, and assumed an air of authority. His Mennaisian critic 
 maliciously remarks that “che neglected nothing . . . to persuade 
 his auditors that he was a man of genius,”*’® and he charges that 
 Bautain’s criterion of truth is not Catholic, but “‘semi-Protestantism, 
 accompanied by illuminism, in which the Church can be only an 
 hors-d’oeuvre.””’* ‘This charge is plainly over-drawn; but the fact 
 remains that when Bautain went to Rome, to submit his writings 
 to the scrutiny of that authority which he confessed to be supreme, 
 he found himself, to his horror, in a state of subconscious rebellion. 
 
 That very morning [he wrote] before arriving at Rome, on the way, 
 I had been assailed by a severe temptation. ‘What need have you of 
 Rome and the Pope in order to know the Truth,” the evil spirit said 
 to me. ‘Is She not before you like the Sun? Do you need the word 
 of another that the sun gives light and heat? Do you not see it? Do 
 you not feel it? Have you not likewise the Gospel, the word of God? 
 This sun, does it not also shine for all the world, for those at least who 
 have eyes to see”—TI heard all that, and I was in distress; not that I 
 had ever had a thought of opposition, but the seduction to which I have 
 always been most exposed has been to care little, inwardly, for outward 
 forms, while yet remaining attached to the Church in all her practices, 
 and never detaching myself from the centre of catholicity. There is 
 a great difference [he admits] between accepting the authority of Rome 
 only negatively, so to speak, and as a condition without which one cannot 
 live, and accepting it positively, with a living acceptance, with love, as 
 if coming to a mother to whom one owes respect and obedience.19* 
 
 ™ Rapport & VPévéque, 22. 8 Tbid., 625. 
 Ens. Phil. B., 631. ™ De Régny, 251-252. 
 
208 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 This temptation once conquered, Bautain was never the same 
 again. It is true that, a few days later, when he heard that his 
 Philosophie du Christianisme was likely to be put on the Index, 
 the wound reopened. 
 
 That made me heart-sick [he wrote] and it would take a great act of 
 faith to adhere to such an affirmation, if it could come from the Holy 
 See. . . . It is the greatest sacrifice that I could make, since it would 
 be the abandonment of my whole life, of my past and of my future... . 
 
 I feel within me [he nevertheless could add] the courage to make the 
 sacrifice, and I pray God to give me strength for it by redoubling my 
 faith, humility, and charity.*°* 
 
 From that time on, Bautain was really living by his objective 
 criterion of truth more than by his subjective; and the proof of 
 it is that he came to speak of faith in a new sense. In the 
 conférences which he gave before the Cercle Catholique in 1842- 
 43, we have faith described no longer as a cognitive faculty, which 
 dimly perceives the truth of that which it accepts, but as a sort of 
 desperate leap in the dark, illumined by not a flash of intuition, 
 and motivated solely by external evidence and the “will to believe.” 
 
 To believe is not to see... . It is not to doubt. ... . It is not to 
 suspect, or to have a mere opinion. . . . To Jelieve, is to give one’s 
 assent to a word; that is, to adhere to it as fully, admit its truth as 
 firmly, as if there were knowledge, although there be neither evidence 
 nor demonstration. Belief thus participates in the characteristics of 
 knowledge with respect to firmness of assent, and in those of opinion 
 with respect to lack of evidence. In belief, the will carries the mind 
 with it. In knowledge, the mind, seeing and convinced, tries to carry 
 the will with it. . . . There are always motives for believing; but the 
 motives which lead one to adhere to the word do not render the proposed 
 truth evident; they simply give the firm conviction that it is the Word 
 of God. Hence faith is at once luminous and obscure, since by it man 
 sees clearly what he must believe, without having the evidence and the 
 knowledge of what he believes. . . . It renders one humble and sub- 
 missive, since it makes one admit by an act of will what the mind does 
 not understand. It is the specific remedy for the original vice of the 
 mind: pride.?°® | 
 
 The non-Catholic will be inclined to marvel at the inconsistency 
 
 De Régny, 262-263. ® Op. cit., 55-56. 
 
 ~ ™ 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 209 
 
 of a Church which condemns a man for basing his philosophy upon 
 the act of submission which that same act of condemnation requires 
 of him. ‘The Catholic will see no inconsistency; fides implicita 
 is naturally required of a man after he has given himself into the 
 hands of an infallible authority; but the Church has never required 
 it of the man who is examining the praeambula fidei, and trying to 
 decide whether or no the Church’s authority is infallible. To 
 demand faith of the honest unbeliever, before giving him sound 
 reasons for believing—will such a mode of procedure not leave 
 the impression that religion is essentially irrational? Such is the 
 reasoning which led to the condemnation of Bautain’s philosophy; 
 and one must admit that it is perfectly consistent. “The Catholic 
 Church must jealously guard the rationality of the arguments by 
 which she proves the existence of God and her own divine com- 
 mission, or she will appear to be resting her case on nothing more 
 solid than vociferous assertions and anathemas. It may be ques- 
 tioned, however, whether Bautain’s fideism really undermines the 
 Catholic system in any such fashion. He was not attacking the 
 attempt to convince the unbeliever; he was simply attacking a 
 rationalistic apologetic which, according to his observation, never 
 did convince the unbeliever, and in its place he wished to set a 
 non-argumentative apologetic which, if his experience with young 
 men was to be trusted, was actually able to convince. We must 
 turn, then, to Bautain’s apologetics before passing final judgment 
 upon his epistemology; for his whole theory of knowledge, truth, 
 and certitude, is meant to be an elaborate justification of his new 
 method of defending the faith, and his whole philosophy is a 
 protracted apology. 
 
 III 
 THE APOLOGETICS OF THE HEART AND THE APOLOGETICS OF 
 THE INTELLIGENCE 
 
 The great document for Bautain’s apologetics is of course the 
 Philosophie du Christianisme. There one sees the process of per- 
 suasion in actual operation, and one gets an incomparable exempli- 
 fication of what Voluntarism means in the sphere of religion; for, 
 in strict accordance with his theory of knowledge, Bautain aims 
 
210 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 primarily at the heart and the will, secondarily, at the “‘intelli- 
 gence,” and only lastly, if at all, at the reason. 
 
 He had, to be sure, three very good subjects for his “apologetics. 
 of the heart.” They were all of them young Romanticists, 
 plagued with mal de siécle and the besoin de croire, filled with a 
 “craving for the infinite,” and dreaming, as one of them expressed 
 it, of “a vague object which might correspond to the need of my 
 soul.”°°? ‘They recognized that their greatest need was for moral 
 power—something to cure them of their fatal abulia—and they 
 believed that it might be found in religion. 
 
 Give me what I lack [cries Julien] that je ~e sais guoi, the privation 
 of which and the necessity of which I feel so keenly. There must be 
 something stronger than anything I am acquainted with, which will give 
 me the means of doing what is right.?°? 
 
 Bautain attracted them, they testify, because they felt “some- 
 thing plein @ame,” “something vital”*°’ in his teaching; and 
 because he bade them judge truth practically. 
 
 You enjoined us [writes Adéodat] to judge the doctrine ... in 
 accordance with the effects it would produce in us, relative to morality 
 and happiness.”°? 
 
 The sovereign remedy for the soul’s disease was prayer, he told 
 them. Let them not wait until they were intellectually convinced 
 of the reasonableness of prayer; let them pray, and judge of the 
 validity of prayer by its moral effects. He refused to argue about 
 the truth of the Scriptures or the dogmas of religion. Read and 
 meditate, he urged them; apply these teachings to your soul’s need, 
 and see if you are not healed. 
 
 It will not be your reason, then [writes the Master], or all reasons 
 put together . . . that will be able to give you the certitude of the 
 
 Phil. Chr., 1, Notice Adéodat. See méme. Je me disais souvent: J'ai vingt 
 xxxiv-xxxvi, where the following signi- ams, et Pignore pourquoi je suis au 
 ficant passage also occurs: “Combien je monde! Qu’est-ce donc que ce fait 
 souffrais d’un indéfinissable malaise! — singulier qu’on appelle la vie?” 
 
 JDavais besoin d’aimer, et pétais facile a Phil. Chr., I, 60. 
 menflammer pour toute ame aimante 72 Thid., Ixv. 
 . . . demandant a étre aimé et compris, a thid., 8: 
 
 quoique je ne me comprisse pas moi- 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 211 
 
 intrinsic truth of the divine Word. Only Itself can testify to its truth; 
 and to this end you must . . . receive it, and you must taste it, just as 
 one can judge of a fruit only by eating it. 
 
 Suppose [he continues] that your eye is diseased—covered with a 
 cataract or paralyzed—and that a friend who takes the most tender 
 interest in you, having been afflicted with the same disease, was cured 
 of it by a particular remedy. This friend comes and talks to you of 
 his care and of the remedy. He makes you a reasoned dissertation upon 
 the nature and qualities of the medicament. His dissertation may give 
 you the desire to take it, but of a surety it will not cure you. He 
 presents you with the substance and tells you the directions and the 
 necessary conditions. You adhere to the conditions, accept the remedy, 
 take it and you are cured!?* 
 
 If you wish, therefore, to test the truth of religion, act as if it 
 were true, and see if you are not strengthened and helped! 
 
 Under this course of instruction, the feeling of the truth of 
 religion began gradually to dawn upon the minds of the three 
 young Romanticists. At first it was very vague. 
 
 Yes [writes Adéodat], the truths developed in your letters give me a 
 sort of inward and spontaneous certitude; they seem to be gently inviting 
 me to admit them, and to rest in them from all the fatigue of my mind. 
 What is this certitude of which I am not certain, this certitude which 
 is sweet to my heart, rather than reassuring for my reason? 7° 
 
 Bautain replies that Adéodat’s certitude is vague “because your 
 inner eye is feeble, because you adhere to particular truths only 
 with reservations, because, free to admit the Word or to refuse it, 
 your reason hesitates.””°° 
 you will see more clearly. 
 
 Later the promised “vision of the truth” began to come to all 
 
 «¢ >] 
 
 the disciples; they began to “see” what at first they had only 
 tasted. 
 
 Believe more strongly, he urges, and 
 
 Truly [writes Eudore], there are instants when I feel myself as it 
 were pierced with beams of light, and then I suddenly perceive the 
 meaning of a word in the Gospel or one of your propositions, which I 
 had hitherto admitted by godt intime rather than with understanding. 
 . . . At each one of these illuminations, my horizon broadens. Another 
 
  Thid., 309-310. 8 rid. 299. 
 ™S rhid.. 287-288. 
 
 15 
 
gaz ‘ ‘THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 world unfolds itself to my gaze, and in the depths of my being there 
 is something like an increase of life and of ardor which is given to me.?°* 
 
 The “apologetics of the heart’? form the groundwork, then, of 
 Bautain’s novel art of persuasion. Without argument, but with 
 a reassuring air of conviction, he would prescribe certain passages 
 of Scripture and certain “propositions” for his neophytes to believe, 
 as a physician prescribes pellets for his patients to swallow, ordering 
 them to “taste and see” if they were not benefited. In this, he 
 was simply adopting the mode of procedure which Mlle. Humann 
 had followed in his own case. He recognized that the crucial 
 moment for him had come when he first set himself, at her sug- 
 gestion, to reading the Gospels, in a receptive mood; and he 
 summed up his whole experience in the words, “J’ai lu, Pai cru, 
 pa vu.”’> Tt would be unjust, however, to say that Bautain 
 relied solely on dogmatic assertions, whose truth was to be tested 
 only by their practical “workings” and their power to satisfy the 
 heart’s desires. The “‘workings” of ideas are theoretical as well 
 as practical; and a “‘true” idea must have not only the power to 
 satisfy the heart’s desire, but also the power to bind other ideas 
 into intelligible and rational systems. “The apologetics of the 
 heart must be supplemented by the apologetics of the intelligence, 
 if conviction is to be complete. 
 
 The Word divine, the principle of knowledge [he says] . . . is given 
 to us as an intelligible germ, as a mother-idea. By faith or by voluntary 
 adherence it is planted in our soul and pushes its roots down into that 
 soil; but as it goes down into the depths of the heart, it strives at the 
 same time to lift itself, to unfold itself in the mind; it strives to form 
 itself, ex-pose itself, and, so to speak, blossom out there in a multitude 
 of consequences which manifest all the truths it bore within it; and this 
 harmonious development, which constituted knowledge, gives us... 
 the proof and the consciousness of what we had already felt or tasted in 
 the depths of our being through the heart.*°° 
 
 What is the nature of these theoretical “consequences” which 
 give us the “proof” of the doctrine which we have already tested 
 by its practical fruits? To answer that question, one would have 
 
 Phil. Chr.y 11,294: ” Ens. Phil. F., 89-90. 
 * Ens. Phil. B., 625. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST ali 
 to give an exposition of Bautain’s whole system of philosophy; for 
 his whole philosophy is an extended effort to unfold the ‘‘multitude 
 of consequences” which ensue when the truth of religion is once 
 presupposed. We may sum up in a few words, however, the chief 
 and decisive “consequence,” which (Bautain thinks) constitutes a 
 triumphant and indisputable proof of the truth of religion: once 
 adopt the first principles of religion as the first principles of your 
 philosophy, and presto! the fragments of human knowledge, 
 hitherto so disjointed that the various sciences do not even constitute 
 a mechanism, begin to knit themselves marvellously together, until 
 presently there rises before your astonished gaze a veritable body 
 of human knowledge, all-inclusive, in which each truth is organi- 
 cally related to all others. 
 
 Modern science and modern philosophy, says Bautain, are in a 
 deplorable state of chaos. “The natural sciences refuse to deal with 
 anything but the visible, the corporeal, the ponderable; hence, 
 Bautain claims, they are “inadequate to their object.” 
 
 Whatever naturally comes into being is not only visible but invisible 
 too; it not only shows a corporeal surface, but also has a hidden substance; 
 it is not merely an effect, but bears within it something also of its cause, 
 whereby it is able to appear and endure.*'® 
 
 When the imponderables are thus ignored, there arises the 
 paradox of a biology which can tell us nothing about life, and a 
 psychology which knows no soul. Mathematics, on the other hand, 
 is adequate to its object; but this is just because the mathematical 
 object is a mental creation, which “neither exists nor lives, but is 
 abstractly thought out and defined in mere words.”*** Since 
 neither natural science nor mathematics is able to reach ultimate 
 reality, philosophy endeavors to fill in the breach. It takes for its 
 territory the realm of the “spiritual, moral, metaphysical’’**” 
 neglected by science and mathematics, yet somehow it manages to 
 
 realities 
 
 7° Gratry, de Methodis Scientiarum, 
 18. Of this essay of Gratry’s, the Men- 
 naisian says: “The parts of this disser- 
 tation which correspond to the paragraphs 
 which M. Bautain has expounded to us 
 represent almost word for word the 
 language of the celebrated professor. 
 
 The disciple has hardly troubled to do 
 more than to translate it into Latin.” 
 Ens. Phil. B., 641. 
 
 “1 Gratry, de Methodis Scientiarum, 
 18-19. 
 
 *2 Thid., 19. 
 
214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 err even more extravagantly than either of its rivals. One reason 
 for this is that philosophers, in trying to grasp the “spirit” of things, 
 neglect the form, too lightly scorning the aid of science and 
 mathematics.”** 
 
 They plunge at once into the secret places and recesses of things, and 
 pass by what is out in the open; they think they are scrutinizing the 
 forces and first principles of Nature, and meanwhile they disdain Nature’s 
 face and countenance. . . . Mathematical stability and strength—as it 
 were, the aid of a heavy armor—they reject; they are ignorant of the 
 changeless laws of natural forms.*** 
 
 There is, however, a more fundamental reason for their failure. 
 They forget that if God is To 6v, one must have experienced God 
 before one can talk about ultimate reality; and thus if they talk 
 about Him at all, they reduce Him to a rational entity, Aristotle’s 
 TO Tl YV Elvat. 
 
 And so, not having been fecundated by experience of the universal 
 Being, not having been enlightened by any intuition of simple Nature, 
 left to themselves alone between God and Nature, midway, as it were, 
 between heaven and earth, they lack both beginning and ending, soul 
 and body, . . . and meanwhile their naked mind goes about disporting 
 itself and raving madly.??° 
 
 Such being the cause of the chaos into which modern science and 
 philosophy have fallen, the task of Christian philosophy is plain: 
 on the one hand, it must found a new philosophy of Nature, in 
 which philosophic insight into the “spirit” of things shall be com- 
 bined with scientific respect for empirical facts and mathematical 
 respect for form and number; and on the other hand, it must 
 bring about a new marriage of philosophy and theology—or better, 
 a transfiguration of philosophy by religious experience. Thus will 
 be founded a truly universal sctence, in which theology and natural 
 science, instead of contending with one another, will confirm one 
 another. 
 
 We affirm [says Gratry, speaking for the “school of Strasbourg”] that 
 
 “8 This criticism is evidently levelled 714 Gratry, de Methodis Scientiarum, 
 against the Naturphilosophie of Schelling 20. 
 and other German Romanticists. pol {ie Ae AY: 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 215 
 
 true science will arise if man approaches God and Nature at once, and 
 takes his stand midway between things divine and things natural, below 
 God and above Nature, thus conceiving a science of the universe at once 
 theological, philosophical, and mathematical: in its first principle theo- 
 logical, in its evolution and spirit philosophical, in the exposition and 
 body of the doctrine, as it were, Mathematical—doctrinam e tribus 
 unam,?16 
 
 There evidently hovered before Bautain’s imagination, in his 
 earlier period, the dream of a vast new philosophical synthesis, in 
 which, as in the mediaeval synthesis, theology should once more be 
 harmonized with secular learning—with modern science and the 
 experimental method, this time, instead of with the learning of 
 the ancients, accepted on authority. For the details of this mag- 
 nificent programme of reconstruction—which, alas, remained only 
 a programme—we must go to a remarkable manuscript course of 
 Bautain’s, probably the one with which he opened his private class 
 at Mlle. Humann’s,?” 
 
 As we have seen, there are two main planks in Bautain’s platform 
 of reconstruction: the founding of a new Naturphilosophie through 
 the alliance of science, mathematics, and philosophy; and the 
 founding of a new metaphysics through the alliance of philosophy 
 and theology. 
 
 The first of these two planks is a bit vague. Sometimes it seems 
 as though Bautain were simply recommending that the natural 
 sciences should make use more frankly of philosophical concepts like 
 “life” and ‘the soul,” and that philosophy, in turn, should be 
 sobered and checked in its wild flights of speculation by a more 
 careful attention to the empirical data of the quantitative sciences. 
 That this is part of his meaning must be evident from passages 
 
 like the following: 
 
 The great means and the only means of harmonizing philosophical 
 doctrines, or rather, rescuing philosophy herself from the sway of arbi- 
 trariness and of scientific prejudices is to restore the natural spirit to the 
 natural form, philosophy to mathematics. . . . It is to admit as philo- 
 sophical Ideas only such as find their ideal really and objectively existing 
 in Nature, and as laws of Nature, only such as demonstrate themselves 
 
 ong LIP ae ly ™ Philosophie, Théologique et Mathé- 
 matique, (1823-24), FB,V10. 
 
216 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 by the laws and the pure forms of mathematics; it is to insist no longer 
 on considering circle and circumference, spirit, and body, time and 
 space, number and figure separately, and as if each subsisted by itself 
 apart, but to see them together, as identical, always united, and main- 
 tained in their union by the /ife.?"* 
 
 Philosophy would then acquire what it cannot have of itself: objective 
 certitude, natural form; .. . and its form would be the living and 
 objective demonstration of itself, and of the truth of its spirit. Then, 
 and only then, would there be no more philosophical schisms, no more 
 French, German, Scotch philosophy, etc., but a single philosophy, as 
 unified and general as Nature, the object of philosophy, is general and 
 unified. . . . Then would the empty and inert forms of science, re- 
 animated by the spirit, and the latter fixed and determined by the form— 
 then would philosophy, reunited with mathematics, no longer be a system 
 of fluctuating and uncertain opinions, . . . and mathematics, reunited 
 with philosophy, resuscitated by it, would no longer be a doctrine sterile 
 for the intelligence, a rational anatomy, operating only on dead bodies, 
 a system of dead letters, killing the spirit, smothering genius, withering 
 and petrifying the soul.?!® 
 
 Here the term “mathematics” seems to be almost equivalent to 
 “quantitative science.” Elsewhere, however, it is used in a defin- 
 itely Pythagorean sense. Bautain regrets that we do not “still 
 see, with Pythagoras, the expression of the laws of the universe 
 in the law of numbers, and, with Plato, the order of generations 
 or of genesis in the principles of geometry.”*”° 
 
 It is impossible to tell which of these two meanings was really 
 uppermost in Bautain’s mind; for he seems to have confused them 
 inextricably, and he never worked out their full implications him- 
 self. His pupils, however, did take the matter up. In the strange 
 manuscript remains which the Abbé Carl left behind him at Juilly 
 there may be seen the reductio ad absurdum of the Pythagorean 
 strain in Bautain’s thinking—page after page of mystic numbers 
 and figures, mingled with Cabalistic lore, derived perhaps from 
 the Jewish members of the band. In the works of Father Gratry, 
 on the other hand, we see a persistent and often fruitful attempt 
 to make a “‘heavy armor” for philosophy by the patient cultivation 
 of natural science and the higher mathematics. It is perhaps in 
 Gratry’s astronomical and physiological speculations, and his bril- 
 
 8 Op. cit., §§ 24-25. = Thid., $ 10. 
 ™® Tbid., §§ 11-12. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST (AV 
 
 liant if specious application of the infinitesimal calculus to the 
 
 elucidation of religious concepts, that this first step in Bautain’s 
 
 program is best realized.”*? 
 
 But the union of philosophy with mathematics is only half of 
 the grand restoration of human knowledge which Bautain proposes; 
 the other half is the union of philosophy with theology. ‘The 
 philosophy of nature in its completed form is at best connaissance, 
 and not science; it presents nature to us as a unified mechanism, 
 not yet as a living organism. 
 
 To mechanize the dead letter by reuniting philosophical] spirit with 
 mathematical forms, to determine and stabilize that spirit by giving it 
 back its basis or its body, is much; it is everything for the science of the 
 world, and all that pertains to the temporal order; but it is not all that 
 man demands for his happiness. . . . He must have a science which 
 shall be not only mechanism, identification of spirit with form, but 
 
 . . organism, living development—a vital, fecund, and fecundating 
 science. . . . Like the universe, like man, and like nature, of which it 
 is to be the science and the doctrine, it must have warmth and life at 
 its center, it must be luminous in its development, and constant, clear, 
 harmonious in its forms; and, as the center . . . always is before the 
 radius, before the circle and the circumference, as Being and center are 
 the absolute conditions of form and existence, so too the doctrine of pure 
 and universal Being, with the doctrine of genesis, or the laws of genera- 
 tion, must constitute the basis, the foundation, the point of departure of 
 philosophic teaching. In fine, this teaching, in order to be true, legiti- 
 mate, and vital, and to answer to the triple need of man, must be as 
 profoundly religious or theological as it is rigorously mathematical.??? 
 
 The necessity of a union of theology and philosophy springs from 
 the fact that the idea of Being, the capstone of every philosophical 
 system, without which it falls to pieces, or becomes a mere 
 mechanism, is accessible only through religious experience. Like 
 all the other ideas, it is innate; but it must be awakened from its 
 state of potentiality by contact with its divine original. 
 have never opened their souls to that celestial touch; they are totally 
 
 Some men 
 
 * Passages like the following would 
 indicate that Bautain intended to do what 
 Gratry did: “Since the method of ob- 
 servation and experiment has been intro- 
 duced into philosophy . . . philosophy 
 finds herself . . . in commerce with all 
 the other sciences; now, they all have 
 
 been rejuvenated in their methodology; 
 hence, she must proceed and speak like 
 them if she wishes to have life and be 
 appreciated. She must observe, experi- 
 ment, examine.” FB,H17, verso. 
 
 22 Philosophie, Théologique et Mathé- 
 matique, §§ 18-19. 
 
218 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 incapacitated for philosophy. Others—and this applies to most of 
 us—have “forgotten” the idea, and need to “recollect” it. This 
 is the true meaning of Platonic reminiscence. 
 
 What causes forgetfulness of the idea? The perversion of the eye 
 of the soul, the swerving of its visual ray or glance from the ideal, the 
 breaking of the relation between subject and object, whence results the 
 absence of the latter as far as the former is concerned. What causes 
 reminiscence? ‘The traces or substantial vestiges which the ideal had 
 posited in the mind, and which, although overlaid, . . . nevertheless 
 subsist in being, in essence, and in potentiality, and can be reawakened 
 in the understanding where they have been posited. How return to 
 the idea? By purging the mind of gross and terrestrial images, by 
 lifting the glance toward the superior region, by putting oneself again in 
 the presence of and e” rapport with real or intelligible objects, by re- 
 turning from forms to Beauty, from spirit to the Truth, from existence 
 to Being, to Love, to Goodness, to God.?** 
 
 It is evident that the “theology” which Bautain proposes to unite 
 with, and make the basis of philosophy is not what one usually 
 understands by the term. It is not a body of doctrine, but an 
 inward experience: “experimental theology,” as Bautain calls it; 
 “sentimental theology,” as the Mennaisian nicknames it; “mystic 
 theology,” as the Church commonly calls it. What Bautain pro- 
 poses to do is not to lay down dogmatically the whole body of 
 Christian theology in its integrity, and then prove its truth by 
 showing the correspondence between theology and secular philoso- 
 phy, as St. Thomas had done. No, his attitude toward theology as 
 it stands is quite revolutionary: he proposes 
 
 to free the fundamental dogmas of Christianity—for Christianity contains 
 all truth—to free its dogmas of all scholastic subtlety, of every historical 
 addition, of everything that the speculative reason, depending always 
 necessarily on the senses, on times, places, and circumstances, has added 
 to it, and to offer these profound dogmas to simple faith, which is the 
 condition size gua non of all knowledge.?** 
 
 In other words, he proposes to do what modern Protestant 
 theology has been attempting to do, ever since Schleiermacher: to 
 get behind rational theology to the religious experience from which 
 
 *® Philosophie, Théologique et Mathé- 74 Thid., § 26. 
 matique, § 6, note. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 29 
 
 it sprang, and from which it borrows such validity as it possesses. 
 What he asks of the philosopher, as a necessary condition of all 
 philosophizing, is not to accept all the dogmas of theology, but to 
 experience God. In this attempt to subject theology to the test of 
 experience, he is undoubtedly unorthodox, from the Catholic point 
 of view; but it should be noted that all the great mystics, many 
 of whom are revered as saints in the Catholic Church, exhibit a 
 similar tendency to reduce theology to lowest terms, and to appeal 
 from doctrine to experience. 
 
 But if philosophy is to be merged on the one hand with mathe- 
 matics and natural science, and on the other hand with experimental 
 theology, what place is left for philosophy itself? Well, the réle 
 of philosophy in Bautain’s synthesis of human knowledge is a 
 mediatorial, harmonizing réle. Philosophy is to concern itself with 
 bridging the gap between the visible and the invisible, between the 
 finite and the infinite; it is to show how Being issues from itself 
 and becomes existence, how the Eternal becomes subject to the 
 forms of time and space. It is the “historical or genetic part” of 
 universal knowledge.**® Standing between God and Nature, and 
 taking for its peculiar province the science of Man, it is to show 
 how Man and Nature issued from God; it is furthermore to point 
 out the myriad analogies which testify to the organic unity of 
 all reality, and which link theology, psychology, and natural science 
 together into a system in which each corroborates and is corroborated 
 by the others. There would be three grand sections in this great 
 corpus scientiarum: 
 
 Inward feeling, taste for Being, or experimental theology; science of 
 the existences and of their generation, or analytical philosophy; and 
 science of the pure forms, or transcendental mathematics. These [says 
 Bautain] might be called its soul, its mind, and its body; together they 
 would form a truly orgamic system, in which the mathematical forms 
 would be to the philosophy of nature what the body is to the mind, the 
 form to the life, space to time, the determinant to the indeterminate; 
 and in which the philosophy of nature would be to sacred ontology what 
 the mind is to the soul or to the will, or the life to its foyer, what the 
 circle is to the center, the indefinite to the infinite, the terminus to 
 eternity.?”° 
 
 8 Thid. =r BVO, . Sue 
 
220 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 From the organic interrelation of all knowledge there follows 
 a most important consequence: the legitimacy of the analogical 
 
 method. 
 { 
 
 If creature and nature form a harmonic whole, a single organism, 
 which we call the world or the universe, science also [argues Bautain] 
 
 . is not and cannot be other than unified; and if each part of the 
 organism is for the whole, comprehended in the whole, in living relation 
 with the whole, and with each constitutive part thereof, the science of 
 each part also must be . . . in organic and analogical relation with the 
 whole, and with each particular science.**’ 
 
 Or, as the Mennaisian puts it: 
 
 The fundamental axiom of his metaphysics is that all beings, all, 
 existences, obey a common law. Each existence presupposes a being 
 whence it issued, and each being presupposes an original Being... . 
 Since the same law rules all that exists, it is clear that whatever is 
 demonstrated of one existence will be demonstrated of all existence.** 
 
 If, therefore, the law of the whole is the law of each part, 
 then the laws of the divine or ultimately real world will find 
 themselves more or less clearly exemplified throughout the whole 
 creation. ‘Theological truths will find themselves corroborated by 
 analogies from the natural sciences, and these analogies will in 
 turn cast light upon theology. 
 
 Visible things declare the invisible, and the facts of nature declare the 
 law of man. There is in physical nature nothing indifferent, nothing 
 arbitrary or fortuitous; everywhere, on the contrary, a deep meaning, 
 a hidden reason. This inferior nature is but the veil of a higher Nature, 
 whose brilliance pierces still through the thickness of the veil. And so 
 the history of natural things, well written, is but a Symbolism.?” 
 
 The dangers of this method are evident; and it cannot be said 
 that Bautain escapes them. On the one hand, he verges on the 
 grotesque in his detailed exegesis of the divine symbolism of Nature. 
 The Trinity is reflected everywhere; every object, for example, 
 must have at least three legs on which to stand! The Cross is 
 
 = FB,V10, § 6. * Variétés, 5. 
 *3 Ens. Phil. B., 596. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 221 
 
 the foundation of every existence; for every vital center, as it 
 begins to polarize, traces first an upright line, and then a transverse 
 line! “Par exemple!” exclaims the Mennaisian, after reciting a 
 few of these enormities, ““Will he show us the existence and 
 necessity of the seven sacraments in the seven stars of the Great 
 Bear!”**° And on the other hand, Bautain’s science is apt to 
 intrude into his theology as mischievously as his theology into his 
 science—mischievously, at any rate, from the point of view of 
 orthodoxy. One of his critics cleverly paraphrases his teaching 
 as follows: 
 
 The visible world is a tracing, a photographic proof of the invisible 
 world. . . . If, therefore, we wish to know the world of spirits, let us 
 go search Nature and its laws; let us proceed from the known to the 
 unknown. ‘This axiom being well fixed in the earth like a solid land- 
 mark, the work of the philosopher is simplified: . . . placed between 
 Nature and Revelation, he has only to apply the laws of the one to the 
 dogmas of the other, and conciliate the natural order with the super- 
 natural order by means of science.?*? 
 
 The critic mistakes the real order of Bautain’s argument: he 
 proceeds, not from the visible to the invisible, but from the in- 
 visible to the visible; if the visible world is a “photographic proof” 
 of the invisible, it is a very bad likeness, for the world as it exists 
 is a degenerate world. What is true of God must be true, in 
 some sense, of phenomena, while what is true of phenomena may 
 not be true at all of God; for the validity of science is purely 
 relative, while the validity of theology is absolute. Nevertheless, 
 it is undoubtedly true that the scientific analogies by which Bautain 
 seeks to show the universality of theological verities, tend to exert 
 a rationalizing influence upon his theology. 
 
 Whatever its dangers, the analogical method is fundamental to 
 Bautain’s apologetics. Analogies are not proofs, he fully admits; 
 but he is not trying to prove anything. He is merely trying, as 
 he puts it, “to conciliate the dignity of the intelligence which de- 
 mands ideas and knowledge with the cry of the heart which calls 
 for faith,” and so make it possible for men of science to “justify 
 
 ™ Ens. Phil. B., 627. *! Quoted in Campaux, Le philosophe 
 de Strasbourg, 36-40. 
 
aoe THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 their faith in the eyes of their mind, and confirm their beliefs by 
 their knowledge.”*** He is trying to smooth the path of those who 
 would like to believe, but are impeded by intellectual difficulties. 
 Knowing that theology is full of stumbling-blocks for the secular 
 mind, he seeks to recommend its dogmas indirectly, by analogies 
 and illustrations drawn from more familiar fields. 
 
 You cannot set up the dogmatic formula authoritatively [he admits] ; 
 it would not be received. Well, if the direct way is not open, if you 
 cannot go straight up to the principle to deduce the science rigorously 
 from it, if your auditors cannot seize the truth in its abstruse forms, in 
 its pure and dogmatic expression, present it in its less elevated applica- 
 tions, in forms nearer to them. Well, what is there nearer to man than 
 himself? . . . What speaks more vividly to his mind than the facts of 
 nature. It is therefore in these two ways and under these two forms 
 that the types of the prototypes, the plainest developments of the idea, 
 must be sought.*3* 
 
 Arguments based upon psychology and upon the study of the 
 realm of animate Nature thus form the core of Bautain’s “apolo- 
 getics of the intelligence.” In both of these realms, his procedure 
 is to set forth a transcendental idea, and then justify it by showing 
 its application to empirical facts. In psychology, he first sets forth 
 the theological idea of man, “indicating the principle, the purpose, 
 and the reason of his existence in this world, with his law which 
 is that of a free but not independent being.”*** Then, like Pascal, 
 he writes a moral psychology designed to make plausible the theory 
 that man has fallen from a high estate, and is destined to return 
 to it, stressing man’s hunger for the Infinite, his dependent and 
 subject state, and his limited spontaneity, which opens the way for 
 true freedom and true peace, found only in submission to a higher 
 Will. In dealing with animate nature, Bautain starts with the 
 theological idea that Nature is the product of a degradation of 
 spirit even profounder than that involved in the fall of man. 
 Hence Nature can only be understood in terms of spirit as we find 
 it in man—“spirit bursting out at all points through imprisoning 
 matter”—just as man can only be understood in terms of Spint 
 as we find it in God. In Nature, he says, 
 
 2 Ens. Phil. F., \xvi. 4 Thid., 41. 
 8 Réflexions, 39-40. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 2215 
 
 the intelligence . . . perceives as it were a second resplendissement of 
 the glory of the Eternal, refracted in a prism less pure, and manifesting 
 itself in more nuanced and duller hues. The science of nature will 
 therefore be to that of man what the science of man will be to that of 
 
 God.235 
 Thus, he concludes, the inquirer will be led 
 
 by the science of man and nature to the idea of the dogma which rules 
 nature and man, and which expresses metaphysically, ideally, what is 
 realized in the life of each. . . . Such was the practise of Origen and 
 the doctors of Alexandria in their learned catéchéses,; where human 
 knowledge served as a step to lift oneself to the intelligence of divine 
 truths, where Christian philosophy, starting from faith and the idea, led 
 to gnosis?®® and praxis.?*" 
 
 But suppose that the inquirer does not respond to this treatment. 
 Suppose he remains cold to the appeal of the Gospel, and, unsatis- 
 fied by your loose analogies and “developments of the idea,” 
 demands an iron-clad logical proof. Ought you not to attempt to 
 comply with his demand? No! answers Bautain. 
 
 Theology forgets her dignity and her celestial origin, she degrades 
 herself, every time she enters the lists and combats with the reason. 
 “Can you believe? ”—that is her first condition, and not “Can you under- 
 stand, discuss, and argue.” . . . “We announce to you,” says the Apostle 
 —not “We prove to you,” but—“‘We announce to you the Word of 
 Life.”?238 
 
 You may indeed reason with the unbeliever at the start, to convince 
 him that his @ priori rational objections are inconclusive; but when 
 all such obstacles are destroyed, you must cease to argue, and leave 
 the Word of God to convince him by its own power. 
 
 After that, what? Supposing the inquirer is still recalcitrant? 
 
 In truth [answers Bautain] I shall do nothing with him if the light 
 of the word does not penetrate within him. His is precisely the case 
 of the blind man who remains in darkness at high noon. . . . It is a 
 great illusion to believe that there is an infallible means of convincing 
 
 5 Pins. Phil. F., 94. 87 Réflexions, 41-45. 
 *® Science is frequently used by Bau- © FB. Vi10,8 223. 
 tain in a sense exactly equivalent to 
 
 YvQ@Otc. 
 
224 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 men, that it is enough to apply this means in order to change them over, 
 enough to present this supposed Criterion in order to compel their assent. 
 Things do not work that way in reality. Man often resists the most 
 evident truth in the most deplorable manner. ‘“The light shone in the 
 darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”?*° 
 
 There are, generally speaking, two main stages in the traditional 
 Christian apologetics. In the first stage, one attempts to prove the 
 validity of certain beliefs common to all or most religions; one 
 argues for the existence of God, the possibility of a future life, 
 etc. In the second stage, one attempts to prove that Chnistianity 
 is the religion, and that the Christian “revelation,” as presented 
 in the Scriptures, or in Scripture and tradition as interpreted by 
 the Church, bears the earmarks of divine origin and hence must 
 be infallible. It will help us to appreciate the originality of 
 Bautain’s apologetics if, in closing our account of it, we deal 
 specifically with his argument for the existence of God, and his 
 argument for the truth of the Christian revelation. 
 
 In the eighteenth century, the favorite arguments for the ex- 
 istence of God had been arguments from external Nature, the 
 cosmological and teleological arguments. For reasons that we 
 have already hinted at, Bautain rejects both of them. It is im- 
 possible to conclude from the finite to the infinite; hence the 
 cosmological argument is inconclusive. If one may trace in Nature 
 certain tendencies which look like the working of a benevolent 
 Creator, one may also trace quite contrary tendencies; hence the 
 teleological argument is inconclusive. The former leads logically 
 to pantheism or deism; the latter, to Manichaean dualism. Neither 
 of them proves the existence of the kind of God the religious 
 consciousness demands. Neither of them is really convincing ex- 
 cept to those who believe in God already, “those who have a living 
 faith in their heart.” It is to such alone that “the heavens declare 
 the glory of God’; as for those who are “destitute of faith and 
 charity,” Bautain is inclined to think that it is folly to “give them, 
 as proofs, nothing but the course of the moon and the planets.” 
 “Far from carrying them with you by this means, in no wise, on 
 the contrary, are you more likely to repel them .. . than by 
 
 attempting to convince them by this sort of reasoning.””*° 
 
 *° 2nd Letter to Ferry, FB,K, Cahier 9 Avertissement, Q. 1. 
 ees: 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 225 
 
 The fallacy of both these arguments, as he repeatedly points 
 out, 1s to try to arrive at the Christian God in two leaps, first 
 proving the existence of a great First Cause or a great Something- 
 or-other, an X-God without personal characteristics or attributes, 
 useful only to explain certain natural phenomena, and then sur- 
 reptitiously clothing this rational entity with qualities without which 
 it is unfit to worship, but which cannot be logically deduced from 
 the original argument. ‘The question of God’s existence should 
 not thus be separated from the question of his attributes: “Truly 
 we do not see how the existence of the Infinite can be conceived 
 in abstracto. . . . Existence considered . . . apart from life, is 
 only a logical entity, to which no truth, no reality, corresponds. 
 It is an idol the reason makes for itself.*** 
 
 The condemnation that Bautain pronounces upon the cosmo- 
 logical and teleological arguments does not fall with equal force 
 upon the other traditional arguments, the ontological, psychological, 
 and moral arguments. 
 
 The ontological argument, as stated by Bautain, is as follows: 
 
 { 
 Every man who has heard the name of God, who has understood the 
 meaning of this sacred name, and who has not rejected it, believes in 
 God; he believes in Him even if he imagines he does not believe in 
 Him; he believes in Him in spite of his negation. God is Being; .. . 
 he is He who Is; and the idea of Being is the fundamental idea, the 
 mother-idea of the human understanding, without which it would be 
 incapable of conceiving any existence. So it is only the fool who can 
 say: God (Being) is not. What good will your reasoning do... if 
 it is addressed to a fool who lacks the Absolute Major Premise of all 
 reasoning, or who denies it with his will, in his heart? *4? 
 
 By itself, however, the ontological argument is insufficient. It is, 
 in fact, platitudinous. That Being is, that there is an ‘Absolute 
 Major Premise,” no one can deny; what Being is, is a totally 
 different question. Man knows that some Absolute Being exists, 
 but “he does not know where Being manifests itself in its truth, 
 where one must look for it, where one may find it in its purity, 
 whether it exists everywhere or nowhere for man.”*** His inde- 
 cision is resolved by no amount of observation of external nature; 
 
 * Ibid. ™ FB,V3, § 6. 
 2 Letter on Common Sense, 646-647. 
 
226 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 it vanishes only when he begins to observe his own inner nature— 
 when he combines the ontological argument with the psychological 
 and moral arguments, in a very special form. 
 
 Every man [says Bautain] bears in his deepest nature the idea of 
 Being, but not every man has the philosophical consciousness of that idea; 
 not every man knows or understands that God is the Absolute Being 
 and that there is a necessary, permanent, and indestructible relation 
 between God and the human soul—that it is only there, in the inner 
 nature or in his interior sanctum, that there is found the truly irrefutable 
 proof, theoretical and moral, of the Absolute, independent Being. Hence 
 he goes out to seek this proof in the external world, or in his secondary 
 faculties, and, seeking it where it is not, and not finding it, he remains, 
 not in doubt about the truth of Being, since he himself says, “I am,’’ but 
 in vagueness concerning the where and the how of the manifestation of 
 Being. He knows not where to seek for God, or what to do with the 
 
 idea of God which has its seat in his soul, and which he cannot dislodge 
 (abstraire ).**4 
 
 The existence of the idea of Being in man—this is, according 
 to Bautain, the only conclusive proof of the existence of God. 
 Sometimes his argument seems to be simply that the presence of 
 the word God and the verb to be in human language, or their 
 presence as thoughts in men’s minds, is totally incomprehensible 
 unless man has really at some time come in contact with a Reality 
 to which they correspond. Sometimes the argument is that in 
 saying I am, the Ego simultaneously affirms the existence of an 
 Absolute Alter; for I am implies I have not always been, which in 
 turn, says Bautain, implies that “I am not therefore of myself, 
 by myself! An Other than myself made me to be and makes 
 me to exist.””?*° 
 
 These arguments, however, are accessory to Bautain’s main 
 argument. ‘To understand this main argument, we must remind 
 ourselves that an idea, to Bautain, is not a rational concept but an 
 innate capacity, an organic craving or need; that all such ideas are 
 correlative to eternal ideals, which alone satisfy their craving; and 
 that the truth of any given rational notion is tested by its capacity 
 to meet the need which the idea embodies. Now the idea of Being 
 or “the subjective capacity to receive the virtue of Being,”**® is 
 the Idea of Ideas, the Form of Forms. 
 
 ~~ PRY 3 ae ee ee Ibsd,,. 9. 15. 46 Thid., § 3. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 227 
 
 It is identical [says Bautain] with the soul, the type or image of the 
 Principle of all things. In its root it is the soul itself, the form divine. 
 In its development, it is the soul reflecting itself in its understanding or 
 
 . it is the inward affirmation of the Ego under the pressure (actioz) 
 of the Non-Ego; that is to say, the conscience.7** 
 
 Conscience, then, or man’s need of God, is the great proof of 
 the existence of God. 
 
 This need [says Bautain] testifies to the existence of a fundamental 
 relation between the Truth and him, and there is in his comscience a 
 truly primitive fact which proves it. It is in this fact... that the 
 point of contact and union between the terrestrial and celestial worlds 
 is found. ‘That is what constitutes the irrefutable proof of the existence 
 of God—so laboriously searched for in inferior nature and in the laws 
 of the reason—the profoundest proof of the relation between God 
 and, man.2** 
 
 ““God must exist, because I need Him so”: in these words 
 Bautain’s argument for the existence of God might be summed up. 
 Otherwise stated, the argument is that the idea of God is true 
 because it 1s good, because it helps and satisfies. Truly, there was 
 never a bolder pragmatism than this! Yet we have here no mere 
 blind determination to “believe what I wish to believe, because I 
 wish to believe it.” Neither have we that form of pragmatism 
 which would say that the utility of the idea of God constitutes its 
 truth. No, for Bautain, the appeal to the heart presupposes a 
 rational argument: the Universe formed me; whatever, therefore, 
 belongs to my deepest nature was imprinted there by something in 
 the Universe; I find in myself a craving for ultimates and abso- 
 lutes; there is therefore Something in the Universe which gave me 
 this craving, and which, I hope, will satisfy it. “The argument 
 might perhaps be compared with a form of theistic argument 
 popularized recently by John Fiske, who deduced it from Darwin- 
 ism. I find it succinctly stated in a recent book of Rufus Jones, 
 the Quaker philosopher: 
 
 A subjective need always carries an implication of an objective stimulus 
 which has provoked the need. There is no hunger, as Fiske has well 
 
 shown, for anything not tasted; there is no search for anything which 
 
 47 Thid., § 5. * Psych. Exp., I, 70. 
 
 16 
 
228 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 is not in the environment, for the environment has always produced the 
 appetite. So this native need of the soul [for ideal companionship] 
 arose out of the divine origin of the soul, and it has steadily verified 
 itself asa )safe guide. to reality yyy, 
 
 What is at first a vague life-activity and spontaneous out-reach of 
 inward energy—a feeling after companionship—remains in many persons 
 vague to the end. But in others it frequently rises to a definite con- 
 sciousness of a personal Presence; and there comes back into the soul 
 a compelling evidence of a real Other Self who meets all the Soul’s 
 need. . . . Nobody who has learned to pray in this deeper way and 
 whose prayer is a prayer of communion and fellowship, wants logical 
 argument for the existence of God. Such a want implies a fall from 
 a higher to a lower level. It is like a demand for proof of the beauty 
 one feels, or an evidence of love other than the evidence of its existence.?*” 
 
 One perceives that behind the pragmatism of Jones’s argument, 
 there is mysticism. It is so also with Bautain. Mysticism, not 
 pragmatism, is always his last word. He does not ultimately rest 
 his case upon the fact that we need God, but upon the fact that we 
 can see God. He does not merely assume and postulate a God to 
 meet his need; he claims to have met Him, and found in Him the 
 complete satisfaction of all his desires. Arguments from Nature, 
 arguments from the moral life, may help a man to find God; but 
 in the last resort he must meet and see Him for himself. He 
 must expose himself to the direct rays of the divine light, and 
 “receive the radiation of Being, as the well-exposed vine receives 
 the radiations of the sun.” Then all doubt will vanish. The 
 man who has seen God needs no further argument. 
 
 Bautain’s method of proving the divinity of the Christian revela- 
 tion is just as original as his method of proving the existence of 
 God. He puts prophecy, miracle, and historical testimony in quite 
 a secondary place, denying the possibility of basing a case on such 
 evidence; and he appeals directly to the faith-awakening power of 
 the Book which contains the revelation, and the Church which 
 announces it—a power due to the perfect correspondence between 
 the Gospel and the soul’s need. If the divine is, by definition, 
 what answers completely to the soul’s need, then the Gospel, which 
 perfectly passes that test, is necessarily divine. 
 
 *? Rufus Jones, The Double Search. © FBV10, § 3, note. 
 Phil., 1906, 101-106. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 229 
 
 Not Hume himself was more radical than Bautain in his attack 
 upon the validity of the old apologetics based on miracle and 
 buttressed with historical criticism. It may be worth while to 
 review his discussion with the Bishop on this point: 
 
 Do you think [asked the Bishop] that the Mosaic Revelation is not 
 proved with certitude by the oral and written Tradition of the Synagogue 
 and Christianity? 
 
 The Mosaic Revelation [answered Bautain] presents two orders of 
 truths: truths of fact (for it is the history of a nation) and divine 
 truths. [Reason may establish the authenticity of the facts, he admits, 
 but] as for the divine truth or the divinity of this revelation, it is from 
 the start an object of faith, like all that is divine, and you will never 
 prove by reasoning alone to a man of reason without faith, that a book 
 written by the hand of a man is a divine authority for all men. . . .7°? 
 
 I will ask you [returned the Bishop] if the proof drawn from the 
 miracles of Jesus Christ, sensible and striking for the eye-witnesses, has 
 lost its force with its brilliancy for subsequent generations? 
 
 It will never lose any of its force [replied Bautain, in part] or its 
 striking quality for delievers. . . . But we are not concerned with the 
 believer. . . . We are concerned with learned pagans, with unbelievers, 
 with deists. Now, how shall one prove the divinity of Jesus Christ and 
 of his Gospel /ogically and by the sole authority of the reason to such 
 ment By the miracles, does some one say? And the miracles—what 
 guarantee will you give of their truth? The Gospel account and the 
 testimony of the Apostles, who were “neither deceivers nor deceived?” 
 . . . Will they not have a right to say to you at the very start that you 
 are begging the question, that you are turning in a circle, the truth of 
 the Gospel revelation which announces the miracles not being susceptible 
 of being rationally proved by the miracles—and besides, in establishing 
 that the Apostles, who were mem, could neither err nor deceive, you 
 suppose a fact just as extraordinary as the very miracles they recount.”°? 
 
 Can you expect an unbeliever [asked the Bishop] to admit the 
 Resurrection of our divine Saviour, before providing him with certain 
 proofs of it? And are not these proofs deduced from reasoning? 
 
 No [replied Bautain]. I shall not expect an unbeliever to admit on 
 my word, however well reasoned, the truth of the Resurrection of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. I shall not even try to prove it to him rationally, 
 sure in advance that he would listen to me only with indifference, if 
 not with disgust. . . . What leads men to believe in Jesus Christ, Saviour 
 of men, is the humility of the heart as opposed to the exaltation of the 
 mind and the pretensions of the reason which thinks to be sel f-sufficient.2°2 
 
 an. Avertissement, Q. 2. ee bed .50 O04: 
 nr dbides OL 3. 
 
230 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Such expressions as these led many to suppose that Bautain did 
 not believe in miracles at all. Three passages in his early essay, 
 “The ethics of the Gospel compared with the ethics of the philoso- 
 phers,” seemed especially shocking, and were exhibited by his critics 
 as a justification for accusing him of heresy: 
 
 It is impossible for us to distinguish true miracles from purely natural 
 Pacis aca 
 
 But the miracles of Jesus, those cures contrary to the laws of nature! 
 . . . Well, the miracles were sudden deliverances; they had as their 
 purpose the alleviating of human woes, and Jesus came to earth for no 
 other end than to heal... . 
 
 When human science shall have explained to us what nature is; when 
 it shall have marked the point up to which its forces and its laws may 
 extend, we may judge whether the extraordinary facts which we designate 
 by the name of miracles are repugnant to the general order, out of line 
 with the common laws, or whether they are not perhaps more outbreaking 
 (éclatante) manifestations, more energetic developments of them.?*4 
 
 Bautain was of course indignant at the accusation that he did 
 not believe in miracles; it seems indeed a rather ridiculous accusa- 
 tion, when one considers his occultistic tendencies. I doubt if 
 there is a single miracle reported in the Bible or in the lives of 
 the saints which he would have found it impossible, @ priori, to 
 believe in. It is plain, however, that, in view of his doctrine of 
 the strict organic unity of all creation, and the parallelism between 
 natural and spiritual law, it was impossible for him to look upon 
 miracles as infringements of the universal laws of nature. ‘“‘We 
 are not inclined to believe, with many theologians,” he says, “that 
 they are suspensions or derogations of the laws of nature, which 
 seems to us to imply a contradiction.”*’? Wherever the Romantic 
 view of the universe as an organism penetrates, the same attitude 
 toward miracles is found; for Romanticism always breaks down 
 the dualism between the natural and the supernatural, and makes 
 the latter appear as the perfection, not the contrary, of the former. 
 To the Romanticist, the signs of the divine are not inexplicability, 
 arbitrariness, and lawlessness; rather the divine is that which alone 
 
 v0 
 
 *54 Mor. Ev. P., 68. °° FB,H, 17, verso. 
 
BAUTAIN AS VOLUNTARIST 23 
 
 ®° Bautain is a true Romanticist at 
 
 makes nature comprehensible.” 
 this point; he believes in miracles unreservedly, but not in mmracle, 
 in the old sense. 
 
 The way of the apologist is hard; and that of the Catholic 
 apologist is particularly hard. As he sallies forth to convert the 
 infidel, he is conscious that there are certain well-marked limits 
 beyond which he cannot go without being disowned by the faith 
 which he represents. “Chere are certain formulae which he cannot 
 alter, certain admissions which he must not make. Like a diplomat 
 at a peace conference, he may fail in either of two ways: by 
 granting too little, or by granting too much. In the first case he 
 fails to break down the antagonism of the adversary; in the second, 
 he fails to get his terms of capitulation ratified at home. Speaking 
 as a rank outsider, I should say that the Catholic apologist of the 
 traditional type fails for the first of these two reasons. He grants 
 too little. He keeps himself so safely intrenched within traditional 
 phraseology that, while he satisfies his brethren concerning his 
 orthodoxy, and gives them the sense that the faith is being ably 
 defended, he does not even interest the unbeliever, much _ less 
 convert him. ‘This, after all, is the more abject failure of the 
 two. Why write an apology at all, if it convinces no one but 
 yourself? It is to Bautain’s lasting credit that he failed in the 
 second way, and not in the first. Whatever the weaknesses and 
 dangers of his apologetics—and they are many—he did at least 
 make an honest and more or less successful effort to do what 
 every real apologist must do: put himself in the place of the 
 unbeliever, face his difficulties as if they were his own, and find 
 a solution for them which is at least comprehensible to the unbe- 
 liever, because phrased in his language. I defy any non-Catholic 
 to read extensively in Bautain without saying to himself, “Well, 
 at any rate, he makes Catholicism intelligible to me. If I could 
 be converted to Catholicism, it would be by that sort of argument!” 
 
 One cannot help wondering why the Church should prefer the 
 apologist who merely defends the faith, to the apologist who really 
 
 *8 This explains why the “New The- which the “Old Theology” still clings. 
 ology” in Protestant circles, which has Cf. Horace Bushnell’s position in Nature 
 Romanticist antecedents, tends to mini- and the Supernatural with Franz Baader’s 
 mize the apologetic value of miracles, to “relative supernaturalism.” 
 
232 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 propagates the faith—even if, in the heat of his passion for souls, 
 he is occasionally guilty of stating old doctrines in novel and 
 unconventional terms. One cannot help regretting the fact that, 
 not only in Bautain’s day but in more recent years,’*’ the traditional 
 apologetic, cold and unconvincing, has always succeeded in crush- 
 ing out every attempt to present Catholicism in a form acceptable 
 to the modern man. One cannot help sympathizing with the 
 reproach which one of Bautain’s half-converted followers addressed 
 to the upholders of the old apologetics: 
 
 We had asked [he writes] whether they intended to go on preaching 
 to unlistening ears, following a method which convinced no one and 
 persuaded no one. . . . We had invited the reactionary clergy to mingle 
 a bit more in our life of anguish and misery; and they did not under- 
 stand what we meant by that. And, for a fact, have the partisans of 
 scholasticism—of that method which expresses itself practically in hard- 
 _ness of heart—have they ever, in imagination, stretched themselves upon 
 the cross of doubt, and thence directed an understanding glance, a sym- 
 pathetic glance, toward the multitude of those who are writhing in the 
 anguish of unbelief? Eh, mais vraiment non. What does that matter 
 to them? Provided they avenge the Church against the infidels (who do 
 not listen to them), their work is accomplished; they have no mission 
 to convert them.?°® 
 
 *7T am thinking, of course, of the 8 These are the words of Paul Roch- 
 Abbé Laberthonniére’s remarkable Essais ette, a Saint-Simonian Socialist, editor of 
 de philosophie religieuse, put on the In- the Journal du Haut- et Bas-Rhin. See 
 dex for being too convincing to the his pamphlet in defense of Bautain, Deux 
 unbeliever ! mots a Pex-éléve, Strasbourg, 1834, 20- 
 
 al. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 BAUTAIN’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 
 
 T Is NOT SURPRISING that to many of his contemporaries— 
 even including his former friend and associate, Damiron' 
 —Bautain seemed to be a skeptic, mercilessly making war upon 
 all constructive philosophies, and upon reason itself, in order to drive 
 men into the arms of a blind and fanatical faith. If one reads 
 nothing but the critical and polemical pamphlets and articles which 
 first brought him into national prominence, one almost inevitably 
 gets this impression. Nothing stands before his destructive criti- 
 cism. He attacks all the current philosophical tendencies, one after 
 another; and if, for a time, he appears to ally himself with one 
 tendency rather than another, the alliance is purely strategic. 
 When the common enemy is destroyed, the alliance is dissolved, 
 and he turns to attack his erstwhile comrades. ‘Thus, in his criti- 
 cism of eighteenth-century philosophy, Bautain makes common 
 cause with all the Romanticists and Idealists, only to turn and 
 criticize the latter more vehemently yet. In his criticism of the 
 scholasticism of the seminaries, he makes common cause with the 
 Traditionalists; but, just as we are about to classify him as a 
 Traditionalist, he turns and launches his sharpest barbs at Lamen- 
 nais. Naturally, the effect of all this was to make him a host of 
 enemies and get him a reputation as a universal destroyer; and so, 
 when the scholastics finally brought about his ecclesiastical assassi- 
 nation, there was little mourning over his demise—except in Stras- 
 bourg, where his constructive philosophy was known. 
 For us, however, now that we understand the main drift of 
 Bautain’s philosophy, these critical essays have a significance quite 
 different. “They are not the random shots of an aimless skeptic, 
 
 1Damiron, Essai sur Vhistoire de la keen, incisive, penetrating, while his dog- 
 philosophie en France au 19me siécle, matism is not strong enough to reassure 
 440-449, esp. 449, where Bautain is the minds which he has shaken at the 
 called “always critical and never eclec- start. One may easily be led to deny 
 tic.? “Doubt,” says Damiron, “is at the all that he denies, without also being 
 bottom of all his objections, and it is brought to believe all that he believes.” 
 
234 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 interested in nothing but destruction, but the consistent reactions 
 of a man who occupies a very definite philosophical position, and 
 defends it against all comers. As such, they not only cast great 
 light on the general philosophical situation, but serve to define 
 Bautain’s position with great exactitude. If we combine these 
 critical reactions to his contemporaries with his eclectic writings 
 on the history of philosophy, we shall get a very good notion of 
 his philosophical antipathies and affinities, and be in a position to 
 define his place in the history of thought. 
 
 I 
 
 BAUTAIN AND His CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 1. His critique of eighteenth-century philosophy. 
 
 As we have seen, the reaction against eighteenth-century philoso- 
 phy was in full swing when Bautain appeared upon the scene. 
 Auguste Comte, who was destined to continue the eighteenth-cen- 
 tury tradition and reinstate the natural sciences in philosophy, was 
 still an obscure figure, quite over-shadowed by Victor Cousin and 
 the Eclectics. “The Normal School still prevailed over the Poly- 
 technic. We must not be surprised, therefore, to find Bautain 
 referring to the eighteenth century in a tone of derision—very 
 much as our younger contemporaries refer to the Mid-Victorian 
 Epoch—as if the characteristic ideas of that period were already 
 too fully discredited to deserve discussion. 
 
 The metaphysics of Condillac—if metaphysics there be in Condillac— 
 the ethics of Helvetius, the politics of the Social Contract, and, brooding 
 over all and in all, the genius or familiar spirit of Voltaire: that is what 
 constituted speculative and practical philosophy in France at the com- 
 mencement of the nineteenth century. It was materialism, sensualism, 
 or egoism in action. And so every one at that epoch was a philosopher, 
 and all the theories of the natural sciences decorated themselves pomp- 
 ously and ridiculously with the name of philosophy. It is thus that 
 we had the philosophy of chemistry, of botany, of physics, of astronomy, 
 of anatomy. And with so many philosophers and in the midst of so 
 many philosophies, there was really nothing that merited the name, or 
 rather there remained only the name.? 
 
 If Bautain were asked what, in general, was the trouble with 
 
INP THE HISTORY" OF THOUGHT 235 
 
 this pseudo-philosophy which he so despised, he would answer just 
 as any Romanticist might answer: the trouble was that the eight- 
 eenth-century philosophers, by trusting too exclusively to discursive 
 reason, had lost the intuition of the organic Whole, and been 
 reduced to an abstract, piecemeal, mechanical view of things. ‘This 
 criticism is best expressed in an eloquent passage in one of Bautain’s 
 manuscript courses entitled Philosophie théologique et mathé- 
 matique’—probably the very course with which he opened his 
 private class at Mlle. Humann’s, after his suspension: 
 
 One should not ¢himk the universe, make it, or construct it, actively 
 and arbitrarily, without acquaintance with the plan or with its laws; 
 but one should see it as it is, receive and reflect its action; one should 
 contemplate and ideate it, to obtain the idea and the science* of it. If 
 then the human mind... had been able to content itself with the 
 simple aspect of nature, seeing her and reflecting her as she lives and 
 exists before it; .. . if, more faithful to his law, man had applied 
 himself to the contemplation of that Nature; . . . if, with a pure soul 
 and a single eye, he had embraced her in her unity, as he embraces or 
 envisages the vault of heaven, as he embraces or envisages a living organ- 
 ism, as he considers or admires a work of art; if he had insisted upon 
 seeing the parts only in their . . . relations to each other and the whole, 
 and never in isolation, each for itself, by section, division, and abstrac- 
 tion; if, finally, he had remembered that it is not by changing zenith 
 and running about the earth that he can enlarge his horizon, but by 
 mounting vertically and raising himself above it—we should even to-day 
 have but a single science, as there is but a single universe.” 
 
 It was the fatal mistake of eighteenth-century philosophy, one 
 gathers, to lose this view of the concrete, living whole, and replace 
 it by a “rational anatomy, operating only upon corpses,”® whereby 
 “‘we separate incessantly that which is identical in itself, that which 
 nature has united.”’ ‘The world was thus reduced from an 
 organism to “wne belle machine, an ingenious mechanism, a great 
 clock,”* which could be taken to pieces and put together again; 
 and, to complete the absurdity of the process, the abstract relations 
 
 "Phil. Chr., IJ, 21-22. * FB,V10. divided line. Jdeas stand in the same 
 “Science is generally a technical term contrast to notions. 
 
 with Bautain. It stands in contrast to 5 FB,V10, §§ 6, 7. 
 
 connaissance, and represents true meta- Mabzaee uly s 
 
 physical knowledge as over against em- " Tbhid., § 15. 
 
 pirical knowledge. Cf. Plato’s twice- 8 Tbid., § 8. 
 
236 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 and magnitudes of these mechanical parts were hypostatized and 
 treated as real entities.° In this artificial world of his own crea- 
 tion, man found himself to be an anomaly and a helpless wanderer 
 —*“a broken column, without summit, and without base, rolling 
 in the wave of time.”’*° 
 
 The only eighteenth-century philosopher to whom Bautain gives 
 the courtesy of a detailed critique, in his review of recent philo- 
 sophical tendencies, is Condillac. “The fundamental difficulty with 
 his philosophy is that it is based upon an atomistic and intellectual- 
 istic psychology. “The final result of its efforts is to explain how 
 an abstraction is formed; and it naively believes itself to have 
 explained man, when it has given an account, according to its 
 method, of how he forms a generalization.”’* As a matter of 
 fact, Condillac’s famous statue never fully came to life; nothing 
 is fully alive that is merely sentient or intellectual, and lacks 
 “the will, the foyer of the life.”’? A philosophy based upon such 
 an artificial and truncated psychology is vitiated from the start. 
 
 Here again Bautain shows himself a true Romanticist; a tendency 
 toward voluntarism in psychology is characteristic of the period. 
 
 2. Critique of the Scotch School. 
 
 For Bautain, the great merit of the Scotch philosophy, in which 
 he was trained, lay in its empiricism. It does not play fast and 
 loose with the facts, or build air-castles of abstractions; it applies 
 the methods of Bacon in the field of psychology, and refuses to 
 assert anything which introspection does not confirm. Condillac 
 had banished the soul and the moral life from psychology; the 
 Scotch school, unable to account for such moumena, yet admits 
 them under the name of “first principles” or “primitive facts” in 
 which one must believe—‘“‘so true is it,” remarks Bautain, “‘that 
 
 in order to know or learn anything one must start from faith in 
 
 a principle.”’*® 
 
 But although the Scotch school has enriched philosophy with a 
 great deal of valuable psychological data, it is open to serious ques- 
 tion whether by its methods the foundations of a systematic philoso- 
 
 °FB,V10, § 10.  Ihid., § 8. the Psych. Exp., arabics to the pamphlet 
 
 “Ens. Phil. F., xviii. (Roman nu- edition.) 
 merals refer to the version prefixed to 2 Thid., xix. % Phil. Chr., I, 30. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 237 
 
 phy can be solidly laid. For one thing, as Bautain points out, the 
 fundamental truths of common sense, of which the Scotch philoso- 
 phy makes so much, have been “singularly multiplied, . . . so that 
 every time they encounter a fact in the human mind which they 
 cannot resolve into anterior facts, and where admission is never- 
 theless necessary to explain others, they set it up as a primitive fact 
 of human nature, greet it with the name of first principle, and 
 thus make of it a sort of dogma, a philosophical article of faith.”** 
 What assurance have we that these supposedly “primitive” facts 
 of consciousness are any more irreducible than the supposedly 
 “simple” elements of modern chemistry? Do they not rather 
 represent unsolved problems, complex phenomena “undecomposed 
 up to date.”*® Furthermore, it has been proved by Kant that the 
 “first principles” at which one arrives by an analysis of the human 
 consciousness are purely relative and subjective. If we are to form 
 a true picture of the real world, we must try to escape from 
 precisely those subjective categories upon which the Scotch philoso- 
 phy rests with all its weight. 
 
 Even supposing the Scotch philosophy to be true as far as it goes, 
 it falls absurdly short of the sort of philosophy we all demand, for 
 it has nothing to say on ultimate questions. As with Baconian 
 science in general, the significance of the Scotch psychology lies 
 in its practical utility, not in its metaphysical adequacy. It deals 
 only with phenomena; the “laws” it discovers are laws of sequence 
 and not of real causality; if it admits the existence of noumena, 
 they simply play the rédle of colorless limiting concepts, of which 
 nothing definite can be affirmed. “One ought not give the name 
 of science to descriptions which at bottom explain nothing,” says 
 Bautain, “nor, above all, attempt to philosophize in that fashion. 
 Monographs on the faculties, hanging together no more consistently 
 than the treatises of our Physics courses or the chapters of our 
 Physiology books, do not give the science of man; .: »As* to 
 immortality and other ultimate questions, the Scotch say cautiously 
 that their answers are “not yet ascertained.” 
 
 It is necessary, as you see, then [explodes Bautain] to adjourn decision 
 
 4 Thid., 29-30. Ens. Phil. F., xxv. 
 % Choses, 422. 
 
238 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 on the spirituality and immortality of the soul indefinitely, since in the 
 three thousand years that men have busied themselves with philosophy 
 they have not been able to gather enough facts to prove this important 
 truth. But until then, until that grave question is settled, if humanity, 
 if man had no other sources of conviction, no other motives for hope 
 and certitude than the inductions of the Scottish philosophy, what would 
 become of him in his every-day life? Man cannot remain ignorant or 
 indifferent where questions of this sort are concerned, without degrading 
 himself. But all these problems are admitted to be insoluble by the 
 Scotch school: it disdains to deal with them, treating them as imperti- 
 nent questions—and to be sure they are very embarrassing for a doctrine 
 which, in trying to explain man, sees in him only an existence, and takes 
 him for a bare fact. After all, he who is willing to believe only in 
 the testimony of his speculative and rational consciousness (for the moral 
 conscience is not here considered) can admit only the facts that it per- 
 ceives. Now it can perceive only what affects it in the present moment; 
 . . . hence it is clear that the Scotch school, to be faithful to its prin- 
 ciple, must repudiate all questions of origin, nature, and destiny.** 
 
 3. Critique of German Idealism and French Eclecticism. 
 Le panthéisme, voila Pennemi! 
 
 Up to this point Bautain has been speaking quite as a German 
 Idealist or a French Eclectic might have spoken. ‘They, too, 
 criticized the mechanistic view of the world, and came out for a 
 vitalistic, dynamic, organic cosmology; they, too, were dissatisfied 
 with the cautious and piecemeal philosophy of the Scotch realists, 
 and, trusting in the higher faculties, launched out en fleine 
 métaphysique. Bautain is in hearty sympathy with the idealistic 
 reaction against extreme realism and extreme materialism; and, 
 so far as the motives and intentions of the Idealists are concerned, 
 he finds them admirable: “it is the need they feel of reducing 
 all truth to a single truth, to unity, after all has been broken and 
 scattered; it is the desire for constructing, building, consolidating, 
 now that the process of sapping, destroying, overturning has lasted 
 so long.”’* 
 
 et even while he views this reaction with approval, he points 
 out that it has gone too far. In epistemology, the eighteenth cen- 
 tury had overstressed the role of the object in the knowing process, 
 to the point of denying the spontaneity of the knowing subject, 
 and making the mind a mere tabula rasa, “having only the capacity 
 
 Phil. Che.; 41,033-35. Te Ge Bred. 155. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT pa 
 
 to receive the imprint which the object leaves upon it.” Realism 
 of this sort had determinism and materialism for its natural con- 
 sequences; for it explained man “more by his exterior and what 
 surrounds him than by what he is in himself.” But the German 
 Idealists, true to their introspective national temperament, have 
 rushed to the opposite extreme, and “pretend to dominate reality, 
 if not to create it.’ ‘All comes from the subject,” they say, “and 
 the object, if it exists, is only the unknown cause or even the 
 occasion of the development of the subject, who draws all knowl- 
 edge from himself, and posits it outwardly by his innate need of 
 manifesting himself, objectivizing himself, so that the universe is 
 
 the manifestation of man’s ideas.’’?® 
 
 Formerly [says Bautain] we were offered, as the science of man and 
 nature, experiments, particular observations, descriptions, words. ‘To-day, 
 there is first laid down the Idea, the principle that each bears in himself. 
 The idea contains everything; all that remains to be done is to open it 
 out and draw from it its consequences, which every one deduces, as a 
 matter of fact, to suit himself, so that our scientific systems bear a strong 
 
 resemblance to poetic creations. . . . They are immense frames which 
 remain empty, general views which are not filled in, magnificent pro- 
 grammes which are not realized. . . . Hence great confusion in doctrine,. 
 
 which is taken for unity, much obscurity which is thought to be pro- 
 fundity, and a vast vagueness which is called universality.”° 
 
 The criticism of idealistic epistemology here stated is essentially 
 the same as that which is implied in the title of a recent book of 
 Professor Santayana’s: Absolute Egotism in German Philosophy. 
 Absolute subjectivism, or mysticism, based on absolute egotism— 
 such is Bautain’s characterization of the idealistic position. How 
 accurate it is, one is somewhat at a loss to say, for, as Professor 
 Baudin remarks, “‘Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had taken advantage 
 of Kant’s absence, and not written their theories of knowledge’; 
 yet as one thinks over all the great systems of the Romantic period, 
 and asks where they got their central ideas and how they justify 
 them, one realizes that something very lke a mystic intuition, 
 unproved and unprovable, lies at the heart of each. Is Bautain 
 far wrong when he gives the following description of an Idealist 
 
 See Psych. Exp., I, 225, 229, for all Phil. Chr., II, 161-162. 
 quotations in this paragraph. 
 
240 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 in the act of conceiving the Idea on which he is to base his system? 
 Would it apply only to Schelling in the midst of one of his “‘in- 
 tellectual intuitions,” or also to Hegel? Was not Hegel suspici- 
 ously touchy about the accusation of Mysticism? 
 
 For him, the subjective and the objective, the contemplating mind 
 with the idea which is the fruit of contemplation, and the contemplated 
 object or ideal, are confounded. ‘There, all oppositions disappear, all 
 distinctions are effaced; contraries are absorbed in the point of indiffer- 
 ence or absolute identity; there is no longer either God or universe, but 
 only the idea . . . the mind knowing itself in the known idea as being 
 itself all, and all being itself.?+ 
 
 In this passage, it is the accusation of mysticism which is stressed; 
 yet the great fault of the Idealists, in Bautain’s eyes, is not their 
 mysticism—he himself is a mystic, as we have seen—but their 
 subjectivism, which is rooted in their moral egotism. ‘There is a 
 radical difference, for Bautain, between a mysticism which consists 
 in opening oneself to the influence of the whole external world, 
 natural, social, and divine, and then trusting the intuitions which 
 are born of that intercourse, and a mysticism which consists in 
 cutting oneself off from the universe by taking an attitude of 
 proud self-sufficiency, and then trusting one’s own subjective 
 intuitions. 
 
 Behold these proud philosophers [he cries] who wish to join to the 
 dignity of morality the triumph of independence! They talk incessantly 
 about the absolute, and they know only phenomena. . . . Shut up as they 
 are in the narrow sphere of their understanding, they cannot escape the 
 law of contradiction which dominates there. Their will stiffens itself 
 with all its force so as not to yield to any influence of word or of 
 example, so as to obey nothing but itself; and at any moment an im- 
 pulsion from without comes and adds itself to the will’s motus proprius, 
 complicates it unawares, and makes it deviate. ‘They think themselves 
 independent; and they are modified every instant of their lives by what 
 surrounds them. ‘They think themselves heroes of virtue, of disinter- 
 estedness, of greatness of soul; and they do not see that the Ego being 
 the sole principle of their actions is also their end, and that they are 
 thus held within the vicious circle of Egoism.*? 
 
 Subjectivism in epistemology leads inevitably to  spiritualistic 
 
 1 FBV3, § 25. *2 Phil. Chr., 1, 63-64. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 241 
 
 pantheism in cosmology. As the eighteenth-century philosophers, 
 with their realistic objectivism, had fastened their attention on the 
 external forms of things, and missed their inner life, so the Ideal- 
 ists, with their intense subjectivism, were fastening their attention 
 upon the inner world of life and spirit, and neglecting the facts 
 of natural science, which alone could give stability and veracity to 
 their philosophical constructions. A world of spirit without form 
 (pantheistic spiritualism) is as bad as a world of form without 
 spirit (mechanistic materialism).?* Yet this is the view to which 
 the egotistic subjectivism of the Idealist irresistibly drives him. 
 
 If man . . . entering into his own depths, gathering himself energeti- 
 cally together to seize in his deepest subjectivity the being which he 
 seeks . . . isolates himself from what surrounds him .. . and tries to 
 live in the pure and simple feeling of the life he wishes to seize in its 
 principle and its nature . .. feeling himself within himself, strong, 
 powerful, free, immortal; feeling himself with all the energy of his 
 Ego, and confusing the action of the objective Being, who posited him 
 and sustains him, with the reaction of his own nature which answers 
 to it, he declares that the Universe, the world, the multiple existences, 
 are but illusions and appearances; that God alone is . . . that is, himself 
 feeling himself to be. . . . Here the human self is deified; it is panthe- 
 ism at its highest stage; it is the absolute identity of the Hindoos; it is 
 the transcendental egoism of the moderns.*4 
 
 The disease of Idealism is now diagnosed: Pantheism! Arrived 
 at this point in his criticism of the German philosophers, Bautain 
 henceforth pays no more attention to the details of their philoso- 
 phies. Beneath the minor points of difference which distinguish 
 Fichte’s transcendental Ego from Schelling’s Absolute, Schleier- 
 macher’s Universum, and Hegel’s Idea, he discerns a common 
 pantheistic creed, involving the confusion of God, Man, and the 
 Universe, and the blurring of all distinctions. He states this com- 
 mon creed in the following terms: 
 
 As the universe in its unfolding is distinguished into two parts, the 
 ideal and the real, the knower and the known, so science also is divided 
 into two sections: 
 
 3 FBV10, § 14. These words of Goschler perfectly re- 
 * Goschler, Du Panthéisme, 11-12.  flect Bautain’s own views. 
 
242 . THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 (1). Pure philosophy or the contemplation of the Absolute in itself, 
 above and independent of all forms, of all phenomena—this is the science 
 of the Holy of Holies, reserved for the most advanced initiates. 
 
 (2). Applied philosophy, which is but a vast symbolism, expressing 
 the development of the One or the All, in the passing formule of 
 humanity and of the world. [This alone, says Bautain, is taught exoteri- 
 cally. Although purposely cloaked in baffling obscurities, it] flatters the 
 mind most remarkably, because from this height one thinks to dominate 
 everything.”° 
 
 i 
 
 Was German Idealism really an esoteric religious cult, preaching 
 a pantheistic faith under cover of philosophical terminologyt 
 Such an accusation seems a bit fantastic; and I doubt if Bautain 
 meant it seriously. Had he cared to press the charge in all sober- 
 ness, he might have pointed to the esoteric tendency which ran 
 through the whole Romantic movement: the wide gulf between 
 the “man of genius” and the vulgar herd, with whom (since they 
 were incapable of understanding him and quite capable of turning 
 and rending him) he could communicate only in tropes and 
 parables! However the accusation is to be understood, Bautain 
 was undoubtedly alarmed at the rapid spread of Romantic Panthe- 
 ism among the educated youth of France and Germany. As he 
 found it cropping out in the most unexpected quarters, and subtly 
 permeating the whole intellectual atmosphere, he may well have 
 sensed a vast conspiracy, and felt himself called upon to warn 
 the whole world against the oncoming pestilence. As he lifts 
 his voice to describe the evil consequences of Pantheism—the 
 scourge of the nineteenth century, as Materialism was the scourge. 
 of the eighteenth—he becomes eloquent, and almost prophetic. 
 
 In religion, says Bautain, Pantheism means the abandonment of 
 all norms of judgment, and the simultaneous acceptance of rival 
 creeds and rival codes. The only essential thing in religion is the ~ 
 adoration of the Absolute, and all religions equally typify “the 
 manifestation of the Infinite, the triumph of spirit over matter, 
 the victory of the idea over the form.”*® Each was a necessary 
 stage in the evolution of the Absolute, and all will pass away, to 
 give way to new creeds and codes that will reveal a new possibility 
 of existence, till the richness of the Idea has at last been fully 
 
 © Phil. Chr. II, 156. bid, 158: 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 243 
 
 unfolded, for “God . . . is everything, and everything is God; 
 especially man, for it is in humanity that the Absolute reaches 
 self-consciousness. . . . The ethics of such a religion consists in 
 the development of life, as intense as possible, and in all its forms, 
 in order to free the idea from its shackles and aid in the mani- 
 festation of the great All.”*’ Charity and other definitely con- 
 ceived virtues give place to vague notions like “harmony” and 
 “fusion”; piety becomes an indefinite and universal aspiration to- 
 ward the Infinite, valued largely for aesthetic reasons, and culti- 
 vated as an emotional outlet. “How many of our contemporaries,” 
 says Bautain, “are religious after this fashion, in the imagination 
 more than in the soul, more from artistic taste than from a recog- 
 nized need of God!”®* What they love, he remarks, is not truth 
 and holiness but Gothic architecture and picturesque ceremonies. 
 
 In art and literature, the beautiful is confused with the ugly. 
 The object of art, say the pantheists, is not the imitation of natural 
 beauty but “the manifestation of the idea by the form.” Every- 
 thing falls under this formula; all things are manifestations of 
 the All, and hence good subjects for art. 
 
 Hence the principal traits which characterize and disfigure the art of our 
 day: the affectation of the grandiose, which tries to give the feeling of 
 the All in each thing, and reveal profundity even in the slightest de- 
 tails, which results in a sublime grotesque, as the exaggerated expression 
 of the trivial and the ugly gives the ignoble and the horrible; the pre- 
 tention to follow no rule, because genius knows none, because enthusiasm 
 cannot constrain itself thereto; the violation of the moral laws and the 
 rules of decency, which fetter, they say, by arbitrary conventions, the 
 expression of the beautiful and the sublime.?® 
 
 In morals, the distinction between good and evil breaks down. 
 Since all is a necessary unfolding of the Idea, all is justified, when 
 looked at from a high enough point of view. ‘The pantheist “‘sees 
 God everywhere, and good in everything—simply because it is.””*° 
 Virtue consists in floating with the stream of the Zeitgeist, “that 
 irresistible force which bears the century along and which is mani- 
 fested by what we call opinion,”** and in giving free course to the 
 vital instincts that are the voice of God speaking within. 
 
 Rolhia:, 159, 8 Thid., 163. © Mor. Ev. D., 341. 
 ” Ibid., 163-164. “ Phil. Chr., II, 164. 
 
 17 
 
244 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 The principles of this morality might be formulated somewhat 
 as follows: 
 
 One must follow the movement of nature, spontaneity, instinct; 
 abandon oneself to the passions which spring up in the heart, to all the 
 desires which sweep us with them, all the impressions which carry us 
 away.°> 
 
 Life is an endless series of transformations, an incessant metempsychosis, 
 a purposeless phantasmagoria, a je we sais guoi.** 
 
 All is permissible for man, all is within his rights: his power has no 
 limit but his will, his will no bounds but his good pleasure.** 
 
 If All is One, there is neither good nor ill.*° 
 
 In politics, as in private life, all morality and all liberty disappear. 
 ‘The State becomes supreme and irresponsible. 
 
 For [says Bautain] you are no longer persons, individuals, citizens; you 
 are the branches of a tree, the radiations of a centre, the movements of 
 a force, the modifications of a substance. There is no more liberty for 
 you in society than in the universe; for society, in order to be true, must 
 be made in the image and likeness of the great All. And so just as in 
 the universe it is the One which produces All, and all the existences are 
 but its modes and instruments, so in politics you are to be the modes and 
 
 instruments of the All which is called the State. The State—a great word. 
 
 about which a lot of furore is made, but which, after all, always means 
 some one—the State is All, and must do everything in its interest and 
 for its glory; the rest is nothing.*® 
 
 And how will the pantheistic State conduct itself among the 
 nations of the world? Bautain’s answer is startling in its prophetic 
 insight : 
 
 Where necessity rules, there is no Jonger any question of justice, virtue, 
 conscience, and remorse, there are simply questions of public safety and 
 raisons d’Etat which imperiously demand such and such a measure; and 
 that measure is just, because it is necessary. ‘The interests of a few men 
 may be injured thereby; that is a private misfortune which, is obliterated 
 in the common good: these are eventualities which disappear in the 
 transcendental view of history, as little things vanish in a vast horizon. 
 From that height, one sees the life of the great All developing in the 
 
 % Mor. Ev. D., 343. * Phil. Chr., Il, 166. 
 8 Tbid., 342. * Mor. Ev. D., 344-345. 
 **Goschler, op. cit., 134. 
 
 i 
 
LINGLE HishOoRy, Ons DHOUGHT 245 
 
 life of the peoples, manifesting itself energetically by their agitations, 
 and often unable to break forth except by terrific catastrophes. Hence 
 comes the shock of nations one against another, and war, without which 
 nothing great is accomplished. It is at the cost of blood that the mani- 
 festation of the Idea in this world takes place; and it is always the Idea 
 which triumphs. It is therefore the fact, that is, force, which finally 
 decides the fate of peoples, and on the field of battle as in the market- 
 place, to be right, one must be the stronger: the law is always on the 
 side of the conqueror." 
 
 Realpolitik and von Treitschke, predicted in the first half of 
 the nineteenth century! If we admire Professor Dewey’s per- 
 spicacity in tracing a connection, after the event, between German 
 philosophy and politics, what shall we say of Bautain, who predicted 
 the consequences of that philosophy before the event? It is only 
 fair to add that Bautain has no animus against the Germans as 
 such, and aims his attack quite as much against the Eclectics as 
 against the Idealists. 
 
 As for Eclecticism, Bautain pours contempt upon it as all con- 
 verts tend to pour contempt upon everything they did and thought 
 while they were yet in their sins. ‘“‘We set ourselves,” he says, 
 reminiscently, “to write the history of philosophy, because we had 
 no philosophy, with the intention of composing one by means of 
 the products of all the schools, diverse and even contradictory as 
 they were. It was a case of trying to make truth out of all the 
 errors.”*> How choose between rival doctrines when you have 
 no criterion of truth? 
 
 Bautain grants that Eclecticism is not pantheistic to the core; 
 it is a petit panthéisme, mingled with many other ingredients.” 
 Cousin was too prudent to leave his unorthodoxy unveiled, and it 
 was only in certain involuntary expressions like “the ‘Trinity of 
 the Infinite, the Finite, and their relations, or God, Nature, and 
 Humanity,” that he revealed it. Yet in one aspect of his teaching, 
 and that a most essential one, he reveals, says Bautain, that con- 
 fusion of opposites which is the chief characteristic of pantheism: 
 
 *7 Phil. Chr., 11, 164-165. had not the audacity; it professed to be 
 
 8 Choses, 422-423. Christian and had not the faith; it is 
 
 Cf. Cerc. Cath., 55, where Bautain pantheistic without wishing to be, and 
 says that Eclecticism “has not the cour- it is not Christian though wishing to 
 age of its convictions or of its sym- appear so.” 
 
 pathies; it wanted to be Hegelian and 
 
246 THE PHILOSOPHY. OF (BAO TAIN 
 
 he tends to admit all philosophical doctrines upon an equal footing, 
 and so blurs the distinction between true and false. In the Ec- 
 lectic view, each epoch in the history of thought, “no matter how 
 perverted it may appear,” has its place. “It was destined to repre- 
 sent a certain phase in the evolution of humanity: .. . all that 
 exists is a fact, and every fact is what it should be, by the very 
 fact that it is.’ And so the most heterogeneous elements go into 
 the eclectic mortar: Epicurus and Zeno, Aristotle and Plato, Kant 
 and the Sentimentalists, all find themselves forcibly reconciled. 
 
 And now [concludes Bautain] mix it, stir it, pound it, and crush it to 
 impalpability, so that nothing will be recognizable in the mixture... 
 in order that there may be fusion and not confusion, and we may not 
 be accused of syncretism, whereas we are making an Eclecticism. You 
 will put that word on the label, and when sick minds and souls come to 
 ask you for remedies for their ills, you will administer this eclectic powder 
 to them in little packets. They will take one a day, until nausea ensues. 
 Then you will stop! ... The remedy will have produced its effect, 
 and they will be cured—probably, of philosophy.*° 
 
 Bautain’s attitude toward the Romantic philosophy is thus curi- 
 ously ambivalent. On the one hand, he is not merely an ally of 
 the Romanticists for certain strategic purposes; he is, in some of 
 his most fundamental conceptions, an out-and-out Romanticist. 
 His vitalistic cosmology and his voluntaristic psychology are Ro- 
 mantic to the core; and even his central religious doctrine of the 
 limited spontaneity of the individual and his need of stimulation 
 from above reminds us strangely of Schleiermacher’s “feeling of 
 absolute dependence.” ‘Yet, on the other hand, as we have just 
 seen, there are times when Bautain appears to think of this same 
 Romantic tendency, of which he is himself so much a part, as if it 
 were a peril, a curse, a thing to be fought and extirpated. At such 
 times, he reminds not of Schleiermacher, but—to pursue the Prot- 
 estant parallel—of Albrecht Ritschl; for, like Ritschl, he has too 
 keen a sense of the peculiar genius of Christianity to attempt to 
 reconcile it with its irreconcilable enemies; and, like Ritschl, he 
 feels that the most irreconcilable enemy of Christianity, as of all 
 ethical religions, is that form of idealistic pantheism in which good 
 
 “ Mor. Ev. D., 313-314. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 247 
 
 and evil become equally divine, and iniquity is justified because all 
 that is, is mght. We shall be still more strongly reminded of 
 Ritschl—and of Protestantism—-when we come to understand the 
 motives that underlay Bautain’s crusade against the Scholastic 
 philosophy that prevailed in the Catholic seminaries. 
 
 4. Critique of Scholasticism. 
 
 Bautain’s aversion for Scholasticism sprang originally, perhaps, 
 from a certain native antipathy toward “logic-chopping”’; but it 
 was immensely strengthened by his perception of the inability of 
 Scholasticism to meet and refute Pantheism. It was a fact, in his 
 own observation, that scholastically trained priests were unable to 
 cope with the intellectual difficulties which cultured young panthe- 
 ists, in increasing numbers, were bringing to them for solution; and 
 so many a troubled and wistful inquirer, Christian at heart but 
 intellectually perplexed, was turned away unsatisfied. In a brilliant 
 passage of the Philosophie du Christianisme,** Bautain confronts 
 such a priest with a young pantheist, and shows, in the ensuing 
 dialogue, how Scholasticism plays into the hands of Pantheism. 
 
 The priest begins with the traditional arguments for the existence 
 of God. ‘Don’t take the trouble, I beg of you,” interrupts the 
 youth. “I, with you, proclaim the necessity of the Being who is 
 in Himself; and it is just because I have recognized Him as the 
 only necessary being that I can see in all contingent beings mere 
 modifications of His substance, more or less limited expressions of 
 His nature.” Shocked at this pantheistic position, the priest replies 
 that it is absurd to reduce all things to one substance; there is an 
 irreducible difference between thinking substance and extended sub- 
 stance. “To this Cartesian distinction the youth objects that 
 Descartes’ own definition of substance (“that which subsists in 
 itself”) leads to pantheism, for “only one Being subsists in itself.” 
 After some inconclusive sparring about the definition of substance 
 and mode, the priest returns to the argument from motion to a 
 Prime Mover, which he thinks establishes the existence of a 
 transcendent and extra-mundane deity. The youth replies that this 
 is exactly the line of reasoning which has led him into “what you 
 call Pantheism and I call transcendental philosophy.” 
 
 “ Py, Chr., I, 168-177. 
 
248 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Those [he continues] who from the existence of the world infer a 
 cause outside the world, evidently exceed the legitimate force of the law 
 of causality. . . . The effect which issued from the cause must have 
 been in it before appearing outside of it. ‘The cause merely posited 
 itself externally, or, as the philosophers say, it made itself its own object. 
 . . . Whether it be eminenter or formaliter, ideally or really, that the 
 world is in the First Cause, or the First Cause in the world, it follows 
 none the less from your cosmological or teleological argument that the 
 universe such as we behold it has issued from God as the effect of God 
 the cause—that it is God made manifest. 
 
 As this argument reduces the priest to a state of incoherency, the 
 youth turns to the attack, and politely suggests that the dualistic 
 cosmology which his opponent has been defending is, after all, 
 somewhat unspiritual, and, at any rate, not in accord with the facts: 
 
 I know of nothing inert and absolutely dead in nature [he urges]. In 
 the denser bodies, in the minerals, there is a continual oscillation of their 
 molecules. See the prodigious activity of the gases. . . . It is the spirit, 
 you will say, which animates them, and I agree; but then what becomes 
 of the sharp diiference, the essential difference, between two terms which 
 penetrate each other perpetually, which unite and mingle in the same 
 lifet If you regard them as opposed by nature, you take away the 
 possibility of explaining their commerce . . . whether in man between 
 his soul and his bedy or in the universe between God and the world. 
 
 ‘The priest now begins to utter angry reproaches. The root of 
 this doctrine is human pride, he cries. The Triune God is above 
 all creation. ‘The youth disclaims any intention to be impious. 
 “If I must above all believe in a God who is above and outside 
 of nature,” he says, “you ought not to have tried to demonstrate 
 his existence to me by the forms of the world. . . . I have no 
 repugnance against admitting the God of the Christians; but, in 
 order to believe in him as you do, I should need either infused 
 faith or a satisfactory theory of the great fact of creation. I 
 should need to have the history of man, and that of Christianity, 
 justified by the needs and conscience of humanity.” The priest— 
 not having been trained in Bautain’s school—has no reply to make, 
 and the young man goes away disappointed. 
 
 The old apologetic then, in which everything rested upon certain 
 rational proofs of the existence of God, is bankrupt; for the modern 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 249 
 mind, it has lost all power to convince. Bautain is of the opinion 
 that Kant has given the coup de grace to all the traditional argu- 
 ments for the existence of God;** but he has certain additional 
 objections of his own, particularly against the cosmological and 
 teleological arguments. Not only is the cosmological argument 
 invalid, but, further, if it were valid, zt would not give us the God 
 Actually, it plays into the hands of Pantheism; ideally 
 Here is how 
 
 of religion. 
 and at its best, it gives us only the God of the Deists. 
 Adéodat puts the matter: 
 
 Something, they say, exists; something has always existed; hence some- 
 thing exists necessarily. They call that a metaphysical proof; they pre- 
 tend to discover the eternity of a cause through the medium of ephemeral 
 existences that have not an instant of stability! And suppose it were so, 
 suppose they had proved to me that this X-God was the prime mover 
 who makes spheres turn round, and that he is the power that hurls the 
 planets through space and maintains them in their orbits; once more, 
 what would this god mean for the need of the heart? What pledge of 
 continuance and protection will he give to the desires and hopes of my 
 soul’ And without these pledges of protection and continuance, what 
 motive have I to make him the object of my love? ** 
 
 Bautain never tires of reiterating the contention that between 
 the God of the cosmological argument (the God of the Deists) 
 and the God of Hebrew-Christian tradition, there is simply nothing 
 in common. 
 
 O my friends [he writes to his Jewish disciples at the very beginning 
 of his correspondence with them], do you realize, then, that between a 
 true Israelite and a deist there is the same difference as between a civil- 
 ized man and a child growing up in savagery? The god of the deist is 
 force, nature, fate, destiny: it is a general cause, assumed to exist because 
 the reason demands a cause for the effects it perceives, . . . a gross 
 image, . . . or else . . . a rational entity, an abstraction, an idol of the 
 mind. . . . And that is what you would substitute for the God of Israel 
 and of Moses, the living God who created man in his image, animated 
 him with his Spirit, and preserves him with his Providence! * 
 
 “For a telling use of Kant’s objec- 
 tions to the cosmological argument, see 
 Bautain’s letter to Riambourg, FB,K, 
 Cahier I, 35. As we have seen, Bau- 
 tain thinks more highly of the ontologi- 
 cal, psychological, and moral arguments 
 
 than of the cosmological and teleologi- 
 cal; but he thinks they must be entirely 
 recast if they are to appeal’ to the 
 modern man. 
 
 Phil Chase 122092210. 
 
 “Tbsd., 19-21, 
 
250 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob .. . mot the 
 God of the philosophers and the savants!”—this phrase from Pas- 
 cal’s amulet might be taken as the summary of Bautain’s critique 
 of the cosmological argument. But the teleological argument 
 escapes no better: if the cosmological argument leads to Pantheism 
 or Deism, the teleological argument leads to Manichaeism. Once 
 we begin to note differences of good and evil in the cosmos, we 
 get, not indeed an indifferent God, cause of good and evil alike, 
 but two rival deities: 
 
 This world in which we live is but an arena, a vast battlefield, where 
 all is opposition and contradiction, where life, by which nature and all 
 the creatures are and subsist, is but a perpetual struggle with death.*° 
 
 ‘This world is a mixture of good and evil; in it contraries reveal them- 
 selves, in conflict with one another: life and death, health and sickness, 
 light and darkness, truth and falsehood, etc. Now, opposite effects 
 arguing opposite causes, there are therefore two contrary causes which 
 share this world between them; they are in conflict, etc. Where is the 
 One, Infinite, Omnipotent God? *® 
 
 If we were to sum up the gist of Bautain’s objections to the 
 whole traditional apologetic, we should have to say that its great 
 error, to Bautain, lay in the attempt to find God through Nature. 
 Not that he disdains the argument from Nature altogether. We 
 have already seen what large use he makes of it in his own con- 
 structive system. What he insists upon is simply that it must not 
 be made a strictly logical argument, else God will be dragged down 
 to Nature’s level; it must be purely an argument from analogy, 
 a tracing of parallels between natural and spiritual law. The 
 primary argument is from man’s deepest moral need; the God of 
 Man thus discovered may later be found to be the God of Nature 
 also, but if we seek for Him in Nature we shall discover—the 
 wrong God. “What it is important for a man to know is not 
 merely the Author of Nature, the great Architect, the soul of the 
 world, etc.; it is above all Ais Author, his God, the God of man; 
 and‘ Nature is mute on this subject.’’** 
 
 So far, Bautain has been criticizing Scholasticism simply for its 
 maladroitness in apologetics. “The philosophy of the schools, he 
 
 * De Vimpuissance de la raison, Rev. “FB,K, Cahier I, 35. 
 Eur., IV, 63. “ Phil. Chr. 1, 194. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT Zou 
 
 points out, is not aware that a new enemy is upon it; it is trying 
 to fight with spears and pikes against guns and cannon. Here is 
 Pantheism “breaking out to-day in every part of the world, be- 
 leaguering, so to speak, the civilization of our time, ... and 
 destined to overturn everything when it shall have conquered every- 
 thing”**—and the official philosophers of the Church, like pig- 
 headed old generals, not only refuse to adopt new tactics them- 
 selves, but cry heresy and treason against all innovators! Why, 
 cries Bautain, should a revision of tactics be considered heretical? 
 The Church has always changed her apologetics to suit the times. 
 Scholasticism was a much decried innovation in its day; the Carte- 
 sian revision of French Scholasticism, under Bossuet and Male- 
 branche, was equally revolutionary in its day; is it not high time 
 for French Catholic thought once more to come to grips with 
 contemporary philosophy, as German Catholic thought has already 
 done? *° 
 
 It was to this safe and sane position that Bautain commonly 
 retreated when attacked by his critics; but his criticism of Scholasti- 
 cism went much deeper than this. Why did the conventional 
 apologetic play into the hands of Pantheism? Was it merely that 
 its method of defense was outgrown, though good enough in its 
 own day? No, its weakness was something worse than that: it was 
 itself tainted with Pantheism. Somehow or other, in grappling 
 with their antagonists, the defenders of the faith had themselves 
 been overthrown and dragged down into the mud. In seeking to 
 meet the human reason, and fight it with its own weapons, they 
 had themselves been led into rationalism; and rationalism, thinks 
 Bautain, always leads in the end to Pantheism, if not to atheism. 
 All this comes out in his critique of the Philosophie de Lyon. This, 
 it may be remembered, was the semi-Cartesian system of philosophy, 
 couched in Scholastic Latin, which Bautain himself was ordered to 
 teach in his Petit Séminaire, when suspicion began to fall upon 
 him. It had been for years the standard philosophical text in most 
 of the French seminaries.” 
 
 In the first place, says Bautain, the Philosophie de Lyon is all 
 wrong in its methodology. Like Cartesianism, it abstracts from 
 
 * Thid., II, 148. © See supra, chapter 1, note 65. 
 ® Tbid., introduction to Letter 28. 
 
202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 experience and tradition altogether, and tries to spin the universe 
 out of the individual reason. It has adopted Descartes’ procedure 
 of systematic doubt: 
 
 when one wishes to philosophize . . . one must abstract oneself from 
 received beliefs and lay aside acquired convictions, that they may have 
 no influence whatsoever upon the scientific procedure of the reason, which 
 is to raise anew the edifice of knowledge; . . . one must discourse upon 
 God, man, and their relations, as if God had never taught us anything 
 about Himself and about ourselves... . It is as if they were told to 
 give up the brightness of the day, to contemplate the spectacle of nature 
 at night, by the light of a torch. And so how many of these poor young 
 men when they leave the school, never recover that unsullied faith which 
 had guided them from infancy. ... There happens to them, most 
 often, what has happened to the whole modern world: it began by 
 parting with faith to cultivate knowledge; it entertained the supposition 
 that it had no faith, and, reasoning in accordance with this supposition, 
 it got lost; the heart of man became filled with darkness, and then 
 accustoming himself to get along without faith, he ended by having 
 none.”? 
 
 Despising faith, tradition, and experience, the Philosophie de 
 Lyon absurdly exaggerates the importance of reasoning and dia- 
 lectic. Its great and fundamental fallacy is to think of logic as 
 an existential science, and the syllogism as an instrument of dis- 
 covery.. This is the error of a// Scholasticism, which may, in fact, 
 be defined as “logic applied to questions of metaphysics and 
 morals.”°* Bautain wonders at the naiveté of philosophers who 
 attach such magical efficacy to the mere process of ratiocination. 
 
 You cannot believe in the existence of God, in the immortality of the 
 soul? It is because you have not looked at these matters logically and 
 according to the rules. A good syllogism will dissipate all your doubts— 
 provided you admit the premises beforehand; otherwise we must give up 
 the attempt to convince you. But be assured that no one but a fool gr 
 an impious person can resist the force of a valid argument.*? 
 
 All this is absurd. “It follows from the very nature of the 
 syllogism,” says Bautain, “that it is not the instrument of any 
 discovery” ;°* for one must have perceived by the intelligence the 
 
 S Phil. Chr., 1,.61-62, _, ™ Jbid., 58: 3 Thid., 66. “4 Thid., 68. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 253 
 
 relation of the three terms before one can set it forth, and it is 
 just in that intellectual intuition of the relation that the true dis- 
 covery lies. “It is the insight (regard) of genius which dis- 
 
 > 55 > 
 
 covers ;°° the syllogism is merely a means of “exposition,” 
 things forth for slower minds. 
 
 to set 
 
 The trouble with Scholasticism is that it has never realized the 
 limitations of the reasoning process as a way to knowledge; it has 
 never undertaken a “critique of the reason.” It has no means of 
 undertaking such a critique; for it should be based on a knowledge 
 of psychology, and how work out a good psychology when “one 
 disdains the study of natural facts and is not willing to draw one’s 
 philosophy from revealed principles?”°’® As a matter of fact, 
 Scholasticism presupposes the wholly inadequate psychology which 
 regards intellectual processes as the sum and substance of all that. 
 goes on in the mind, neglecting volition and emotion altogether. 
 “Tt defines man as a reasonable animal,” says Bautain, “and the 
 soul as a thinking substance [Aristotle plus Descartes], because it 
 is with thought and the reason that it is going to do all the rest.”°* 
 
 Bautain is convinced that, as a general rule, Rationalism and 
 Pantheism go together; and, in the case of the Philosophie de Lyon, 
 he finds an instance of this rule. In this philosophy, the funda- 
 mental metaphysical notion is that of Being in General. ‘This 
 notion is obtained ‘‘by making abstraction from the species and 
 from the individuals which limit the universal notion of being.” 
 The result is a pure notion, signifying simply “the manner in which 
 the mind can envisage all the existences, without dwelling on their 
 properties and generic qualities.””* Being in General, that is, is 
 nothing in particular: “pure negation of all that constitutes 
 existence, form, quality, properties, attributes, relations, etc.”°° 
 The resulting conception is extremely hard to distinguish from 
 the conception of Nothing: “Being in General is what does not 
 exist or what the reason conceives as not existing.”’” The effort 
 is made to save a remnant of concreteness by calling Being in 
 General the opposite of Nothing; but Nothing is then defined as 
 
 ® Tbid. mw Abidug 71) 
  Thid. © Ibid. 
  Thid., 65-66. * Thid. 
 
 8 Tbid., 70. 
 
254 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 privation of Being, which gives us a circular definition. Being 
 is divided dichotomously into spiritual being and corporeal being; 
 spiritual being into uncreated (God) and created, spiritual being. 
 God is thus defined as a fraction of a fraction of a general notion 
 signifying Nothing! Nay, it is worse than that: 
 
 If the notion of spirit is but a distinction in the universal notion of 
 Being, matter, the other distinction or second species of the same genus, 
 participates in the nature of their common principle, which comprehends 
 them both. Matter and spirit, confounded at their source, are therefore 
 the same at bottom! ... Do you not perceive [cries Bautain] at the 
 end of all these distinctions and all this confusion a gross pantheism, and 
 the fatalism of the ancients with all its consequences! ®? 
 
 Christian philosophy had become pantheistic! It was but natural 
 that when this dreadful suspicion came over Bautain’s mind, he 
 should proceed to attack Scholasticism with a virulence and a cru- 
 sading zeal that made him a host of enemies.°’ Indeed, the situa- 
 tion was alarming enough, as Bautain conceived it! Here was 
 German Romanticism creeping into the veins of the French nation 
 like a virus, and sapping its moral stamina. ‘The natural protector 
 of morality was the Christian Church; yet when one called on 
 Christianity to combat the disease of Romanticism, one discovered 
 that Christian philosophy was vitiated by an even deadlier disease! 
 Yes, even deadlier; for German Romanticism at least trusted the 
 higher intuitions of the soul, and so arrived at a vitalistic, spiritual- 
 istic type of pantheism, while Catholic Scholasticism, believing the 
 reason to be the highest human faculty, deified the universe of 
 mathematical space and time,** and arrived at a kind of Spinozistic 
 pantheism. Small wonder then, that the Scholastic arguments for 
 the existence of God made no impression on a Romanticist. They 
 represented a kind of rationalistic dogmatism, a kind of naturalistic 
 
 pantheism, which he himself had outgrown. 
 
 © PKil. Chr, Tl, 73-74. 
 
 ® One can hardly blame Raess and 
 Liebermann for resenting the implica- 
 tion that the instruction at the Grand 
 Séminaire was tainted with Pantheism. 
 The type of Scholasticism for which they 
 stood was very different from the 
 Scholasticism of the Philosophie de Lyon 
 
 —much less influenced by Cartesianism, 
 and much nearer to authentic mediaeval 
 Scholasticism. 
 
 * Bautain points out that the Philoso- 
 phie de Lyon (Metaphys. gen., article 
 3) actually lays down the proposition 
 that “space is the divine immensity.” 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 255 
 
 How did Christian philosophy ever come to be infected with 
 such a disease? That, to a man like Bautain, trained in the history 
 of philosophy, was a question of great interest and importance. 
 De Bonald and de Maistre argued that all the errors of modern 
 philosophy were the inevitable consequence of the attempt of 
 Descartes to philosophize dans un poéle, as an isolated individual 
 _ mind, artificially severed from society and tradition. Bautain, too, 
 felt that many of the defects of French Scholasticism could be 
 traced to the influence of Descartes. ‘The pantheism of the 
 Philosophie de Lyon was derived from Descartes as logically as the 
 pantheism of Spinoza. 
 
 But Bautain was not content to stop there; for he considered 
 that the root of pantheism was rationalism, and Christian philos- 
 ophy had become rationalistic long before Descartes. The great 
 mediaeval Scholastics were themselves deeply imbued with rational- 
 ism; it is to them that the attempt to find God through Nature, 
 and prove his existence by purely rational arguments, is to be traced. 
 Where did they get their rationalism? Surely from some pagan 
 source; for rationalism is foreign to the genius of Christianity. 
 Bautain claims to be able to show the exact moment at which the 
 paganization of Christian thought took place. It was the moment 
 when, under the double influence of the teaching of Abelard and 
 the recovery of the works of Aristotle, “dialectic came gliding into 
 the bosom of Christianity and into her schools.” Never was there 
 such a transformation in Christian thinking in so brief a space of 
 time. Logic and dialectics, hitherto despised, became a veritable 
 craze; nothing could be accomplished without the use of the syllog- 
 ism. Aristotle’s philosophy, censured by the early Fathers of the 
 Church, became the object of “a sort of idolatry’; and, in spite 
 of the opposition of Pope Gregory LX, matters had soon reached 
 such a pass that ‘one was even expected to accept with deference 
 every part of it, every proposition, every word. Every mind was 
 to bow before the word of the Master—and yet,” observes Bautain, 
 “not to mention the rest, what has become of Aristotle’s physics 
 to-day?”®° 
 
 The pernicious influence of Aristotle! That, to Bautain, is the 
 source of all the troubles that have beset Christian thought from 
 
 PPa tera ii, 11. 
 
256 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 that day to this. If only it could have been nipped in the bud! 
 If only Pope Gregory IX, and the doctores biblici, positivi, veteres 
 who supported him in his attack upon Aristotelianism had prevailed 
 over the doctores sententiarii et novi! But since they did not pre- 
 vail, since the serpent of pagan rationalism was suffered to glide 
 into the bosom of Christianity, a great reform is now necessary; 
 and now, strangely enough, the reformer finds that the rdles have 
 shifted, and Christian conservatism itself is on the side of paganism! 
 
 What was new then, what was expressly disapproved by the sovereign 
 Pontiff in those days, has since that time so won its way in the ecclesiasti- 
 cal schools that even to-day the argumentative method is regarded as 
 essential in the teaching of theology, and, in the opinion of many, it 
 almost participates in the sacredness of dogma. It is the positive method 
 which in our days would be declared an innovation; and what was 
 ancient, and respected as such, in the twelfth century would seem a 
 novelty and perhaps be rejected in the nineteenth.®® 
 
 Precisely what was the nature of the great reform which Bautain 
 hoped to accomplish? What was the “positive” tradition to which 
 he here appeals, and which he contrasts with the “dialectical” 
 tradition of the Schoolmen? It must be confessed that Bautain’s 
 program is a bit vague. Sometimes he seems to be appealing, like 
 the Traditionalists, from reason to authority; sometimes he ex- 
 plicitly appeals from the Aristotelian tradition to the Platonic, from 
 Abelard and St. Thomas to St. Bonaventura, St. Bernard, St. 
 Augustine, and the Alexandrian Fathers; sometimes he seems to 
 be contending that there is a radical inconsistency between the 
 Hebrew-Christian view of God and the world and the Greek view 
 of .God and the world,®’ so that even Platonism is an inadequate 
 vehicle for Christian thought. At such moments the Protestant 
 reader of Bautain is strongly reminded of Ritschl and Harnack, 
 and their attempt to purge Christian theology completely of the 
 pernicious influence of Greek metaphysics. Here, where he is in 
 a sense most reactionary, most unprogressive, most anti-philosophi- 
 cal, is the point where Bautain most nearly approaches the position 
 of certain Catholic ‘“Modernists” like the Abbé Laberthonniére. 
 Tt is by going “back to” something—“back to Paul,” “back to 
 
 ® Phil. Chr., II, 12, note. See infra, section II of this chapter. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT Petey 
 
 Christ”—that most revolutionary movements begin. There are 
 the seeds of a new Reformation in Bautain’s criticism of Scholas- 
 ticism. 
 
 5S. Critique of Traditionalism. 
 
 The question of Bautain’s relation to the Traditionalists has 
 repeatedly faced us in the course of our study. In our examination 
 of Bautain’s theory of knowledge, we have frequently been tempted 
 to deny that there is any real kinship between his doctrine and that 
 of the Traditionalists; and yet we have been forced to admit that 
 the points of agreement are too numerous and too patent to be 
 overlooked. It is time now to pronounce a final judgment on this 
 question; and we shall find that Bautain himself is our best witness. 
 If we examine his attitude toward the philosophy of Lamennais, we 
 shall find him defining his relation to the whole Traditionalist 
 movement with perfect clarity. 
 
 The readers of Bautain’s first public manifesto as chef d’école* 
 must have been surprised at the vigor with which he attacked 
 Lamennais. His attack upon the school of Condillac, upon the 
 Scotch school and the Eclectics, and even his attack upon the 
 Scholastics, were quite in the spirit of Lamennais. The Tradi- 
 tionalists were in fact the chief rivals of the Scholastics in France 
 at this time; and if they had not yet attacked Scholasticism as 
 violently as Bautain attacked it, that was only because they had not 
 perceived how rationalistic it was. Had Lamennais suspected that 
 the same Cartesian rationalism which he described as the root of 
 all the errors of modern philosophy was characteristic of the phi- 
 losophy which was taught in the Catholic seminaries, he would 
 have raised a shout, and called out all his Traditionalist cohorts. 
 Yet no sooner had Bautain finished with his bitter arraignment 
 of Scholasticism than he turned savagely upon Lamennais and 
 condemned his philosophy on the following counts: 
 
 1. It is not philosophical. 
 
 It has no principle of knowledge in it, and it takes away all means 
 of acquiring one, since, incessantly interposing a human authority between 
 man and the facts, it shuts him off from access to them. 
 
 ® De Penseignement de la philosophie en France au XIXme Siecle. Ens. Phil. F. 
 
258 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 It destroys the possibility of immediate certainty (évidence), since 
 general testimony . . . can lead us to Je/ieve, but can in no case make 
 us see. Well, what is knowledge without évidence. 
 
 It degrades the human intelligence, made to contemplate the truth. 
 . . . Imposing . . . testimony as infallible, as a supreme authority from 
 which there is no appeal, . . . it attacks the most noble prerogative of 
 man, his liberty, by which he has the power to grant or refuse his assent 
 to that which is set before him.*® 
 
 2. dait as not. Catholic, 
 
 It tends to substitute for the only infallible authority, which is that 
 of God, a human authority, that of common sense or the general reason. 
 . . . The martyrs who, however numerous they were, were still in the 
 minority in the midst of the mass of the pagans, were only fools, then!*® 
 
 3. As an apologetic, it has no appeal for the modern man. 
 
 It found little sympathy among men of our age, who wish évidence 
 and not authority, who wish to see the truth for themselves and not 
 receive it on the testimony of another. They have not considered it 
 possible to philosophize by proxy, or that common sense absolved one 
 from the need of knowledge, or that everybody’s reason was entrusted 
 with the task of thinking for each. It was in the ecclesiastical schools. 
 that it produced the greatest effect.” 
 
 After this sweeping criticism of the man who was then recog— 
 nized as the chief of the Traditionalist school, Bautain adds a 
 casual note’* in which he mentions the names of certain philosophers 
 in whose teachings he finds less to criticize, and with whom, one 
 infers, he is in substantial agreement: de Maistre, de Bonald, 
 Ballanche, Azais, and Riambourg—all ‘Traditionalists!** This 
 note must have puzzled many of his readers: how could he be 
 so much opposed to Lamennais, and still find himself in essential 
 agreement with the Traditionalist school? No one could place 
 Bautain. ‘The opponents of ‘Traditionalism classed him as a 
 
 @ Ens. Phil. F, \ii-lviii. theless one in spirit with the émigré phi- 
 ” Ibid., \viii, 1x. losophers who founded the Traditional- 
 7 Tbid., 1xi-lxii. ist school. Riambourg, an out-and-out 
 ® Tbid., \xiii. Bonaldian, was a personal friend of Bau- 
 
 * With the possible exception of Azais, tain’s. See FB,K, for some of their 
 who had a somewhat original “philosophy letters. 
 of compensation,” but who was never- 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 259 
 
 ‘Traditionalist, while the ‘Traditionalists themselves became _ his 
 vehement opponents. Bautain himself seems to have felt that an 
 explanation of his position was imperative; and so, in a long letter 
 to the Revue Européenne,* he endeavored to clear the whole 
 matter up. 
 
 In this letter, Bautain repeats his previous objections to Lamen- 
 nais’s philosophy, with many amplifications; but with all this we 
 have no concern. It ought to be sufficiently plain to the reader, 
 by now, why it was that Bautain reacted so violently against the 
 philosophy of “common consent.” To an intuitionist, a second- 
 hand assurance of truth is no assurance at all. We are interested 
 not in the points at which Bautain differs from Lamennais, but 
 the points at which he agrees with him; and here he is very explicit. 
 He lays down three clear-cut propositions, which sum up not only 
 all that he has in common with Lamennais, but, incidentally, all 
 that he has in common with Traditionalism: 
 
 (1). That the human reason cannot rise by its own strength to the 
 knowledge of the First Principle, or ie that of any fundamental truths. 
 Principles are not “things of reason,” entities, abstractions. 
 
 (2). That it cannot develop, as reason, without the datum of lan- 
 guage, which is necessarily traditional. 
 
 (3). That reason cannot act without principles and axioms which 
 
 it does not create, which it cannot verify, and which nevertheless it is 
 obliged to admit, under penalty of rendering itself null and void.’° 
 
 All three of these propositions are expanded and discussed at 
 length. We need not dwell upon the first and third, for we are 
 familiar with Bautain’s doctrine that faith and intelligence neces- 
 sarily precede reason, and furnish it with all its major premises. 
 ‘The second demands sharper attention. ‘The Bonaldian theory of 
 language is the most characteristic doctrine of the Traditionalist 
 school; and Bautain’s attitude toward this doctrine will reveal, like 
 a touchstone, his whole attitude toward Traditionalism. I quote 
 at some length, that I may neither conceal Bautain’s fundamental 
 agreement with his contemporaries in a belief now generally re- 
 garded as bizarre, nor conceal the originality of his interpretation 
 of it. 
 
 4 Lettre sur le sens commun, Rev. Eur., © Thid., 649. 
 
 VI, 637-673. 
 
 18 
 
260 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Reason [he says] cannot develop spontaneously and, as it were, by its 
 own effort. One thinks only by means of speech and words, with the 
 aid of language; and the formation of a language presupposes the most 
 subtle exercise of thought. ‘This circle is found in every question of 
 origin, and can be avoided only by the intervention of a superior power. 
 
 . . Neither man in general, nor a people, nor an individual, has ever 
 had the initiative in his development, nor has he ever become what he 
 wanted to become: or, to put it differently, it was never his will which 
 made the plan of his education or determined his original direction. 
 The human race at its origin was under the immediate control of 
 Providence, and received in its primitive relationship with its divine 
 Author and with its creation all the 7¢dées méres, all the truths which were 
 destined to serve as principles for its future science, and at the same 
 time as motives for the will.“* When it swerved from this relationship, 
 it was because it heard and lent an ear to amother word, a word of nega- 
 tion, cf criticism, of reflection, a lying word. In the one case as in the 
 other, it did nothing but react and respond freely to what had been 
 Sate DOF hulk 
 
 What is true of humanity is true of each people, and here the truth 
 is yet more evident. A people does not appear suddenly on the surface 
 of the earth, like a swarm of insects after a thunderstorm. There is no 
 nation or people that has not its antecedents. It is either the develop- 
 ment of a family, or a fraction of an existing nation which moves else- 
 where, or, finally, an agglomeration of fragments of population which 
 accumulate and form as it were an alluvial society. In all these forms, 
 there is a language, if not several; in a language, there are traditions of 
 which it is the container; there are ideas, scraps of knowledge, customs; 
 and all this comes from the mother-society. . . . To imagine that peoples 
 or nations constitute themselves by agreement, by deliberation, by social 
 contract; to ascribe to them, in the state which people have pleased to 
 call the state of nature, the reasonings, the systems, the combinations and 
 abstractions of certain thinkers of modern times, is truly to feed upon 
 chimeras; it is to invent society instead of studying it. A people, by 
 the very fact that it is a people, comes from somewhere and from some 
 one; it bears in its moral and intellectual constitution, and in its language, 
 which is the expression thereof, all the principles and all the essential 
 conditions of its future. 
 
 Let these observations now be applied to the individual who is born 
 and develops in the environment of an already developed society. His 
 
 *° Cf. Durkheim on the social origin of 
 the logical categories. The Traditional- 
 ists and the modern sociological school 
 both trace many of our fundamental 
 moral and metaphysical concepts to ‘“‘col- 
 lective representations”? which have come 
 down to us from primitive man. The 
 
 Traditionalists say they were dictated by 
 Deity; the sociologists say they were de- 
 duced from the structure of society. For 
 the Traditionalists, the primitive origin 
 of an idea accredits its truth; for most 
 modern thinkers, quite the reverse. 
 
INGTHE HISTORY OR STHOUGHT 261 
 
 spirit is immersed in the spiritual atmosphere of this society, as his body 
 lives and moves in the environing air. Just as all the forces, all the 
 fluids which stir in the air, press upon, stimulate, penetrate his organs 
 and become modified, so the moral influences, of which the social at- 
 mosphere is full, excite and develop his spiritual faculties by means of 
 speech and language, which is for the life of ‘the spirit what the air 
 is for the body—the bearer of light; . . . and the development of his 
 spirit, like that of his body, goes on at first quite unconsciously, as a 
 composite resultant of the antecedents from which he springs and the cir- 
 cumstances in which he is placed. ‘That is the destiny, the fatu7, to 
 which each man who is born into the world of time is exposed; and 
 it is out of that fatality, the consequence of an original unlawful act of 
 humanity, that his liberty must extricate itself. . . . It is to the society 
 in the midst of which he is formed that man owes all the basal truths 
 that he knows; they are given to him in the germ in infancy, enclosed in 
 the shell of words, like seeds cast into the soil, which germinate only 
 after a long time... . We say then, with the author of the Essay 
 [Lamennais] that the individual reason is nothing except in relation to 
 the general reason of society, to which it clings as a child to its mother. 
 We say that the reason cannot exist as reason except by means of language, 
 which furnishes it the necessary means for its exercise, and which, in 
 giving it words, transmits to it the types of the objects which the names 
 represent. ‘That is what produces what may be called the spontaneous 
 education of man, the primitive and indestructible basis on which all 
 his beliefs are founded. And so we regard as empty hypotheses those 
 attempts at methodical doubt, those suppositions of entire ignorance, of 
 a tabula rasa, of an empty understanding, which modern reason has de- 
 lighted in making from Descartes to Condillac, and which they continue 
 to make even to-day in the schools, under another form, when they 
 attempt to demonstrate to a supposed unbeliever . . . by rational argu- 
 ments the existence of God, of the soul, etc.77 
 
 The reader will notice, I hope, that in the very act of accepting 
 much that was common to all the Traditionalists, Bautain has 
 assimilated it to his own most fundamental conceptions. ‘The 
 formula of /:fe—external stimulus awakening internal response— 
 dominates the whole. ‘Tradition does not impose itself upon the 
 individual’s mind as upon a lifeless, putty-like mass; it is the at- 
 mosphere in which the individual mind grows, freely selecting 
 from that which is offered—to its own destruction, if it selects 
 badly. Language is but the “container” of tradition, the “expres- 
 sion” of the “moral and intellectual constitution” of a given 
 
 ™ Rev. Eur., V1, 642-646. 
 
262 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 society; it is a short-hand expression for the total pressure of society 
 upon the individual. We are far removed from the mechanical 
 theory of de Bonald. 
 
 To conclude, then, Bautain agrees with the Traditionalists in 
 their negations, but not in their affirmations. He agrees with them 
 in their anti-intellectualism, but he proposes a different substitute 
 for rationalism: not blind acceptance of social and ecclesiastical 
 authority, but “intelligence,” “faith,” and the ‘“‘test of works.” 
 He insists upon the importance of “authority” as strongly as they— 
 “for the child, it is his parents’ authority; for the disciple, his 
 master’s; for the outer man and the truths which bear upon his 
 self-preservation, that of society”;‘* and, we may add, in religious 
 matters, that of the Divine Word of which the Church is the 
 custodian—but its importance is temporary, and merely pedagogical. 
 Without hearkening to some word of authority, no knowledge; yet 
 hearsay knowledge, even in the religious sphere, is not the final or 
 the highest type of knowledge. Faith leads to sight at last. 
 
 If there is one member of the Traditionalist school with whom 
 Bautain has more in common than with all the others, it is de 
 Maistre. We saw in our Introduction how strong is the mystic 
 and intuitionistic strain in de Maistre’s thought. Much that is 
 central in Bautain’s theory of knowledge—his theory of innate 
 ideas, for example—may have been derived directly from de 
 Maistre. If his theory is broader and more philosophical than that 
 of the haughty émigré, that is due to his deeper knowledge of the 
 history of philosophy, and his contact with German Catholic 
 thought. 
 
 One thing more is really needed to complete our picture of 
 Bautain’s relations with contemporary schools of thought: an ac- 
 count of his relations with contemporary German Catholic thought, 
 as represented by the school of Munich, the school of ‘Tubingen, 
 the school of Bonn, etc. Here, however, we are practically reduced 
 to conjecture. Bautain hardly mentions his German Catholic 
 contemporaries at all; although we know that, through Mlle. 
 Humann, he was profoundly influenced by them. He is opposed, 
 as a matter of course, to the rationalism of Hermes and the school 
 of Bonn; he thinks Franz Baader “sincerely Christian at heart,” 
 
 8 Rev, Eur., VI, 650. 
 
INT THEZHISTORY OF* THOUGHT 263 
 
 but too much taken with the ideas of Saint-Martin and Jacob 
 Boehme;"* he has pleasant relations with the school of Tiibingen, 
 and gets a long and, on the whole, commendatory letter from 
 Moehler himself, discussing the Philosophie du Christianisme. 
 That is about all we know definitely; and yet it is possible to define 
 Bautain’s position in relation to these schools of thought with con- 
 siderable assurance. He stands closest, I think, to the school of 
 Munich, where Romanticism was most completely regnant; and 
 yet, while he is more of a Romanticist than most of his Catholic 
 contemporaries, he has a horror of Romantic pantheism that sets 
 him off from Baader and all the school of Munich. Baader aims 
 to reconcile theism and pantheism; Bautain tries to purge Christian 
 theology of every vestige and suspicion of pantheism. As _ his 
 French compatriots noted in Bautain a certain exotic flavor of 
 German Romanticism, so his German contemporaries noted in him 
 a certain French imtransigeance, which caused them to set him down 
 as a reactionary and an obscurantist.°° We may say, in sum, that 
 so far as contemporary influences are concerned, Bautain’s philoso- 
 phy was a mixture of French Traditionalism with the Romanticism 
 of the school of Munich. If this formula is insufficient to express 
 the richness of his thought, it is partly because it leaves out of 
 consideration his individual religious experience and philosophical 
 genius, and partly because it neglects the influence of the classical 
 philosophers. 
 
 II 
 BAUTAIN AS AN ECLECTIC: 
 His PHILosoPpHyY OF THE History oF [THOUGHT 
 
 We have seen how Bautain pokes fun at his former associates, 
 the Eclectics, for trying, in their eagerness to find truth in every- 
 thing, to make essentially irreconcilable views mix and fuse in 
 
 would perhaps understand that, but it will 
 
 ™ Cf. supra, chapter I, note 30. 
 be an enigma for most of his readers.” 
 
 8° When Bautain’s first essays came out, 
 
 one of his French critics (Ami de la 
 Religion, LXXV, 517) accused him of 
 writing in a barbarous and incomprehen- 
 sible style: “The author speaks of the 
 great categorical imperative; a German 
 
 If so familiar an allusion was an enigma, 
 
 -one hardly wonders that Bautain was mis- 
 
 understood! On the impression which 
 Bautain created in Germany, see Vermeil, 
 
 op. cit., 115-117. 
 
264 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 their philosophical melting-pot. “To a man of his iconoclastic 
 temper, bent on purifying the faith from all admixtures of error, 
 the view that every philosophy and every epoch in the history of 
 thought represents a step forward toward the truth could not but 
 be obnoxious. ‘To him, there are certain philosophies which it is 
 our business not to appreciate but to reject and combat with all the 
 force there is in us; and there are certain periods in the history 
 of thought when men, instead of progressing toward the truth, 
 have wandered so far astray that it is best for us to leap over the 
 whole period, and go back to the point of divagation, if we are to 
 escape their errors. 
 
 Nevertheless, there was always a good deal of the Eclectic in 
 Bautain. His knowledge of the historic philosophers, acquired 
 before his conversion, could hardly be obliterated; and the Eclectic 
 habit of entering sympathetically into diverse points of view, and 
 assimilating as much of each as one consistently could, was almost 
 second nature to him. ‘The iconoclastic mood was not always upon 
 him; his mission was not merely to purify Christian philosophy, but 
 to restate it in modern terms, and reconcile it as far as he honorably 
 could with the prevailing philosophical tendencies, as St. Thomas 
 had done in his day. ‘To attempt to do this, was to use the Eclectic 
 method; and Bautain was conscious of the fact. Given a criterion 
 of selection, he says, the Eclectic method is excellent, and Christian 
 apologists have always used it. 
 
 In this sense and in this manner, Christianity is essentially eclectic. 
 The word of Jesus Christ is sown as a seed in the world; it germinates 
 there, develops, blossoms, and bears fruit in a marvellous fashion in the 
 midst of pagan civilization and all the philosophical knowledge of the 
 time. The Church is founded in this environment; ... and, in the 
 discussion of the doctrines she meets upon her path, she accepts all that 
 is not contradictory to her, and gathers in all the elements which can 
 be reconciled with the truth which she proclaims. Whoever is not 
 against us is for us. There is nothing in this thought of Plato which 
 is contrary to the revealed word; the Church adopts it. This maxim 
 of Aristotle has nothing in it contrary to dogma; the Church makes it 
 her own. This precept of Stoicism is in harmony with or not in oppo- 
 sition to discipline; the Church appropriates it. That is how Christ- 
 ianity practices eclecticism.§+ 
 
 *t Mor. Ev. D, 317-318. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 265 
 
 We must not be surprised, then, to find Bautain writing a sort 
 of philosophy of the history of thought and representing his own 
 philosophy as the culminating stage in a process of gradual approxi- 
 mation to the truth—quite like Hegel or Cousin. Philosophies of 
 the history of thought were in style just then. To the Encyclo- 
 pedists of the eighteenth century, it seemed that the history of 
 thought could be safely neglected; one could apprehend Truth best 
 by keeping one’s Reason free from the contamination of the super- 
 stitions of the past, and seeing things for oneself. “To the philoso- 
 phers of the early nineteenth century—radicals and conservatives 
 both—this appeared to be a great error. We do not best approach 
 the truth by pretending that we are the first investigators who ever 
 lived; we need to study the traditions of the past, either, as Comte 
 would say, to free ourselves from their errors, or, as the Tradi- 
 tionalists would say, to appreciate their divine wisdom, or, as Hegel 
 and the Eclectics would say, to appreciate their relative truth and 
 so climb upon the shoulders of our predecessors. It was customary, 
 then, for all philosophers to get a running start of at least a millen- 
 nium or two before propounding the truth which was to set the 
 capstone upon the philosophical structure of the ages. Bautain 
 is no exception. 
 
 There are to be found in Bautain’s writings two distinct and 
 not wholly harmonious philosophies of the history of thought. One 
 of these, entitled T'rwe and False Philosophy,’ is written in his 
 sternest, most uncompromising mood, and painted in black and 
 white, like St. Augustine’s “City of God.” The other,** which 
 represents a later and maturer view, is far more conciliatory, and 
 makes a place for all types of philosophy, even rationalism, on a 
 graduated scale. Bautain the Traditionalist, the reformer, the 
 opponent of Pantheism and Rationalism speaks in the former; 
 Bautain the Romanticist, the Eclectic, the apologist speaks in the 
 latter. 
 
 Two great tendencies—so begins the essay on True and False 
 Philosophy—have been struggling with each other since the be- 
 ginning of human thought: rationalism and traditionalism, sophis- 
 
 82 Rev. Eur., V, 635 et seq.; VI, 524 Psych. Exp., 1, 16 et seg.; cf. Mor. 
 et seg.; reprinted in Phil. Chr., letters Ev. P, passim. 
 23-26. Cf. Choses, 113-120. 
 
266 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 tic and true philosophy. Both claim to spring from the love of 
 wisdom; but the only type of wisdom which rationalism considers 
 possible 1s such as the unaided human individual can acquire by 
 rational reflection upon his own experience; while traditionalism 
 affirms the existence of a higher Wisdom—the heavenly Wisdom 
 whose praises are sung in the book of Proverbs—vouchsafed to 
 favored individuals, conditioned upon purity of heart, and embodied 
 in the sacred traditions of the race. So far as European civiliza- 
 tion is concerned, the chief source of rationalism is Hellenic; of 
 traditionalism, Hebraic. 
 
 The Hebrew type of wisdom is not speculative and argumenta- 
 tive, like that of the Greeks, but essentially practical and intuitive. 
 The Hebrew sage, as Bautain points out, was not a “philosopher” 
 at all; he was either a seer or else a scribe, meditating upon the 
 writings which seers had left behind. 
 
 And so [says Bautain] to prove his knowledge and his orthodoxy the 
 Israelite did not resort to reasoned demonstration, to disputation. He 
 cited the text, saying: “It is written.” He recounted facts in their 
 natural or geneological order.** 
 
 In other words, the only kind of philosophy known to the 
 Hebrews, is a sort of philosophy of history. When a Hebrew 
 seeks to inspire faith in his God, he does not argue, he recounts 
 the history of his people. In the New Testament, as in the Old, 
 events are the only arguments by which the belief in Providence 
 is sustained; the missionary sermons of Peter, Stephen, and Paul 
 are nothing but panoramas of sacred history, “‘recounted without 
 commentary, without discussion, without demonstration, with no 
 other proof than the exposition of the acts of Providence and the 
 natural course of events itself.” ‘The Hebrew mind apprehends 
 the divine in seeking to discern the meaning of history, and this 
 apprehension is immediate and intuitive. “Life evidences itself 
 through its activity as light does through its brilliancy.” It is 
 precisely because the Hebrew does not reflect and reason that he 
 is able to plumb the mystery of man’s origin and destiny. Ques- 
 tions of whence and whither are questions that can never be 
 solved by reasoning. 
 
 84 Phil. Chr., I, 348. Litt ney 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 267 
 
 Thought, like the brook, could not ascend again to its source without 
 losing its way. It is not by concentrating himself within himself, by 
 reflecting himself in the mirror of his inward consciousness, that man 
 will recognize his primal Source, for reflection can show him only his 
 momentary state of existence, and not what he was before the present 
 reflection, or what he will be the next moment. It is not with the aid 
 of his memories that he will explain his origin, for no creature was ever 
 present at his own creation, . . . and, once more, no creature is able 
 to see into its own depths; and thus man cannot know himself in himself 
 
 or by himself.°* 
 
 Bautain maintains, as vigorously as Ritschl and Harnack, that 
 between the Greek genius in general and the genius of Judaism 
 and Christianity, there is unalterable opposition. “Che Hebrew finds 
 his God intuitively, in human history and the moral life; the 
 Greek finds his God by a process of rational reflection upon the 
 phenomena of Nature. Yet no sooner has he said this, than he 
 proceeds to soften the sharpness of the contrast by pointing out 
 that there is a non-rationalistic strain in Greek philosophy: the 
 Pythagorean strain, which Bautain traces to Egyptian influences, 
 and believes to be derived from primitive revelation. ‘The great 
 and distinguishing doctrine of this Pythagorean school is the 
 necessity of moral preparation for the intuition of religious truth. 
 
 Pythagoras [says Bautain| founded the only really serious school of 
 philosophy in the Occident, where conduct went hand in hand with 
 speculation. His disciples had to pass through a long and painful process 
 of testing . . . to free them by degrees from the prestige of the senses, 
 the illusions of the imagination, the prejudices of the reason, and all 
 the opinions and habits which savored of their former manner of life; 
 to purify them, in order to render them capable of receiving . . . the 
 announcement of certain truths unknown to the multitude, and of 
 reaching at last, by illumination of the celestial ray, the contemplation 
 of pure verity. . . . And so there issued from this school a multitude of 
 remarkable men; . . . and even more than a century after the violent 
 destruction of this school, there was not a distinguished man in Greece 
 who did not participate in its spirit. . . . The Socratic school, which 
 appeared long afterward, continued the work begun by Pythagoras, but 
 in a manner less profound, less vigorous, and less pure.*® 
 
 Bautain is surprisingly cool toward Socrates. He complains that 
 
 *§ Tbid., 340. © Ibid., 355-357. 
 
268 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Socrates’ teaching was too largely negative and destructive, too 
 dialectical in form, and too flippant in spirit, to be a means of 
 moral betterment. Living in a time when the Greek reason was 
 in the full luxuriance of its development, and intoxicated with the 
 sense of its own powers, Socrates undertook to defend the traditional 
 morality and the higher intuitions of the spirit—a serious task, 
 demanding a serious mind. But Socrates, instead of putting his 
 disciples through the ethical and religious discipline which alone 
 could fit them for the appreciation of truths of this higher order, 
 adopted the logic-chopping methods and the jesting humor of the 
 Sophists themselves, and flippantly discussed the most sacred mys- 
 teries in the public squares. 
 
 His lessons [says Bautain] were almost jewx @esprit. . . . He often gave 
 instruction to whomsoever he met, without demanding any preparation; 
 and far from imposing silence on beginners, he questioned them endlessly, 
 and provoked them to talk. He did not trouble his disciples much 
 about their conduct, as the example of Alcibiades shows. In his con- 
 versations, lofty truths are not announced with befitting gravity; but, 
 proposed under the form of doubts and questions, they are abandoned to 
 the criticism of the reason and the discussions of dialectic. . . . It is a 
 polemic which always begins with a negation; it is the rational or argu- 
 mentative method which thinks it cannot solidly establish the truth except 
 by first destroying all that could be said to contest it or deny it. He 
 brought Science out of the temples to exhibit her in the public square; 
 he prostituted the Word of Wisdom to every man’s reason and imagina- 
 tion, . . . making a game of the most serious thing in the world, and 
 casting into the gusts of a vain polemic the profound ideas which he had 
 gained in the temples, and the high inspirations which he had received 
 in solemn moments of ecstasy.** 
 
 Plato and Aristotle represent respectively the Pythagorean and 
 Sophistic strains in the Socratic school. With Plato, Greek philoso- 
 phy reaches its apogee: “all that the Greek genius can produce of 
 grace and high nobility.”°* For Bautain, as for Emerson, the 
 image of the twice-divided line is the epitome of all true philosophy. 
 ‘The superiority of intuitive knowledge to reasoned knowledge and 
 to sense perception; the unreality of sensible objects by comparison 
 with ideas and ideals; the need of moral discipline and aspiration 
 
 Phil. Chr., I, 358-359. S$ Thid., 360. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 269 
 
 as a preparation for the contemplation of the superior realms of 
 truth: all this is Gospel to Bautain. Plato, he admits, has ‘‘more 
 light than warmth and affection”; in his philosophy, “truth was 
 rather contemplated and admired by the intelligence than received 
 in the heart, tested, and practised”; still, Plato is to Pythagoras 
 what fulfilment is to presentiment. 
 
 Aristotle, on the contrary, is the prince of rationalism, the Past 
 Grand Master of Sophistic. His system is a dull drab travesty of 
 Plato’s, where the Platonic ideas, reduced to the level of rational 
 entities, lifeless and unsubstantial, give a semblance of objectivity 
 to a purely subjective and artificial schema. Whatever truth it 
 contains it owes to its intuitive presuppositions; and yet “it does not 
 know enough to lift its glance to that which dominates it,” and 
 fails to recognize the existence of the realm of ideal truth from 
 which it gets its premises. 
 
 A few formulas, a few definitions, a few axioms on one side; a few 
 facts and a few observations, with plenty of distinctions, on the other; 
 and in between these postulates and their data, the reason with its great 
 instrument, with its tri-square and its syllogistic form: that is all he 
 needs, not only to ascertain the truth of science, but to construct it or 
 create it, to form a system of thoughts and words, to which all truths 
 as well as all realities must accommodate themselves.®® 
 
 ‘The inevitable outcome of Aristotelianism is the clipping of the 
 wings of genius, the stifling of the noblest intuitions of the heart, 
 and the shrinking of the horizon of the universe to the limits set 
 by the dull sensual vision of the average man. ‘Or else,” adds 
 Bautain, “it finds its outcome in a Critical Philosophy, whose last 
 word is that man knows nothing and can know nothing; and which 
 leaves him, together with universal doubt, naught but distaste for 
 science and despair!”°® Such was in fact the final outcome of 
 ancient philosophy. 
 
 It was into a jaded and disillusioned world that the envoys of 
 Christianity came preaching a wisdom above the wisdom of man; 
 and the world, convinced of the impotence of the unaided human 
 reason to reach metaphysical truth, listened and accepted. “This 
 conviction of impotence,” says Bautain, “has always been, and still 
 
 © rhid., 361-362. oO 754d:0363. 
 
270 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 is, the first psychological requirement for profitably receiving the 
 word of salvation.”*’* ‘The Apostles did not try to give rational 
 explanations of their doctrines, so as to accommodate them to the 
 human understanding; they boldly admitted that what was wisdom 
 to them must appear foolishness to the “natural man’”—whom 
 Bautain likes to identify with Aristotle’s “rational animal.” ‘They 
 trusted, in the first place, to the self-evidencing power of the 
 words of light and life which they uttered, and, in the second 
 place, to the convincing power of their practical fruits in trans- 
 forming their converts and the whole fabric of civilization. Still, 
 they could not long remain without a philosophy; for now, since 
 the appearance of the Divine Word in human and intelligible 
 form, a genuine science of the divine was possible, and demanded 
 to be formulated, for the unification of doctrine as well as for 
 the convincing of unbelievers. So Christian theology was born: 
 Platonic largely in form, since many Christian converts were 
 Platonic philosophers; but drawing its principles and sanctions 
 mainly from the Scriptures. 
 
 The Platonic period in Christian thought—the period of Clement 
 of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Augustine—seems to be the hey-day 
 of true philosophy in Bautain’s estimation. But an evil day came 
 when certain doctors of the Church—Abelard and Peter Lombard 
 among the first—repeated Socrates’ mistake, and “descended into 
 the arena, trying to repel rational arguments with rational argu- 
 ments.”°* ‘Thus was born Scholasticism. 
 
 As soon as reasoning was appealed to as a means of ascertaining meta- 
 physical truth, the school of Aristotle might be expected to reappear: 
 it was in fact resuscitated by a sort of fatal coincidence, both by the 
 diffusion in Europe of the Arab translations and commentaries, and later 
 on by the importation of the original writings. . . . Then arose an 
 unprecedented infatuation for the Stagirite philosopher, and, in the full 
 sense of the word, a sort of idolatry.®? 
 
 None of the Scholastics escapes Bautain’s disfavor. The trail 
 of Aristotle is over them all. For a few of them, notably St. 
 ‘Thomas, he professes a certain admiration; they were “men of 
 rare intelligence,” he admits, and they “often took a bold leap, 
 
 "Phil. Chr., II, 4. * Thid., 10. 8 Thid., 10-11. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT LAPT 
 
 sustained as they were on the wings of faith”; nevertheless, he 
 adds, “the logical equipage with which they were obliged to load 
 themselves soon brought them to earth, and they were forced to 
 drag themselves painfully along through the science of syllogistic, 
 in order to arrive at the presentation of the relation of one truth 
 to another under the form of a rational conclusion.”** Such a 
 method could not reign forever. It soon became evident that 
 reason could get out of the Scriptures and the Sentences whatever 
 it chose to put in; and the disgust and uncertainty which followed 
 upon this discovery led to a violent reaction against Scholasticism, 
 
 and to the birth of Modern Philosophy. 
 
 Here [says Bautain] occurred a new revolution in the realm of 
 thought and science. So long as the old scholasticism reigned, philosophy 
 and theology remained united. They both rested upon the revealed 
 word, to which they appealed in the last resort, whether to establish the 
 major premises of their arguments, or to confirm their conclusions. The 
 first principles were saved; they subsisted in the midst of the impudent 
 riot of reason, still maintained by the authority of the Church. But 
 when reason, fortified by practice, had perceived that she was mistress. 
 of the discussion, she tried to set herself in the place of that authority.” 
 
 And so, carefully circumscribing the territory of philosophy, 
 and separating it entirely from that of theology, Reason proclaimed 
 her independence of faith. She constituted herself “judge with- 
 out appeal, Sovereign Reason”®® within her chosen sphere, and 
 sought her premises either “in herself” (Descartes) or “in the 
 exterior world” (Bacon). ‘This divorce between theology and 
 philosophy, faith and reason, was one of the most dreadful calami- 
 ties that ever overtook the world. ‘““The greatest misfortune of 
 our century,” says Bautain, “is that it lacks religious faith; and 
 it lacks it, because faith and science have been separated, because 
 they have been declared incompatible, if not contrary.”** 
 
 Bautain is much severer in his judgment of Descartes than in 
 his judgment of Bacon. ‘To be sure, he shares the general Con- 
 tinental prejudice against Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism; but he admits 
 the value of natural science, and freely grants that, in that sphere, 
 the Baconian method works. “It is beyond all doubt since Bacon,” 
 
 * Thid., 13-14. © Thid., 14. Thue. Use ” Ens. Phil. F, xii. 
 
Pe ig? THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 he writes, “that the only way to know facts is to observe them; 
 that experimentation and induction are the two great methods of 
 the natural sciences—and one sure thing is that the dialectical 
 method counts for very little in the numerous discoveries made 
 since that time.’ Natural science is no enemy of theology, in 
 Bautain’s mind; the laws of nature are types of the laws of the 
 spiritual world. As for the experimental method, well, it was 
 after all the experience of God that Bautain was setting over 
 against the abstract notion of God; mystics and intuitionists are 
 all empiricists, if you permit them to define the field of experience 
 widely enough. 
 
 Descartes, on the other hand, was inaugurating a type of phi- 
 losophy that was really a substitute for theology, for it was a 
 comprehensive world-view based no longer on the syllogistic ex- 
 position of truths received from tradition, but on the human 
 reason’s analysis of itself. The danger of it was concealed at 
 first, for Descartes unconsciously smuggled in traditional truths 
 like the existence of God in the shape of axioms and first principles; 
 but the Christian philosophers who seized upon Descartes’ method 
 as a means of staying up the tottering structure of Scholasticism, 
 have gradually approached the logical outcome of Cartesianism: 
 Spinozism. Their God is simply the empty form of their own 
 understandings, or, if they admit sense data for the reason to work 
 upon, he is the First Cause of Nature. In neither case is he the 
 God of religion, for the moral and religious nature of man finds 
 no place in the Cartesian psychology; and in both cases he is un- 
 real, for the Kantian critique has exposed the subjectivity of the 
 forms of the understanding and the whole world of Nature which 
 they shape. 
 
 It would not be fair to leave the impression that Bautain is 
 wholly hostile to Descartes. As an opponent of Aristotelianism 
 and Scholasticism, and as a proponent of the Platonic doctrine of 
 innate ideas, he has Bautain’s sympathy. Bautain only regrets that 
 the Platonic tendency in Cartesianism, represented by Malebranche, 
 failed to outstrip the rationalistic tendency which culminated in 
 Spinozistic pantheism and the PAilosophie de Lyon. Malebranche 
 is, after Plato, Bautain’s most admired master. The following 
 remark indicates pretty clearly where their point of contact lies: 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 273 
 
 To see all in God signified for him [Malebranche] to perceive the 
 truth in the divine ideas, archetypes of the existences and of knowledge, 
 which the intelligence can contemplate by means of a higher light. 
 Those who made sport of this great man in the following century did 
 not even suspect what he meant. They were incapable of understanding 
 
 the sublime leadings of the Christian philosopher.*® 
 
 In the essay on True and False Philosophy, the history of 
 modern philosophy is only vaguely alluded to, not because Bautain 
 is less familiar with modern than with ancient philosophers—on 
 the contrary, he shows far less acquaintance with Aristotle, whom 
 he grossly misunderstands, than with any of the modern philoso- 
 phers—but because the whole purpose of the essay is to furnish 
 an historical background for his polemic against rationalism in 
 Christian thought. Once the historical antecedents of the Philoso- 
 phie de Lyon have been made clear, this purpose is accomplished, 
 and the epic of Truth and Error closes dramatically with the 
 defenders of the City of God made captive by the hosts of Satan— 
 and no rescuer yet in sight. “To relieve the suspense, we may 
 perhaps be permitted to supply the dénotiment which Bautain prob- 
 ably had in mind. The hosts of darkness are thrown into sudden 
 confusion by the unexpected defection of one of their ablest men, 
 Immanuel Kant, who pulverizes their mightiest engine of destruc- 
 tion, known as the Reason. ‘Traditionalism and Platonism® then 
 come to the rescue, and an Age of Faith is ushered in, amid 
 universal rejoicings. 
 
 One might say that Kant did for Bautain what Montaigne did 
 for Pascal:*°° he led him to despair of reaching truth by the path 
 of reason, and so drove him to embrace religious faith as the only 
 alternative to complete skepticism. What part the study of Kant 
 played in driving Bautain into that state of psycho-physical de- 
 pression from which Mlle. Humann saved him, we do not know, 
 but we do know that the Variétés philosophiques, the first original 
 
 ® Psych. Exp., I, 104. 
 
 ® Tn the Choses de Vautre monde, 113- 
 120, the contrast between Traditionalism 
 and Rationalism reappears as the contrast 
 between Platonism and Rationalism. 
 
 1 See the Dialogue with M. Sacy, 
 printed among the Opuscules in all large 
 
 editions of Pascal’s Pensées. Pascal, by 
 the way, should certainly be included 
 among those who most influenced Bau- 
 tain. See Bautain’s answers to the Bishop 
 (quoted in the Avertissement), where 
 Pascal is constantly cited. 
 
274 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 book which Bautain produced after his conversion, deals chiefly 
 with the problems raised by Kant; and we may surmise that he 
 began to regain his intellectual balance when he came to realize 
 that the Kantian critique, while it condemns all merely rationalistic 
 metaphysics to the limbo of subjectivity, has no terrors for the 
 man who believes in the existence of faculties superior to reason. 
 From that time on, he thought of Kant in terms of warm admira- 
 tion; and he cherished the hope that Kant might do for the whole 
 world what he had done for him. 
 
 The glory of Socrates [writes Bautain] is to have protested, in the 
 name of conscience and in the name of beliefs founded on the moral 
 law and on tradition, against the subtleties of the reason abandoned to 
 itself; and that which in our own day has made illustrious the philosopher 
 of Kénigsberg—too little known in France, in spite of the appeal made 
 daily to his authority—that which gives him a genuine right to the 
 gratitude of the partisans of the true philosophy, is that, in his Critigue 
 of Pure Reason, he has demonstrated incontestably the impotence of the 
 reason to solve definitively a single problem of metaphysics.*°* 
 
 The epic of True and False Philosophy, while it leaves us in no 
 doubt as to what Bautain’s chief antipathies and affinities are, fails 
 to define his position with exactitude. It leaves the impression 
 that he disagrees completely with Aristotle, the Scholastics, and all 
 their progeny, and agrees completely with Plato and all his school. 
 Such an impression would be erroneous. When Bautain is in his 
 calmer and more conciliatory mood, he is much more discriminating 
 in his appraisal of the historic philosophies; and it is in this mood 
 that he makes the classification of philosophies which is first sketched 
 in the little essay on The Ethics of the Gospel Compared with the 
 Ethics of the Philosophers,’ and later elaborated in the Introduc- 
 tion to the Psychologie Expérimentale, which forms a sort of 
 preface to his whole system of philosophy. 
 
 The basis of this classification of the philosophies is that concept 
 of the evolution of life through response to more and more spiritual 
 stimuli which, as we have already seen, is the central idea in 
 
 Phil Chr s Tas. systémes de Morale, which forms a vast 
 
 La Morale de VEvangile comparée elaboration of the preceding, the same 
 a@ la morale des philosophes. In the — scheme is used, with certain modifications. 
 Morale de lEvangile comparée aux divers 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 275 
 
 Bautain’s philosophy. ‘Man, when he is born here below,” says 
 Bautain, “Ss already potentially all that he can become, all that 
 he . . . is destined to be in reality in the realm of time. His life 
 on earth is an unfolding of his potentiality, an unfolding of his 
 properties and his faculties, a continual evolution of his interior 
 nature, so that he successively exposes himself outwardly, such as 
 he is inwardly.”*°* Now, each faculty of man is called out in its 
 turn by that stimulus in the environment which answers to its need; 
 the external world takes on a different hue at each stage, according 
 to the nature of the stimulus to which man is just then responding. 
 “Hence,” says Bautain, “as many philosophical systems as there 
 are distinct elements in man and well-marked steps in his develop- 
 ment; as many pretended sciences of man as there are phases or 
 forms in which he presents himself to the observer, and principal 
 faculties which manifest his life.”*°* In other words, since man 
 is the microcosm in which the macrocosm is reflected, a defective 
 or one-sided “anthropology” or psychology immediately results in 
 a defective or one-sided metaphysic. Thus all differences in phi- 
 losophy can be traced to the field of psychology. “This psycho- 
 logical classification of the philosophies becomes a philosophy of 
 the history of thought by virtue of the law of recapitulation. 
 
 The law which presides over the development of the human individual 
 during his sojourn on earth is also that which rules over the progress of 
 the species; so that humanity as a whole, nations, and societies, present 
 in the course of their history the same phases and pass through the same 
 periods as the individual; or rather, the individual follows necessarily 
 the law of the race.*°° 
 
 The first period in the individual and racial evolution of man 
 is the period of physical development. ‘“‘At this stage,” says Bau- 
 tain, “he is alive only in so far as he feels physical influences and 
 instinctively reacts toward them; he exercises his taste, his discern- 
 ment, his natural activity, in the sole interest of the body; he lives 
 only by the body and for the body.”*°® Since physical stimuli 
 occupy the whole field of his attention, the philosophy which corre- 
 sponds to this stage in his development is of course Sensualism in 
 
 18 Psych. Exp., I, 16. 1% Psych. Exp., 1, 35, note 2. 
 1% Mor. Ev. P, 25. 16 Thid., 17. 
 
276 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 psychology and Materialism in metaphysics. It is the period of the 
 “lust of the flesh.” “The philosophical subject is here man at the 
 first stage of his development, in his infantile state. The object 
 which corresponds to this stage is the terrestrial world and all that 
 relates to the needs of the animal life.”*°’ Materialism is of 
 course not confined to the infancy of the race; the school of 
 Epicurus has not lacked followers in all ages; materialism appears 
 whenever psychology limits its attention to sense-perception (as in 
 the school of Condillac) and ethics fancies that man’s soul can be 
 satisfied when his senses are gratified. 
 
 To childhood succeeds youth; to the “lust of the flesh,” the 
 “lust of the eye.” Adolescence is the period when, through the 
 influence of language and society, man “begins to distinguish him- 
 self from objective nature, and distinguish it from himself; and 
 then also,” says Bautain, “a new need manifests itself or makes 
 itself felt, a new tendency announces itself: the taste for beauty.””*°* 
 The youthful taste for beauty is the first step in man’s Platonic 
 initiation. "The object which corresponds to this stage in his de- 
 velopment is Nature no longer looked upon as a mere source of 
 sensation, but “‘seen as a spectacle,”*” full of hints of the higher 
 Beauty that shall later be revealed. Man’s natural philosophy at 
 this period is Romanticism, in which Aesthetic values alone guide 
 the imagination, and the beautiful is made the measure of the true 
 and the good. Whenever this occurs, as in the time of the Renais- 
 sance, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
 
 you will get brilliant and superficial theories, which draw man into a 
 fantastic world, and keep him in a sphere full of illusions and marvels. 
 . . . Hypotheses take the place of science, and virtue has dignity only in 
 so far as she shows herself under a tragic or romantic form. Hence the 
 egoism of imagination and vanity, when man... prostrates himself 
 before the products of his genius or before the work of his hands,*”° 
 
 Next comes the critical period of the development of reason, 
 closely associated with the development of the sense of justice, or 
 practical reason. ‘“‘Reason,” says Bautain, “stops the fougue of 
 the imagination, tempers its fire and brilliancy. Images, just now 
 
 ™ Psych. Exp., I, 18. ™ Tbid., 20. 
 8 Ibid., 19. 9 Mor. Ev. P, 21. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 227 
 
 so seductive, lose their color: disenchantment commences; and 
 hardly has man lent an attentive ear to the dictates of reason, 
 before he acquires the consciousness of a new need, more noble 
 and more general than the preceding: the need of order, of 
 justice, or of moral beauty.”*** Man is here on the boundary-line 
 between two worlds and two selves, one phenomenal and empirical, 
 the other transcendental. “The reason is the highest empirical 
 faculty; the moral sense is the first hint of man’s superior nature, 
 which puts him in touch with a superior world. 
 
 If a man or a people, arrived at the age of reason, still leans toward 
 the inferior nature, the reason will be regarded as the noblest attribute 
 of the human creature, who will be defined as a “‘reasonable animal.” 
 If, on the contrary, one is sufficently extricated from matter to lift one’s 
 glance toward the spiritual world, animality will appear as an accidental 
 degradation, and it will be said of man that he is an “‘asimalized 
 feqsome)1*? 
 
 In the former case the result is Aristotelianism; in the latter 
 case, Stoicism. ‘The Aristotelian ethics, according to Bautain, 
 represent a compromise between man’s animal and rational nature, 
 whereby extremes of devotion and self-abnegation are as much 
 excluded as extremes of animal passion. ‘“The perfection, the 
 wisdom of man,” according to this system, “will consist in obeying 
 at once the laws of animality and those of reason . . . that is to 
 say, he will satisfy the beast as much as he can without disturbing 
 and degrading his reason.”*** Stoicism, on the other hand, tends 
 to “divide man within himself and lift spirit above matter, reason 
 above animality,’*** for which reason Bautain regards it as the 
 highest possible form of rationalism. 
 
 Both Aristotelianism and Stoicism suffer from the original vice 
 of rationalism: subjectivism. Acute self-consciousness is the chief 
 characteristic of the critical period that separates youth from man- 
 hood. ‘Thought is no longer inspired by the sight of the external 
 universe, but rather by reflection upon the phenomena of the world 
 within; it becomes abstract instead of pictorial. Man “identifies 
 
 MM Psych, Exp., I, 21. "8 Tbid., 35-36. 
 12 Mor. Ev. P, 34-35. M4 Thid. 
 
278 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 the Ego with the non-Ego,”**’ he “makes himself his own object, 
 subject-object,”**® proclaiming his absolute spontaneity and absolute 
 autonomy in the face of all the facts that proclaim his absolute 
 dependence on external stimulation and guidance. In epistemology, 
 he makes his own reason the measure of possible reality; in ethics, 
 he makes his own individual will and judgment the test of what 
 is right; in politics, he proclaims the sovereignty of the people— 
 which implies the power of human reason “to found the principle 
 from which all law, all justice, derive.”**’ All this goes to show 
 that we are now in the period of the “‘pride of life’—as deceptive 
 in its way as the lust of the eye and the lust of the flesh. 
 
 Pride goeth before a fall; and dogmatism, when pushed too far, 
 leads to skepticism. The effort to deduce the universe from the 
 constitution of one’s own reason, and the effort to found ethics 
 and politics on rational principles laid down by the legislating self, 
 are doomed to failure. A jangling of opinions breaks out, that 
 soon leads to despair. Morals and institutions and the universe 
 itself, all seem to begin to crumble. But skepticism is only a 
 passing phase. 
 
 It breaks down with the rationalism of which it is the final consequence, 
 as soon as man recognizes that Being, the source of good, and the mys- 
 terious law promulgated in the conscience do not fall within the sphere 
 of the senses, and thus can no more be demonstrated to the reason than 
 they can be refuted by it. . . . If man denies the truth of Being and 
 the Good, he is no longer skeptical, nor reasonable; he is senseless 
 (insensé); that is to say, void of any sense for things ethical and divine. 
 If he believes in goodness and in the conscience, although conscience and 
 goodness cannot be demonstrated to him, he is no longer either a 
 rationalist or a skeptic: he is a Jeliever, in spite of his reason.218 
 
 Meanwhile, if man’s development is not arrested, there have 
 been dawning upon him the first intimations of a higher nature 
 and a higher world. ‘The stage of reason is, in fact, not a stage 
 but a boundary-line. ‘Reason ... is not an essential element 
 of the human being at all; it is not even an absolute or necessary 
 property; it is only a temporary modification, a mode of being of 
 the mind. It holds a middle place between the senses and the 
 
 ™° Psych. Exp., I, 37. OS hid, 323 “7 Ibid.. 39. 8 Mor. Ev. P, 42-43. 
 
INDI BE HISTORY) ORs tHOUGHT 279 
 
 imagination, which it ought to govern, and the intelligence and 
 will, which it ought to obey.”"* Through the sense of justice 
 which is associated with it, it leads man to suspect the existence of 
 a higher world; it cannot bring him into contact with it. Love 
 and intelligence are the higher prototypes of which justice and 
 reason are but shadows; they lead man, if he will yield himself 
 to their guidance, above the realm of phenomena into the realm of 
 Truth. First comes “fa sort of vague faith in the existence of a 
 superior world . . . in which beauty, truth, and goodness must 
 dwell”; then faith gradually becomes sight, and man has arrived 
 at the “third degree of the Platonic initiation,” or the “philosophy 
 of intelligence.”*”° 
 
 Here the subject lifts his glance above himself and the world, toward 
 the celestial regions in which he seeks his object. That object is eternal 
 Wisdom, manifested in the world of the intelligences; it is the ideals 
 which live in this world and are reflected in the purified human under- 
 standing; and the scientific theory of the idea, the product of this 
 reflection of the intelligence, constitutes /dealism, Spiritualism, Pantheism, 
 in the true sense of this word.**! 
 
 The word “Pantheism” should be sufficient warning to us that 
 Bautain has not yet reached the top of the ladder; for Pantheism, 
 as we have seen, is his béte noir. It is worthy of note that he 
 applies the term not only to the Rationalism he detests, but also to 
 the Platonism he admires, and to the post-Kantian Idealism whose 
 relation to Platonism he recognizes'*"—to everything, in sum, which 
 falls short of the supreme philosophy, Christianity. 
 
 But in what respect does Platonism fall short of Christianity? 
 Bautain’s criticism at this point is much less incisive and much more 
 friendly. ‘One is often astonished,” he remarks, “in reading the 
 works of Plato, and above all those of the neo-Platonists, such as 
 Jamblichus, Plotinus, Proclus, etc., to find in their language so 
 great a resemblance to Christian language.”*** Plato even had a 
 presentiment of the Fall of Man. But neither he nor his followers 
 
 9 Thid., 43. the relation of modern idealism to the 
 ™ Psych. Exp., 1, 26. ancient idealism of Pythagoras, Plato, 
 121 Thid. and Neo-Platonism.” FB,V3, § 24. 
 
 ™ Cf. the following marginal note on 18 Psych. Exp., I, 43. 
 
 manuscript lecture on Idealism: “Show 
 
 by 
 
280 THE PHILOSOPHY ‘OF BAUTAIN 
 
 seem to have been conscious of man’s radical inability to reach 
 perfect knowledge and the perfect virtue which is its condition on 
 his own initiative. 
 
 He recognizes well enough [says Bautain] that man is born blind to the 
 true light, and that he cannot see it unless his interior eye is opened and 
 purified; but he seems to believe that this depends solely upon the will 
 of man, and that he has only to direct his desire toward the Truth to 
 obtain the evidence of it at once. It is not by active purification, or by 
 speculation or intuition; in a word, it is not by his own activity that man 
 can enter into the ways of Wisdom. Wisdom must come to meet him; 
 she must touch him with a ray of her light; she must solicit him and 
 attract him “par le fond,”?**4 
 
 The beginning of all true philosophy is a sense of imperfection, 
 a sense of the need of exterior aid; in short, “humility of heart.” 
 This granted, the way is open for a type of philosophy whose 
 object is “no longer the wisdom of the flesh or the senses, the 
 wisdom of thought or of one’s own mind (secular, worldly, 
 temporal, human wisdom, in fine), but divine Wisdom, ideal and 
 prototype of all wisdom, universal Beauty, mother and model of 
 all particular beauty, source of all virtues, which, at every step 
 in the spiritual development of man, is always, whether he knows 
 it or ignores it, the object of his love and the end of his seeking.”*”° 
 What the Greeks sought under the name of Sophia, the Hindus 
 under the name of Swadah, the Hebrews under the name of 
 Chochmah, the Christian possesses: the divine Verbum, presented 
 in the Scriptures and the traditions of the Church, enlightening 
 man fully on those ultimate mysteries of his origin, nature, and 
 destiny, which even Plato barely glimpsed. 
 
 Arrived at this high point, we can perceive at once the unity 
 and the diversity of philosophy. In its ideal and true form, “phi- 
 losophy is one: for it grows out of a single Idea, as the tree grows 
 out of a seed.”'*® But in its temporal development, it presents 
 itself in several phases, like the tree; and each of these phases is 
 a partial manifestation of the complete truth, as each phase in the 
 tree’s development is a partial realization of all that it is destined 
 to become. And each step in the development of the thinking 
 
 4 Psych. Exp., I, 42. 16 Thid., 29. 
 pad (8 keds 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 281 
 
 subject is called out by some new external stimulus: “Thus the 
 action of light upon our eye gives us the consciousness of our 
 faculty of vision; . . . the human word gives us the consciousness 
 of our faculty of conceiving the meaning of the word, of thinking 
 it and judging it,”**? 
 Word, we shall know nothing of things divine. ‘The necessity 
 of external stimulation at each step may be seen from the following 
 schematic representation of the whole process of development, 
 which sums up Bautain’s whole philosophy of the history of 
 thought: 
 
 and unless we open ourselves to the Divine 
 
 Relation 
 Between sensual man and the sensible world; 
 Between the imagination of man and the world of images; 
 Between reasonable man and the rational world, the sphere of thought 
 and opinions. 
 Then relation 
 Between moral man and society governed by the moral law; 
 Between intelligent man and the intelligent world; 
 Finally, between the soul of man or spiritual man desiring and loving 
 eternal Wisdom, and Wisdom giving Itself to man.1*8 
 
 In short, Christianity alone has the complete philosophy, because 
 it alone is the product of the whole of Reality reflected in the 
 whole of the nature of man; all other philosophies are partial 
 philosophies, because the product of part of reality reflected in part 
 of man’s nature. Metaphysics and Psychology advance side by 
 side; a limitation in one is a limitation in the other. 
 
 Bautain makes only a sketchy application of this scheme to the 
 history of philosophy. Since he admits that all types of philosophy 
 have had their day more than once in the history of thought, it is 
 clear that he does not look upon the whole history of thought as 
 a single process of development from “childhood” to “maturity”— 
 particularly since he considers Mediaeval and Modern Philosophy 
 to be inferior to the philosophy of the first Christian centuries. 
 His view seems to be that the Western world has gone through two 
 great philosophical cycles. The first culminated in the triumph 
 of Christianity, for which Skepticism and Platonism, each in its 
 
 Pl bid 3. that this is an elaboration of Plato’s 
 18 Thid., 29-30. The reader will note twice-divided line: 
 
282 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 fashion, prepared the way; and it ended when the barbarian in- 
 vasions made it necessary to reéducate the race. The “rationalism” 
 of the Middle Ages should not deceive us; it was not the genuine 
 rationalism of maturity, but a sort of premature, adolescent ration- 
 alism. “Like big children,” he says, “the men of that time rea- 
 soned by imitation and from memory; argued on imaginary ques- 
 tions, for the pleasure of winning a victory over their enemies.”’!”® 
 Real rationalism did not develop until the Reformation, and found 
 its appropriate habitat among the hard-headed, practical-minded 
 English. France became rationalistic only by forced imitation, 
 contrary to her character and genius. ‘Ihe second great cycle is 
 just about to culminate, thinks Bautain. ‘The criticism of Kant 
 and the Platonism of the Idealists and Eclectics have produced just 
 the right combination of humility and expectancy; if Christian 
 philosophy can be purged of pagan Aristotelianism and adjusted 
 to modern ideas, it may win the world again as it did in the first 
 Christian centuries. 
 
 Bautain frequently compares his own period to that of Clement 
 and Origen. A “new Alexander,’ Napoleon, has arisen out of 
 the anarchy produced by skepticism and rationalism. ‘Then, in the 
 period of renewed liberty that has followed the removal of the 
 conqueror’s yoke, reason, repenting of her excesses, has tried to 
 recover herself by taking a more spiritual form in the Eclectic 
 philosophy—as of old, at Alexandria. But doubt pursues her, and 
 the manifold systems of the day compass their mutual destruction. 
 And now, as in the ancient. world, Faith begins to make herself 
 heard in the silence that ensues upon the futile strife of systems: 
 Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, Manzoni, Lamartine, Sylvio Pellico. 
 It is no time for argument, for men are sick of arguing. ‘Make, 
 rather, an appeal to Faith in a spirit of faith, and she will answer 
 you: for Faith is everywhere awake now, and awaits only a 
 stimulating beam of light to develop and vivify all hearts.’*° A 
 note of Apocalyptic expectation pervades the earlier writings of 
 Bautain; the times are fulfilled, and the Age of Faith, whose 
 herald he feels himself to be, is at hand. In his later writings, 
 this gives way to a tone of pessimism. Having failed to embrace 
 
 1® Mor. Ev. P, 37. ™ Phil. Chr. I, xii. The words are 
 Bonnechose’s; but the ideas are Bautain’s. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 283 
 
 Christianity, philosophy is about to revert to materialism, following 
 in the train of the left-wing Hegelians;*** and so, Sisyphus-like, 
 must begin again at the foot of the hill of knowledge. 
 
 We have spoken as if there were a certain inconsistency between 
 Bautain’s two philosophies of the history of thought. ‘There is 
 indeed a wide difference of mood and attitude between Bautain 
 the reformer and Bautain the apologist. As reformer, he seems 
 to be making war upon all secular philosophy, and heading straight 
 for obscurantism; as apologist, he seems to look with kindly favor 
 upon pantheism itself, and it lacks but little of being Christian in 
 his eyes. Yet is not this the perpetual problem of the religious 
 thinker? On the one hand, it is his task to discriminate between 
 the native essence of his religion and those foreign admixtures 
 which threaten to obscure and vitiate it. On the other hand, he 
 must make these central truths intelligible to his contemporaries 
 by expressing them in current categories, and taking to himself as 
 much of contemporary thought as he honestly can. ‘These two 
 tasks, apparently conflicting, are really supplementary; both efforts 
 must be pushed to the limit, if either is to be accomplished. Syn- 
 cretism and provincialism, complete assimilation and complete 
 fossilization, must equally be guarded against, as the history of 
 Reformed Judaism shows. If Bautain failed to commend Christ- 
 ianity adequately to his contemporaries, it was not because he was 
 jealous of certain central truths, which he sought to disengage 
 from all sorts of “pagan” contaminations, but because he did not 
 carry far enough his search for the real “essence” of Christianity. 
 A recent critic’? has remarked that the Modernist movement in 
 the Catholic Church failed because it was not radical enough. 
 Instead of going back to Paul, as the Reformers did, or to Jesus 
 and the prophets, as modern liberal Protestants are doing, it went 
 back only to—Plotinus. ‘The same is true of Bautain. If at 
 times he seems to feel that there is something deeper in the primi- 
 tive Hebrew-Christian tradition than can be expressed in terms of 
 Greek philosophy, in the end he is content to be a neo-Platonist."” 
 
 181 See Mor. Ev. D, 334-335. ernists as one who clearly perceives the 
 12 Heiler, Wesen des Katholizismus. radical incompatibility between the Greek 
 18 The Abbé Laberthonniére stands out view of God as the timeless, changeless 
 almost alone among the Catholic Mod- essence of things, and the Hebrew view 
 
284 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Christian neo-Platonism, modified by the influence of Pascal, 
 Malebranche, and Kant; combined with French Traditionalism 
 and German Catholic Romanticism; enriched with concrete data 
 from biology and psychology: such is our final formula for 
 Bautain’s philosophy. 
 
 III 
 BAUTAIN’s INFLUENCE UPON THE SUBSEQUENT HIsTORY OF 
 FRENCH CATHOLIC THOUGHT 
 
 The history of French Catholic philosophy in the nineteenth 
 century falls into three main periods. In the first period, which 
 extends through the year 1840 (the date of Bautain’s recantation), 
 the Traditionalist philosophy is dominant. ‘The second period is 
 a period of transition. It may be said to terminate in 1879 with 
 Leo XIIT’s adoption of Thomism as the official philosophy of the 
 Catholic Church.*** In it, Traditionalist tendencies still persist, 
 and it takes a series of official decrees, ending with the condemna- 
 tion of Ubaghs and other Louvain professors in 1866, to crush 
 out the movement finally. In the earlier part of the period, 
 Platonic and Romanticist influences seem to predominate, express- 
 ing themselves in the “Ontologist”” movement, and in various in- 
 tuitionistic and voluntaristic tendencies; in the latter part, ration- 
 alistic and neo-Scholastic tendencies come rapidly to the fore. In 
 the last period, neo-Scholasticism, fostered by the patronage of 
 Leo XIII, becomes theoretically the only orthodox philosophy; 
 but, under plea of apologetical exigencies, a very vigorous neo- 
 Romanticist movement continues to carry on the intuitionism and 
 voluntarism of the preceding period, until it finally culminates 
 (and is crushed) in the Modernist controversy. 
 
 Bautain’s philosophy is interesting, not only in itself, but as an 
 
 epitome of all the conflicting tendencies of the century. 
 
 of God as the overruling Providence that 
 is guiding the course of history, the 
 “Power not ourselves that makes for 
 righteousness.” See his Réalisme chrétien 
 et idéalisme grec. Bautain, and most of 
 the Modernists, even though they see a 
 certain contrast between Hebrew “tradi- 
 tionalism” and Greek “rationalism,” come 
 
 In him 
 
 back eventually to the Platonic way of 
 looking at things. For an illustration of 
 Bautain’s underlying Platonism, see his 
 views on the unreality of time and change, 
 pp. 131-134 supra. 
 
 ™ Encyclical Zterni Patris, Aug. 4, 
 1879. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 285 
 
 the Traditionalist movement ripens and begins to wane; through 
 him the influence of German Romanticism, with its revival of 
 Platonism, begins to be effective in French Catholic circles; in his 
 semi-Aristotelian Vitalism, finally, there is foreshadowed one of 
 the most fruitful tendencies of contemporary neo-Scholasticism. 
 Standing at the confluence of two civilizations, in cosmopolitan 
 Strasbourg, and at the turning-point of the century, he combined 
 Into a single system the ‘Traditionalism of the French Catholics 
 and the Romanticism of the German Catholics, and thereby helped 
 to redirect the whole current of French Catholic thought in the 
 latter part of the century. How extensive was his influence, one 
 realizes only when one comes to trace the subterranean channel 
 through which it operated. 
 
 I do not refer primarily to his influence upon the dying Tradi- 
 tionalist movement, with which his name is exclusively associated 
 in most people’s minds. As we have seen, the central ideas of 
 his philosophy are Platonic and Romanticist, not Bonaldian. His 
 alliance with the school of de Bonald, de Maistre, and Lamennais 
 was hardly more than a strategic alliance, springing from a com- 
 mon hatred of rationalism and all its works. He proved a power- 
 ful ally, to be sure; for, with his professional knowledge of the 
 history of philosophy, he was able to trace the rationalistic strain 
 in Catholic thought back beyond Descartes to the great mediaeval 
 Scholastics, and ultimately to Aristotle; and so from that time 
 on, Augustin Bonnetty and other Traditionalists were accustomed 
 to point to the victory of the doctores sententiarii over the doctores 
 biblict in the eleventh century, when the craze for Aristotelian 
 dialectics swept all before it, as the beginning of the rationaliza- 
 tion and “paganization” of Christian philosophy. But if Bautain 
 lent powerful weapons to the Traditionalists, in their attack upon 
 rationalism, he gave no aid or comfort to their obscurantistic 
 tendencies. The role of tradition in his theory of knowledge is 
 purely pedagogical: it does not override the intelligence of the 
 individual; it helps to develop it. It was in this modified form 
 that the Traditionalist position was set forth by Ubaghs, Laforét, 
 and other Louvain professors, who proved to be its last defenders. 
 It is hard to see why this form of Traditionalism should ever have 
 been condemned; it is not at all inconsistent with a sane respect 
 
286 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 for the human reason, and all the facts of social psychology are 
 in its favor. | 
 
 ‘The real successors of Bautain are not, however, to be sought 
 among the Traditionalists; they are to be sought among those who, 
 in the above-mentioned period of transition, were the great adver- 
 saries of the ‘Traditionalists: those to whom Ferraz gives the 
 misleading name of “semi-rationalists,” but who are better de- 
 scribed as intuitionists and voluntarists. “Che leaders of this group 
 were two men who might fairly be described as unavowed disciples 
 of Bautain: the Abbé Maret and Father Gratry. 
 
 Ferraz has traced in some detail the influence of Bautain upon 
 the philosophy of the Abbé Maret. He points out that Maret’s 
 Essai sur le Panthéisme (1840), the work which first brought him 
 fame, is directly inspired by Bautain’s Essai sur le Panthéisme, 
 printed as a Supplement to Letter 29 in the Philosophie du Christ- 
 ianisme, and by Isidore Goschler’s thesis, Du Panthéisme, which 
 appeared just a year before Maret’s essay. “The main contention 
 of this essay is one of Bautain’s main contentions: that “reason, 
 separated from revelation and abandoned to itself?**’—“‘reason 
 alone,’ in other words—always ultimately leads to pantheism. 
 Again in his Théodicée chrétienne ou comparaison de la notion 
 chrétienne et de la notion rationaliste de dieu (1844), Maret takes 
 the position that the human reason is capable of proving the exist- 
 ence of God and the infinity of His perfections “only in case it 
 [the reason] has developed in a Christian mzlieu, and under the 
 influence of external instruction.”**® Ferraz thinks, however, that 
 in his Philosophie et Religion, published in 1856, Maret has 
 abandoned his Traditionalism and has come completely over into 
 the camp of the Rationalists. This is a half-truth: Maret has 
 abandoned his ‘Traditionalism—by 1856 it had already become 
 dangerous doctrine, and only a few “‘bitter-enders” were still hold- 
 ing on—but he has not become a “rationalist,” in any sense which 
 would distinguish his philosophy from that of Bautain. He has 
 simply shifted his emphasis from the negative to the positive side 
 of Bautain’s teaching, and brought to the fore Bautain’s doctrine 
 that man has within him a hierarchy of innate ideas—of which 
 
 
 
 85 Ferraz, 364. 8 Ferraz, 367. See the préambule to 
 Maret’s book. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 287 
 
 the zdée-mére is the Idea of Being—which, when fully brought 
 to consciousness, give him the faculty of knowing God (and the 
 world of the divine ideals) directly and intuitively. Of this doc- 
 trine Ferraz says: “It is rationalism pushed to the point of teach- 
 ing that intuition of the Being of Beings is possible: in a word, 
 ontologism”’;**’ and it is because he conceives ontologism to be 
 “completely opposed” to Bonaldian Traditionalism that he supposes 
 Maret to have executed a complete volte-face between 1844 and 
 1856. Now, ontologism zs completely opposed to Bonaldian Tradi- 
 tionalism, but it is an integral part of Bautainian Traditionalism. 
 It may therefore be boldly affirmed that the Abbé Maret, in his 
 whole philosophical pilgrimage, never moved outside the circle of 
 ideas marked out by Bautain. 
 
 The same may be affirmed of Father Gratry—due allowance 
 being made for his real originality, which is to be found not in 
 his philosophical ideas themselves, but in the wealth of poetical 
 imagination with which he developed and illustrated them, and 
 in the humanitarian passion which he breathed into them. He was 
 a poet, a social idealist, and a saint, not a philosopher; and he 
 never would have formed a system if he had not found one ready- 
 made, in the neglected works of Bautain. Perhaps he was un- 
 conscious of his plagiarism; in composing his works he was accus- 
 tomed to rely upon bursts of inspiration, and he was unwilling, 
 like most mystics, to acknowledge that inspirations which felt so 
 divine could have any human source. His efforts to throw the 
 public off the trail, however, by altering Bautain’s terminology and 
 by attacking traditionalism and fideism in the name of “reason,” 
 would suggest a more conscious plagiarism. In his Souvenirs de 
 jeunesse, Gratry speaks very bitterly of Bautain; we are always 
 bitter against those whom we know we have wronged. Bautain, 
 on his part, never raised his voice to expose the plagiarism; perhaps 
 he was glad to have his ideas propagated, even under false colors. 
 For the rest, Gratry’s philosophy deserves the popularity it achieved; 
 the pupil far outshone the master in brilliancy of style and lucidity 
 of exposition. What is more, he had tact. Bautain always put his 
 
 187 Thid., 371. “Ontologism” gets its is usually traced to the influence of Ros- 
 name from the prominence given to the mini and Gioberti; but I believe it should 
 “idea of Being.” Its popularity in France be traced to Bautain instead. 
 
288 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 ideas in a form that shocked people’s sensibilities and aroused their 
 opposition; when Gratry set forth the same ideas in other words, 
 he was loudly applauded, and elected to the Académie Francaise. 
 
 We cannot here go into a detailed comparison of Gratry and 
 Bautain, to prove our point. ‘The reader may convince himself 
 of Gratry’s extensive dependence upon Bautain by glancing through 
 Ferraz’s lucid and sympathetic exposition of Gratry’s philosophy, 
 where many of the parallels between master and disciple are pointed 
 out.*** We should merely like to clear away one illusion, which 
 Gratry deliberately creates, and to which Ferraz unsuspectingly 
 falls victim: the illusion that, in loudly championing the cause of 
 “reason,” and in blaming those who claim that reason cannot prove 
 the existence of God,’ he is really departing from Bautain’s 
 position. Not at all; he is merely changing Bautain’s terminology. 
 Whereas Bautain distinguished between two faculties, reason and 
 intelligence, Gratry distinguishes between two types of reasoning, 
 ““deduction” and “dialectic,” which correspond exactly to Bautain’s 
 “synthesis” and “analysis.” He agrees perfectly with Bautain in 
 maintaining that discursive reason can never prove the existence 
 of God; and if he maintains that “reasoning” can prove it, it is 
 only because he calls zmtuition (“dialectic”) a species of reasoning, 
 and works out on this basis an elaborate “dialectical logic,” 
 buttressed with formidable mathematical analogies. Bautain had 
 worked out a “logic of the intelligence” along similar lines. This 
 misunderstanding once dispelled, it becomes evident that Gratry 
 was no more of a rationalist than Bautain. If he did not attack 
 the “rationalists,” he attacked the “‘sophists”——-and meant the same 
 thing. He was an intuitionist, a mystic—yes, and a voluntarist or 
 semi-pragmatist as well—for it was a fundamental point with him 
 as with Bautain, that “the soul has two wings to lift itself to God, 
 dialectics [Bautain’s intelligence| and love”;**° and of the two, 
 love is the stronger. “The méthode morale must be joined to the 
 méthode dtialectique, if we are to be true metaphysicians. ‘The 
 heart has reasons which the head knows nothing of. 
 
 *8 See Ferraz, 373-431; especially 376- Translated by Alger under the title Guide 
 377, 406-415. to the knowledge of God, Boston, 1892. 
 ™® See Introduetion to his Philosophie. Crowned by the Academy. 
 De la connaissance de Dieu, Paris, 1853. Ferraz, 406. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 289 
 
 Gratry survived Bautain by only five years; but the “Strasbourg 
 philosophy” did not die with him. Its influence continued to be 
 active through the teaching and writing of Léon Ollé-Laprune, 
 a follower of Gratry,’** professor of philosophy at the Ecole 
 Normale. A sane and cautious thinker, he was guilty of none of 
 the extravagancies of Bautain and Gratry; but that he belongs in 
 the same stream of thought is unquestionable. His fundamental 
 thesis has been well stated by his disciple Maurice Blondel: 
 
 Knowledge (even philosophical knowledge) and certitude (even 
 rational certitude) are not ideas of the pure understanding and the pure 
 reason. Belief is an integrant element in knowledge, as knowledge is 
 an integrant element in belief itself; that is to say, the /ife of the mind 
 is always an organic part of the life of the creature; that is, philosophy 
 is at one and the same time an affair of the reason and an affair of the 
 soul; that is to say, finally, that thought is no more sufficient for a life, 
 than a life is able to find in itself its own light, strength, and total law. 
 “We must not see nothing but reason in man, and nothing but man in 
 Peasonn ss 
 
 ‘ 
 
 I add one decisive quotation from Ollé-Laprune himself,'** 
 given in this same article of Blondel’s: 
 
 The true philosopher thinks with his entire soul and also—let us 
 speak bluntly—with his body; he thinks with his whole being. . . . He 
 thinks, by resting upon the ground which upholds him, by remaining in 
 contact with humanity of which he forms a part, in contact with the 
 living and the dead; the thought of others, the thought of the human 
 race, thanks to language and tradition, are present to him and enter into 
 his substance. He thinks, finally, attached to God, the Principle, the 
 Support, the Light and Rule of all thought. . . . That a man should 
 go out on the quest for truth with a mutilated soul, is something I 
 cannot understand.1*#4 
 
 Since the death of Ollé-Laprune in 1898, the current of thought 
 which we have been tracing has broadened and deepened percepti- 
 
 *) Houtin (Histoire du Modernisme 8 This is from his remarkable book 
 catholique, 11) refers to Ollé-Laprune’s entitled De la certitude morale (9th ed., 
 philosophy as “une philosophie ... re- Paris, 1924); see also his more popular 
 
 nouvelée de Malebranche et de Gratry.” , book, Le prix de la vie (4th ed., Paris, 
 “2 Revue polit. et litt., 4th series, XII, 1923). 
 wiz. “4 Revue polit. et litt., 4th series, XII, 
 218. 
 
290 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 bly, and in conjunction with many other influences, has helped to 
 initiate several important contemporary movements of thought— 
 notably the Catholic Modernist movement of 1898-1908, and the 
 great anti-intellectualist movement which in English-speaking 
 countries expressed itself in the Pragmatism of James, Schiller, 
 and Dewey, but which was something far more complex and 
 widespread than the term Pragmatism now connotes. In this most 
 recent period, as once before in the days of the “Strasbourg school,” 
 we shall find the Bautainian philosophy represented not by isolated 
 thinkers like Ollé-Laprune, passing on the torch in comparative 
 obscurity, but by a whole group of collaborators: the school of 
 the “Philosophy of Action.” 
 
 The founder of this school was Maurice Blondel, whom we 
 have already cited as an enthusiastic disciple of Ollé-Laprune. His 
 remarkable book, L’Action: Essai @une critique de la vie et @une 
 science de la pratique, published in 1893, is based squarely on 
 Ollé-Laprune’s thesis that the will has primacy over the intellect 
 in matters of metaphysics; but although the thesis was not a new 
 one, the skill with which Blondel worked out his ‘“‘dialectic of 
 the will’ was something new and interesting in the eyes of many 
 professional philosophers, who had hitherto been inclined to dismiss 
 Ollé-Laprune with a shrug of the shoulders. Fouillée, comment- 
 ing on Blondel’s philosophy, whose affinity with his own he early 
 perceived, said that he believed the work of the twentieth century 
 would be the formulation of a philosophy of action which should 
 correct the intellectualistic emphasis of previous centuries. Bout- 
 roux, speaking at the Philosophical Congress of 1900, said that 
 he believed a science of action to be as legitimate as a science of 
 knowledge; in the science of action, many things that were rightly 
 excluded from the science of knowledge might properly be con- 
 sidered, and questions of religion, conscience, will, and faith were 
 quite in order. Milhaud, writing in the Revue philosophique in 
 1902, said that he felt Blondel’s philosophy of action represented 
 a sort of new positivism, a fourth stage that went beyond Comte’s 
 third.**? Meanwhile, Blondel had become the center of a group 
 
 “© For the early history of the move-* articles by de Sailly cited in the next 
 ment, and the attitude toward it of paragraph. 
 Fouillée, Boutroux, and Milhaud, see the 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 291 
 
 of liberal Catholic thinkers—among whom the names of Le Roy, 
 Wilbois, Fonsegrive, and the Abbé Laberthonniére deserve particu- 
 lar mention—and his philosophy, in their hands, was constantly 
 penetrating new territory and coming into manifold relations with 
 contemporary science, philosophy, and theology. In the years 
 1900-1906, its popularity and its influence grew by leaps and 
 bounds. The Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, under the edi- 
 torship of Laberthonniére, became its avowed organ; the Revue 
 de Métaphysique et de Morale printed articles by Blondel, Le Roy, 
 Wilbois, and others, expounding the position of the school; and— 
 crowning stroke—Brunetiére, the eminent literary critic, converted 
 to Catholicism late in life, devoted his last years to the defense 
 of religious faith in terms of the Philosophy of Action. 
 
 ‘The wide ramifications and ambitious program of the Philosophy 
 of Action at this time of its greatest influence are well indicated 
 in a series of expository articles by B. de Sailly, which appeared 
 in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne in volumes 151-153 
 (years 1905-06 )—a series of articles which attracted the attention 
 of William James and which are mentioned in the preface to 
 “‘Pragmatism’’**® along with articles by Blondel and Le Roy, and 
 books by Schiller and Dewey, for the benefit of the reader who 
 may wish to delve more deeply into the pragmatic philosophy. 
 According to de Sailly’s first article’*’ there are five “elements” 
 in the Philosophy of Action: 
 
 1. A critique of the immediate data of consciousness (données 
 de la conscience); or, as Le Roy prefers to call it, @ critique of 
 common sense. Here, the school of the Philosophy of Action 
 makes common cause with Bergson, accepting with enthusiasm the 
 conclusion of his Données immédiates de la conscience, that com- 
 -mon sense has a tendency to materialize and spatialize reality, so 
 that its data need to be radically corrected before they are fit for 
 use in the building of any ultimate philosophy. Certain members 
 of the school (notably Le Roy) have gone so far in carrying on 
 this line of thought initiated by Bergson that they have come to 
 be regarded as out-and-out Bergsonians; yet it is clear that they 
 
 “4° Pragmatism, preface, viii. 147 Annales de phil. chrét., 151: 180-195. 
 
 20 
 
292 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 are primarily disciples of Blondel, and only accidentally disciples 
 of Bergson.*** 
 
 2. A critique of science. Here, the school of the Philosophy 
 of Action makes common cause with Poincaré, Milhaud, Duhem, 
 Vincent—and, one might add, Boutroux—in their contention that 
 scientific theories and concepts are only useful points of view, 
 whose relative “truth” consists simply in their ability to help us 
 solve certain practical problems, and fulfil certain practical pur- 
 poses. Here again, Le Roy is the chief spokesman of the school. 
 In his articles on Science et Philosophie in the Revue de Méta- 
 physique et de Morale, vols. 7 and 8 (1899-1900), he states 
 that science does not deal with the “inner life and infinite richness 
 of concrete reality,” but with the external forms of things, viewed 
 from various angles, or rather, with the rational symbols of these 
 forms. Every scientific schema is undertaken for a certain practical 
 purpose; it is true if it fulfils that purpose. Scientific truth is 
 “the growing success of our conquest of the world.” “In a word,” 
 concludes Le Roy, “‘scientific truth resembles moral good: one 
 does not receive it from without, one acts it and makes it (om la 
 pratique et on la fait).”*’’ To this doctrine de Sailly gives the 
 name of “‘the new positivism.” 
 
 3. A critique of the old epistemology. Here, the views of the 
 school are best stated in an article of Blondel’s in the Revue de 
 Métaphysique et de Morale for 1898, on The Idealistic Illusion. 
 According to Blondel, the modern dilemma between idealism and 
 realism, subjectivism and objectivism, is the result of a too intel- 
 lectualistic definition of truth: the correspondence or adaequatio 
 of the idea and the object. Blondel would replace the problem 
 of the relation of the idea to the object with the problem of the 
 relation of the idea to the totality of action (action totale). From 
 this point of view, an idea is not an attempted “copy” of anything, 
 
 “8 Cf. Leclére, Pragmatisme, Modern- 
 isme, Protestantisme, 149: Malgré ses 
 caractéres speciaux, cette philosophie [Le 
 Roy’s] rejoint bien celle de M. Blondel, 
 lui fait suite, et offre delle-méme a 
 favoriser Vapologétique chére aux parti- 
 sans du dogmatisme moral. On “moral 
 
 dogmatism,” cf. point 4 in de Sailly’s 
 analysis, infra. 
 
 + James mentions these articles also in 
 the preface to “Pragmatism.” 
 
 ™ Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 
 r hme 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 293 
 
 but a “moment, a means, in the development of life, which it 
 illuminates and furthers”; and the truth of an idea consists pre- 
 cisely in its capacity to further life. TThis is the aspect of his 
 philosophy to which Blondel was accustomed, as early as 1888, to 
 give the name of pragmatisme, a name which he later gave up 
 when he became acquainted with the more relativistic pragmatism 
 of James.’ De Sailly is inclined to think that it would be better 
 to retain the term pragmatisme for Blondel’s philosophy, and use 
 Schiller’s term humanism for the philosophy of the Anglo- 
 American pragmatists. 
 
 4, “Moral Dogmatism.? ‘The expression is the Abbé Laber- 
 thonniére’s. Out of this searching criticism of common sense, 
 science, and the nature of knowledge, there emerges, according 
 to him, not a new skepticism or a universal relativism, but a new 
 dogmatism. The old dogmatism of the intellect, destroyed by 
 Kant, is gone forever—though the Scholastic philosophers in their 
 blindness fail to realize the fact—and we must henceforth agree 
 that absolute reality is not discoverable along the path of reason; 
 but 7 action we may attain the Absolute. In action, in the very 
 process of discovering the best practical attitude to take in such a 
 world as this, we at the same time win a practical certitude con- 
 cerning the ultimate nature of the universe. In the last analysis, 
 all depends upon an act of will, an act of faith. The man who 
 takes the right practical attitude comes to have the right philosophy; 
 the man who takes the wrong attitude goes astray in all his think- 
 ing—and when Laberthonniére defines these determining attitudes 
 
 more specifically, we are at once aware of the influence of 
 
 Bautain 2°? 
 
 On the one hand, the attitude of those who, lifting themselves up to 
 the rank of an Absolute, consider that everything depends on them with- 
 
 1 On Blondel’s use of the term prag- Maine de Biran as the two philosophers 
 matisme, and his reasons for giving it who had most deeply influenced him. The 
 up, see Stebbing’s Pragmatism and French Philosophy of Action is undoubtedly the 
 
 Voluntarism, Cambridge, 1914, Index, product of other influences besides Bau- 
 Blondel. tain’s; but I feel that his influence, 
 
 *2T should, in all fairness, state the though indirect and unrecognized, was 
 fact that Laberthonniére, up to the time fully as important as those which were 
 I interviewed him, had hardly read Bau- more consciously recognized. 
 tain at all. He named Boutroux and 
 
294 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 out their depending on anything; on the other hand, the attitude of 
 those who, recognizing their dependence and their relativity, endeavor 
 to open themselves and issue from themselves to seek higher up the 
 center of their life and of their thought. One might say that the on 
 attitude is faith in self; the other, faith in God.?** | 
 
 5. An “integral apologetic” for the truth of the Catholic faith, 
 based upon the foregoing philosophy. ‘This apologetic will be 
 found best formulated in Laberthonniére’s Essais de philosophie 
 religieuse. Its nature may be easily guessed from the account 
 which has just been given of his “Moral Dogmatism.” 
 
 De Sailly is quite conscious of the antecedents and affinities of 
 the movement he is describing. He considers rightly, I believe, 
 that the true progenitors of the Philosophy of Action in France 
 are Ravaisson, Gratry, and Ollé-Laprune. We need only carry 
 the family tree one step farther back than Gratry to visualize the 
 relation of Bautain to the movement. Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, 
 Boutroux, and Bergson; Bautain, Gratry, Ollé-Laprune: this sums 
 up the double genealogy of the Philosophy of Action. As for the 
 relation of the Philosophy of Action to Anglo-American Pragma- 
 tism, de Sailly’s account of it is somewhat vitiated by his tendency 
 to regard the Philosophy of Action as the one great movement of 
 the day, in which even such a philosophy as Bergson’s appears only 
 as a minor contributing “element.” From this perspective, Anglo- 
 American Pragmatism appears to him to be a somewhat paradoxical 
 and insufficiently worked-out form of the Philosophy of Action, 
 marred by un expédient terre a terre et un assez pauvre empirisme. 
 Its humanistic, utilitarian, and naturalistic tendencies are of course 
 repugnant to him. It would be a still greater fault of perspective, 
 however, were we to turn about and view the Philosophy of Action 
 as a sort of half-way Pragmatism. Actually, we have in Prag- 
 matism and the Philosophy of Action two closely related but rela- 
 tively independent trends within a larger, world-wide movement 
 for which we have no name in English, but which is often referred 
 to in French by the term pragmatisme. ‘Their true relations will 
 come out clearly, I believe, if we take two of their most eminent 
 representatives, William James and Edouard Le Roy, and compare 
 their positions. 
 
 *SRéalisme Chrétien et Idéalisme Grec., 114-115. Cf. 86-87, 94-95, 147-149, 206-214. 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 295 
 
 James and Le Roy afford a good test case, for they are in many 
 respects nearer together than any other pair of figures we might 
 choose. James was more influenced by French voluntarism than 
 was any other Anglo-American Pragmatist. He constantly con- 
 fessed his debt to the voluntarism of Renouvier; like Le Roy, he 
 was much influenced by Bergson; and he was at least acquainted 
 with the writings of Blondel and Le Roy, as most of his Pragma- 
 tist associates were not. Le Roy, on his part, was much more of 
 a pragmatist than the other members of the school. Berthelot, 
 in his Romantisme Utilitaire, the most thorough study of the 
 antecedents and ingredients of the pragmatist movement with which 
 I am acquainted,*’* says that Le Roy is entitled to be called a 
 Pragmatist in the full sense of the word, while neither Blondel 
 nor Bergson is to be rated more than a “semi-pragmatist.” It is 
 significant that, as late as 1907, when the other members of the 
 school had ceased to call themselves pragmatists, Le Roy still used 
 the term pragmatisme to describe his own philosophy.**? Both 
 James and Le Roy, moreover, were motivated in their philosophy 
 by the desire to rehabilitate religious faith, and find some legitimate 
 way of escape from scientific positivism and agnosticism. Both 
 proposed practical helpfulness as the criterion of truth in the realm 
 of religion, and both went on to contend that this pragmatic test 
 of truth was, after all, the only criterion of truth in every realm. 
 
 The difference between them—and between the two schools— 
 begins to appear when we note that James, in his effort to put 
 religious truth on a par with scientific truth, was led to deny that 
 there was any such thing as truth in the ordinary sense of the 
 word. The utility of an idea, for him, constituted its truth. Le 
 Roy, on the other hand—and here he represents the whole school, 
 from Bautain down to the present day—always considered that the 
 practical consequences of an idea afforded a test of its genuine and, 
 if the word be permitted, its objective truth. Religious truth, to 
 Le Roy, is not merely on a par with scientific truth in the general 
 hurly-burly of relativity; it is a superior order of truth. Common 
 sense, science, and philosophy represent ascending degrees of valid- 
 
 4See I, 27, 119. On the broader 5 See his Dogme et Critique, Paris, 
 meaning of pragmatisme in French, cf. 1907, Index, pragmatisme. 
 supra, chapter III, note 175. 
 
296 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 ity. ‘The truth of each is relative to the practical object which 
 it has in view; yet the validity of science is superior to that of 
 common sense, and that of philosophy to that of science, because 
 the end in view is more inclusive. And even philosophy (whose 
 last word, for Le Roy, is not Bergsonian intuition, but action) is 
 inferior to religion as an ultimate point of view; for all dialectics, 
 even voluntaristic dialectics, approach the Absolute only as a limit. 
 ““A St. Vincent of Paul comes nearer than a Spinoza to the depths 
 of veritable reality.”*°° Le Roy is quite right when he says, in 
 his Dogme et Critique, 
 
 \ 
 
 You will please note the difference between the doctrine I defend 
 
 and contemporary English ‘“‘pragmatism.” The latter, it seems, puts 
 
 . in place of the desire for truth a preoccupation with mere wtility. 
 
 I propose nothing of the sort. All I say is that the true must be acted 
 
 and lived as well as thought out; that discernment can operate, here, 
 
 only by . . . putting things into practice—in brief, by making an effort 
 toward effective realization.1°’ 
 
 The Philosophy of Action lost its popularity as quickly as it 
 gained it. All the leading figures in the school, especially Laber- 
 thonniére and Le Roy, were implicated in the Modernist move- 
 ment; and the authors of the Encyclical Pascendi*** found the 
 root of all the errors of the Modernists in this “agnostic” philoso- 
 phy. Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the school of the Phi- 
 losophy of Action was scattered to the four winds, as the school 
 of Strasbourg had been; and the influence of Bautain was once 
 more on the wane. As the father of Fideism, he was already in 
 ill repute; as a Modernist before the Modernists, he was emphati- 
 cally to be shunned. 
 
 I think we must agree that Bautain was one of the grandparents 
 of French Catholic Modernism; yet before we praise or blame him 
 too extravagantly for that, we should be clear in our minds as to 
 precisely what his relation to Modernism is. Modernism was a 
 very complex movement, consisting of at least three distinct and 
 
 6 See the end of the last article on WN. Y., 1908, translated by Tyrrell. Cf. 
 Science et Philosophie, Rev. de Mét. et the Encyclical’s account of this philoso- 
 de Mor., VIII, 71. phy, 154-180, with the Modernists’ reply, 
 
 Op. cit.» 331-332. 93-110. 
 
 *8 See The Programme of Modernism, 
 
IN THE HISTORY OF THOUGHT 297 
 
 independent tendencies: radical Biblical and historical criticism, 
 represented by Loisy and Duchesne; a radical social movement, led 
 by Mare Sangnier, who sought to ally the Church with modern 
 humanitarianism and democracy; and finally, philosophical Mod- 
 ernism, or the Philosophy of Action, represented by such men as 
 Blondel, Le Roy, and the Abbé Laberthonniére.!*® Bautain was 
 neither an historical critic nor a social liberal. He knew little 
 about the critical methods which German scholars were even in his 
 day applying to the study of the Bible and the history of the 
 Church; and what little he heard about them shocked him greatly. 
 He took comparatively little interest in the efforts of Lamennais 
 and Lacordaire to reconcile Catholicism with democracy and 
 political liberalism; they, not he, are the real ancestors of “social 
 160 He would even have recoiled from the views 
 Never- 
 
 Modernism. 
 expressed by Le Roy on the nature of religious dogmas. 
 theless, the voluntaristic principles which Le Roy pushes to such 
 lengths in his Dogme et Critique’™ are essentially Bautain’s prin- 
 ciples; and Le Roy got them, in part, through devious channels 
 whose windings can be clearly traced, from Bautain. Bautain 
 was to the French philosophical Modernists what Newman was to 
 Tyrrell. If Cardinal Newman is venerated—and read—by good 
 Catholics, in spite of the alarming conclusions which have been 
 deduced from some of his teachings, why should Bautain, the 
 French Newman, be so completely ignored by the Church which 
 he loved and served so well? 
 
 I have spoken as if the collapse of the Modernist movement put 
 a definite end to Bautain’s influence. ‘That is not strictly true. 
 Philosophical Modernism, before its collapse, had made its contri- 
 bution to the general current of contemporary thought; and several 
 of the former leaders of the school—Blondel and Le Roy, for 
 
 instance—are still philosophizing as individuals, in a somewhat 
 
 1 See Houtin, Histoire du modernisme 
 catholique, Paris, 1913. 
 
 1 Tt is true that Bautain wrote a pop- 
 ular book on Religion et Liberté, and ran 
 for election in 48 on a liberal platform; 
 but his political liberalism was not nearly 
 so thorough-going as that of many other 
 Catholic priests. 
 
 1611¢ Roy says, for example (op. cit. 
 25-26) that “‘God is personal’ means 
 ‘act in your relations with God as in your 
 relations with a human person.’ Simi- 
 larly, ‘Jesus is risen? means ‘be in the 
 same relation to him as you would have 
 been before his death, or as if in the 
 presence of a contemporary.’ ” 
 
298 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 more cautious manner, preferably on non-religious themes. ‘The 
 works of Ollé-Laprune, the soberest and least speculative of all 
 Bautain’s spiritual successors, and the only one who never incurred 
 the charge of heresy, still have an enormous vogue. And—who 
 knows?—the present Aristotelian revival in Catholic circles may 
 not last forever. Christian thought, as Professor Gilson*® is fond 
 of pointing out, has swung back and forth continually between 
 Platonism and Aristotelianism; and even since the Encyclical 
 A eterni Patris there is room for another pendulum-swing, since the 
 philosophy of St. Thomas contains Platonic elements. When 
 Platonism comes back into its own, the philosophy of Bautain and 
 his successors may again receive the attention it deserves from his 
 co-religionists. Meanwhile, the rest of us, less concerned with 
 questions of orthodoxy and heresy, are free to salute with respect 
 the noble and pathetic figure of the “philosopher of Strasbourg,” 
 who did so much to make Catholicism intelligible to the modern 
 mind. 
 
 2M. le professeur Etienne Gilson, 
 professor of Mediaeval Philosophy at the 
 Sorbonne. It was Professor Gilson who 
 first directed my attention to Bautain. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
a ay 
 uN \ Ny 
 
 way’ 
 re a 
 
 } wh! 
 i & ae 
 
 "i state Wy 
 
 Dee ; 
 nas n't ee 
 
 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 I. On THE GENERAL MOVEMENT OF THOUGHT TO WHICH 
 BAUTAIN BELONGS 
 
 1. On THE GENERAL History or CatTHouic THouGHT SINCE 1800! 
 
 WERNER, K., Geschichte der apologetischen und polemischen Literatur, 
 Schaffhausen, 1861-67. Vol. V. 
 
 Scumip, A., Wissenschaftliche Richtungen auf dem Gebiet des Katho- 
 lizismus. Munich, 1862. 
 
 Brin, P. M., Histoire de la philosophie contemporaine. Paris, 1886.. 
 2me Partie, “‘Restauration de la philosophie chrétienne.” 
 Neo-scholastic point of view. 
 
 Betuamy, J., La Théologie Catholique du 19me siécle. 2nd ed. Paris,, 
 1904. 
 
 For the conventional view of Bautain, see pp. 29 ef seg. 
 
 Hesert, M., L’Evolution de la foi catholique. Paris, 1905. 
 
 La Prana, G., “Recent Tendencies in Roman Catholic Theology.” Har-- 
 vard Theological Review, July, 1922, pp. 233-292. 
 
 2. On FRENCH AND BELGIAN CATHOLIC THOUGHT IN THE 19TH 
 CENTURY 
 
 Damiron, P., Essai sur Vhistoire de la philosophie en France au xixme 
 siécle. 5th ed. Brussels, 1835. 
 French Catholic thought in the early 19th century treated in its relations with: 
 
 contemporary philosophy. The 5th edition contains an important supplement,. 
 in which a critique of Bautain’s philosophy occurs. 
 
 FerrAz, M., Histoire de la philosophie en France au xixme siécle: Tra-- 
 ditionalisme et Ultramontanisme. Paris, 1880. 
 
 The best single book for getting the background of our subject. Good chapter 
 on Bautain. 
 
 Branves, G., Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. London,, 
 1906. Vol. III, “The Reaction in France.” 
 
 WEILL, G., Histoire du catholicisme libéral en France, 1828-1908.. 
 Paris, 1909. 
 
 WuLrF, M. pe, Histoire de la philosophie en Belgique. Brussels, 1910. 
 Part III, esp. pp. 266-314. 
 
 GueErarp, A. L., French Prophets of Yesterday: a study of religious 
 thought under the Second Empire. N. Y., 1913. 
 
 Masson, P. M., Rousseau et la Restauration Religieuse. 2nd ed. Paris, 
 1916. 
 
 Relation of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and the Romanticist movement to the 
 Catholic revival of the early 19th century. 
 
302 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Mowrret, F., Le Mouvement Catholique en France de 1830 a 1850. 
 
 Paris, 1917. 
 
 ‘Couutns, R. W., Catholicism and the Second French Republic. N. Y., 
 1923; . 
 For the social program of the Liberal Catholics of 48, see the Introduction, 
 and chapters I-III. 
 
 3. On German Catuo.tic THOUGHT IN THE 19TH CENTURY 
 
 ‘Werner, K., Geschichte der Katholischen Theologie. Munich, 1866. 
 Book III, esp. pp. 400-510. 
 
 LicHTENBERGER, H., Histoire des idées religieuses en Allemaens 2nd 
 ed., 3 vols., bane 1888. 
 Vol. I, Chap. VII; Vol. III, Chap. VII. 
 
 Goyrau, G., L’Allemagne Religieuse: Le Catholicisme. 3rd ed., 2 vols., 
 Paris,. 1905, 
 Book II, “La pensée catholique et la pensée allemande.” 
 
 VermMeIL, E., J.-A. Mohler et l’école catholique de Tubingue. Paris, 
 1913. 
 
 Contains important introduction on the general movement of Catholic thought 
 in Germany in the early 19th century. 
 
 II]. On BautTAaAIin’s LIFE AND TEACHINGS 
 
 Lamazou, ABBE, L’Abbé Bautain. Paris, Bureau de la Semaine Religieuse, 
 1867. 
 Cf. Semaine religieuse de Paris, Oct. 26, 1867. 
 
 ForsseT, THEODULE, “L’ Abbé Bautain.” Correspondent, June 10, 1868. 
 These articles by Lamazou and Foisset are simply brief obituary sketches. 
 
 ‘Campaux, A., L’Abbé Bautain. Paris, 1868, Strasbourg, 1869. 
 Extended eulogy. Abbrev., Campaux I. 
 
 Die el tis Le Philosophe de Strasbourg: étude sur l’Abbé Bautain et son 
 école. Nancy, 1876. 
 Same as above, with supplement. Abbrev., Campaux II. 
 
 RéEcny, ABBE DE, L’Abbé Bautain: sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris, 1884. 
 The one indispensable book on Bautain. 
 
 IncoLp, PERE, L’Abbé Bautain: étude sur sa vie et ses oeuvres, avec des 
 documents inédits. Paris, 1884. 
 Review of de Régny, containing some documents from other sources. 
 
 Mer es L’Abbé Bautain et ses disciples. Colmar and Paris, 1897. 
 Unpublished letters. Reprinted from Miscellanea Alsatica. 
 
 oh DN case Lettres inédites du P. de Rozaven, S.J., sur les erreurs de 
 M. Bautain. Paris, 1902. 
 
 Borriges, E. von, “Louis Bautain.” Zeitschrift fiir die Geschichte des 
 Oberrheins, Neue Folge, XXVII (1902), pp. 99-140. 
 
 Priecer, L., “Ueber Bautain’s Stellung zur Scholastik.” Strasshurger 
 Dioxzesanblatt, 1906, pp. 79-88, 119-134. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 303: 
 
 Fricue, Me., Une Francaise d’Alsace: Mlle. Louise Humann. 2nd ed. 
 Paris, 1921. 
 
 A life inseparable from Bautain’s. 
 
 Baupin, E., Louis Bautain, le ‘philosophe de Strasbourg.’ Discours pro- 
 noncé le 22 novembre 1920 4a la rentrée solennelle de Université. 
 de Strasbourg. Strasbourg, 1921. 
 
 Abbrev., Baudin I. 
 
 A RAN ae “La philosophie de Louis Bautain.” Revue des sciences re- 
 ligieuses, 1 (1921). 
 
 Abbrev., Baudin II. The Rev. des. sci. rel. is published by the Faculty of 
 Catholic Theology at the University of Strasbourg. 
 
 Plast: ‘Correspondance entre Bautain, Moursvieff, et Metschersky.” 
 Rev. des sci. rel., III (1923). 
 
 Other references to Bautain will be found in the biographies of his pupils 
 (infra, V), and in the following books: 
 
 Forsset, IM., Vie du R. PP? Eacordaire; 2nd ed, 2 vols., Paris, 1873. 
 An ideal introduction to the whole Liberal Catholic movement. Consult index: 
 for references to Bautain. 
 
 GUERBER, J., Bruno Franz Leopold Liebermann. Freiburg-i.-Br., 1880. 
 Pp. 365 ef seg. 
 
 BaupriLuarT, A., Les Normaliens dans l’Eglise. Paris, 1895. 
 
 Pp. 17-33. 
 (Anon.) Mgr. André Raess, Paris, 1905. 
 Pas / fer seg. i 
 
 III. Baurarn’s Works 
 
 1. PusBiisHED Works 
 
 For complete list, see de Régny, op. cit.. Appendix D. I cite here only those works: 
 which are important as sources for the study of Bautain’s philosophy. Most 
 of them will be found at the Bibliothégue Nationale in Paris; but the best 
 collection of Bautainiana, including also the works of Bautain’s pupils and’ 
 much pamphlet material, will be found at Strasbourg, in the Bibliothégque Uni- 
 versitaire et dé la Ville. The library of the College of Juilly contains several 
 works otherwise inaccessible, as does also that of the Ecole Normale, at Paris. 
 Several of the more important works may be found at the New York Public 
 Library; others at Columbia. 
 
 DissERTATIO PHILOSOPHICA, de idealismo et phaenomenismo, in eo quod 
 pertinet ad existentiam substantiae spiritualis; quam .. . proponit. 
 Peis ie Vie Bautain:, Paris, de’ Patris, ‘1816. 
 
 Peers: 
 VARIETES PHILOSOPHIQUES. Strasbourg, Silbermann, 1823. 
 Pp. 44. Abbrev., Variézés. 
 
 Propositions générales sur la vie. Strasbourg, Silbermann, 1826. 
 Pp. 63. Abbrev., Props. 
 
 La moraLeE de l’Evangile comparée 4 la morale des philosophes. Stras-- 
 bourg, Février, 1827. 
 
 Pp. 76. Abbrev., Mor. Ev. P. 
 
304 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 DE LENSEIGNEMENT de la philosophie en France au xixe siécle. Stras- 
 bourg, Février; Paris, Derivaux, 1833. 
 
 Pp. 91. Abbrev., Ens. Phil. F. Reprinted, with a few excisions and revisions, 
 in the Psych. Exp., I, pp. i-xcix. 
 
 ‘QUELQUES REFLExIoNs sur la doctrine du sens commun. Paris, Bureau 
 de la Revue Européenne, 1833. 
 
 Abbrev., Sens commun, or Letter on Common Sense. Reprinted from the 
 Revue Européenne, VI, pp. 637 et seg. (1833). 
 
 ‘QUELQUES REFLEXIoNs sur l’institution des conférences religieuses 4 Paris. 
 Paris, Thuan, 1834. 
 
 Abbrev., Réflexions. Reprinted from the Univers Religieux, Folio L2, Columns 
 1117, 1202, 1262, 1443, (1833-34). 
 
 [ DE L’ENsEIGNEMENT philosophique de M. |’Abbé Bautain. Paris, 1834. ] 
 Abbrev., Ens. Phil. B. The anonymous Mennaisian’s critique. So full of 
 quotations from Bautain’s unpublished lectures that it deserves to be counted 
 as a primary source. 
 
 PHILOSOPHIE DU CHRISTIANISME. Correspondance religieuse de L. Bau- 
 tain, publiée par l’Abbé H. de Bonnechose. Paris, Derivaux; Stras- 
 bourg, Février, 1835. 
 
 2 vols., pp. cxviiit375 and 502. Abbrev., Phil. Chr. 
 
 LEeTTRE 4 Mgr. Lepappe de Trévern, évéque de Strasbourg. Strasbourg, 
 Derivaux; Paris, Lagny, 1837. 
 
 Pp. 24. Abbrev., Lettre a Pévéque. 
 
 ‘PuiLosoPpuiz. Psychologie Expérimentale. Strasbourg, Derivaux; Paris, 
 Lagny, 1839. 
 
 2 vols., pp. xcixt388 and 500. New edition, with title L’Esprit humain et 
 ses facultés, Paris, Didier, 1859. Abbrev., Psych. Exp. This and the Pil. 
 
 Chr. are our two most important sources. 
 
 PHILOSOPHIE morale. Paris, Ladrange et Dezobry, 1842. 
 2 vols., pp. ixt555 and 651. Abbrev., Phil. Mor. 
 
 REsuME des conférences faites au cercle catholique, 1842-43. Paris, au 
 cercle catholique, 1843. 
 
 Pp. 30. Abbrev., Cerc. Cath. Reprinted from the Correspondant, July 15, 
 1843. 
 
 La Reticton et la liberté considérées dans leurs rapports.. Conférences 
 de Notre-Dame de 1848. Paris, Sagnier et Bray, 1848. 
 Pp. 238. New edition Paris, Hachette, 1865. Abbrev., Rel. et Lib. 
 
 Avis AUX CHRETIENS sur les tables tournantes et parlantes, par un ecclési- 
 astique. Paris, Devarenne et Perisse, 1853. 
 Pp. 24. 
 
 FETE DEs ECOLES, Panégyrique de saint Paul, prononcé en l’église patro- 
 nale de Sainte-Geneviéve, le dimanche 2 décembre, 1855. Paris, 
 Adrien Le Clere, 1855. 
 
 Pp. 72. Contains Bautain’s recantation of his fideistic heresy. 
 
 ‘La Morate de |’Evangile comparée aux divers systeémes de morale. Lecons 
 faites 2 la Faculté de théologie, en Sorbonne, pour servir d’intro- 
 duction au cours de théologie morale. Paris, Vaton, 1855. 
 
 Pp. viiit453. Abbrev., Mor. Ev. D. An elaboration of Mor. Ev. P. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 305 
 
 PHILOSOPHIE des lois au point de vue chrétien. Paris, Didier, 1860. 
 Pp. viiit431. 
 
 La CHRETIENNE de nos jours. Lettres spirituelles. Paris, Hachette, 
 1859-61. 
 
 3 vols., pp. xiiit396, 392, and vit128. Bautain’s own account of his con- 
 version will be found in Vol. II, Letter XV. 
 
 La CONSCIENCE ou la régle des actions humaines. Paris, Didier, 1861. 
 Pp. 448. 
 
 ManveEt de philosophie morale. Paris, Hachette, 1866. 
 Pp. ivt+440. 
 
 Les cuosss de |’autre monde, journal d’un philosophe recueilli et publié 
 
 par labbé Bautain. Ocuvre posthume. Paris, Hachette, 1868. 
 Pp. viiit449. Abbrev., Choses. 
 
 De Véducation publique en France au xixe siécle. Paris, Bray et Retaux, 
 
 1876. 
 
 Pp. viiit326. Contains passages bearing on Bautain’s educational philosophy. 
 
 2. UNPUBLISHED Works 
 
 These, together with various other documents bearing upon Bautain’s life and teach- 
 
 ings, constitute the Fonds Bautain, which Professor Baudin and I have analyzed 
 _ and classified as follows. References to the Fonds Bautain (FB) may be iden- 
 
 tified by looking up the proper letter, or letter and number, in this table. Thus, 
 FB,V7 would refer to the Ms. Logigque dated 1832-33. Documents lettered A 
 to E, inclusive, are to be found in the Archives of the Bishopric of Strasbourg; 
 H to Q, in the library of the College of Juilly; U and V, in the possession 
 of the Congrégation des Dames de St.-Louis, at Juilly. 
 
 A. Various papers concerning the polemics. 
 
 B. Courses and extracts from courses. 
 (1) Extracts from courses (period before Bautain’s conversion). 
 (2) Course in Ethics (1829-30). 
 (3) «Psychology (1833-34). 
 (4) yh “* Anthropology (1834-35). 
 (5) 5 “Logic (no date). 
 
 C. Notes AND ExTRAcTs from articles on Bautain and his pupils. 
 
 D. NEWSPAPER ARTICLES. 
 
 E. Communications from the clergy in support of the Bishop’s Aver- 
 tissement. 
 
 t . . ° . . . . . ° . . . ° . . 
 
 H. Simple exposé de la question entre Mgr. PEvéque de Strasbourg et 
 plusieurs prétres de son diocése. (Manuscript in Bautain’s own hand- 
 writing.) 
 
 I. SrrasBourc aFFairs (letters and documents). 
 
 J. CorreEsponvENcE (1830-1840). 
 
 K. Copy of Bautain’s correspondence (two cahiers, 1833-1840). 
 
 L. Documents concerning the appeal to Rome (1838-1840). 
 
 M. Bauratn’s JOURNAL at Rome (two cahiers, 1838). 
 
306 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 FATHER PERRONE’s observations on Bautain’s writings. 
 BoNNECHOSES’s CORRESPONDENCE concerning the matter of the Con- 
 grégation de St.-Louis. 
 
 LETTERS FROM BauTain to de Régny (Juilly period). 
 
 VARIOUS LETTERS about Bautain, addressed to de Régny. 
 
 O-4 
 
 LETTER to the Rector of the Academy (July 1, 1822). 
 
 Manuscript philosophical works of Bautain. 
 
 (1) Cours de métaphysique (1821-22). 
 
 (2) Principes de philosophie. Métaphysique. (1821-22). 
 
 (3) Métaphysique. Ontologie. 
 
 (4) Elementa metaphysicis (sic). 
 
 (5) Anthropologie (1826-27). 
 
 (6) Logigue (1824-25). 
 
 (Fu a ae 185323 38 
 
 (8)  “ (1840-41). 
 
 (9) De la Vérité. De la Certitude. (Companion essays, dated 
 1846.) 
 
 (10) Philosophie, théologique et mathématique (1823-24). 
 
 <q on 
 
 IV. CoNTEMPORARY COMMENT ON BAUTAIN AND His 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 1. In PERIODICALS 
 
 Revue Européenne, Vol. 1V, pp. 58 ef seg.; V,.635 et seg.; VI, 33, 149, 
 52403730 X WeA81¢ 
 Friendly to Bautain. 
 
 Ami de la Religion, Vol. LXXV, pp. 513 e¢ seg.; LXXXI, pp. 3, 33 
 
 (articles by the Abbé Raess); LXXX, 129; LXXXIII, pp. 305, 385, 
 417 (articles signed “L.D.A.”’); also LXXXII, 241, 385; LXXXIV, 
 141, 173, 461, 784; LXXXV, 209; LXXXVIII, 145, 449; XCVI, 
 3559/0, ee. 
 Hostile to Bautain. Besides the articles cited, scattered references to Bautain 
 and his pernicious ideas will be found in almost every number, from Vol. 
 LXXV to Vol. XCVIII. 
 
 Revue d Alsace, 2e série, 1, 339 et seg. (1837). 
 
 Criticism of Bautain’s philosophy by Ch. Boersch. 
 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, 1844. Article on “La philosophie du clergé,” 
 by Emile Saisset. 
 Contains critique of Bautain. 
 
 References to Bautain’s controversy with the Bishop may also be found in the follow- 
 ing periodicals: Univers Religieux, Correspondant, Annales de Philosophie 
 Chrétienne, Les Etudes Religieuses, La Dominicale, Union Ecclésiastique, Mémo- 
 rial du Clergé (Ghent), Journal des Villes et Campagnes, Gazette de France, 
 Courrier de la Meuse, Journal du Haut- et Bas-Rhin, Le Semeur, Le Temps. 
 Consult their files for 1834-35. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 307 
 
 2. In Booxs anp PAMPHLETS 
 
 Un mor sur la soutenance de M. Bautain. (Anon.) Strasbourg, 1826. 
 
 AVERTISSEMENT sur la philosophie de M. Bautain, prétre de notre diocése 
 et professeur 4 l?Académie de Strasbourg. Strasbourg, Le Roux, 1834. 
 
 ExposiT1on abrégée des questions les plus importants de la religion, adressée 
 aux éléves de son grand-séminaire par ]’Evéque de Strasbourg. Paris, 
 1834. 
 Designed to warn the students against the errors of Bautain. 
 
 Letrre a M. l’Evéque de Strasbourg, 4 l’occasion de son Avertissement 
 sur l’enseignement de M. |’Abbé Bautain, par Paul Rochette. Stras- 
 bourg, 1834. 
 
 Pp. 74. Rochette was a Saint-Simonian admirer of Bautain, editor of the 
 Journal du Haut- et Bas-Rhin. For summary and critique of this letter, cf, 
 Ami de la Religion, LXXXII, 241, 385. 
 
 REFLExions sur la lettre de M. Paul Rochette. (Anon.) Strasbourg, 
 1834. 
 
 Deux mots 4a l’ex-éléve en théologie, éléve en droit. Strasbourg, 1834. 
 Rochette’s rebuttal, in reply to the above. 
 
 Un mor en réponse aux deux mots. Strasbourg, 1834. 
 
 Counter-rebuttal by the anonymous critic (F. J. Clavé?). 
 
 Coup p’oEIL sur |’enseignement de M. l’Abbé Bautain, par PAbbé D.... 
 Strasbourg, 1835. 
 
 Reprinted, with additions, from the articles signed “L.D.A.” in the Ami de la 
 Religion. 
 
 QUELQUES REFLEXIoNs sur l’enseignement de M. Bautain, en réponse au 
 coup d’oeil de Abbé D....par un laique (Fayet?). Strasbourg, 
 1835. 
 
 EcLaIRCISsEMENTS sur |’enseignement de M. Bautain, en réponse au coup 
 d’oeil de Abbé D.... sur cet enseignement. Par l?Abbé Théodore 
 Ratisbonne. Strasbourg, 1835. 
 
 Diz Leuren des Hermesianismus tiber das Verhaltnis der Vernunft zur 
 Offenbarung gutgeheissen, und die entgegenstehenden Ansichten als 
 falsch und gefahrlich verworfen von dem Bischof von Strassburg, 
 Herrn Lepappe de Trévern, nebst einem Breve Sr. Papst. Heilig- 
 keit, Gregors XVI. Von J. W. J. Braun. Bonn, 1835. 
 
 Rapport a4 Mgr. |’Evéque de Strasbourg sur les écrits de M. l’Abbé Bau- 
 tain. Publié par ordre de sa Grandeur. Strasbourg, 1838. 
 
 BrieF an Bautain. Von J. A. Mohler. Printed in Mohler’s Schriften 
 und Aufsdtze, ed. Déllinger, Regensburg, 1839, II, 141-164. 
 
 La CHRETIENNE de nos jours suivant M. lAbbé Bautain, par un chrétien 
 protestant. Paris, Grassart, 1863. 
 
 Pa33 5: 
 To this list should be added the anonymous Mennaisian’s critique (Ens. Phil. B), 
 which is so important a source that I have included it in the list of Bautain’s 
 
 works (supra, III). 
 
 21 
 
308 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 V. THINKERS IMMEDIATELY INFLUENCED BY BAUTAIN 
 
 1. ADOLPHE CARL 
 
 BANNACHE, PERE, Notice Biographique sur le R. P. Carl. Paris, 1874. 
 
 Caru, A., L’enseignement de la rhétorique, doit-il précéder dans ]’instruc- 
 tion de la jeunesse, celui de la logiquef ChAlons, 1824. 
 
 oh eR a Pay De origine et natura verbi humani. Strasbourg, 1827. 
 
 Re AUy ea Essai sur le langage articulé. Strasbourg, 1827. 
 
 elias Du matérialisme en médecine. Strasbourg, 1828. 
 The last three essays are theses for the degrees of docteur-és-lettres and doctor 
 of medicine. 
 
 2. ‘THEODORE RaTIsBOoNNE 
 (Anon.) Le T. R. Pére Marie-Théodore Ratisbonne, fondateur de la 
 
 société des prétres et de la congrégation des religieuses de Notre- 
 Dame de Sion. Paris, 1903. 
 See Vol. I, Chaps. III-X, XX; Vol. II, Chap. XIV, for references to Bautain. 
 
 RaTIsBoNnE, T., Des obligations qui naissent du mariage. Strasbourg, 
 1826. 
 
 Ee a Essai sur l’éducation morale. Strasbourg, 1828. 
 
 NaN is Eclaircissements sur l’enseignement de M. Bautain, en réponse 
 au coup d’oeil de Abbé D....sur cet enseignement. Strasbourg, 
 1835. 
 
 3. IstpoRE GosCHLER 
 GoscuLER, I., Acte public sur la puissance paternelle. Strasbourg, 1826. 
 aaa ha Du Panthéisme. Strasbourg, 1839. New ed., Paris, 1862. 
 whinge”, De psalmorum poési et philosophia. Strasbourg, 1840. 
 
 Theses for the degrees of licence en droit and docteur-és-lettres. 
 
 Among the works of Ratisbonne and Goschler should also be mentioned their speeches 
 at the Hdétel-de-Ville, before the Société d’encouragement pour le travail parmi 
 les Israélites de Strasbourg, printed by Silbermann, 1826-27, and preserved in 
 a collection of pamphlets at Juilly. 
 
 4. Henri DE BoNNECHOSE 
 Besson, L., Vie du Cardinal de Bonnechose. 2 vols., Paris, 1887. 
 
 See Vol. I, Chaps. V-VII and p. 507, for references to Bautain. 
 BonnEcHosE, H. pe, Letter to the Revue Européenne, May, 1834. 
 Hugg ee Introduction to the Philosophie du Christianisme. 
 
 Besides this important introduction by Bonnechose, autobiographical notices and letters 
 
 were contributed by four of the other disciples: Ratisbonne (Adéodat), Goschler 
 (Eudore), Lewel (Julien), and Adolphe Carl. 
 
 5. Mor. Maret (1805-1884) 
 
 FERRAZ, Of. cit., 357-373. 
 Bazin, G., Vie de Mgr. Maret. 2 vols., Paris, 1891. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 309 
 
 Maret, H. L. C., Essai sur le panthéisme. Paris, 1840. 3rd. ed., re- 
 vised, 1845. 
 
 a St aber Théodicée chrétienne, ou comparaison de la notion chrétienne 
 avec la notion rationaliste de Dieu. Paris, 1844. 
 
 ye ae Philosophie et Religion. Dignité de la raison humaine et 
 nécessité de la révélation divine. Paris, 1856. 
 
 eee ae nee Lettre . . . 4 nos seigneurs les évéques de France. Paris, 
 
 1858. 
 
 Reply to Dom Guéranger’s attack on the above. 
 
 6. ALPHONSE Gratry (1805-1872) 
 
 FERRAZ, Op. cit., 373-431. 
 
 Perraup, A. L., The Last Days of Father Gratry. Translated by special 
 permission, by Henrietta Lear. London, 1872. 
 
 O.LLE-Laprune, Eloge du P. Gratry. Paris, 1896. 
 
 Wacner, “Le Pére Gratry en Alsace,” Revue catholique dAlsace, 1900, 
 pp. 836 e¢ seg. 
 
 PERravuD, A. L., Le Pére Gratry: sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris, 1900. 
 
 Cuavuvin, Le Pére Gratry. Paris, 1901. 
 
 Braun, L. L., Gratry’s Theorie der religidsen Erkenntnis. Strassburg, 
 1914. 
 
 PoinTUD-GUILLEMOT, Essai sur la philosophie de Gratry. Paris, 1917. 
 
 eet eee La doctrine sociale de Gratry. Paris, 1917. 
 
 Gratry, A., Des préceptes de la rhétorique. Strasbourg, 1829. 
 
 Lh pga Dissertatio philosophica de methodis scientiarum. Strasbourg, 
 1833. 
 Twin theses for the degree of docteur-és-lettres, written under Bautain’s di- 
 
 rection. 
 ae WAN AOE Philosophie. De la connaissance de Dieu. 2nd ed., 2 vols., 
 
 ‘Paris, 1854. 
 
 This work was “crowned” by the Académie Francaise. Eng. ed., translated by 
 Alger, with title “Guide to the Knowledge of God,” Boston, 1892. 
 
 ae. et Logique. Paris, 1854. 
 
 Tn ee De la connaissance de l’A4me. 2 vols., Paris, 1857. 
 
 PACA Fe La philosophie du Credo. Paris, 1861. 
 
 he as Les sources de la régénération sociale. Paris, 1862. 
 
 Yee ee a: La morale et la loi de Vhistoire. 2 vols., Paris, 1868; 4th 
 ed., Paris, 1909. 
 
 Se seh a! Souvenirs de ma jeunesse. 16th ed., Paris, 1920. 
 
 See pp. 133-158 for references to Bautain. 
 
 For a fuller list of Gratry’s works, consult the biographies of Perraud and Chauvin, 
 supra. This list is designed to exhibit Bautain’s influence upon Gratry. For a 
 good essay on Gratry in English, see Guérard, op. cit. (supra, section I, 1, of 
 this bibliography). On Bonnetty and other thinkers less directly influenced by 
 Bautain, see Ferraz, op. cit., 345-355. 
 
310 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 VI. THInKERS INFLUENCED BY BAUTAIN "THROUGH GRATRY 
 
 1. Ernesr Hexzio (1828-1885) 
 
 GUERARD, 0p. cit., 63-68. 
 
 HeE.1o, E., M. Renan, L’Allemagne, et l’athéisme du xixe siécle. Paris, 
 1859. 
 
 RA Roe L’Homme. Paris, 1872. 2nd ed.,. Paris, 1894. 
 
 a oka, re Les plateaux de la balance. Paris, 1880. 
 
 pov tess Philosophie et athéisme. Paris, 1888. 2nd ed., Paris, 1903. 
 
 dea KE Le siécle, les hommes et les idées. Paris, 1895. 4th ed., 
 Paris, 1905. 
 
 2. Lton Oxvieé-Laprune (1839-1898) 
 
 FonsEGRIVE, G., Léon Ollé-Laprune. Paris, 1898. 
 
 BLonDEL, M., “Portraits contemporains: Léon Ollé-Laprune.” Revue 
 politique et littéraire, 4th series, XII (1898), pp. 216-221. 
 
 PRONE OL Léon Ollé-Laprune. Paris, 1900. 
 
 BazaiLuas, La crise de la croyance. Paris, 1901. 
 Consult the table of contents for references to Ollé-Laprune. 
 
 FonseGRIvVE, G., Léon Ollé-Laprune: Phomme et le penseur. Paris, 1912. 
 
 OLLE-LaprungE, De la certitude morale. Paris, 1881. 9th ed., Paris, 
 1924. 
 
 ae ap es ane La philosophie et le temps présent. Paris, 1890. 2nd ed., 
 Paris, 1894. 
 
 Ube tenets Les sources de la paix intellectuelle. Paris, 1892. 
 
 ERA a Le prix de la vie. Paris, 1894. 44th ed., Paris, 1923. 
 
 ibe ara La vitalité chrétienne. Paris, 1901. 
 Articles collected by G. Goyau, who also contributes an excellent introduction 
 on Ollé-Laprune. 
 
 La raison et le rationalisme. Edited by V. Delbos. Paris, 
 
 VII. CoNTEMPORARY THINKERS INFLUENCED BY OLLE-La- 
 PRUNE: THE SCHOOL OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION 
 
 1.. Maurice BLonpEL 
 
 Bulletin de la société francaise de philosophie, 1902, p. 190; 1908, pp. 
 27 ovteees 
 
 Paropi, D., La philosophie contemporaine en France. 2nd ed., Paris, 
 1920. 
 Pp. 302-306, 308, 315. 
 
 Gunn, J. A., Modern French Philosophy. London, 1922. 
 Pp. 86-88, 259-269, 311-312. 
 
 GILBERT, K., Maurice Blondel’s Philosophy of Action. Univ. of North 
 Carolina, 1924. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 311 
 
 BuonpvEL, M., L’Action. Paris, 1893. 
 The most important work produced by the school. Out of print, and very hard 
 to obtain. The only copy I have found in this country is at the Widener 
 Library, Harvard. 
 
 Ae sais (a Lettre sur les exigences de la pensée contemporaine en matiére 
 dapologétique. Saint-Dizier, 1896. | 
 Reprinted from the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, Jan.-June, 1896. 
 
 Ge ee “L’Ilusion idéaliste.” Rev. de métaphysique et de morale, 
 
 araet yrs Le procés de lintelligence. Paris, 1922. 
 
 2. THe Asst LABERTHONNIERE 
 Littey, A. L., Modernism: a record and review. London, 1908. 
 Chap. VIII. 
 LaBERTHONNIERE, L., Essais de philosophie religieuse. Paris, 1903. 
 CHE ees Réalisme chrétien et idéalisme grec. Paris, 1904. 
 tag ac La Positivisme et Catholicisme. Paris, 1911. 
 
 3. Epouarp Le Roy 
 LILLEY, of. cit. 
 Chap. XIII. 
 Paropl, of. cit. 
 Pp. 242-245, 307-311. 
 Le Roy, E., “Science et philosophie.” Rev. de métaphysique et de 
 morale, VII-VIII (1899-1900). 
 eet tats “Qu’est-ce qu’un dogme?” Quinzaine, Apr., 1905. 
 Eng. translation by Robinson, with title “What is a Dogma?” Chicago, Open 
 Court, 1918. 
 
 et va Dogme et Critique. Paris, 1907. 
 The above reprinted, with the objections of certain critics, and lengthy rebuttal. 
 She eee eae Une philosophie nouvelle, Henri Bergson. 2nd ed., Paris, 
 1913. | 
 Eng. translation by Benson, N. Y., 1914. 
 
 4. GrorGE FonsEcrive (-Lespinasse; published novels under pseudonym 
 of Yves le Querdec) 
 
 BarBiER, ApsBE, Les démocrates chrétiens et le modernisme. Paris, 1907. 
 Pp. 215-265. 
 
 FonsEGRIVE, G., Essai sur le libre arbitre, sa théorie et son histoire. Paris, 
 Lee fer end ed... Paris, -1896. 
 
 pee ONS La causalité efficiente. Paris, 1893. 
 
 etd, wets, Catholicisme et démocratie. Paris, 1898. 
 
 payee a Le Catholicisme et la vie de l’esprit. Paris, 1898. 2nd ed., 
 Paris, 1899. | 
 
 ie Lee La crise du libéralisme. Paris, 1899. 
 
 ‘es fat L’Attitude du catholique devant la science. Paris, 1900. 
 
312 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 MINAS ioe: 8: La crise sociale. Paris, 1901. 
 Uo ane ae Catholicisme et libre pensée. Paris, 1905. 
 AOS eek Essais sur la connaissance. Paris, 1909. 
 Note especially the essay on Le Kantisme et la pensée contemporaine. 
 Eléments de philosophie. Paris, no date. 
 
 5. FERDINAND BRUNETIERE (1846-1906) 
 
 SaRGENT, Les Grands Convertis. Paris, 1906. 
 FonsEGRIVE, Ferdinand Brunetiére. Paris, 1908. 
 Parop1, D., Traditionalisme et Démocratie. Paris, 1909. 
 Part I, Chap. I, “Traditionalisme et Moralité: M. F. Brunetiére.” 
 BRUNETIERE, F., La science et la religion. Paris, 1895. 
 MAR aed La renaissance de Vidéalisme. Paris, 1896. 
 oe Saha Le besoin de croire. Besancon, 1898. 
 BAR AN Ris Aprés le procés: réponse 4 quelques intellectuels. Paris, 1898. 
 ReaD Les raisons actuelles de croire. Lille, 1899. 
 WEP Cas oy L’idée de solidarité. Toulouse, 1900. 
 TN aS: Les motifs d’espérer. Lyons, 1901. 
 re Discours de combat (4 series). Paris, 1900-1903. 
 Arca tat L’Action sociale du christianisme. Paris, 1904. 
 Aan ae Sur les chemins de la croyance. Paris, 1905. 
 I list only those works of Brunetiére which show him as a Catholic apologist, and as 
 
 a popularizer of the Philosophy of Action. Wilbois and de Sailly should also 
 be mentioned as adherents of the school of the Philosophy of Action. 
 
 VIII. On THE PHILOsoPHY OF ACTION, AND ITs RELATION 
 TO MopERNISM AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 1. ExposITIONs AND CRITIQUES OF THE PuiILosopHy oF ACTION 
 
 BuonaiutTl, E., “La filosofia dell’azione.” Studi religiosi, V, 211-256. 
 
 LrecLErE, A., “Le mouvement catholique kantien en France 4 l’heure 
 présente.” Kantstudien, VII (1902). 
 
 Goujon, ABBE, Les ennemis de la raison. La philosophie de la volonté 
 et Papologétique de ’immanence. Chez l’auteur, 1906. 
 
 Dre Tonquepec, La notion de la vérité dans la philosophie nouvelle. 
 Paris, 1908. 
 
 RucciERo, G. pE, Modern Philosophy. N. Y., 1921. 
 P. 302. . 
 
 2. ON THE PHILosopHY oF ACTION IN Its RELATION To CATHOLIC 
 MopDERNISM 
 
 CavaLLanti, ABBATE, Modernismo e Modernisti. Brescia, 1907. 
 MERCIER, CARDINAL, Le modernisme. Brussels, 1908. 
 
 Eng. translation, St. Louis, 1910. 
 Havutcoeur, A., Autour du Modernisme. Paris, 1908. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 313 
 
 Lesreton, J., L’Encyclique et la théologie moderniste. Paris, 1908. 
 Gaupavup, “Les erreurs du modernisme.” La foi catholique, 1908-09. 
 La foi catholique was founded to combat Modernism, and contains much inter- 
 
 esting material. 
 
 GopryeEz, J., The Doctrine of Modernism and its Refutation. Phila., 
 1908. 
 
 RicxaBy, J., The Modernist. London, 1908. 
 
 TYRRELL, G., (translator) The Programme of Modernism. N. Y., 1908. 
 The response of a group of Modernists to the Pope’s Encyclical, which is 
 printed in full and examined point by point. 
 
 BEauRREDON, C., Le modernisme, ou les bases de la foi. Paris, 1908. 
 
 SaBATIER, P., Modernism. London, 1908. 
 
 Rally eens Les Modernistes. Paris, 1909. 
 
 Dexmont, T., Modernisme et Modernistes. Paris, 1909. 
 
 Mavumus, E. V., Les Modernistes. Paris, 1909. 
 
 Kuse x, J., Geschichte des katholischen Modernismus. Tiibingen, 1909. 
 Pp. 89-105. 
 
 Cauty, Mer., Libéralisme et Modernisme. Paris, 1910. 
 
 VERMEERSCH, A., De modernismo tractatus. Bruges, 1910. 
 
 SCHNITZER, J., “Der katholische Modernismus.” Zeitschrift fiir Politik, 
 Ee(i9l1y: 
 
 Dest er Der katholische Modernismus. Berlin, 1912. 
 
 Anthology of Modernist writings, Klassiker der Religion series. 
 
 TavERNIER, E., Le Modernisme. Paris, 1912. 
 
 LosstEIn, P., Quelques enseignements du modernisme. Paris, 1912. 
 
 Fontaine, J., La synthése du modernisme. Paris, 1912. 
 
 Bampton, J. M., Modernism and Modern Thought. London, 1913. 
 
 HovutTin, A., Histoire du modernisme catholique. Paris, 1913. 
 
 The best history of the movement. Chaps. I and III make clear the relation of 
 the Philosophy of Action to the other aspects of the Modernist movement. 
 Besides the references given above, consult Denzinger’s Enchiridion for the 
 Decree Lamentabili, the Encyclical Pascendi, and the Decree Sacrorum; see 
 also the articles on Modernism in the Catholic Encyclopaedia and in Hastings? 
 
 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. In English, the best presentation of 
 the Modernist position will be found in the works of George Tyrrell. 
 
 3. On THE PHILosopHY oF ACTION IN ITs RELATION To PRAGMATISM 
 
 SaILLy, B. pr, “Les éléments de la philosophie de l’action.” Avzmales de 
 philosophie chrétienne, 151: 180-195 (1905). 
 
 BourpEau, J., Pragmatisme et modernisme. Paris, 1908. 
 
 LrEcLERE, A., Pragmatisme; Modernisme; Protestantisme. Paris, 1909. 
 
 Hésert, M., Le Pragmatisme. Etude de ses divers formes anglo-améri- 
 caines, francaises et italiennes et de sa valeur religieuse. 2nd ed., 
 Paris, 1909. 
 
 FouiL.tEE, A., La pensée et les nouvelles écoles anti-intellectualistes. 
 2nd ed., Paris, 1911. 
 
314 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Boutrroux, E., Science et Religion dans la philosophie contemporaine. 
 Paris, 1908. 
 See Part II, Chap. III, “La Philosophie de l’Action.” | 
 
 BERTHELOoT, R., Un Romantisme Utilitaire: étude sur le mouvement 
 pragmatiste. 3 vols., Paris, 1913. Vol. III. 
 
 STEBBING, L. S., Pragmatism and French Voluntarism. Cambridge, 1914. 
 
 Spiriro, Uco, Il Pragmatismo nella Filosofia Contemporanea. Saggio 
 critico, con Appendice Bibliografica. Florence, 1921. 
 Note especially Part II, Chap. V, “Il Pragmatismo Religioso.” 
 
 Leroux, E., Le Pragmatisme américain et anglais. Paris, 1923. 
 
 Arcuno, O., La Filosofia dell’Azione e il Pragmatismo. Florence, 1924. 
 A good bibliography is appended to this book. 
 
4 A .} 
 WL aN 
 
 eRe ply. 'p 
 
 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abelard, 255, 256, 270. 
 
 Absolute, the, 52, 61, 63, 76, 226, 241, 
 242, 243, 293, 296; wv. God, Being, 
 Infinite. 
 
 Abstraction, 156; v. Reason. 
 
 “Adéodat,” 87, 210, 211. 
 
 “Adolphe,” 81. 
 
 Affre, Mgr., 93. 
 
 Aggregation, 122 ff., 156, 163; v. Analy- 
 sis, Science, Logic. 
 
 Agnosticism, 295, 296. 
 
 Alexandrian Fathers, viii, 71, 99, 223, 
 256, 270,282: 
 
 All, the, 242-244. 
 
 Ami de la Religion, 89, 263, 306. 
 
 Analogy, method of, 70, 90, 102, 122, 
 1235013072219-223,.250, 
 
 Analysis and synthesis, 156, 162, 288. 
 
 Ancillon, 57. 
 
 Angels, 129, 131, 132. 
 
 Azxnales de philosophie chrétienne, 31, 
 $3; 291. 
 
 Anti-intellectualism, ix, 41, 72, 75, 90, 
 91, 96, 142, 159, 168, 262, 290; w. 
 Reason, Fideism, Intuitionism, Tradi- 
 tionalism, Voluntarism, Pragmatism. 
 
 Antinomies, Kantian, 74, 144. 
 
 Apologetics, 69, 174; non-argumentative, 
 91, 209; of Bautain, in contrast with 
 the old, 33 ff., 81, 94, 142, 201, 209 
 ff.. 224, 231, 232, 247-250; of Cha- 
 teaubriand, 6; of Frayssinous, 5, 32; 
 of Laberthonniére and the Modernists, 
 232, 294; of the heart and of the 
 intelligence, 209 ff., 212; of the Scho- 
 lastics, 31, 88, 95, 247-250; of the 
 Traditionalists, 7 ff., 26, 31, 32, 258. 
 
 Argument, futility of rational, 68, 69, 
 POA a eeet 104, 17 55) 2255129255268, 
 270, 282. 
 
 Aristotle and Aristotelianism, 127, 142, 
 161, 214, 246, 253, 255, 256, 264, 
 268-270, 272-274, 277, 282, 285, 298. 
 
 Asceticism, 77, 120. 
 
 Atheism, 3, 18, 33, 72, 251. 
 
 “Atheist Catholics,” 38. 
 
 Attention, 152-154, 157. 
 
 Authority, 8, 14, 18, 24, 61, 62, 75, 95, 
 96, 100, 102, 104, 136-140, 149, 184, 
 187, 19080198; :203,: 257, 258, 262; 
 
 objective and subjunctive, 203; of the 
 
 Catholic Church, 20, 22, 96, 100, 142,, 
 203-207, 209, 262, 271; of the Pope, 
 22; of Scripture, 205, 206, 229, 262; 
 of tradition, 204, 262; wv. Liberty. 
 
 Autonomy, 34, 61, 64, 78, 95, 104, 109, 
 131, 190, 240, 278; wv. Spontaneity,, 
 Liberty. 
 
 Avenir, I, 28. 
 
 Axioms, 78, 143, 144, 150, 168, 173, 
 
 188, 259, 269, 272. 
 
 Azais, 258. 
 Baader, F., viii, 35, 49, 50, 51-54, 71,. 
 
 E2000, P21, 22917 .262,1263. 
 
 Bacony) Franks; 133523650237) 27 1: 
 Ballanche,; P.-S:,. 16, 17)\23-25, 32, ‘83, 
 
 258. 
 
 Base and acid, 106, 109, 110, 118, 122,. 
 128, 152; wv. Plasm, Being, Nature. 
 Baudin, Eugéne, x, 62, 64, 73, 90, 138, 
 
 1393-1769°.17750239.9303,.305; 
 
 Bautain, Louis, 
 
 Early life and philosophical training,. 
 56-63. 
 
 His conversion, and its effect upon his 
 philosophy, 63-79, 103-105. 
 
 Unsuccessful attempt to reform Catho- 
 lic philosophy, 83-93, 256, 265, 283. 
 
 Recantation, 93-97, 284. 
 
 Later life, 97-101. 
 
 Relations with his pupils, 80-83, 85- 
 87, 97-99, 287, 288; v. Gratry, etc. 
 
 Philosophical writings, 32, 57, 73, 81- 
 82, 87, 91, 99-101, 303-306. 
 
 As an apologist, 32-34, 79-81, 84, 209- 
 232, 283; wv. Apologetics. 
 
 As an educator, 86, 89, 92, 138-140. 
 
 As an orator, 59, 101, 141. 
 
 As a_ psychologist, 117, 
 145 ff. 
 
 General plan of his philosophy, 102, 
 135, 213-219. 
 
 Its negative, anti-intellectualistic as- 
 pect, 75-79, 140 ff., 224 ff., 229 ff., 
 24d ff... 265 i. 
 
 Its constructive and eclectic aspects, 
 75y. 002) fa 213 thee saeco 
 265, 274 ff. 
 
 His relations with Cousin and _ the 
 Eclectic school, 56-60, 88, 245, 246, 
 263, 264; with the Scotch realistic 
 school, 57, 58, 236-238; with Kant, 
 
 135, 144, 
 
318 
 
 66, 74, 273, 274; with the Post- 
 Kantian Idealists, 60-63, 238-245; 
 with the German Catholic Roman- 
 ticists, 71, 72, 262, 263; with the 
 Traditionalists, 32, 186-188, 257- 
 262, 285, 286. 
 
 His hatred of Aristotle, 255, 256, 268, 
 269; of eighteenth-century philoso- 
 phy, 234-236;. of pantheism, 241- 
 245; of scholasticism, 247-257. 
 
 His Platonism, 74, 75, 109, 117. 
 
 His political liberalism, 297. 
 
 His attitude toward Biblical criticism, 
 297. 
 
 His influence, 294-298. 
 
 Beauty, love of, 157, 158, 276; panthe- 
 istic conception of, 243; wv. Dialectics, 
 Good. 
 
 Being, 61, 71, 78, 102, 105, 106, 109, 
 118, 124, 129, 136, 161, 164, 176, 
 1720 21 Zs 2198225, eh 2G; A287 8; 
 287; and existence, 72, 128, 217-219; 
 and life, 106 ff.; in general, 253, 254; 
 v. God, Infinite, Absolute, Essence, 
 Life. 
 
 Belief, 169; wv. Faith. 
 
 Bergson, ix, 105, 113, 142, 156, 159, 
 162, 163, 167, 291, 292, 294-296. 
 
 Berkeley, 151. 
 
 Berlin Academists, 57. 
 
 Berthelot, R., ix, 199, 295, 314. 
 
 Besoin de croire, 31, 210; v. Need. 
 
 Biran, Maine de, ix, 30, 293, 294. 
 
 Blondel, M., x, 289-293, 295, 297, 310, 
 311. 
 
 Boehme, Jacob, 39, 43, 44, 50, 71, 72, 
 263. 
 
 Boersch, C., 60, 61, 306. 
 
 Boéthius, 160, 161. 
 
 Roisserée, the brothers, 40, 49. 
 
 Bonald, Vicomte de, vii, viii, 6, 7-1, 
 14-18, 25, 26, 32, 38, 185-187, 255, 
 258, 259, 262, 285, 287; uv. Tradition- 
 alism. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 4, 5, 7, 25, 282. 
 
 Bonn, school of, vii, 46, 49, 55, 90, 262. 
 
 Bonnechose, H. de, 86, 89, 91, 92, 98, 
 282, 308. 
 
 Ponnetty, A., 31, 83, 95, 285, 309. 
 
 Bossuet, 17, 251. 
 
 Boutroux, E., 290, 292-294. 
 
 Bréhier, Prof., 43. 
 
 Brentano, 40, 49. 
 
 Brunetiére, F., 291, 312. 
 
 Bunsen, Baron, 72. 
 
 Bushnell, Horace, 231. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Cabalism, viii, 50, 71, 114, 216. 
 
 Cabanis, 29, 30. 
 
 Campaux, ‘A. 35, 57; 59) 60507 2e2er, 
 302. 
 
 Capacities, innate, 
 Need. 
 
 Carl, Adolphe, 81, 82, 85, 174-115, 139, 
 L55y8216,,°3083 
 
 Cartesian; v. Descartes. 
 
 Categorical imperative, 47, 263. 
 
 Catholicism, revival of, in France, 3 ff., 
 53 ff.; in Germany, 36 ff.; and politi- 
 cal conservatism, 4, 16, 18, 25, 27, 29, 
 38; and political liberalism, 25 ff., 
 297; and paganism, 21, 22, 255, 256, 
 285; and Romanticism, 38 ff. 
 
 Center, vital, 108, 133, 164, 217, 219; 
 v. Foyer. 
 
 Certitude, 19, 53, 54, 58, 59, 169, 174, 
 175, 184, 190, 191, 793 #f., 210, 211, 
 289, 293; and faith, 194; subjective 
 and objective principles of, 193 ff.; 
 three kinds of, 196, 197, 205; w. 
 Truth, Knowledge. 
 
 Charles X, 32. 
 
 Chateaubriand, 6-7, 21, 29, 32, 37, 282. 
 Choses de Vautre monde, 56, 57, 62, 
 101, 130, 237,245, 265, 273; 303: 
 Christ, Jesus, 229, 230, 257, 283, 297; 
 
 resurrection of, 94. 
 
 Christianity, 21, 30, 31, 34, 37; v. Reve- 
 lation; “new,” 30; wv. Saint-Simon. 
 
 Cicero, 62. 
 
 Claudius, Matthias, 42. 
 
 Clement; v. Alexandrian Fathers. 
 
 Coe, G. A., 138. 
 
 Cognitio centralis, 44. 
 
 Cognition, 71, 145 ff... 175, 176; v. 
 Knowledge. 
 
 Coleridge, 161. 
 
 Collins, Ross, x, 28, 302. 
 
 Colmar, Megr., 55, 64, 65, 69, 86. 
 
 Common consent, Common sense; v. Sens 
 commun. 
 
 Comte, Auguste, ix, 23, 30, 234, 265, 
 290. 
 
 Conception, 118, 120, 121, 148, 250-152, 
 183, 188, 190; wv. Generation, Thought. 
 
 Concepts, 47, 48, 154; and ideas, wv. 
 Ideas; and percepts, 199, 200. 
 
 Cencordat, 4. 
 
 Condillac, 12, 29, 30, 32, 153, 163, 234, 
 236, 257, 26%, 276: 
 
 Conscience, 8, 47, 197, 198, 206, 207, 
 227, 248, 278; intellectual, 196, 203. 
 
 Contemplation, 154, 160, 183. 
 
 187,.. 2263 \04) Ideas 
 
INDEX 
 
 Contract, social, 8, 234; wv. Rousseau. 
 
 Cousin, Victor, 30, 34, 35, 56, 59, 60, 
 88, 102, 234, 245, 265; wv. Eclecti- 
 cism. 
 
 Critical Philosophy, 66, 74, 77, 269; vw. 
 Kant. 
 
 Critique of Pure Reason, 66, 74, 274; 
 of Practical Reason, 66; v. Kant. 
 
 Crystallization, 110, 122. 
 
 Cuvier, 45. . 
 
 Damiron, 5, 57, 73, 233, 301. 
 
 Darwin and Darwinism, 134, 227. 
 
 Death, 109, 120, 121, 132; wv. Immor- 
 tality. 
 
 Deduction and induction, 155, 156, 162, 
 188; v. Logic, Sylogism. 
 
 Definition, futility of, 165. 
 
 Deishi e318, 33y Ole eat, 229s eeo, 
 250. 
 
 Delbos, V., 9, 310. 
 
 Democracy, 8, 16, 23, 28, 100, 186, 297. 
 
 Demonstration and monstration, 162, 
 165. 
 
 Denzinger, 94. 
 
 Dependence, 75, 294; v. Humility. 
 
 Der contraponirte Gott, 48. 
 
 Descartes, and the Cartesian philosophy, 
 vii, viii, 19, 46-49, 52, 127, 170, 247, 
 261, 271, 272, 285; and French Scho- 
 lasticism, 31, 251-255, 257; vw. Doubt, 
 Cartesian. 
 
 Destiny, 133, 134, 249, 261. 
 
 Determinism, 239. 
 
 Development, 77, 78, 121, 1735, 148-150, 
 Peep ae o0,157, 212; 243,261, 
 275; embryonic, 108, 110 ff.; physical, 
 116 ff., 275; mental and spiritual, 117 
 ff., 145 £f., 276 ff.; v. Evolution. 
 
 Dewey, John, ix, 199, 245, 290, 291. 
 
 Dialectical ws. positive method, 256. 
 
 Dialectics, 255, 285, 296; of the intelli- 
 gence and of the will, 159; of beauty, 
 161; wv. Logic. 
 
 Diderot, 3. 
 
 Ding an sich; v. Thing-in-itself. 
 
 Doctores biblici vs. doctores sententiarii, 
 Baby 255- 
 
 Déllinger, 49, 95. 
 
 Dogma, 150, 205, 210, 218, 222, 223; 
 evolution of, 55. 
 
 Dogmatism, 19, 104, 254, 278; “moral,” 
 292-294. 
 
 Doubt, Cartesian, 46, 91, 170, 252, 261. 
 
 Dualism, 49, 52, 124, 224. 
 
 Duchesne, Abbé, 297. 
 
 Duhem, 292. 
 
 319 
 
 Durkheim, 260. 
 
 Earth-Spirit, 129, 137; v. World-Spirit. 
 
 Eckhart, Meister, 50, 71. 
 
 Eclecticism, 30, 32, 59, 73, 88, 161, 234,, 
 238, 245, 246, 257, 263-265, 282. 
 Education, 26, 27, 82, 83, 138-140, 148. 
 
 Ego and non-Ego, 226, 278; v. Self. 
 
 Ego(t)ism, 234, 239-241, 276; v. Indi- 
 vidualism, Autonomy. 
 
 Fichendorff, 40. 
 
 Eidos, Platonic, 125; v. Form, Idea. 
 
 Eighteenth century, philosophy of the, vii,, 
 8, 12, 29, 46, 202, 224, 233, 234-236, 
 241; wv. Condillac. 
 
 Elan vital, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113,. 
 124; wv. Bergson, Vital principle. 
 
 Emerson, 161, 177, 185, 268. 
 
 Empiricism, ix, 10, 18, 128, 199, 202,, 
 236, 294. 
 
 Encyclical Hterni Patris, 284, 298; Pas- 
 cendi, 296. 
 
 Encyclopedists, the, 265. 
 
 Enlightenment, the, (Aufklarung), vii). 
 37, 47, 49. 
 
 Enseignement de la philosophie en France 
 au xixe siecle (Ens. Phil. F.), 32, 87- 
 SAMLGGS Oss Lonel os caestlas 2505 
 PRI ORY EAD Rey) Loe ee 
 
 Enseignement philosophique de... Bau- 
 tain (Ens. Phil. B.), 80, 89, 115, 122,, 
 141,° 162," 163,166; 1845189, 191, 
 LOS SEL OFS IDR Mies od aah Lash dk Oe 
 220, 221, 304-307. 
 
 Epicurus, 125, 246, 276. 
 
 Equality, 23, 62, 73. 
 
 Erdmann, 57. 
 
 Ere Nouvelle, V, 28. 
 
 Error, possibility of, 198. 
 
 Essence and existence, 108; v. Being. 
 
 “Eudore,” 81, 211. 
 
 Evidence, intuitive, 134, 155, 169, 184,. 
 187, 198, 200, 201, 258; w. Intuition. 
 
 Evil, 129, 131, 132, 192, 247, 250; pan-- 
 theistic conception of, 243. 
 
 Evolution, 77, 135, 145, 148, 163, 167,. 
 185, 274, 275; of the Absolute, 242; 
 v. Development. 
 
 Experience, 13, 30, 70, 94, 140, 143, 145, 
 146,150, (155, 168, -180,7 196, 9 197,, 
 199, 202, 219, 252, 272; and knowl- 
 edge, 146; future, 201, 203; religious, 
 218; v. Empiricism. 
 
 Explanation, 154, 158. 
 
 Eye, psychic, 160. 
 
 Faculties, cognitive, 143, 144, 150, 153,. 
 189, 226, 237, 275, 277, 288; evolu- 
 
320 
 
 tion of the, 145-148; higher, 44, 157- 
 161, 190, 238, 254, 274, 277; innate, 
 162; wv. Imagination, Reason, Intelli- 
 gence, Faith. 
 
 Faiths 4195057,.077, 2110, vl 6S 401 68-141, 
 224, 236, 282, 295; and authority, 
 262; and intelligence, 157, 170, 171; 
 and knowledge, 78, 157, 166, 169- 
 TFS / O09 e200 eek colo 
 222, 252, 279, 289; and love, 159, 
 173; and will, 171, 172, 293; as a 
 cognitive faculty, 44, 71, 208, 279; 
 blind (fides implicita), 78, 143, 168, 
 186, 201, 208, 209; in self ws. faith 
 in God, 294; primacy of, 44, 76, 168, 
 173-175, 259; wv. Reason, Fideism, 
 Feeling, Taste. 
 
 Fall, of\man; 224131, 5135, 279 otethe 
 World-Spirit, 130. 
 
 Fatalism, 34, 254. 
 
 Fechner, 129. 
 
 Fecundation, 107, 109, 119, 126, 128, 
 148-151; wv. Stimulation. 
 
 Feeling,):76-79;.145; (1525, 155, 17020133: 
 192, 198, 199, 219; wv. Taste, Faith, 
 Intuition, Evidence, Religion. 
 
 Ferraz, M., 104, 143, 186, 187, 286 ff., 
 S01 30837309. 
 
 Fichte, 57, 60, 71, 103, 138, 145, 146, 
 167, 239, 241. 
 
 Fideism, viii, 97, 142, 143, 767 f., 209, 
 287, 296; wv. Faith. 
 
 First Cause, 225, 248, 272; wv. God. 
 
 Fiske, John, 227. 
 
 Fliche, Mme., 64, 71, 303. 
 
 Foisset, M., 5, 26, 303. 
 
 Foisset, Th., 87, 88, 302. 
 
 Fonds Bautain, 62, 72 ff., 84, 95, 115, 
 131, 143, 144, 163 ff., 174 ff, 191, 
 197, 198). 205¢ 206021) Sufix 222 Fe 
 230, 235, 236, 240, 241, 249, 250, 
 2595 107 Oy SUS SUD 
 
 Fonsegrive, G., 291, 310-312. 
 
 Form, | 120, 326; ¢1285::148, 2263) 227, 
 242; and life, 113, 219, 241; and 
 spirit, 182, 214, 216, 217; general and 
 particular, 150; wv. Eidos, Substance, 
 Being, Nature, Plasm. 
 
 Fouillée, 290, 313. 
 
 Feyer, 105-108, 111, 112, 141, 146, 163, 
 219, 236; wv. Center. 
 
 Trancke, 42. 
 
 Frayssinous, 5, 29, 32. 
 
 Freedom, 140, 222; wv. Liberty. 
 
 Free-will, 34; wv. Liberty. 
 
 Freud, 114. 
 
 Froebel, 139. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Functions, organic and mental, 116, 117, 
 145, 147, 190; instrumental character 
 of, 112, 147, 159. 
 
 Galileo, 13. 
 
 Gallicanism, 91. 
 
 Gallitzin, Princess, 42, 43. 
 
 Galvani, 45. 
 
 Generation, 109; wv. Conception. 
 
 Genius, 80, 151, 158, 162, 177, 180- 
 185, 187, 190, 202;.207, 2216-5242. 
 243, 269. 
 
 Germ and sperm, 128, 148 ff.; v. Being 
 and life. 
 
 Gerson, 161. 
 
 Gilson, 298. 
 
 Gioberti, 287. 
 
 Gnosis, 223; wv. Science. 
 
 God, attributes of, 225; existence of, 5, 
 47, 52, 72, 75-79, 93, 94, 168, 188, 
 190, 209, 224-228, 247-250, 252, 261, 
 272, 286, 288; experience of, 181, 
 200, 201, 214, 219, 272; knowledge 
 of, 52, 70, 177, 237; (of, Nature.eue. 
 the God of Man, 248-250, 255, 272; 
 v. Absolute, Being, Infinite. 
 
 Gorres, viii, 38, 49. 
 
 Goethe, 43-45, 104. 
 
 Golden Age, 14, 15. 
 
 Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the, 
 158.1615) 171, 5195, %218 9-209. 
 
 Goschler, Isidore, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89, 91, 
 241, 244, 308. 
 
 Gospels; wv. Scriptures. 
 
 Goyau, G., 36, 38, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 
 50, 3302, 310. 
 
 Grand Séminaire, 55, 85, 86, 89, 90, 92, 
 254. 
 
 Gratry, Alphonse, viii, 86, 98, 162, 186, 
 213-215, 216, 217, 286-289, 294, 309. 
 
 Gregory IX, 255, 256. 
 
 Giinther, Anton, 48, 49, 52, 54. 
 
 Guizot, 35. 
 
 Kamann, 42. 
 
 Harnack, 256, 267. 
 
 Heart, 6, 39, 87, 79, 158, 176, 205, 210, 
 212, 221, 269; ws. the head, 77, 112, 
 288; wv. Feeling, Faith. 
 
 Hegel, 34, 35, 39, 44, 51, 52, 60, 71, 
 102, 129, 135, 164, 239-241, 245, 265, 
 283. 
 
 Heiler, F.j322, 293. 
 
 Hellenism vs. Hebraism, 256, 266, 267, 
 283, 284; v. Traditionalism and Ra- 
 tionalism. 
 
 Helvetius, 234. 
 
 Herder, 37. 45. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Hermes, Georg, vii, 46-48, 54, 90, 91, 
 262. 
 
 Hoffman, 50, 53. 
 
 Holbach, d’, 3. 
 
 Houtin, 289, 297, 313. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 30, 80, 177. 
 
 Humann, Georges, 35, 64. 
 
 Humann, Mlle. Louise, 34, 35, 64-73, 
 84-87, 97, 104, 212, 215, 235, 262, 
 27350003, 
 
 Humanism, 293, 294. 
 
 Hume, ix, 180, 229. 
 
 Humility, 75, 95, 105, 110, 208, 229, 
 282; wv. Submission, Dependence, Re- 
 ceptivity. 
 
 Idealism, viii, 19, 30, 33, 49, 55, 60, 66, 
 72, 104, 180, 233, 238-245, 279, 282; 
 v. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; and real- 
 ism, 292; ancient and modern, 279. 
 
 “Tdea, The,” 164, 223, 239-245, 279. 
 
 Ideas, 159, 170, 177, 180-184, 204, 217, 
 218, 221, 242, 279, 280;.¥v.. Form, 
 Capacities, Need, Notions; and ideals, 
 177, 192, 215, 226, 240, 268; and 
 realities, 192; and sensations, 30; di- 
 vine, 127, 179, 183, 273; generating 
 (idées-méres), 102, 103, 121, 124, 125, 
 138, 212, 225, 260, 280, 287; innate, 
 Behe, wks tb, 149.) 177,187,195, 
 196, 204, 217, 262, 272, 286; Pla- 
 tonic, 125, 127, 161; transcendental, 
 60, 222; ws. concepts or notions, 157, 
 159, 235. 
 
 Illumination, 183, 211. 
 
 Illuminism, 185, 207; wv. Light. 
 
 Images, 149, 159, 161, 188, 276; w. 
 Ideas. 
 
 Imagination, 120, 159-161, 243, 276, 279. 
 
 Immortality, 22, 34, 224, 237, 238, 252; 
 v. Death. 
 
 Impressions, sense, 154; wv. Senses. 
 
 Inanimate, the, 128; wv. Inorganic. 
 
 Incarnation, the, 22, 33. 
 
 Index, the, 92, 208. 
 
 Individuality, 113, 116, 126, 132, 152. 
 
 Individualism, 104; wv. Autonomy, Ego- 
 (t)ism. 
 
 Infallibility, three kinds of, 53. 
 
 Infinite, the, 31, 40, 41, 48, 76, 133, 
 054155, LS lye LS, 224; 2255-242, 
 243, 245; craving for the, 195, 210, 
 222; “men of the,” 158, 180; “ray 
 of the,” 171; v. God, Absolute. 
 
 Ingold, Father, 98, 99, 302. 
 
 Inorganic, the, 122, 123, 152; wv. Inani- 
 mate, Panvitalism. 
 
 Sak 
 
 Insight, immediate, 77, 78; v. Intuition, 
 Intelligence, Evidence. 
 
 Inspiration, 177-183; wv. Revelation. 
 
 Instinct, 13, 14, 135, 243, 244. 
 
 Intellect, 145, 205; v. Mind, Reason. 
 
 Intelligence, 67, 134, 137, 144, 147, 152, 
 154, 157-167, 170, 171, 183, 184, 189, 
 190F AU Js Aue Loy 22lye25e259,262, 
 269, 273, 279; wv. Intuition, Reason, 
 Faith. 
 
 Interactionism, 124; v. Mind and Body. 
 
 Introspection, 178, 236. 
 
 Intuition, 13-16, 24, 39, 44, 57, 62, 68, 
 69, 90, 159, 167, 176, 180, 183, 214, 
 239, 254, 280, 284, 287, 288, 296; 
 intellectual, 182, 240, 253; of the in- 
 telligence and of the soul, 183; w. 
 Intelligence. 
 
 Intuitionism, ix, 142, 759 ff., 176, 186, 
 259, 262, 284, 286, 288. 
 
 Intussusception, 103, 106, 116, 122, 163, 
 169; v. Aggregation, Life. 
 
 Jacobi, 44, 47, 57, 71, 161. 
 
 Jamblichus, 279. 
 
 James, William, ix, x, 197, 199, 290- 
 296; and Bautain, 199-203; and Le 
 Roy, 294-296. 
 
 Jones, Rufus, 227, 228. 
 
 Jouffroy, 57, 73. 
 
 Judgment, 155, 157, 172, 188, 190, 204; 
 of relation, 153; synthetic a priori, 
 150. 
 
 Juilly, college of, 97, 114, 216, 305, 
 306. 
 
 “Julien,” 81, 210. 
 
 Jung-Stilling, 42. 
 
 Justice, 138. 
 
 Justin Martyr, 99. 
 
 Juxtaposition, 122, 163; v. Aggregation. 
 
 Kant and Kantianism, viii, ix, 12, 30, 
 39, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 
 50.760, 024, foe) 90s ile tes 245 
 14950172, 2189 7 237g odo ens eros 
 VTA aD YARDS A KTR D AE PO © 9 14 
 cal Philosophy. 
 
 Kepler, 13. 
 
 Knowledge, theory of, 19, 52, 53, 82, 
 139), 1425" 2092 (239) 2575, 28sec ss 
 and experience, 146; a@ priori and a 
 posteriori, 150; mediate and immedi- 
 ate, 160; v. Cognition, Faith. 
 
 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft; v Critique. 
 
 Krummacher, 72. 
 
 Kuhn, 54. 
 
 Laberthonniére, L., 114, 232, 256, 283, 
 291 ff., 311; v. Philosophy of Action, 
 Modernism. 
 
322 
 
 Lacordaire, viii, 17-19, 28, 29, 33, 87, 
 92, 297. 
 
 Laforét, 94, 285; wv. Louvain. 
 
 Lamartine, 177, 282. 
 
 Lamennais, viii, 16-29, 32, 50, 53, 80, 
 87-89, 186, 187, 190, 191, 196, 197, 
 233, 257-259, 261, 285, 297; v. Sens 
 commun, Traditionalism. 
 
 La Motte-Fouqué, 40. 
 
 Language, theory of, 10, 11, 15, 83, 139, 
 Loo SS 155) 1 50n ty 4 2ot, TLOO: 
 187, 204, 226, 259-261, 276; v. Bonald. 
 
 Laromiguiére, 30. 
 
 Leclére, 292, 312, 313. 
 
 Legitimism, 25, 33. 
 
 Leibnitz, 43, 45. 
 
 Leo Xl? 
 
 Leo XIII, 29, 284. 
 
 Le Roy, E., x, 290-297, 311; and William 
 James, 294-296. 
 
 Lessing, 45. 
 
 Lewel, Jules, 81, 85, 91; his brother 
 Nestor, 86. 
 
 Liberalism, political, 27-29; theological, 
 29; uv. Catholicism, and. 
 
 Liberty, 23, 24, 27, 28, 60-62, 73, 100, 
 103,° 258,.2613), moral 152." 1533" of 
 the press, 26; v. Authority, Autonomy, 
 Freedom. 
 
 Lichtenberger, H., 36, 38, 43, 302. 
 
 Liebermann, B. F. L., 55, 89, 254, 303. 
 
 Lite /isy S200 sl dU oy te tO. 
 LIS TID Theh eee eee 20st sO. 
 140, 147, 156, 215, 216, 261; and 
 mind, 147; divine, 51, 124, 130, 133, 
 137, 138; essence, existence and, 130, 
 225; general and particular, 127, 152; 
 v. Elan vital, Being. 
 
 Light) 69-71, 0106; (LOsl ol ld eel oes 
 160, 170, 175, 781-185, 191, 204, 211, 
 223, 228, 273, 280, 289; and life, 71; 
 and the Word, 184, 185; wv. Illu- 
 minism, Mysticism. 
 
 Locke, John, 10, 12, 57, 145, 149. 
 
 Logic, 135, 188, 252, 2553 “dialectical,” 
 288; of intelligence and of reason, 
 162, 166 ff., 288; of organism and 
 of mechanism, 162, 166; wv. Dialectics, 
 Syllogism. 
 
 Loisy, Abbé, 297. 
 
 Lombard, Peter, 270. 
 
 Touis 5 V Lis eos tes 
 
 Louvain, school of, 97, 284, 285. 
 
 Love, 134, 138, 158, 159, 183; and fear, 
 in education, 139, 140; and _ intelli- 
 gence, 279; law of, 138. 
 
 Lyman, E. W., 199. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 McGiffert, A. C., 44, 45. 
 
 Maistre, Joseph de, vii, viii, 6-16, 17, 
 LSS 521, 623-255. 326385855 aes ogee 
 258, 262, 285; wv. Traditionalism. 
 
 Mal de siécle, 31, 80, 138, 210. 
 
 Malebranche, viii, 176, 251, 272, 273, 
 284, 289. 
 
 Man, idea of, 125, 134, 222. 
 
 Manichaeism, 224, 250. 
 
 Manzoni, 282. 
 
 Maret, Abbé, 28, 29, 286, 287, 308, 309. 
 
 Martignac, 27. 
 
 Mary, the Virgin, 115. 
 
 Massillon, 17. 
 
 Masson, P. M., 6, 301. 
 
 Materialism, 29, 30, 33, 46, 74, 83, 124, 
 234, 238, 239, 241, 242, 276, 283. 
 Mathematics, 150, 202, 213 ff., 217, 219; 
 transcendental, 219; v. Philosophy, Sci- 
 
 ence. 
 
 Mayence, school of, 54, 55. 
 
 Mechanism, 39; vw. Organism. 
 
 Melun, Vicomte de, 28. 
 
 Ménégoz, E., 168. 
 
 Mental healing, 119. 
 
 “Mental matrix,” 149; v. Understanding. 
 
 Merian, 57. 
 
 Mezzofante, Cardinal, 92. 
 
 Microcosm and Macrocosm, 48, 129, 132, 
 PAN eR ES 
 
 Milhaud, G., 290, 292. 
 
 Mind, 146, 158, 159, 189, 190, 208, 
 222; wv. Intellect, Thought, Reason. 
 
 Miracles, 94, 228-231. 
 
 Modernism, Catholic, ix, 55, 95, 142, 
 199, 256, 283, 284, 290, 296 f., 312, 
 SWE 
 
 Moehler, viii, 54, 72, 90, 94, 95, 263, 
 302. 
 
 Monads, 128. 
 
 Monism, 44, 49, 124. 
 
 Montaigne, 273. 
 
 Montalembert, 28. 
 
 Montesquieu, 9. 
 
 Morale de DPévangile .. . (Mor. Ev. P, 
 Mor. Ev. D.), 82, 99, 144, 170, 180, 
 230, 243, 244, 246, 264, 265, 274, 
 2755. 283,303, 207. 
 
 Munich, school of, viii, 46, 49, 50, 55, 
 262, 263; v. Baader. 
 
 Mysticism, viii, ix, 14, 39, 41-43, 46, 
 69-71; (161; 176,),177,, 180,01 855<219, 
 239, 240, 262, 288; wv. Illuminism, 
 Pragmatism, Knowledge. 
 
 Natural religion, 8, 18, 39. 
 
 Naturalism, 294. 
 
 Nature, 8, 48, 49, 51, 67, 70, 71, 75, 
 
INDEX 
 
 78, 104, 125, 127, 134, 735, 148, 151, 
 154, 156, 214-223, 227, 230, 272, 276; 
 and spirit, 127 ff.; God and, 78, 130, 
 248, 267, 272; idea of, 125 ff.; laws 
 TAS, 955° 250,%235237 9) eo Spir- 
 itual law; logic of, 148, 156, 163; 
 philosophy of, 82, 214-217, 219; state 
 Orr 85°. 155/260; 
 
 Need, sense of, 195, 226 ff., 250. 
 
 Newman, viii, ix, 59, 99, 297. 
 
 Nietzsche, 104. 
 
 Notions, 159, 188, 226, 253; wv. Ideas. 
 
 Noumena(1), 46, 48, 126, 221, 236, 237; 
 v. Phenomena(1). 
 
 Novalis, 41, 43. 
 
 Objects, 126, 153; intelligible, 184, 200, 
 218; natural, 200. 
 
 Cbjectivism, 241. 
 
 Occasionalists, 128. 
 
 Occultism, 39, 42, 71, 230. 
 
 Oetinger, F. C., 42, 43, 50. 
 
 Qllé-Laprune, L., 289, 290, 294, 298, 
 309, 310. 
 
 Ontologism, 284, 287. 
 
 Organism and environment, 135; devel- 
 opment of the, 54; vs. mechanism, 39, 
 
 Berea On Siu 54-0104. 1 157\162,4163, 
 
 Disease ise avy 255;2564 "eg. Loge, ° 
 
 Romanticism. 
 
 Organs, sensory, as distinguished from 
 senses, 147, 178; wv. Sensations, Senses, 
 Pressentiments. 
 
 Origen; v. Alexandrian Fathers. 
 
 Overbeck, F., 40, 41. 
 
 Ozanam, 28, 33. 
 
 Pacte de famille, 87, 97, 98. 
 
 Pantheism, 33, 44, 46, 49-52, 144, 224, 
 241-246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253-255, 
 263, 265, 279, 286; and Scholasticism, 
 247 ff.; and Rationalism, 251 ff.; Ro- 
 mantic, 242, 263; Spinozistic, 254, 272; 
 spiritualistic, 254. . 
 
 Panpsychism, 110, 124. 
 
 Panvitalism, 102, 122-124, 248. 
 
 Parallelism, 124; wv. Interactionism. 
 
 Pascal, viii, 6, 172, 222, 250, 273, 284. 
 
 Paulsen, 124. 
 
 Pellico, Sylvio, 282. 
 
 Perceptions, 148, 188, 276; supersensible, 
 178; wv. Pressentiments. 
 
 Perrone, 93. 
 
 Pestalozzi, 139. 
 
 Petit Séminaire, 32, 86, 89, 90, 92, 251. 
 
 Phenomena(1), 144, 161, 173, 180, 221, 
 237, 242, 279; v. Noumena(1). 
 
 Philo, 71. 
 
 Das 
 
 Philosophie de Lyon, 89, 251-255, 272, 
 273: 
 
 Philosophie du Christianisme (Phil. Chr.), 
 SPOT WOZ SO 0 13k, 160s 169, 
 184, 194, 196, 204-206, 208-212, 234, 
 236, 237-240, 242-245, 247, 249-256, 
 263, 265-271, 274, 282, 304. 
 
 Philosophie morale (Phil. Mor.), 99, 171- 
 173, 181, 195, 196, 304. 
 
 Philosophy, 75, 213, 219; and mathe- 
 matics, 213-217; and science, 123, 125, 
 215-217, 292; and theology, 214-223, 
 271, 272; of history, 266; of nature, 
 v. Nature; true and false, 265-274. 
 
 “Philosophy of Action,” ix, 290-297, 
 312-314; wv. Blondel, Le Roy, Prag- 
 matism, etc. 
 
 Pietism, 42, 44. 
 
 Pius IX, 100. 
 
 Plasm, 106, 110, 111, 126, 127; and 
 life, 128; and spirit, 106, 110; w. 
 Base, Nature, Being. 
 
 Plato and Platonism, viii, ix, 62, 71, 74, 
 rine (1 Sea We Oy bar OR A Ce en PR CR 
 171, 176, 180, 186, 190, 216, 246, 
 256, 264, 268-270, 272-274, 276, 279- 
 282, 284, 285, 298; neo-Platonism, 39, 
 TA EOO YS TNL SA poy cae see 20 ts 
 
 Plotinus, 69, 161, 279, 283. 
 
 Poincaré, 292. 
 
 Point, mathematical, 108, 122, 140, 165, 
 166; saline, 110, 122, 149; wv. Center, 
 Foyer. 
 
 Polarization, 51, 103, 110-112, 129, 140, 
 167 po2eks 
 
 Poser, meaning of, 146. 
 
 Positivism, ix, 295; the new, 292. 
 
 Postulates, 143, 172, 228, 269; v. Ax- 
 ioms. 
 
 Potentiality, 106, 109, 111, 217, 218, 
 275; and actuality, 127, 128, 130, 142; 
 or latency, 126. 
 
 Praeambula fidei, 209. 
 
 Pragmatism, ix, x, 142, 171, 172, 191, 
 199, 202, 203, 228, 290-294, 313, 314; 
 
 and mysticism, 228; semi-, 190 ff., 
 288, 295. 
 
 Pragmatisme, meaning of, in French, 
 292-295. 
 
 Prayer, 68, 154, 210. 
 
 Pressentiments, 173, 179. 
 
 Prime Mover, 247; wv. First Cause. 
 
 Principles, 77, 193, 222, 236, 237, 259, 
 272, 289; active and passive, 105, 
 106, 114, 115, 136; male and female, 
 
324 
 
 106, 114; objective and 
 105-107, 109-111, 113. 
 
 Proclus, 279. 
 
 Progress, 8, 24, 25, 135, 204, 206; vw. 
 Evolution. 
 
 Propositions générales sur la vie, 82, 
 105-123, 145. 
 
 Pseudo-Dionysius, 71. 
 
 Psychologie Expérimentale (Psych. Exp.), 
 OOF TOD LO7al Li gel 25-1 Zoe soelg5, 
 140, 144, 146-160, 171, 172, 177, 178, 
 181-184, 200-203, 227, 236, 239, 265, 
 273, 275-281. 
 
 Psychology, genetic, of cognition, 145 
 ff., 156, 158; metaphysics and, 275, 
 281; of Kant, 144; of the Scholas- 
 tics, 253; of the Scotch school, 236 
 ff.; pure and experimental, 135; tran- 
 scendental, 178. 
 
 Fythagoras and Pythagoreanism, 
 115, 216, 267-269, 279. 
 
 Quélen, Mgr., 33, 34. 
 
 Radiation, 107, 116, 141, 147, 149, 228; 
 v. Center, Development. 
 
 Raess, André, 55, 89, 93, 254, 303. 
 
 Rapport, idea of, 21, 50, 70, 116, 125, 
 130, 135-138. 
 
 subjective, 
 
 114, 
 
 Rationalism, 19, 31, 39, 41, 43-48, 54, ° 
 
 72, 84, 91, 96, 97, 180, 251-257, 262, 
 265 ff., 273, 277-279, 282, 284-288; 
 and pantheism, 251-257; and Platon- 
 ism, 273; and Traditionalism, 265 ff.; 
 semi-, 286. 
 
 Ratisbonne, Th., 81, 83, 85, 91, 98, 139, 
 308. 
 
 Ravaisson, ix, 294. 
 
 Reaction, necessity of, 148, 151-153, 181; 
 v. Stimulation. 
 
 Realism, 136, 238, 239; Scotch, viii, 21, 
 30-327 58,023 0-296, 2576 
 
 Realpolitik, 245. 
 
 Reason, 47, 60-62, 134, 146, 155-157, 
 159, 160, 188-190, 276-279, 286-288; 
 and authority, 14, 24, 256, 271; and 
 experience, 154, 156; and faith, 8, 18, 
 39, 44, 47, 50, 58, 59, 62, 63, 69, 
 Fan THe TON 820 91 5/9555 94) 9097, 
 104, 143, 159, 165, 167-176, 190, 229, 
 252, 259, 271; and intelligence, 159- 
 167, 189, 288; and language, 260; 
 and revelation, 176 ff.; critique of the, 
 142 ff., 253; discursive, 13-15, 69, 
 189, 288; laws of the, 227; meta- 
 physical impotence of the, 9, 46, 65, 
 66, 72-74, 76, 77, 93, 94, 100, 743, 
 144, 218, 225, 269, 274, 293; practi- 
 cal, 47, 144, 276; “things of,” 259; vw. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Faith, Reasoning, Rationalism, Kant. 
 Reasoning, 19, 44, 76, 94, 144, 148, 155, 
 157, 160, 168, 188-190, 224, 229. 
 
 Recapitulation, principle of, 275. 
 
 Receptivity, 75, 105, 109, 168, 169, 190; 
 v. Humility, Faith. 
 
 Redemption, 129, 131. 
 
 Reflection, 153-156, 160, 169, 173, 222, 
 223; v. Thought, Reasoning. 
 
 Régny, Abbé de, 33, 34, 56, 59, 64, 65, 
 67-69, 72, 80, 81, 83, 85, 91, 94-98, 
 101). 135,°-17639 2079 22085 302, 
 
 Reid wens sg: 
 
 Relativism, 31, 191, 198, 293, 295. 
 
 Religion of feeling, 39, 42. 
 
 Reminiscence, Platonic, 218. 
 
 Renaissance, 276. 
 
 Renouvier, ix, 295. 
 
 Revelation, 74, 93, 94, 170, 176-187, 
 206; and tradition, 184; extraordinary, 
 178, 179; Mosaic, 229; primitive, 10, 
 16, 21, 24, 31, 185, 267; truth of the 
 Christian, 224, 228-231. 
 
 Revue Européenne (Rev. Eur.), 31, 35, 
 53, 54, 71, 72, 87, 88, 121, 130, 143, 
 186, 250, '259;'261, 262,°26539306, 
 
 Revue politique et littéraire, 289. 
 
 Revue philosophique, 290. 
 
 Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 291, 
 292, 296. 
 
 Riambourg, 84, 144, 249, 258. 
 
 Richter, Jean-Paul, 43. 
 
 Ritschl, Albrecht, 246, 256, 267. 
 
 Rochette, Paul, 232, 307. 
 
 Rohan, Cardinal de, 86, 89. 
 
 Romanticism, viii, ix, 24, 30, 33, 35, 38 
 ff., 47, 49, 54, 55, 71, 80, 81, 89, 
 91, 104, 127, 130, 139, 161, 177, 185, 
 199, 210, (211, °230, 823 1fa233 een 
 236, 239, 242, 246, 254, 263, 265, 
 276, 285; German Catholic, 284; logic 
 of, 164; neo-, 284. 
 
 Rosmini, 287. 
 
 Rousseau, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 24, 42, 
 43, 104, 139. 
 
 Royce, J., 132, 191, 204. 
 
 Royer-Collard, 21, 30, 58. 
 
 Rozaven, Father, 98, 99, 102. 
 
 Sabatier, Auguste, 95, 168. 
 
 Sailer, Father, 42. 
 
 Sailly, B. de, 290-294, 312, 313. 
 
 St. Anselm, vii, 161. 
 
 St. Augustine, viii, 99, 161, 186, 256, 
 265, 270. 
 
 St. Bernard, 161, 256. 
 
 St. Bonaventura, 256. 
 
 Saint-Laurent, 73. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Saint-Louis, Messieurs de, 86, 90, 92. 
 
 Saint-Martin, 14, 50, 263. 
 
 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 24. 
 
 Saint-Simon, 30, 202, 231. 
 
 St. Theresa, 69. 
 
 St. Thomas, vii, viii, 100, 161, 218, 256, 
 264, 270, 298. 
 
 St. Vincent of Paul 296. 
 
 Sand, George, 30. 
 
 Sangnier, Marc, 29, 297. 
 
 Santayana, George, 12, 239. 
 
 Savoyard Vicar, 3; v. Rousseau. 
 
 Skepticism, 9, 18, 19, 31, 57, 66, 72, 73, 
 Pier el oa a3,\ 2735 2/ 9) 201293. 
 
 Schelling, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52-54, 57, 71, 
 Five 01 35,1675 177, 214.4239-247, 
 
 Schiller F2C.S.5ix, 290; 291,..293. 
 
 Schlegel, Friedrich, 40, 43, 177. . 
 
 Schleiermacher 36, 43, 44, 71, 142, 218, 
 241, 246. 
 
 Schmid, A., 36, 48, 301. 
 
 Scholasticism, vii, viii, 31, 32, 46, 47, 
 Peon 05. 142, 2a 2 aoe 4 7 
 257, 270-272, 274, 285, 293; Bautain’s 
 definition of, 252; neo-, 142, 284, 285; 
 pantheism and, 251-255. 
 
 Science, and theology, 220-222, 272; 
 validity of natural, 13, 157, 166, 180, 
 i 6251), a2 3% 237 241,.271,. 292; 
 293; v. Mathematics, Philosophy. 
 
 Science vs. connaissance, 159, 163, 217, 
 223, 235; v. Gnosis. 
 
 Scott, Walter, 282. 
 
 Scotus Erigena, 71. 
 
 Scriptures, 67, 74, 205, 206, 210, 212, 
 224, 228-230, 270, 271. 
 
 Self, the, 152, 154, 169, 226, 227, 241; 
 existence of, 57, 180; wv. Ego. 
 
 Self-consciousness, 109, 118, 131, 133, 
 152-154, 178, 277; of the Absolute, 
 243. 
 
 Self-expression, 104; wv. Individualism. 
 
 Sens commun (common sense or com- 
 mon consent), 20-22, 53, 57, 88, 186, 
 190, 196, 197, 202, 204, 225, 237, 
 257-259, 291, 293; v. Lamennais. 
 
 Sensations, 30, 148, 190. 
 
 Senses, 74, 112, 120, 134, 145-148, 154, 
 TG 178, 2285,00189;) 218; 2783" v. 
 Organs. 
 
 Sensibility, 131, 133, 147, 205. 
 
 Sensorium commune, 146; 147; v. Un- 
 derstanding. 
 
 Sensualism, 29, 180, 234, 275. 
 
 Sentimentalists, 246. 
 
 Sex, 106, 110, 113-115, 120; wv. Prin- 
 
 ciples, male and female. 
 
 325 
 
 Socrates, 123, 267, 268, 270, 274. 
 
 Soul, 147 ff., 172, 180, 190, 210, 215, 
 227, 236, 253; relation to mind and 
 body, 108, 116, 118, 119, 121, 124, 
 134, 145, 219, 248; wv. Mind. 
 
 Space, 129-131, 132, 133, 219, 254; vw. 
 Time. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 167. 
 
 Spener, 42. 
 
 Spinoza and Spinozism, 33, 39, 44, 45, 
 520254, 2555) 272,296. 
 
 Spirit, 48, 49, 106, 118, 121, 126-129, 
 Mote S6al4 ye 216, 5 2bee eee e eal 
 animal, 112, 127, 134; matter and, 
 128, 147, 242, 254, 277; nature and, 
 125; v. Life, Form. 
 
 Spiritism, 124. 
 
 Spiritualism, 29, 33, 241, 279. 
 
 Spiritual law, in the natural world, 70, 
 T3p Ose 10S A290 220-223.0250 5.00, 
 Nature, World. 
 
 Spontaneity, absolute, 60, 75, 78, 97, 138, 
 190, 278; limited or conditional, 75, 
 S20 100 103,°113; 138,222,246; of 
 the knowing subject, 238; v. Autonomy, 
 Receptivity. 
 
 Staél, Mme. de, 30, 64. 
 
 Stahl, 108. 
 
 State, the, 244, 245. 
 
 Staudenmaier, 37, 54. 
 
 Stebbing, L. S., 293, 314. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 57, 58. 
 
 Stimulation, necessity of external, 105, 
 LOGS RYT IS loos 12GB La 1: 
 187, 246, 278, 281; wv. Fecundation, 
 Spontaneity, Life. 
 
 Stirner, 104. 
 
 Stoicism, 134, 264, 277. 
 
 Strasbourg Philosophy, 79, 83, 289. 
 
 Strasbourg School, 79, 81, 82, 115, 214, 
 290, 296. 
 
 Subconscious, the, 178. 
 
 Sublimination, 120. 
 
 Subjectivity, 52. 
 
 Subjectivism, 239-241, 277; and object- 
 ivism, 292. 
 
 Submission, 209, 222; wv. Humility. 
 
 Substance, 126, 128, 129, 134, 144, 154, 
 213, 247, 253; v. Base, Nature, Plasm. 
 
 Supernatural vs. natural, I RUIMIP ES be 
 
 Supernaturalism, 50; relative, 50, 51, 231. 
 
 Swedenborg, 43. 
 
 Syllogism, 76, 79, 162, 188, yAY 2535 
 255, 269, 271; v. Logic, Reasoning. 
 
 Symbolism, 220, 242. ; 
 
 Systole and diastole, 117; v. Life, Va-et- 
 
 vient. 
 
326 
 
 Tabula rasa, 149, 187, 238, 261. 
 
 Taste, 78, 155,170, 172) 183, 186, 192, 
 199, 202, 211, 212, 219; wv. Feeling, 
 Faith. 
 
 Tertullian, 168. 
 
 Testimony, 186, 187, 196-198, 205, 228, 
 229, 258; wv. Authority. 
 
 Theism, 33, 50-52, 227, 263; wv. Athe- 
 ism, Pantheism, God. 
 
 Theology, 214 ff., 270; and philosophy, 
 214 ff.; and science, 220-222; experi- 
 mental (sentimental, mystic), 218,219; 
 old and new, 231; rational, 218; vw. 
 Apologetics. 
 
 Theosophy, 42, 43, 71. 
 
 Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), 44, 66, 
 125; 
 
 Thomism, 284; wv. St. Thomas. 
 
 Thought, 152 ff., 160, 189, 267; dis- 
 cursive, 190; vw. Mind, Reason. 
 
 Time,’ 129,.130;'237). 13271533, 461; 219, 
 254, 275; wv. Space. 
 
 Tracy, Destutt de, 29. 
 
 Tradition, 10, 14, 16, 24, 27, 102, 159, 
 162; 3170.5 185, 204 R205 5 1 224252, 
 255, 261, 272, 274, 285; and revela- 
 tion, 184; wv. Traditionalism, Author- 
 ity. 
 
 Traditionalism, viii, ix, 7 ff., 16 ff., 25, 
 26.) 29331,.035,055, 47 95 PLoS oes. 
 233, 256, 257-262, 265, 284-287; and 
 rationalism, 265 ff. 
 
 Transcendental Ego, 241, 277; ethics, 
 60-63, 103; faculty, 62, 66, 150, 161; 
 philosophy, 247; psychology, 178; view 
 of history, 244; world, 277; v. Nou- 
 mena(1). 
 
 Transcendentalism, 161, 162, 185. 
 
 Treitschke, von, 245. 
 
 Trévern, Mgr. Lepappe de, Bishop of 
 Strasbourg, 66, 85, 86, 90-92, 95, 96, 
 98, 144, 174, 175, 188, 190, 207, 229, 
 273; his Avertissement, 79, 90, 91, 93, 
 1735-224, 0225, 229912753 our: 
 
 Trinity, the, 30, 48, 115, 127, 129, 171, 
 220, 245, 248. 
 
 Truth, criterion of, 20, 53, 186, 191, 
 197-211, 224, 295, 296; five kinds of, 
 192, 193; love of, 158; meaning of, 
 191-193, 292; need of, 193, 194; w. 
 Certitude, Knowledge. 
 
 Tiibingen, school of, viii, 46, 54, 55, 90, 
 262, 263. 
 
 Twice-divided line, 161, 268, 281. 
 
 Tyrrell, George, 99, 199, 296, 297. 
 
 Ubaghs, 97, 284, 285; wv. Louvain. 
 
 Ultramontanism, 18, 26, 46, 55, 91. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUTAIN 
 
 Understanding, 44, 130, 146, 148-150, 
 189, 289; divine, 133; forms of the, 
 143; sphere of the, 149; v. Sensorium 
 commune, Verstand. 
 
 Univers Religieux, 33, 57. 
 
 Utility, argument from, 6, 18, 202, 227, 
 295, 296. 
 
 Utilitarianism, ix, 271, 294. 
 
 Va-et-vient, 103, 107, 116, 117, 135- 
 137, 146. 
 
 Valla, Father, 89. 
 
 Variétés philosophiques, 82, 139, 144, 
 
 172, 179, 180, 188,* 189, 220," 273, 
 303. 
 
 Vermeil, E., 36, 46, 72, 263, 302. 
 
 Vernunft, 44, 47, 161; v. Reason. 
 
 Verstand, 47, 149, 161; uv. Understand- 
 ing. 
 
 Vienna, school of, 46, 48, 49, 55. 
 
 Vincent, 292. 
 
 Visions, 178, 179. 
 
 Vital principle, 145, 152, 164, 173; w. 
 Elan vital. 
 
 Vital process, 111; wv. Life. 
 
 Vitalism, 45, 151, 246, 285; neo-, 142; 
 v. Panvitalism, Life. 
 
 Volker, Marcus, 44. 
 
 Voltaire, 3, 46, 53, 234. 
 
 Voluntarism, ix, 112, 136, 142, 159, 171, 
 199, 209, 236, 246, 284, 286, 288, 
 295, 297; wv. Will, Pragmatism. 
 
 Verstellungsvermogen, 149; wv. Under- 
 standing. 
 
 Walther, Abbé, 60. 
 
 War, 25, 245. 
 
 Weill, G., 6, 301. 
 
 Weltkreatur, 49; v. World-Spirit. 
 
 Werner, K., 36, 46, 48, 53, 301, 302. 
 
 Wilbois, 291, 312. 
 
 Will, 120, 137, 145, 147, 153, 155, 158, 
 172, 183,190, 195,197," 205eecues 
 210, 219, 236, 240, 279, 293; autono- 
 my of, 60, 65, 103; dialectics of, 290; 
 primacy of, 145, 159, 191, 290; to 
 believe, 171, 208; wv. Voluntarism, 
 Faith, Soul, Reason. 
 
 Windischmann, 49. 
 
 Wisdom, 130, 133, 134, 140, 159, 279, 
 280, 281; and knowledge, 201; hu- 
 man and divine, 280. 
 
 Wiseman, Cardinal, 50. 
 
 Word, the, 106, 108, 115, 118,..12f, 
 137, 182, 183-186, 200, 206, 211, 212, 
 223, 262, 270, 280; human and di- 
 vine, 281; wv. Light, Wisdom. 
 
 Works, test of, 184, 201-203, 210-212, 
 262; v. Truth, Pragmatism. 
 
INDEX | 327 
 
 World, the, 48, 126, 729 #ff., 136, 220; and invisible, 221; wv. Nature, Nou- 
 celestial, 130, 227; divine, 180, 220; mena(1). 
 external, 131, 226; intelligible, 138, © World-Spirit, 129, 131-133. 
 159, 180, 181; material, 157; phe- Zeitgeist, 243. 
 nomenal, 133, 134, 189, 192, 277; Zeno, 246. 
 spiritual, 157, 159; terrestrial, 130,  7Zinzendorf, 42. 
 132, 227; transcendental, 277; visible 
 

 
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