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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/historyofmodernpOOlvyb 
 
History of Modern Philosophy 
 
 in France 
 

 
History of Modern BU esGR BY 
 
 in France 
 
 BY 
 
 LUCIEN LEVY-BRUHL 
 
 MATTRE DE CONFERENCES IN THE SORBONNE, PROFESSOR IN 
 THE ECOLE LIBRE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES 
 
 REPRINT EDITION . 
 
 CHICAGO LONDON 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 1924 
 
COPYRIGHT BY 
 Tur Open Court PuBLISHING Co. 
 CHICAGO, U.S. A. 
 
 1899 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Printed in U. S. A. 
 
 NABERS & CO-CHICACO 
 
 
 
edad Dane U GID: 
 
 A book ought to speak for itself, and the brief- 
 est prefaces are the best. Accordingly, I shall 
 restrict myself to the few words indispensable to 
 the purpose of indicating the object and the char- 
 acter of this work. 
 
 Given the intention of writing a History of 
 Modern Philosophy in France, it was natural to 
 begin it with Descartes, since by general consent 
 Descartes opened a period in the history of philo- 
 sophic thought, and this not simply for France, but 
 for the world at large. 
 
 This History does not claim to be complete— 
 that is to say, it does not consider all who have 
 treated philosophical subjects in France from the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century down to our 
 days. Frequently, philosophers of lower rank and 
 only moderate originality are not mentioned in it 
 at all. The author did not wish to burden his 
 book, already large enough, with a mass of neces- 
 sarily dry and uninteresting information regarding 
 philosophers who are little known, and deservedly 
 so. And above all, he did not intend to write a 
 
 v 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 work of erudition, but a history. Now, philos- 
 ophers without marked originality—those, for 
 instance, who were simply disciples of the masters— 
 have indeed their value in the eyes of that erudi- 
 tion which wishes to know all there is to be known 
 of a certain epoch. But their value is slight in 
 the eyes of the historian. For he does not propose 
 merely to perpetuate facts and dates; such infor- 
 mation is but the raw material for his work, which 
 consists chiefly in grasping the connection of facts, 
 and in deducing the laws of the development of 
 ideas and doctrines. This is why he must concen- 
 trate his attention upon the really representative 
 men, and upon works which ‘‘have had a posterity.’’ 
 
 While we have neglected the philosophical writ- 
 ers whose influence has been slight in the evolution 
 of French thought, there are others, on the con- 
 trary, to whom we have given much space, although 
 they are not usually grouped with the philosophers 
 
 ped 
 
 ““by profession. Such are, for example, Pascal, 
 Fontenelle, Voltaire, Renan, etc. We have had 
 very strong reasons for this. Is it not too narrow 
 a conception of the history of philosophy to see in 
 it exclusively the logical evolution of successive sys- 
 tems? Doubtless this is one way of looking at it; 
 but we can understand, also, that philosophic 
 
 thought, even while having its especial and clearly 
 
PREFACE. Vil 
 
 limited object, is closely involved in the life of each 
 civilisation, and even in the national life of every 
 people. In every age it acts upon the spirit of the 
 times, which in turn reacts upon it. In its develop- 
 ment it is solidary with the simultaneous devel- 
 opment of the other series of social and intellectual 
 phenomena, of positive science, of art, of religion, 
 of literature, of political and economic life; in a 
 word, the philosophy of a people is a function of its 
 history. For instance, philosophic thought in 
 France for the past two centuries bears almost alto- 
 gether, though indirectly, upon the French Revolu- 
 tion. In the eighteenth century it is preparing 
 and announcing it; in the nineteenth it is trying 
 in part to check and in part to deduce the conse- 
 quences of it. 
 
 It is proper, therefore, to introduce into our his- 
 tory of modern philosophy in France, along with the 
 authors of systems distinctly recognised as such, 
 those who have tried under a somewhat different 
 form to synthesise the ideas of their time, and who 
 have modified their direction, sometimes profoundly. 
 Would that be a faithful history of philosophic 
 thought in France which should exclude, apart from 
 the names cited above, those of Montesquieu, 
 Diderot, Rousseau, and Joseph de Maistre? The 
 
 question is not, as it seems to me, whether they 
 
Vill PREFACE. 
 
 should have a place, but what that place shall be? 
 The reader will see that we have not been satisfied 
 to take half steps, and the question has been settled 
 in this volume in the most liberal spirit. 
 
 In closing, there remains the agreeable duty of 
 expressing my best thanks, first of all, to the Open 
 Court Publishing Company which offered a most 
 kind and generous hospitality to this foreign work, 
 then to Miss G. Coblence, the translator, and to 
 Professor W. H. Carruth, of the University of 
 Kansas, for his thorough revision of the translation. 
 
 PARIS, August, 1899. L. L.-B. 
 
TA BIRO R GO NTN TS 
 
 CHAPTER I PAGE 
 
 DESCARTES - - - - ° - . I 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 CARTESIANISM.—MALEBRANCHE - . 2 38 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 PASCAL s - - - ° 3 re 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 BAYLE.—FONTENELLE - : - - : 1077), 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 MONTESQUIEU - - - - ° - 139 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 VOLTAIRE - - - : = ° 2 169 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE ENCYCLOPDISTS - . - a - 207 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ROUSSEAU . - - - ° - 236 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CONDILLAC~ - - - - : : - 271 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 CONDORCET - - - - - - 288 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Tue IpgOLOGIsTS—THE TRADITIONALISTS - - 303 
 ix 
 
x TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MAINE DE BIRAN.—COUSIN AND ECLECTICISM - 321 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE SociaAL REFORMERS.—AUGUSTE COMTE - - 352 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 RENAN.—TAINE - = : : : : a7 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT IN FRENCH PHILOSOPHY 436 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 CONCLUSION - - - - - - 468 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY : * - . ~ - 483 
 INDEX : . . . - = - 495 
 
Chaat 
 
 DESCARTES. 
 
 WITH Descartes a new period of modern philos- 
 ophy begins. It is not, indeed, a beginning ina 
 literal sense: there is no such thing in the history 
 of ideas, nor elsewhere. Descartes, who came after 
 the great scientific and philosophical illumination of 
 the sixteenth century, had profited largely by it. 
 He owed much to the Italian Renaissance, and not 
 less to the Renaissance in France and in England. 
 He was acquainted with the discoveries of contem- 
 porary men of science, such as Galileo, Torricelli, 
 and Harvey. Even scholastic philosophy, which he 
 was to combat, left a lasting impression upon his 
 mind. 
 
 However, after we have considered all the influ- 
 ences, both of the past and of the present, which 
 were exercised upon him, the originality of Descartes 
 shines out all the more conspicuously, and we see 
 the more clearly that he initiated a new philosophic 
 method. Hegel called him a hero, and this hyper- 
 bole may in a certain sense be justified. Descartes 
 had, indeed, no vocation for martyrdom. But 
 nature had endowed him with that higher sort of 
 courage which is love of truth and devotion to sci- 
 ence; and if the name of hero is due the men whose 
 
 I 
 
2 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 exertions have laid open new paths for human 
 thought, Descartes is undoubtedly entitled to the 
 name. 
 
 The attitude of Descartes toward the philos- 
 ophers who preceded him is remarkable,—he delib- 
 erately ignores them. Although well acquainted 
 with their works, he builds his own system as if he 
 knew nothing of them. He wishes to depend solely — 
 on his own method and reason. Not that he per- 
 sonally holds in contempt either the ancient or the 
 modern philosophers. He is not so presumptuous 
 as to believe that his mind is superior to theirs. He 
 even acknowledges that many truths had been dis- 
 covered before he created his method, but these 
 truths he does not wish to accept on tradition. He 
 is determined to discover them for himself. By 
 means of his method he proposes to obtain these 
 truths, no longer mixed pell-mell with the mass of 
 doubtful or erroneous opinions, but set in their right 
 places, and accompanied with their proofs. Thus 
 only do they become valuable and useful. For a 
 truth, when isolated, sporadic, and floating and un- 
 connected with the truths that have gone before it, 
 and consequently powerless to develop those that are 
 to come after it, is of slight interest in itself. To 
 acquire such a truth is not worth the trouble we 
 must take in order to understand ancient books, and 
 the time we lose in learning the ancient languages. 
 All this time were better employed in training our 
 reason to grasp the necessary concatenation of truths 
 as deducible one from another. 
 
DESCARTES. 3 
 
 This is already a first motive, and a quite suffi- 
 cient one, for Descartes to dispense with erudition 
 and to take no account of traditional doctrine. But 
 he has another and more weighty one. He seeks 
 not what is probable, but what is true. Now the 
 first requisite in finding what is true he takes to be 
 the casting aside of the philosophy taught in his 
 time, which contented itself with probability and 
 gave no satisfactory demonstrations. Therefore, 
 though he occasionally retains the vocabulary of 
 scholasticism (for instance in the greater part of his 
 Méditations), though he even borrows some of his 
 matter from, it (for instance, in the ontological 
 argument, in the theory of continuous creation), 
 nevertheless Descartes broke distinctly and com- 
 pletely with the method and spirit of the philos- 
 ophy which had been handed down from antiquity 
 through the vicissitudes of the Middle Ages and the 
 struggles of the Renaissance. Even what he seems 
 to borrow from it, he really transforms. Cartesian- 
 ism not only has a positive meaning, which we shall 
 presently study, but it has to begin with a critical 
 function, and proposes first of all to do away witha 
 philosophical system which, appealing to substan- 
 tial forms and occult causes, claimed to explain 
 everything and could demonstrate nothing. 
 
 There is accordingly something more in his atti- 
 tude to his predecessors than a mere protest against 
 the authoritative method, —a protest which had 
 already been raised by eloquent voices in the six- 
 teenth century and even earlier. We have in it, in 
 
4 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 fact, a set determination to consider the generally 
 accepted philosophy as null and void, and to 
 replace it with another which shall owe nothing to 
 the former. A bold undertaking, not merely of a 
 reformative but of a revolutionary nature. In Eng- 
 land, Bacon, while combating the Scholastic Phi- 
 losophy in the matter of experimental method, 
 nevertheless derived from it his conception of phys- 
 ical reality. Hobbes, however much he may have 
 freed himself from traditional metaphysics, is never- 
 theless the heir of the later great English scholastics. 
 In Germany likewise, the genius of Leibniz is one 
 of conservatism as well as of innovation. He openly 
 disapproves of Descartes’s excessive severity to- 
 ward scholasticism, of which, for his part, he pre- 
 serves a great deal, in his doctrine as well as in his 
 terminology. Therefore we see his successor Wolf 
 restoring, so to speak, a new scholastic system, based 
 on the philosophy of Leibniz. It was this philos- 
 ophy that Kant imbibed; and later on, after Kant’s 
 Krittk, akind of new scholasticism appeared (in the 
 school of Hegel for instance), indisputably related 
 to that of the Middle Ages. Thus, in Germany, 
 the thread of philosophical tradition was never 
 entirely broken. 
 
 In France, owing to Descartes, the case was 
 altogether different. The Cartesian philosophy 
 aimed at nothing less than the utter destruction of 
 its rival. It prevailed; and, as early as the latter 
 part of the seventeenth century, the victory was com- 
 plete. This was both favorable and unfavorable to 
 
DESCARTES. 5 
 
 the progress of French philosophy. Of course, it 
 was no small advantage for the latter to free itself 
 from the prestige of antiquity, from the tyranny of 
 scholasticism, to regain its full independence, and 
 to draw its inspiration freely from the spirit of the 
 mathematical and physical sciences, the increasing 
 power of which was a genuinely new element in the 
 life of mankind. To this the success of Cartesian- 
 ism, and the fact that its method persisted, even 
 after the doctrine was discarded, bear sufficient 
 testimony. But on the other hand, certain dis- 
 pleasing characteristics of French philosophy in the 
 eighteenth century may, at least in some measure, 
 have originated in this breaking with tradition. 
 A taste for abstract and too simple solutions, a con- 
 viction that it is sufficient to argue soundly upon 
 evident principles in order to discover the truth, 
 even in the most complex problems of social life— 
 in short, a lack of historical spirit, with which the 
 French philosophy of that period has been re- 
 proached—all these faults are owing in some meas- 
 ure to the spirit of Cartesianism. Certain it is that 
 Descartes and his followers, in their contest with 
 tradition, failed to appreciate its value and necessary 
 function. 
 
 Nothing is so significant in this respect as the 
 way in which these writers speak of history. As it 
 is not a science, it cannot possibly be the basis of a 
 school. It may entertain us, but it cannot really 
 teach us. It is even liable to beget false ideas, and 
 to be an encouragement to extravagant undertak- 
 
6 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 ings. And, logically speaking, whatever rests on 
 historical claims only is insufficiently justified. This 
 last maxim may, in practice, have most serious con- 
 sequences. Descartes foresaw the attempt that 
 would be made to extend its application to political 
 and social problems. He therefore openly disclaims 
 beforehand this application, which he personally 
 refuses to make. Yet if he wishes us to abstain 
 from criticising existing institutions, it is in his case, 
 as in Montaigne’s, for reasons of utility alone. One 
 can easily imagine circumstances in which considera- 
 tions of utility would favor the other side. It is, 
 then, a mere question of expediency. 
 
 This tendency to claim that reason alone ought 
 to be the basis of opinion, because reason alone can 
 demonstrate it to be true, and the consequent ten- 
 dency to make free use of rational criticism, appear 
 in the history which Descartes gives us of his mind. 
 Of all that he learned at school, nothing satisfied him 
 except mathematics. Hardly had he freed himself 
 from the sway of his masters (the best, he says, 
 there were then in Europe), when he deliberately 
 set about forgetting their teaching. He speaks 
 only with irony of the various sciences, or so-called 
 sciences: medicine, law, philosophy, as they were 
 taught in his day. He coolly turns his back on 
 belles lettres, and holds history in contempt. Geom- 
 etry alone found favor in- his eyes; still he won- 
 dered greatly at its being used only as an object of 
 amusement for the curious, and that ‘‘on so firm a 
 basis nothing more lofty had been established.’’ 
 
DESCARTES. vf 
 
 The ground was now cleared; Descartes could begin 
 to build. 
 
 According to some, Descartes is first of all a 
 man of science, and secondly a philosopher. Ac- 
 cording to others, the philosopher in him predomi- 
 nates over the man of science. In point of fact, 
 philosophy and science were not separated in Des- 
 cartes’s view. He seeks to establish the system of 
 truths accessible to man—a system which he con- 
 ceived as unique, and which may be figured as an 
 endless chain. And he seeks it in order to find the 
 means of living as uprightly and happily as possible. 
 Thus the end which Descartes has in view is a right- 
 eous and happy life: wherein he agrees with the 
 philosophers of his time, and, we may also say, of 
 all times. 
 
 In order to attain to this righteous and happy 
 life, leaving out of account the teachings of religion, 
 Descartes sees no sure way but the possession of 
 truth or science. Now science, in its turn, rests on 
 metaphysics, or primary philosophy, whence it 
 derives its principles. Therefore Descartes proposes 
 to bea metaphysician; but this he will be for the sake 
 of science itself. Metaphysics is to him a road, but 
 indeed a road of paramount importance, since all the 
 rest depends upon the principles discovered therein. 
 Besides, mathematics, physics, and other theoretical 
 sciences are also roads, the terminal point lying in 
 the applied sciences, to which they lead. ‘‘The 
 whole of philosophy,’’ says Descartes, in the Pref- 
 
8 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ace to the Principes de la Philosophie, ‘is like a tree, 
 the roots of which are metaphysics; the trunk is the 
 science of physics; and the branches shooting from 
 that trunk are all the other sciences, which may be 
 reduced to three main ones, viz., medicine, me- 
 chanics, and ethics, by which last I mean the highest 
 and most perfect ethics, which, since it presupposes 
 a complete knowledge of the other sciences, is the 
 supreme degree of wisdom.” 
 
 Thus if Descartes is careful to make a distinction 
 between the sphere of action and that of knowledge, 
 and if, before undertaking the long and difficult 
 task of seeking after truth, he provides himself with 
 a ‘‘provisional’’ ethics, which he unquestioningly 
 accepts from authority and custom, he nevertheless 
 proclaims the principles of action to be dependent 
 upon knowledge. It is the business of reason not 
 only to enlighten, but also to guide us. Descartes, 
 believing in the future progress of mankind, consid- 
 ers it to be dependent on the development of the 
 sciences. We even observe, in several passages, that 
 the progress of ethics appears to him subordinate 
 to that of mechanics and of medicine. But these 
 in their turn depend for their advancement upon the 
 establishment of a sound and rigorously demon- 
 strated physical science. Thus, although science is 
 not its own end, the fundamental problem of philoso- 
 phy according to Descartes is finally reduced to the 
 problem of the establishment of science. 
 
 Now there is no breach of continuity between 
 metaphysics and physics; on the contrary, there is 
 
DESCARTES. 9 
 
 a natural and necessary transition from the one to the 
 other. Descartes attempted to build up a system by 
 means of which one could proceed uninterruptedly 
 from the first principles of cognition and of being, 
 in a word, from God, down to the most specific scien- 
 tific propositions of physiology or of ethics, without 
 one link missing in the chain. A bold conception, 
 which dominates the whole system and is inseparable 
 from the famous method of Descartes. 
 
 Up to this point mathematics alone appeared 
 to Descartes worthy of being called a science. It 
 differs from everything else he had learned in the 
 perfect lucidity of its principles, in the rigorous dem- 
 onstration of its propositions, and in the inevitable 
 sequence of its truths. But to what does it owe 
 these characteristics, if not to the method from 
 which mathematicians make it a rule never to depart? 
 Therefore, in order to establish the science or philos- 
 ophy sought by Descartes, it was sufficient to find 
 a method that should be to philosophy what the 
 method of mathematical deduction is to arithmetic, 
 algebra and geometry. 
 
 To apply to that universal science conceived by 
 Descartes the method so effectively employed in 
 the above-mentioned sciences would evidently be 
 the simplest solution of the problem proposed. 
 But this solution is impracticable. The mathemat- 
 ical method, as we see it practiced in “‘the analysis 
 of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns’’ is 
 a special method, limited to the study of figures in 
 geometry, and confined in algebra to symbols and 
 
IO MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 rules which hamper the mind. _ How could one pass 
 from these processes, which are especially adapted to 
 particular sciences, to the general method required 
 by general science or philosophy? Descartes would 
 undoubtedly never have conceived such an audacious 
 hope, had not a great discovery of his set him on 
 this track. He had invented analytical geometry, 
 or the method of expressing by means of equa- 
 tions the properties of geometrical figures, or, 
 inversely, of representing determinate equations by 
 means of geometrical figures. In this way, Des- 
 cartes substituted for the old methods, which were 
 especially adapted to algebra and geometry as dis- 
 tinct branches, a general method, applicable to what 
 he called the ‘‘universal mathematical science,’’ 
 viz., to the study of ‘‘the various ratios or propor- 
 tions to be found between the objects of the mathe- 
 matical sciences, hitherto regarded as distinct.’’ 
 Not only did this discovery mark a decisive epoch 
 in the history of mathematics, which it provided 
 with an instrument of incomparable simplicity and 
 power, but it furthermore gave Descartes a right to 
 hope for the philosophical method he was seeking. 
 Ought not a last generalization to be possible, by 
 means of which the method he had so happily dis- 
 covered should become applicable, not only to the 
 ‘‘universal mathematical science,’’ but also to the 
 systematic combination of all the truths which our 
 finite minds may permit us to attain? 
 
 Thus was formed in Descartes’s mind the method 
 which he summed up in the Dzscours de la Méthode, 
 
DESCARTES. II 
 
 and which was destined in his plan to replace the 
 useless and sterile ancient logic. It is inexpedient 
 here to explain these rules minutely. We must, 
 however, observe that the first one, ‘‘Never to 
 accept a thing as true which I do not clearly know 
 to be such,’’ is not, properly speaking, a precept of 
 method. Such precepts are set forth in a subse- 
 quent set of rules, where Descartes successively pre- 
 scribes analysis for dividing difficulties into parts, 
 and synthesis for constructing and expounding sci- 
 ence. But the first rule is quite different. It does 
 not Jay down a process to be used in order to dis- 
 cover truth. It concerns method only in so far as 
 method is not separated from science itself (and such 
 indeed was Descartes’s meaning). If such is the 
 case, the first step of method—or of science—must 
 be to determine accurately by what mark we can 
 recognize what is to be regarded as true, and what 
 is to be set aside as being only probable or dubious. 
 This mark is what we call evidence. This first rule 
 may have been suggested to Descartes, as the others 
 were, by mathematics. Even as in his method he 
 generalized the processes used for mathematical re- 
 searches and demonstrations, so in this formula he 
 laid down the regulating principle to which this sci- 
 ence owes its perfection, and which was also to be- 
 come the regulating principle of the new philosophy. 
 
 Thus the famous rule of ‘‘evidence’’ reaches far 
 beyond the scope of a mere principle of method. 
 Both from what it excludes and what it implies, 
 it may be looked upon as the motto of the Carte- 
 
LZ MODERN. PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 sian philosophy. It rejects, to begin with, any 
 knowledge grounded upon authority alone (except- 
 ing the truths of religion). Even though Aristotle 
 and all his commentators were agreed on one opin- 
 ion, this would be no proof of its being true; and 
 should it really chance to be so, the authority of 
 Aristotle would count for nothing towards estab- 
 lishing its standing in science. Nothing can be 
 admitted in ‘science. but what 1sevident.- hi “a, 
 nothing but what is so clear and plain as to leave 
 no possible doubt, or is soundly deduced from prin- 
 ciples which rest on such evidence. The whole sys- 
 tem of scholasticism: metaphysics, logic, physics, 
 thus stands irretrievably condemned zz toto. The 
 so-called moral sciences, which cannot attain to a.de- 
 gree of evidence comparable to that of mathematics, 
 and which have to content themselves with more or 
 less strong probability, are likewise rejected by the 
 Cartesian formula; in fact, Descartes, as has already 
 been observed, had but little esteem for history and 
 erudition. 
 
 But what makes this rule of paramount impor- 
 tance is, that it establishes reason as supreme judge 
 of what is false or true. Reason thus proclaims its 
 own sovereign right to decide without appeal. 
 What we are to think, to believe, and to do should 
 be determined solely by evidence; and of that evi- 
 dence reason alone is judge (except in the case of 
 urgency compelling us to immediate action). It is 
 true, reason being identical in all men, that such 
 truth as becomes evident to one of them becomes 
 
DESCARTES. 13 
 
 so to all other men likewise. Therefore the assent 
 given to evidence by one mind is by implication 
 equivalent to the universal consent of mankind; so 
 that the individual reason which distinguishes be- 
 tween true and false is precisely the universal feature 
 in every man. 
 
 Nevertheless, Descartes felt the danger that lay 
 in his formula. He foresaw the very serious mis- 
 understandings to which it might give rise, and he 
 endeavored to prevent these by taking multifarious 
 precautions. First of all, the truths of religion are 
 carefully set apart and withdrawn from the criticism 
 of reason. They donot fall under its jurisdiction. 
 It is not ours to examine them, but to believe them. 
 According to Descartes, we must seek neither to 
 adapt them to our reason, nor to adapt our reason 
 to them. They belong to another domain. Then 
 Descartes makes a distinction between the sphere 
 of knowledge and that of conduct; he submits to 
 provisional ethics, which is to be replaced by defini- 
 tive ethics only when science is completed, that is 
 to say, in a still remote future. Moreover, even 
 in the province of speculative thought Descartes 
 refrains from touching upon political and social 
 questions. He censures ‘‘those blundering and 
 restless humours’’ ever ready to propose unasked- 
 for reforms. Thus, after moral and religious prob- 
 lems, political problems in their turn are cautiously 
 set aside. Where, then, shall the absolute sover- 
 eignty of reason be exercised? In philosophy, in 
 abstract sciences, in physics; in short, wherever 
 
14 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 men generally have no other interest but that of 
 pure truth. 
 
 Well-meant precautions these were, no doubt, 
 but vain precautions, too. Let reason rule supreme 
 over this apparently limited province, and by de- 
 grees it will invade the others. If we allow it, as 
 a principle, the right to decide without appeal 
 between falsehood and truth, it soon will admit of 
 no restrictions but those it sets of its own accord 
 through the works of a Kant or of an Auguste 
 Comte. In fact, French philosophy in the eight- 
 eenth century was in the main an endeavor to 
 apply the spirit of the Cartesian method to the very 
 objects: politics, ethics, religion, which Descartes 
 had carefully set apart. By holding nothing as 
 true until I have evidence of its being so, do I not 
 in advance deprive all historical rights of the means 
 of securing recognition; do I not thereby summon 
 all privileges, institutions, beliefs, and fortunes to 
 produce their title deeds before the bar of reason? 
 By solemnly paying homage to Descartes, the ‘‘ As- 
 semblée Constituante’’ proved that the spirit of the 
 Revolution was conscious of one of its chief sources. 
 
 Being now in possession of his method, did not 
 Descartes have all that was necessary to construct 
 his philosophic system with absolute mathematical 
 certainty? No, for in mathematics the foundation 
 principles: axioms and definitions, are so plain and 
 evident that no reasonable mind will question them. 
 But philosophy had until his time been wanting in 
 
DESCARTES. 15 
 
 such principles, and the object which Descartes has 
 in view is precisely to establish them. 
 
 To attain this end, he first casts aside as false 
 (at least provisionally) all the opinions which he has 
 hitherto held as true, and which are only probable. 
 In order to avoid tedious enumerations, he proposes 
 to consider opinions from the point of view of their 
 sources. ‘‘For instance,’’ says he, ‘‘having some- 
 times found my senses deceitful, I will distrust all 
 that they teach me. As I have sometimes erred 
 with regard to very simple reasoning, I will distrust 
 the results of even the most positive sciences. Lastly, 
 I may suppose that an evil genius, who is all-pow- 
 erful, takes delight in making me err, even when I 
 believe I see the truth most plainly. Therefore, by 
 a voluntary effort, which is always possible since I 
 am free, I will suspend my judgment even in cases 
 where the evidence seems to me irresistible. 
 
 ‘‘Is there any proposition which is not affected 
 by this ‘‘hyperbolical’’ doubt? There is one, and 
 one only. Let my senses deceive me, let my rea- 
 sonings be false, let an evil genius delude me con- 
 cerning things which appear to me most certain; if 
 Ivam) mistaken, it issbecause’)l),am,—-and' this truth 
 “IT think, therefore I am,’’ cogito, ergo sum, is so 
 self-evident and so certain that the most extrava- 
 gant doubt of skeptics is unable to shake it.’’ Here 
 then is the first principle of philosophy sought for 
 by Descartes. And even as Archimedes asked only 
 a standing-place to lift the world, so Descartes, 
 having found a guid inconcussum, an indisputable | 
 
16 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 proposition, set to work to erect his whole system 
 upon this foundation. 
 
 However, if according to the custom bf philos- 
 ophers we distinguish the sphere of knowledge from 
 that of existence, this proposition, or, as it is called, 
 Descartes’s cogito, is certainly first in the sphere of 
 knowledge; for I may have doubts about whatever I 
 may think, but about my thinking I can have no 
 doubt, even in the very moment when I doubt. But 
 in the sphere of existence the Absolute, that is, God, 
 comes first. Therefore Descartes, as soon as he had 
 established the cogzto, turned to demonstrating the 
 existence of God. He knows that he thinks, but he 
 also knows that he doubts, and therefore that he is 
 imperfect; for not knowing instead of knowing is an 
 imperfection. He therefore has an idea of perfection. 
 Whence comes this idea? Descartes examines all 
 the conjectures which may be made as to its origin; 
 he eliminates them one after another as inadequate 
 until one only remains, viz., that the idea of perfec- 
 tion cannot have sprung from experience, that we 
 could not have it if the all-perfect Being, that is, 
 God, did not actually exist, and that therefore this 
 idea is as ‘‘the stamp left by the workman upon his 
 work.”’ 
 
 Descartes was bound to demonstrate the exist- 
 ence of God at the very outset. Otherwise, the sup- 
 position of an evil genius, who was able to deceive 
 him even when he conceived things with perfect 
 clearness, would have cast suspicion upon all proposi- 
 tions but the cogzto; the doubt which he himself 
 
DESCARTES. 197, 
 
 had raised would have paralyzed him. In order to 
 do away with such a supposition, Descartes at once 
 proceeds to demonstrate the existence of an all- 
 perfect God, who cannot possibly wish to deceive 
 us. But is not this a syllogistic circle? If the 
 plainest argument, in order to be accepted as valid, 
 needs the guaranty of God, what will guarantee the 
 argument intended to prove the existence of God? 
 
 A syllogistic circle indeed, had not Descartes 
 escaped from it with the help of the following 
 reasons: God’s guaranty is necessary, not for the 
 sake of the evidence, which is quite sufficient in 
 itself so long as it lasts (whereof the cogito is a 
 proof); but in order to assure me of the truth 
 of propositions which I remember having admitted 
 as evident without remembering for what reasons. 
 It is necessary, in short, wherever memory inter- 
 venes, but only in that case. Now if we have no 
 need of memory to know that we think, neither 
 do we need it to know that God exists. In spite 
 of the syllogistic form which Descartes gave to 
 the proof of the existence of God, this proof is 
 rather intuitive than grounded on formal reasoning. 
 In ‘the act of conceiving the idea of the All-perfect 
 Being, I see at the same time the impossibility of His 
 not existing. The existence of all other things is 
 looked upon as only possible; but the existence of 
 God appears as evidently necessary, being com- 
 prised in the very notion of God. This is no argu- 
 ment, but rather an immediate apprehension. It 
 is, as Malebranche said shortly afterwards, a proof 
 
18 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ‘‘from mere vision.’’ The syllogistic circle there- 
 fore was only apparent. Descartes was right in 
 establishing the existence of God immediately after 
 the cogito. Henceforward he could in all confi- 
 dence make use of the faculties given him by God, 
 who never deceives. He only needed now to fol- 
 low out his method carefully, and to link propo- 
 sitions together in the requisite order, in order to 
 arrive infallibly at the truth. 
 
 Now, the requisite order is, to begin with things 
 which are most general, simple, and easy to grasp; 
 that is, with the primary principles from which the 
 other truths are to be deduced. Physics therefore 
 is not to be studied until metaphysics is well 
 grounded. Acting upon this precept, Descartes first 
 established the existence of an absolute and perfect 
 Being, that is, God; for the same reason he now 
 proceeds to ascertain the essence of the soul and 
 of the body. To reach this end, his starting point 
 is again the cogzfo. 
 
 I think, lam; but what am I? A creature that 
 thinks; that is to say, judges, remembers, feels, 
 imagines, and wills; a being whose existence is not 
 linked to any place, nor dependent upon any material 
 thing. Descartes has just got out of his universal 
 doubt by means of the cogzto. The only thing 
 the existence of which he can maintain at this 
 point is his own thought. Now, the existence of 
 his thought does not appear to him to be neces- 
 sarily linked to that of his body and dependent 
 upon the latter. On the contrary, he may sup- 
 
DESCARTES. 19 
 
 pose that his body does not exist, and that the 
 perception of the external world and of his own 
 members is an illusion. He is even unable for the 
 present to reject this supposition; he cannot do so 
 till later on, and even then with some difficulty. 
 Nevertheless, since he thinks, he is certain he 
 exists.;| But, conversely, let. him) fora .moment 
 suppose that he ceases to think; upon this suppo- 
 sition he ceases to exist, although all external 
 bodies and his own body should remain real. 
 Therefore, the cognition of his own being, which 
 is his thought, by no means depends on ma- 
 terial things, the existence of which is still problem- 
 atic. Therefore his whole nature is to think. 
 ‘“You suppose,’’ some opponent said to Descartes, 
 “‘that your own body does not exist, and you say 
 that nevertheless you continue to think. But 
 should your supposition prove true, that is to 
 say, should your body and your brain be dis- 
 solved, can you affirm that even then you would 
 continue to think?’’ To which Descartes answered: 
 ““I do not assert this,—at least not now. My 
 present object is not to demonstrate the immortal- 
 ity of the soul. This is a metaphysical question I 
 am not now able to solve,—for I know only one 
 fact as yet, viz., that I think (and also that God 
 exists). The whole question I am examining is 
 merely : ‘What am I?’ Now it appears from 
 what has been said, that my existence is known to 
 me as that of a being endowed with thought and 
 endowed only with thought; for, whilst I am as 
 
20 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 certain as possible of the existence of my thought, 
 the existence of anything else is still wholly doubt- 
 fulto me. The existence of this thought may pos- 
 sibly be actually connected with that of the brain. 
 I know nothing about that. I am not discussing 
 that for the present. One thing is certain: I know 
 myself as a thought, and I positively do not know 
 myself as a brain.’’ 
 
 This is one of the leading features of the philos- 
 ophy of Descartes, and one which may enable us to 
 measure his influence, by comparing what had been 
 thought before him with what was thought after 
 him. The cogzto of Descartes displaced, so to speak, 
 the axis of philosophy. To the ancients and to 
 the scholastics (theology excepted), the thinking 
 mind appeared inseparable from the universe, re- 
 garded as the object of its thought, just as the soul 
 itself was conceived to be the ‘‘substantial form’’ 
 of the living body. According to Descartes, on the 
 contrary, the existence of the thinking mind, far 
 from being dependent on any other existing thing, 
 is the essential condition of every other existence 
 conceivable to us: for if I am certain of the ex- 
 istence of anything but myself, with far better 
 reason am I certain that I, who have that thought, 
 am in existence. The only reality I cannot pos- 
 sibly question is that of my own thought. 
 
 Both the adversaries and the successors of Des- 
 cartes started from this point. All the modern 
 forms of idealism, so utterly different from the 
 idealism of the ancients, have a common origin in 
 
DESCARTES. 21 
 
 the cogito. The tempered and prudent idealism 
 of Locke, the Christian idealism of Malebranche, 
 the skeptical idealism of Hume, the transcendental 
 idealism of Kant, the absolute idealism of Fichte, 
 and many other doctrines derived from these, which 
 have appeared in our century, are all more or less 
 closely related to the foundation principle of the 
 Cartesian philosophy. Moreover, the conception of 
 nature in modern science must also be connected 
 with it. For, as we shall see farther on, when Des- 
 cartes set thought, that is, the soul, so distinctly 
 apart from everything extraneous to itself, in so 
 doing he made necessary a new conception of force 
 and life in the material world. 
 
 Now, let us add to the Cartesian formula, ‘‘I am 
 a thing which thinks,’’ the following principle, ‘‘ All 
 that I conceive clearly and distinctly is true.’’ Then, 
 since I conceive clearly and distinctly that the nature 
 of the body and that of the soul have no attributes in 
 common, therefore it is true that these two natures 
 or substances are separated one from the other. 
 Not only is there no need of my having any notion 
 of the body in order to comprehend the soul, but 
 also the soul has no need of the body in order to 
 SxS 
 
 Descartes, therefore, had a right to infer that 
 ““the soul is more easily known than the body.’’ 
 This does not mean that, according to his doctrine, 
 psychology is an easier science than physics or 
 physiology. Psychology as we conceive it has no 
 place in the system of Descartes; there is at most 
 
22 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 a mere sketch of it in the Passions del’ Ame. But 
 this maxim is metaphysical, not psychological. It 
 means that there is no more evident knowledge than 
 that which the soul has of itself, since there is none 
 which it is more impossible to doubt; that the 
 body, on the contrary, is known only representa- 
 tively, and that, far from our being unable to doubt 
 its existence, we cannot overcome such a doubt, 
 when once raised, save by means of laborious and 
 complicated reasonings. 
 
 In order to make all this clearer still, let us re- 
 member Descartes’s oft-repeated caution to “‘cast 
 off all the impressions of the senses and imagina- 
 tion, andtrust ‘to reason alonesjeplherewarcenet 
 two kinds of evidence: one which tells us that the 
 sun shines, that honey is sweet, that lead is heavy; 
 and another which informs us that if equals be 
 added to equals, the sums are equal. Only the 
 latter proposition is self-evident; the former 
 statements, in spite of any prepossession to the con- 
 trary, are not so. The impressions of the senses 
 are vivid, but confused; we cannot account for 
 them, and nothing can warrant them to be true. 
 The water which is warm to me seems cold to you. 
 Cold and heat, as well as all other qualities per- 
 taining to bodies, with the exception of extension, 
 are not inherent in them; they are relative to the 
 sentient subject. Therefore, if we think we know 
 bodies by what our senses teach us of them, we fall 
 into error, as will happen every time when, through 
 overhastiness or prejudice, we form a judgment 
 
DESCARTES. 23 
 
 before the evidence is complete. For can I not 
 have in a dream all the perceptions I now have, and 
 be as firmly persuaded of their reality? But whether 
 I am dreaming or waking, it is true that two and 
 two are four, and it is trué that I, who think ‘so, 
 am in existence. 
 
 Thus, previous to philosophical reflection, noth- 
 ing seems to us so well known as the body and its 
 qualities, because we form images of them continu- 
 ally and without any difficulty; whereas it is not 
 easy for us to realize what the soul is, seeing that it 
 is not an object for the imagination to grasp. The 
 first task of the philosopher consists precisely in 
 disengaging himself from the false light of the senses 
 and seeking the true light of reason. It is an effort 
 akin to the one demanded by Plato, when he termed 
 philosophy the science of the invisible, and recom- 
 mended the study of mathematics as a preparatory 
 training. The body and the organs of the senses, 
 far from making us acquainted with what really is, 
 are a hindrance to the proper activity of the mind. 
 Even matter, which we fancy our hands, eyes, ears, 
 etc., can apprehend immediately, we really know 
 only by means of our understanding. For the lat- 
 ter alone can give us a distinct notion of it, viz., 
 the notion of a thing measurable in length, breadth, 
 and depth. 
 
 The other qualities of bodies are not really in- 
 herent inthem. ‘‘Look at this piece of wax; it has 
 just been taken from the hive; it has not yet lost 
 the sweetness of the honey it contained; it still re- 
 
24. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tains something of the fragrance of the flowers from 
 which it was gathered; its color, figure, and size are 
 apparent; it is hard, cold, easily handled, and if you 
 strike it, will give forth some sound. * * * But 
 now, while I am speaking, somebody brings it near 
 the fire; whatever taste remained in it is exhaled, 
 the odor evaporates, its color changes, its shape is 
 lost, its size increases, it becomes liquid, it is 
 warmer, one can hardly handle it, and when we 
 strike it, it will no longer give forth asound.’’ And 
 yet the same wax is, there.-4eiherefore thismvaz 
 was neither the honey-sweet flavor, nor the pleas- 
 ant flowery smell, nor the whiteness, nor the form, 
 nor the sound, but merely a body which, a short 
 time before, was apparent to my senses under these 
 forms, but now presents itself under other forms. 
 Therefore all I can concezve clearly and distinctly 
 about this body is its extension. 
 
 Descartes’s definition of the soul is “‘a thing 
 that thinks’’; of the body, ‘‘a thing that has ex- 
 tension.’’ This doctrine is strangely at variance 
 with the metaphysics taught in his time. The 
 scholastic philosophers, who on this point followed 
 the teaching of Aristotle, regarded the soul as both 
 the principle of life and the principle of thought. 
 The same soul which in plants is purely nutritive, 
 becomes locomotive, then sensitive in animals, and 
 lastly, in man, rational. And though such a doc- 
 trine made the immortality of the soul a difficult 
 thing to conceive, it was no cause of embarrassment 
 
DESCARTES. 25 
 
 to the schoolmen, for immortality to them was an 
 object of faith, not of demonstration. There is 
 neither a nutritive nor a locomotive soul, says 
 Descartes. There is but one kind of soul, which is 
 the thinking soul, for feeling is thinking. Nu- 
 trition and locomotion are explainable simply by 
 the laws of mechanics. Animals, which do not 
 think, do not feel either. They may be looked 
 upon as automatons, and the perfection of some of 
 their actions may be compared to the perfection 
 of the workings of a clock. After this, we can 
 no longer suppose that the destiny of man after 
 death is the same as that of flies and ants. 
 
 Scholastic physics likewise assumed the existence 
 of forces and occult causes inherent in matter, and 
 thought the specific nature of certain natural phe- 
 nomena could not otherwise be accounted for. Here 
 again Descartes adopts the reverse of their doctrine, 
 rejecting zz toto these assumed principles, forces, 
 and causes, which to him are but confused notions, 
 hypotheses convenient to sluggish minds, explana- 
 tions which explain nothing, but merely repeat the 
 enunciation of the problem under another form. 
 Given matter, that is, extension as considered by 
 geometricians, he wants no other data than number, 
 motion, and duration. These are sufficient, he con- 
 siders, to account for all the phenomena which 
 take place in bodies either inorganic or living. 
 
 Thus Descartes’s physical science is purely ra- 
 tional in character and in scrupulous accordance 
 with the rule of his method which forbids him to 
 
26 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ‘faccept anything as true unless it appears by evi- 
 dence to be so.’’ It tends to assume a geometrical 
 form, and all questions of physics are reduced, at 
 least in principle, to problems of mechanics. ‘‘Give 
 me matter and the laws of motion,’’ says Descartes, 
 ‘and I will build a universe exactly like the one 
 that we behold, with skies, stars, sun, and earth, 
 and on the earth minerals, plants, and animals; in 
 short, everything that experience introduces to us, 
 except the rational soul of man.”’ 
 
 No doubt Descartes imagined all natural phe- 
 nomena, and in particular those of animated beings, 
 to be less complicated than they really are. His 
 conceptions are those of a great mathematician, 
 living at a time when physics and chemistry 
 hardly existed, and when biology did not exist at 
 all. He thinks he can determine a przorz the num- 
 ber of the fixed stars. He imagines he can describe 
 accurately the formation of the foetus. He hopes, 
 by taking due care of the human machine and by 
 repairing it when necessary, to protract the life of 
 man indefinitely, to conquer disease and even death. 
 Scientific men in our days are better acquainted 
 with the difficulties of such problems, and are con- 
 sequently less pretentious. But the scientific ideal 
 they aim at, though indefinitely removed from that 
 which we are considering, has remained pretty much 
 the same as Descartes conceived it: to discover the 
 laws of every phenomenon by reducing them, as far 
 as possible, to number and measure, and to discard 
 
DESCARTES. 2; 
 
 every metaphysical hypothesis meant to explain any 
 class of physical phenomena. 
 
 This geometrical conception of the material uni- 
 verse was repeatedly attacked by the successors 
 of Descartes. Leibniz endeavoured to prove that the 
 Cartesian definition of matter was incompatible 
 with the laws of motion. Leibniz is fond of con- 
 necting Democritus and Descartes, and is wont to 
 quote them together. The parallel is an ingenious 
 one, but should not be followed up too closely. 
 No doubt Descartes, like Democritus, requires only 
 matter and motion in order to explain the genesis 
 of the physical universe. But, to say nothing of 
 the very considerable differences between the ex- 
 planation of Democritus and that of Descartes, 
 can any one forget that the physical science of 
 Democritus and his metaphysics are all one and 
 the same thing? Atoms and vacuum are to him the 
 primal elements of all things, and, as was objected 
 to him by Aristotle, he does not take the trouble 
 even to explain the origin of motion. With Des- 
 cartes, before physics is begun a complete meta- 
 physical system has first been established, and it 
 is from this that physics is to derive its principles: 
 the primordial laws of phenomena (for instance, that 
 light propagates itself in straight lines) are deduced 
 from God’s attributes. Moreover, Descartes is not 
 compelled by his system, as Democritus is, to deny 
 the existence of final causes. On the contrary, he 
 maintains their existence. It is true that he for- 
 
28 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 bids us to seek them out, but the reason is that, 
 according to him, it would be highly presumptuous 
 in us mortals to try to comprehend God's designs; 
 the more so as God’s liberty is absolute and infinite, 
 and since, in consequence, His acts may be wholly 
 unintelligible to our reason. And lastly, far from 
 looking upon matter as self-existent, Descartes be- 
 lieves that bodies, as well as all other finite things, 
 exist only by God’s express will and constant 
 help. Should this help cease for an instant, all 
 bodies would at once sink back into nothingness. 
 
 The mechanical character of Descartes’s system, 
 if mechanical it be, is therefore far removed from 
 the materialism of Democritus. Descartes firmly 
 maintained the reality of free-will, to which he 
 ascribes an essential part in his theory of judg- 
 ment and of error. It is only as physicist, not 
 as philosopher, that Descartes may be termed 
 mechanical. But in this sense, nearly all men of 
 science are so, too; for, to use F. A. Lange’s strik- 
 ing expression: ‘‘Mechanism is an _ excellent 
 formula for the science of nature.”’ 
 
 But is not, however, the strictly deductive sci- 
 ence conceived by Descartes very remote from 
 the modern science of nature, which employs the 
 experimental method with so much zeal and suc- 
 cess? True, Descartes often thought deduction 
 easy when it was difficult, and possible when it 
 was impracticable. But this was a question of fact, 
 not of principle. As this or that branch of science 
 (at least, of physical science) is gradually brought 
 
DESCARTES. 29 
 
 nearer to perfection, we see it grow from the experi- 
 mental into the rational. Such has long been the 
 case with astronomy and celestial mechanics, and 
 later, successively, with optics, with acoustics, with 
 hydrodynamics, with the theory of heat and elec- 
 tricity and other fields of physics, all so many con- 
 firmations of the Cartesian ideal. 
 
 Moreover, Descartes himself assigned an im- 
 portant rdle to the experimental method. Anec- 
 dotes depict him to us as rising very early, in 
 Amsterdam, in order to choose in a butcher’s shop 
 the joints he wished ‘‘to anatomize at leisure’; or 
 answering an inquirer who wished to see his library, 
 ‘‘Here it is,’’ at the same time pointing to a quar- 
 ter of veal which he was busy dissecting. In the 
 last years of his life he devoted only a few hours 
 a year to mathematics, and not much more to 
 metaphysics. He busied himself almost exclu- 
 
 ’ 
 
 sively with experiments in physics and physiology. 
 How could he have failed to appreciate the import- 
 ance of a method which he was himself so assiduously 
 putting into practice? 
 
 ‘“ Anticipating causes with effects,’ 
 cartes’s felicitous definition of experimenting. It 
 clearly shows the functions he ascribed to it. Were 
 there only one way in which a certain effect might 
 
 ’ 
 
 is Des- 
 
 be deduced from given causes, experimenting would 
 be unnecessary. But natural phenomena are so 
 complex, and the possible combinations of causes 
 are so numerous, that we may nearly always explain 
 in several ways the production of a given effect. 
 
30 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Which is the right way? Experiment alone can 
 decide. Let us make a distinction between science 
 already developed and science which is developing. 
 To expound a developed science the suitable method 
 is deduction,—descent from causes to effects. But 
 science which is developing cannot yet adopt this 
 method; and to discover unknown laws, it must em- 
 ploy the experimental method, must anticipate 
 causes with effects. 
 
 Descartes had written a Trazté du Monde and 
 was about to publish it, when the condemnation 
 of Galileo for heresies concerning the motion of the 
 earth altered his resolution. Being above all desir- 
 ous to work in peace, and to postpone as long as 
 he could a perhaps inevitable conflict with the 
 theologians, he published only a few fragments of 
 his physical theories, and put a summary sketch 
 of it into the admirable fifth part of the Dzscours 
 de la Méthode. We must certainly deplore the 
 loss of this great work, which would throw light 
 upon many an obscure point in the Cartesian 
 philosophy. But after all, the essential part of 
 the doctrine did not lie here, any more than in 
 the well-known hypothesis of ‘‘vortices,’’ which 
 the Cartesian philosophers of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury vainly tried to set up in opposition to the 
 principle of universal gravitation discovered by 
 Newton, and with which some physicists now partly 
 agree in their theories of matter. 
 
 The main interest lies elsewhere, viz., in the per- 
 
DESCARTES. 31 
 
 fect character of the science of nature, of which 
 Descartes had such a clear and precise notion, even 
 though he was far from being able to put it into prac- 
 tice save in a few points (for instance, by his discov- 
 eries in optics). It is said that the man who in- 
 vented the plough still walks, invisible, beside the 
 peasant who drives his own plough in our days. I 
 might almost say that, in our laboratories, Descartes 
 stands invisible and present, investigating with our 
 scientific men the laws of phenomena. 
 
 If he had lived, would he have passed on from 
 the sciences of life to the ethical and social sciences, 
 as he had done already from mathematics to phy- 
 sics, and from physics to anatomy and physiology? 
 This may be doubted. To say nothing of considera- 
 tions of prudence, to which Descartes was most sus- 
 ceptible, he held in slight esteem the visionaries and 
 political’ reformers: ofmthes sixteenth century, and 
 would have been sorely vexed if any comparison had 
 been drawn between their fancies and his own doc- 
 trines. On the other hand, he could not but find it 
 extremely difficult to make social facts fall in with his 
 method, since, as Auguste Comte very aptly ob- 
 served, so long as biology is not sufficiently ad- 
 vanced, social science must needs be out of the ques- 
 tion. Now, in the time of Descartes, biology was 
 still unborn. Even ethics he does not seem to 
 have taken into deep consideration. He borrows the 
 rules of his provisional ethics from Montaigne and 
 from the Stoics. Stoicism, modified in some re- 
 spects, also forms the fundamental part of Des- 
 
32 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 cartes’s moral letters to Princess Elizabeth. Itisa 
 peculiarity of French philosophy, that it has pro- 
 duced many moralists and few moral theorists. 
 The reason for this we shall seek elsewhere. Cer- 
 tain it is that Descartes was not one of these theor- 
 ists. Perhaps he believed that scientific ethics 
 (ethics not grounded on religious authority) could 
 not be established till the science of man was estab- 
 lished, and the connection of the physical and the 
 moral better known. To this knowledge he opened 
 the way in his Zrazté des Passions de 1’ Ame. 
 
 All the precautions taken by Descartes, all his 
 prudence, did not shield him from the attacks his 
 philosophy was to bring upon him, as being ‘‘sub- 
 tle, enticing, and bold.’’ After hesitating a long 
 while, the Jesuits, by whom he had been brought 
 up at La Fléche, and among whom he had still 
 some friends, declared themselves against his phi- 
 losophy. The seventh series of Odjections, by 
 Father Bourdin, express the opinion of this society. 
 Descartes wrote a vigorous reply. His quarrel with 
 the Jesuits was one of his motives for not living in 
 France. He established himself in Holland, where 
 he lived a long while in undisturbed peace. But 
 as his philosophy spread, attention was drawn to 
 him, and as the universities of the country were 
 beginning to quarrel about his theories, he felt that 
 his life there would soon become unbearable. He 
 therefore resolved to yield to the entreaties of Queen 
 Christina, who earnestly urged him to come to 
 Sweden. But he could not endure the severe clim- 
 
DESCARTES. BB 
 
 ate of that country, and hardly six months had 
 elapsed when he died of inflammation of the lungs. 
 Later, his body was brought back to France. 
 
 The philosophy of Descartes was in accord with 
 the leading tendencies of his time. The success 
 which attended it from the moment it appeared is 
 a proof of its opportuneness, and it is difficult to 
 determine whether it formed rather than expressed 
 the spirit of the age. Doubtless it did both. As 
 has been said, the seventeenth century in France 
 was preéminently the “‘age of reason.’’ 
 
 Aimez donc la raison; que toujours vos écrits 
 Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix, 
 said Boileau; yet perhaps, had it not been for the 
 Cartesian philosophy, this taste for reason might 
 not have asserted itself so earnestly and have been 
 so perfectly conscious of its existence. 
 
 This philosophy of ‘“‘clear ideas’’ prevailed in 
 France in the second half of the seventeenth century, 
 and from France its influence spread over all Europe. 
 Though vigorously attacked in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, both as to its metaphysics and its physics, 
 it nevertheless remained discernible even in the 
 methods of its adversaries. Locke, Hume, and 
 Condillac had not the same conception of evidence 
 as Descartes; but their empiricism was as fond of 
 clearness as his rationalism had been. Newton 
 combated the hypothesis of ‘‘vortices,’’ but he 
 preserved the Cartesian notion of a mechanical ex- 
 planation of physical phenomena. For a thorough- 
 
34 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 going and express negation of the Cartesian spirit 
 we must go to the end of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. Then the German romantic writers spring 
 up, and maintain that the philosophy of clear 
 ideas is false from its very principle. Accord- 
 ing to them, reality is not clear, and the more 
 satisfactory a doctrine is to the human understand- 
 ing, the surer it is to reproduce only the surface of 
 things, while the essence of them is mysterious, in- 
 tangible and inexpressible. . Whence it follows that 
 religions, arts, and literatures are spontaneous phil- 
 osophies, incomparably deeper than the systems 
 produced by the conscious labor of the understand- 
 ing, even as the works of nature are artistically 
 superior to the articles manufactured by man. 
 
 The philosophy of Descartes, to tell the truth, 
 affords but little scope to sentiment, and still less 
 to the imagination and to the hidden and uncon- 
 scious activities of the mind. It places value on 
 evidence alone, whose vivid, but glaring light, dis- 
 pels the chiaroscuro so dear to romantic writers. 
 This fixed and rigid purpose has its drawbacks, 
 which were not long in making their appearance 
 among the followers of Descartes. 
 
 But apart from the fact that in Descartes himself 
 the rational effort was uncommonly sincere and vig- 
 orous, at the time when this philosophy appeared 
 it was really necessary. It was a deliverer. It 
 put an end to superannuated doctrines, the domi- 
 nation of which was still heavily felt. It cleared 
 the ground, and set physics free, once for all, from 
 
DESCARTES. 35 
 
 the clogs of metaphysical hypotheses. Lastly it 
 formulated problems which needed formulation. 
 Descartes wished to furnish science not only with a 
 powerful and flexible instrument such as Bacon had 
 already sought, but also with an unchanging and 
 immovable basis. Thence sprang the “ provisional 
 doubt,”’ with which his method bids him begin, 
 which obliges him to test all previously acquired 
 information, and which may be looked upon as the 
 starting-point of all modern theories of knowledge. 
 For this doubt, which affects successively percep- 
 tion, imagination, reasoning power, and stops only 
 before the immediate self-intuition of thought, is 
 itself a criticism of the faculty of knowledge. It 
 studies it in its connection both with the outward 
 object and with the very mind which is thinking; in 
 short, it heralds Kant’s Crztzque of Pure Reason. 
 An innovating and fruitful doctrine nearly al- 
 ways develops in various directions. The various 
 minds that receive it gradually draw from it diverse 
 and sometimes contradictory conclusions, most of 
 which were overlooked and would often have been 
 disapproved of by the founder of the system. This 
 is perhaps even truer of Descartes than of any 
 other philosopher. Being chiefly preoccupied with 
 the method and structure of science, he did not 
 hesitate to leave open, at least temporarily, many 
 important questions which his method did not 
 require him to solve immediately. Thus it hap- 
 pened that metaphysical systems very different 
 from one another were soon founded on the Car- 
 
36 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tesian principles. Spinoza adopted the definition 
 which Descartes had given of soul and matter, 
 but in thought and extension he saw only two 
 attributes of one and the same substance. Beside 
 this pantheism, appeared the idealism of Male- 
 branche, which proceeds no less directly from Des- 
 cartes; for did not the latter say that ‘‘truth is 
 the same thing as being?’’ And? doesnot ‘the 
 theory of continued creation lead directly to that 
 of occasional causes? Locke, who combated Des- 
 cartes on the subject of innate ideas, without un- 
 derstanding him exactly, has on the other hand many 
 points in common with him; the very idea of inven- 
 torying and examining the ideas in our minds is 
 singularly akin to the critical examination of our 
 knowledge which, in Descartes, precedes the cogzto. 
 And lastly, into the idealism of Leibniz the Cartesian 
 element enters in large measure; for instance, the 
 notion of sensation being but a dim intellection, 
 which is the central point of Leibniz’s theory of 
 knowledge, had already been clearly stated by Des- 
 cartes. 
 
 The philosophy of Descartes is therefore a sort 
 of cross-road whence diverge the chief ways followed 
 by modern thought. Still, outside of France, his 
 method has not been followed without restrictions, 
 and his philosophy has been accepted only to be 
 immediately combined with other elements, either 
 traditional or modern. In France, the influence 
 has been far deeper and more enduring. There, 
 while the Cartesian philosophy may have lost its 
 
DESCARTES. 37 
 
 prestige rather quickly, the Cartesian spirit, owing 
 doutless to its close affinity with the very genius of 
 the nation, has never disappeared, and we shall 
 recognize its influence, not only throughout the 
 whole eighteenth century and in the French Revo- 
 lution, but in all the greatest thinkers of the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
CHAP UR Kis 
 
 CARTESIANISM IN FRANCE, MALEBRANCHE. 
 
 UPON the appearance of the Descours de la Méthode 
 the majority of the French public declared them- 
 selves forthwith in favor of Descartes. Descartes 
 had published the work in French, ‘‘the language of 
 hishicountryaains preference,to, latin, wethat ores 
 teachers,’’ and had thus appealed beforehand to all 
 those ‘‘who make use of their reason.’’ The event 
 proved him to have reckoned rightly. Never was 
 a new doctrine more favorably received. How sur- 
 prising and delightful to see a bold and living 
 philosophy, the chief concern of which was to 
 ‘“suide reason well and to seek the truth in sci- 
 
 ’ 
 
 ence,’’ suddenly springing up to confront an anti- 
 quated and decaying tradition which had no life 
 nor use outside the walls of the schools! No less 
 pleasing was it for the clearness and simplicity of 
 its principles, which formed such a happy contrast to 
 the obscurity, distinctions, and endless subtleties of 
 scholasticism. Many women were ardent Car- 
 tesians. The Femmes Savantes in Moliére speak, 
 as a matter of course, of thinking substance and 
 subtile matter, and Madame de Sévigné was on the 
 point of becoming a Cartesian in order to show her 
 sympathy with Madame de Grignan, her daughter, 
 38 
 
CARTESIANISM IN FRANCE. 39 
 
 who was very partial to Descartes, and called him 
 ener tather,;© 
 
 In spite of the rapid and brilliant success of this 
 philosophy, and of the enthusiastic admiration 
 bestowed upon its author— 
 
 Descartes, ce mortel dont on efit fait un dieu 
 Cheziles' paiens]. Sein 
 
 still it encountered a fierce and tenacious opposition, 
 which, no doubt from the first, foresaw its own de- 
 feat, but did not confess itself vanquished till the 
 end of the seventeenth century. This opposition 
 sprang chiefly from the universities in which the 
 traditional scholastic doctrine was taught. In some 
 of these, into which the philosophy of Descartes 
 speedily made its way, it was immediately com- 
 bated and condemned. In Paris only Boileau’s 
 Arrét burlesque saved the Parliament from the 
 ridiculous step of an actual fiat forbidding the 
 teaching of any other philosophy than that of Aris- 
 totle. In Rome the Jesuits succeeded in having 
 the works of Descartes inserted in the /udex Expur- 
 gatorius. They had hesitated a long while, and 
 the rupture might have been avoided had the matter 
 not been complicated with ecclesiastical conten- 
 tions. It was sufficient that the Oratorians and the 
 Jansenists had openly declared themselves in favor 
 of Descartes, to cause the Jesuits to oppose him. 
 It was for them an opportunity of humiliating the 
 congregation of the Oratory and one more means 
 of persecuting the Jansenists. Thus the philosophy 
 
 t'‘ Descartes, this mortal who would have been a god among the pagans.”’ 
 
40 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of Descartes served as a pretext for most unphilo- 
 sophical quarrels. 
 
 In opposition to Descartes the Jesuits placed 
 Gassendi, the keenest and deepest of his critics. 
 Not that Gassendi’s philosophy had no points in 
 common with that of Descartes. Like the latter, 
 and before him, Gassendi had proclaimed the rights 
 of free philosophy, and attacked scholasticism with 
 unusual violence; like him also he was a mathema- 
 tician and a physicist as well as a philosopher, and 
 in full accord with the men of science of the six- 
 teenth century and the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth. To this his scientific biographies and his 
 correspondence with Galileo bear testimony. But, 
 unlike Descartes, he did not undertake to substitute 
 for scholasticism a system of his own. Being well 
 versed in the history of ancient systems, he applied 
 himself chiefly to reviving that of Epicurus. He 
 endeavored to restore the real physiognomy of the 
 latter philosopher, disfigured as it had been by 
 legendary tradition, and his real doctrine, no less 
 distorted than his character. He took up again, on 
 his own account, the chief features of the Epicurean 
 logic and physics. Yet while he was a sensation- 
 alist, and gave, like Epicurus, a materialistic expla- 
 nation of acquired knowledge, Gassendi nevertheless 
 maintained that there is an immortal soul within us, 
 and that there is a God whose Providence created 
 and rules the world. This eclecticism, the sincerity 
 of which does not seem doubtful, served to prevent 
 Gassendi from being a very formidable adversary of 
 
CARTESIANISM IN FRANCE. 41 
 
 Cartesianism. As a reviver of atomism, and the 
 defender of a physical conception which was soon 
 after to be adopted by such men as Boyle and New- 
 ton, Gassendi left a lasting impress on the history of 
 philosophy. But the empiricism which he opposed 
 to the rationalism of Descartes was not consistent 
 enough to stop the progress of the latter for any 
 length of time. 
 
 Descartes had always lived as a good Roman 
 Catholic; and before laying down his doctrine he 
 had carefully “‘set apart’’ all truths pertaining to 
 religious faith. This certainly was an evidence of 
 his respect and submissiveness; and yet such a 
 precaution did not satisfy every one. Religious 
 truths are not so easily “set apart.’’ For instance, 
 how does Descartes make his theory, according 
 to which matter is nothing else than extension, 
 agree with the mystery of transubstantiation? It 
 seems, indeed, that it should always be possible 
 to accord with a mystery, so long at least as one 
 does not formally deny it. In fact Descartes tried to 
 show that his doctrine asserted nothing incompat- 
 ible with the mystery; but his explanations were 
 not thought orthodox, and they marred rather than 
 mended matters. Bossuet preferred to disregard 
 them, so as not to be bound to censure Descartes, 
 and thought himself justified in so doing, as Des- 
 cartes had not published these explanations over 
 his own name. 
 
 Be the truth what it may on this point, the Car- 
 tesian rationalism, which boldly freed itself from all 
 
42 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 authority, even from religious authority, was cal- 
 culated to alarm pious consciences, and actually 
 elicited from them hostile judgments. Some 
 looked upon Descartes as a useful ally of religion. 
 They rejoiced to see him combat the libertine with 
 his own weapons, and demonstrate, with the help 
 of reason alone, the existence of God and the differ- 
 ence between body and soul. Others were not so 
 much impressed with the service rendered to reli- 
 gion as they were made uneasy by seeing reason 
 and faith thus deliberately separated, fearing lest 
 the side of faith should finally find itself in the 
 minority. Besides, were libertines so sure to be 
 silenced by Descartes’s demonstrations, and might 
 not his principles very possibly be turned to good 
 account by unbelievers? Pascal, while admiring 
 the genius of Descartes, really seems to have pointed 
 out the danger in which the Christian dogma would 
 be involved by the results of such a philosophy. 
 
 It was necessary therefore to allay this solicitude. 
 It was not sufficient that the philosophy of Des- 
 cartes did not deny the truths of religion; it must 
 needs show that the consequences of its principles 
 were in strict accordance with what Christian faith 
 demanded that its followers should believe. Scho- 
 lasticism had endeavored to effect such a reconcilia- 
 tion, and had found its strength in having, at least 
 for a time, achieved it. The same problem con- 
 fronted the Cartesian philosophy, and attempts at 
 solution were not long wanting. The craving for 
 unity is an imperious one; many minds are not 
 
CARTESIANISM IN FRANCE. 43 
 
 contented with two classes of truths in juxtaposi- 
 tion, even if no contradiction be perceptible be- 
 tween them; the two classes must, to satisfy them, 
 be reduced to one. 
 
 The task here was made particularly difficult by 
 the characteristics of both the theology and the 
 philosophy which had to be reconciled. Protes- 
 tant theology has in the end always acquiesced, 
 more or less readily, in such philosophical doctrines 
 as were not positively irreligious; this it is justified 
 in doing, since it acknowledges itself to be a prod- 
 uct of evolution, and holds that change is no sign 
 of error. But the Roman Catholic theology, on 
 the contrary, makes immutability the necessary 
 condition of truth. Not only the dogma, but the 
 very interpretation of the dogma is fixed, and not 
 even the slightest modification of what has been 
 established by infallible and divine authority must 
 be exacted to secure agreement with a philosoph- 
 ical doctrine. The Cartesian system, on the other 
 hand, is positive and clear cut, and hardly lends 
 itself to compromises, which its methods forbid by 
 strictly excluding from the realm of science what- 
 ever cannot maintain itself before the court of 
 reason. Moreover, to effect the desired reconcilia- 
 tion, and make Cartesianism a doctrine not only 
 respectful to but expressive of faith, required a 
 mind at once extraordinarily metaphysical and ex- 
 traordinarily pious; an imagination wonderfully 
 quick and penetrating and able to recognize in the 
 Cartesian precepts and tenets the religious convic- 
 
44 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tions with which it was itself imbued. Such a soul 
 was Malebranche. 
 
 Malebranche was a philosopher, to use Plato’s 
 beautiful expression, with his whole soul. Far 
 from raising a kind of impenetrable partition be- 
 tween his religious faith and his rational thought, 
 he did not even conceive the possibility of a con- 
 flict between faith and philosophy, if the latter 
 were genuine. ‘‘I am persuaded, Ariste, that one 
 has need to be a sound philosopher in order to find 
 one’s way into the understanding of the truths of 
 faith, and that the better fortified one is in the 
 true principles of metaphysics, the more steadfastly 
 will he cling to the truths of religion.’’ These few 
 words sum up the program which Malebranche en- 
 deavored to carry out, or more exactly, the postu- 
 latum, the truth of which his whole philosophy 
 seeks to establish. 
 
 To this end it was necessary for him to introduce 
 between Catholic dogma and Cartesian rationalism 
 new elements which would cnable him to pass by 
 imperceptible degrees from the one to the other. 
 These elements offered themselves to him almost 
 spontaneously in Augustine, whose doctrine was 
 particularly studied by the congregation of the 
 Oratory, to which Malebranche belonged. With 
 the help of Augustine, he dipped deep into ancient 
 philosophy, whence he borrowed chiefly Platonic 
 notions, toward which the natural bent of his mind 
 inclined him. Thus the connection between ancient 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 4S 
 
 and modern philosophy, which Descartes thought 
 he had definitively interrupted, was renewed in the 
 very first generation that followed him, at the hands 
 of his most illustrious successor. But Malebranche 
 did not make himself a slave to Plato as Scholasti- 
 cism had been subject to Aristotle. On the contrary, 
 the mixture, or rather blending, of these Platonic 
 elements with the Cartesian principles gave to Male- 
 branche’s doctrine an original flavor. 
 
 The great work on which Malebranche labored 
 for ten years, and which appeared in 1674, was 
 entitled La Recherche de la Vérité, or The Search for 
 Truth. Yo begin with, whoever undertakes such 
 a search is to make a careful distinction between 
 rational evidence, the only sign of truth, and the 
 false light of the senses, which, in spite of its ap- 
 parent clearness, gives but deceitful information. 
 Our senses produce vivid impressions upon us, but 
 downotienlichten use siheieht. of reason,,.on, the 
 contrary, which seems cold, shows us things as they 
 really are. Therefore, we must close our bodily 
 eyes, and accustom ourselves to see only with our 
 spiritual eyes. 
 
 This precept is often expressed in language which 
 reminds us of Plato. Socrates, in the Piedo, repre- 
 sents the body as an element of confusion and 
 darkness, obfuscating the natural clear-sightedness 
 of the soul, which it subjects to gross and deceitful 
 appearances; it restricts the soul to an imperfect 
 reminiscence of the eternal realities, and is, in fact, a 
 sort of prison from which the wise man’s soul yearns 
 
46 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 to be released. Similarly, Malebranche speaks of 
 the tumult of the senses which prevents the soul 
 from hearkening to the voice of reason. He then 
 passes on by imperceptible degrees from the Platonic 
 to the Christian point of view. The soul’s sub- 
 servience to the body becomes a consequence of the 
 original fall; the dominance of the senses over the 
 spirit is said to be the result of sin, and the soul’s 
 possession of truth to be communion with God. 
 ‘‘The spirit stands, so to speak, between God and 
 the body, between good and evil, between what 
 illumines and what blinds it, what rules it well and 
 what rules it ill, what may make it perfect and happy, 
 and what is apt to make it imperfect and unhappy.’ 
 
 Thus, according to Malebranche, as well as 
 according to Plato, philosophy first requires the 
 soul to assunie a different attitude from that which 
 it occupied before reflecting. Things which are 
 visible and tangible, which may be tasted and smelt, 
 it first believed to be real: it shall henceforth look 
 upon them as illusory. Things, on the contrary, 
 which are neither seen nor touched, but are cog- 
 nizable by the intellect alone, it shall look upon as 
 the only ones which are real. Malebranche has no 
 difficulty in establishing the truth of this precept, 
 supporting it by Descartes’s principles. He shows 
 that the secondary qualities of bodies are all relative 
 to the thinking subject. That property alone belongs 
 to bodies which we conceive by means of our under- 
 standing—i. e., extension. Our senses therefore 
 teach us nothing. We think we see the room in 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 47 
 
 which we are. We think we see the sun. Itisa 
 delusion, and itis certain that we do not. It is not 
 even possible to conceive how we could see them; 
 for in what way could such material objects act upon 
 the immaterial soul, there being nothing in common 
 between it and them? 
 
 Must we then reject entirely the data given by our 
 senses as false and deceitful? No, says Malebranche; 
 our senses are neither deceitful nor corrupt, if we 
 make use of them only as regards their proper func- 
 tion; that is, the preservation of the body. They 
 fulfill their duty admirably well, speedily warn the 
 soul by means of pain and pleasure, by means of 
 pleasant and unpleasant sensations of what it must 
 do or refrain from doing for the preservation of life. 
 he ot hey represent instanctinus,iand haveuts 
 blind infallibility. If we had to depend on reflection 
 for avoiding the various dangers which threaten our 
 body at every moment, we should very soon per- 
 ish. The senses are marvelously well suited for 
 this office, and in most cases it is sufficient for us to 
 trust to their spontaneous activity. But let us ex- 
 pect nothing more from them! Valuable as they 
 are for our preservation, they are incapable of teach- 
 ing us. Many of our errors arise from our neglect- 
 ing to make this distinction. As our senses do not 
 deceive us concerning what is beneficial or harmful, 
 we fall into the habit of trusting to them in all 
 things, even where they can only lead us astray. 
 
 This tendency is almost unavoidable. In order 
 to make us heedful of the impressions made by the 
 
48 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 senses, God caused them to be attended with 
 pleasure and pain. A pin’s prick, though convey-. 
 ing no distinct information (for we do not even 
 know what takes place here in the nerves and 
 brain), produces upon us a most vivid impression, and 
 compels us to give our attention to it. We thus 
 form the habit of judging of the reality of things by 
 their practical interest for us; that is, we trust to 
 the senses in order to know what things are, and 
 in this we are mistaken. 
 
 If, therefore, we really know ‘‘outward objects,’’ 
 it is not by means of sensations, since these are 
 dim and give us no reliable information. It is 
 by means of zdeas—i.e., of representations clear 
 to the understanding and which have nothing in 
 common with sensations. Ideas are in God, and 
 the mind perceives them in God. When it discov- 
 ers any truth, or sees things as they are in them- 
 selves, it sees them in God’s ideas—that is, with a 
 clear and distinct vision of what is in God, who 
 represents “them: «Chus, severyptinve) ithe ipime 
 knows the truth it is united with God; in some 
 measure it knows and possesses God. 
 
 For the demonstration of this celebrated theory 
 of ‘‘vision in God,’’ Malebranche depends upon the 
 Cartesian principles. He defines the soul as that 
 which thinks, and the body as that which has ex- 
 tension. An instinctive feeling persuades us that 
 these two are united, and we feel confident of it. 
 But we have no evidence of it, and we even see 
 quite plainly that the mind and the body are two 
 
MALEBRANCHE. AQ 
 
 things of quite opposite kinds. We do not, then, 
 understand how something corporeal—that is, some- 
 thing which has extension—can produce upon the 
 soul an impression which can be called knowledge, 
 or how the soul can go out of itself to wander 
 through the heavens*. The object of knowledge, 
 therefore, can be nothing else than an idea. When 
 I perceive the sun, for instance, whether it be above 
 the horizon or not, whether I be musing or dream- 
 ing, matters little. ‘Ineonetease!; indeed; my per- 
 ception is true, and in the other false, and we are 
 not without a means of distinguishing between 
 them; but it is never the material object that I per- 
 ceive, it is always the idea of the object that is 
 present in my soul. 
 
 Beset by the objections raised against him, Male- 
 branche gave several successive forms to his theory 
 of the vision of ideas in God. We cannot here 
 make a distinction between them; let it be suffi- 
 cient to indicate the method by which he arrives at 
 Enismineor.)) Te: examinecewonevalter-another, all 
 the hypotheses which may explain our knowledge 
 of ideas. He first eliminates the theory of “‘sensi- 
 ble images,’’ which had been derived from an- 
 tiquity by scholastic philosophers. This hypothesis 
 increases, instead of solving, difficulties, and one 
 cannot understand how sensible images, being 
 something material, can be transformed into some- 
 thing spiritual, like ideas. Does, then, the human 
 soul produce ideas spontaneously? It is mere 
 
 * Aller se promener dans les cieux.”’ 
 
5O MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 human pride to imagine that the soul can produce 
 anything. Such a supposition would imply that it 
 is endowed with causality. Now, as will soon be 
 shown, no creature is a cause. God alone acts in 
 the Universe. Shall we say that ideas were created 
 by God, together with the soul? A very improb- 
 able hypothesis, and not easily made to agree with 
 God’s wisdom. It would suppose “‘infinities of 
 
 ’ 
 
 infinite numbers of ideas’’ to exist in each created 
 soul. Is it not far more reasonable to suppose that 
 ideas are eternally subsisting in God? We know 
 them when God thinks best to reveal them to us. 
 
 6é 
 
 This hypothesis is not only the most ‘‘practical,’’ 
 but also the one which best shows us our depend- 
 ence upon God. As space encompasses bodies, so 
 does God encompass minds. To know is to partake 
 of the divine intelligence. The ideas which repre- 
 sent God’s creatures to our minds are but God’s 
 perfections corresponding to these very creatures 
 and representative of them. 
 
 We perceive ideas only by means of pure under- 
 standing; for the world of ideas is a purely intel- 
 lectual world to which the senses have no access. 
 The worst sort of confusion would follow from mis- 
 taking sensations, which Malebranche terms the 
 modalities of our soul, for ideas, which are in the 
 divine intelligence. But there is no room for mis- 
 take in the matter, so completely do the character- 
 istics of modalities differ from those of ideas. The 
 modalities of the soul are changeable, ideas are im- 
 mutable; modalities are particular, ideas are uni- 
 
MALEBRANCHE. SI 
 
 versal and general; modalities are contingent, ideas 
 are eternal and necessary; modalities are dim and 
 obscure, while ideas are very clear and luminous; 
 modalities are but dimly though keenly felt, while 
 ideas are clearly known, being the foundation of all 
 sciences. And not only do we see in God the ideas 
 of ‘‘outward’’ objects, but we also see in Him the 
 axioms of reason, and such truths as Bossuet, fol- 
 lowing Augustine, termed eternal. 
 
 The hypothesis of the ‘‘vision in God,’’ the most 
 probable, and indeed the only probable one, accord- 
 ing to Malebranche, seems to our common sense 
 extremely paradoxical. It called forth the taunts 
 of his contemporaries, and the well-known line: 
 
 “Lui qui voit tout en Dieu n’y voit pas qu'il est fou*.’’ 
 
 Yet it is a legitimate corollary of the principles 
 established by Descartes; and the theories of Spin- 
 oza and Leibniz on this point, though different 
 in expression, are not very remote from that of 
 Malebranche. Descartes had proved that we do 
 not know objects through our senses, but by our 
 understanding; and that, to the intuition of the 
 mind, matter is merely what has extension. Now 
 the science of extension is geometry. It is com- 
 posed of truths which appear to the mind as uni- 
 versal and necessary. Kant denominates them 
 ““a priort,;’’ Malebranche calls them immutable and 
 etetnal. Where lisethem primary, cause .of i these 
 truths, and consequently of the whole physical 
 
 *** Fle who sees all things in God sees not his own lunacy there.” 
 
52 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 world? Evidently not in my individual under- 
 standing, which is finite and perishable. It can 
 only be in an understanding which is as infinite, 
 eternal and necessary as those truths themselves. 
 Descartes had already said that all our science is 
 true only because God exists. Malebranche went a 
 step farther, and asserted that there is no science 
 save through our participation in the divine thought. 
 We see the truth only when we see things as they 
 really are, which we never do unless we see them in 
 Him who contains them intelligibly. 
 
 Malebranche, as a good Cartesian, has a purely 
 geometrical and mechanical conception of nature. 
 ‘“With extension alone,’’ he says, ““God produced 
 all the admirable things we see in nature, and even 
 what gives life and movement to animals.’’ Yet, 
 though Malebranche agreed with Descartes in saying 
 that animals are machines and do not feel, he was 
 evidently interested in the extraordinary discov- 
 eries just made by Swammerdam, Leewenhoek and 
 several other scientific men with the help of the 
 recently-invented microscope. The theory of ‘‘en- 
 cased germs,’’ though with Leibniz he accepted it 
 as the most plausible theory of the time, leaves 
 him only half satished. He easily understands how, 
 by the mere power of mechanical laws, the tiny tree 
 hidden in the seed will grow progressively, and 
 gradually become the tall oak which we behold. 
 No doubt the actual division of matter goes far be- 
 yond the reach of our senses, and it is probably the 
 same with the organization of matter. A drop of 
 
MALEBRANCHE, 53 
 
 liquid, Leibniz says, is a pond full of fishes, and 
 every drop of blood in one of those fishes is another 
 pond*® full of) fishes, andm<soy on) ad@.¢njinetum. 
 Malebranche also concedes this, but he cannot so 
 easily account, by the power of purely mechanical 
 laws, for the preservation of species, each apart from 
 the others, even to their minutest features. It is 
 not so evident to him as to Descartes that with 
 matter and the laws of motion one can completely 
 account for a world like ours, including the plants 
 and the animals. He would suppose something to 
 exist besides, not unlike Plato’s ideas, the ‘‘divine 
 models,’’ the ‘‘archetypes of beings,’’ which live 
 forever in God’s mind, and which determine his 
 choice among possible things. The permanence of 
 species would seem to him inexplicable otherwise. 
 Malebranche here stands half-way between Des- 
 cartes and Leibniz. “He begins, as, the former 
 does, with a geometrical conception of the science 
 of nature; and almost finishes, like the latter, with 
 a metaphysical conception, the predominant ideas 
 of which are order and harmony. 
 
 We are’ hereby “broughtwback)to! Godii The 
 sight of nature everywhere compels us to admire 
 the simplicity and the fecundity of her ways. Male- 
 branche feels vividly the beauty of nature. But, 
 like most men of his time, he feels in her beauty 
 chiefly the reason which it manifests. He sees 
 imvit; above all thingsmordeéer. he idea of\ carder 
 is, I may say, pivotal in the philosophy of Male- 
 branche; not only is it the ground principle of 
 
54 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 his ethics, but it holds a no less important place 
 in his metaphysical speculations. He conceives 
 reality to be an assemblage of ‘‘orders,’’ corres- 
 ponding and subordinate to one another. Above 
 the order of the physical world rises the order of 
 moral realities, the one being ruled by the laws 
 of magnitude or quantity, the other by the laws 
 of quality or perfection. The order of grace comes 
 next, not to supplant but to correct the order of 
 nature. Even in the attributes and perfections of 
 the divine essence, order also reigns. All these 
 ‘‘orders’’ converge in harmonious unity, of which 
 our feeble understanding can have but a very im- 
 perfect notion. They have led to the comparison 
 of Malebranche’s system with a magnificent pal- 
 ace—a vast and noble building, the richness and 
 majesty of which, while flattering the imagination, 
 afford reason supreme satisfaction. They might 
 also be compared to the grand choral constructions 
 of J. S. Bach, who also attains the sublime by the 
 harmonious richness of a powerful creation in 
 which order always rules. 
 
 Everything that is, owes its existence to God; all 
 that we know, we know in God. But how do we 
 know God Himself? How are we made sure of 
 His existence? What do we know of His nature 
 and attributes? In what measure can we under- 
 stand His relation to the world? 
 
 In such a philosophy as that of Malebranche the 
 existence of God is not called in question. From 
 
MALEBRANCHE. Es 
 
 the very first step which reason tries to take God 
 overshadows it. If I am, God is; if I think, God 
 is; if I know any truth, God is; if any phenomenon 
 takes place, God is. Nothing can be or can take 
 place without a cause, and there is no other cause 
 than God. Therefore Malebranche might well re- 
 gard a demonstration of the existence of God as 
 superfluous. Yet he gives proofs of it, and he even 
 thinks that some of the arguments usually proffered 
 are not worthless. He does not reject the proof 
 based on final causes. The contemplation of the 
 order which reigns in nature often fills him with 
 admiration for the Author of all these beauties, 
 for there can be no doubt that we must postulate 
 a mind in order to explain them. He reasons on 
 this point as Voltaire did later.. When I see a 
 watch, I am right in concluding that there is an 
 intelligence back of it, since mere chance cannot 
 possibly have produced and combined all the wheels. 
 How then should it be possible for chance and the 
 conjunction of atoms to be capable of arranging in 
 all men and animals the many various impulses, 
 accurate and well proportioned, which we see in 
 them, and for men and animals to beget others in 
 their exact likeness? 
 
 This proof produces a strong impression upon 
 the mind; but Malebranche was aware that, from a 
 logical point of view, it is not unimpeachable. The 
 most beautiful, the noblest and strongest proof that 
 may be given of the existence of God is drawn 
 from our idea of the infinite. That we have this 
 
56 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 idea, is an undoubted fact. The very ones who 
 deny the existence of God have this idea even while 
 denying. Not only does the human mind conceive 
 the idea of the infinite, but it conceives it even 
 before the idea of the finite. For the idea of the 
 infinite comes to us together with the very idea 
 of being. In order to form an idea of a finite 
 being, we subtract something from the general idea 
 of being, which must therefore have existed before 
 the other. Fénelon says much the same thing: 
 that, in spite of appearances, the idea of the infinite 
 is positive, and the idea of the finite negative, since 
 the former represents being as unlimited and the 
 latter represents it as limited—i. e., by a nega- 
 tion of whatever is beyond the limit. Therefore, 
 Malebranche concludes, the mind perceives noth- 
 ing save through the idea it has of the infinite, 
 and all particular ideas are but portions of the 
 general idea of the infinite. And from this he 
 demonstrates in several ways the necessary exist- 
 ence of God. 
 
 Now, from the very fact of our having such an 
 idea it evidently follows that God exists. This 
 may be shown in several ways: first, as Descartes 
 did, making use of the ontological argument. One 
 has a right to assert concerning a thing all that 
 ‘one clearly conceives to be comprised in the idea 
 which represents this thing. Now, I clearly con- 
 ceive that the necessity of His existence is com- 
 prised in the idea of God. Therefore God exists. 
 Malebranche was aware of the strength of the objec- 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 57 
 
 tions to which this proof is open. He endeavors 
 to answer them by insisting (as Descartes had al- 
 ready done) upon the following point: that the 
 idea, Of thesinfinite: being grime...) of) God} istunhke 
 any other; that it constitutes a unique case, to 
 which ordinary rules are not applicable, and that 
 what is not true as regards all other ideas is true as 
 regards this one. Thus, while I may conceive the 
 idea of a triangle, or of a mountain, without there 
 existing any triangle or mountain, the idea of the 
 infinite alone is of such a kind that, if I have this 
 idea, the thing itself necessarily exists. 
 
 But to tell the truth, Malebranche transforms 
 thiseeproofin idefending ita hey form) of: ithe 
 reasoning disappears, and our knowledge of God 
 is presented as being immediate and intuitive. 
 When wesee a creature, Malebranche says—a body 
 for instance—we do not see it in itself. We see it 
 through an idea; that is, through the vision of cer- 
 tain perfections which are in God and which repre- 
 sent it. It might, therefore, be possible for us to 
 see this creature, and a whole world of creatures, 
 without their actually existing. God would only 
 need to reveal them to our vision, without having 
 created them in any other sense. But God Himself 
 we do not thus see through an idea. ‘‘Creatures 
 alone are visible through ideas which represent them 
 eveneebefore: the.) creaturesmareu made (pul ie * 
 The infinite, however, can be seen only in itself, 
 for nothing finite can represent the infinite. If we 
 think of God, He must exist. We cannot see the 
 
58 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 , 
 
 idea of Him without Him.’’ The theory of vision 
 zm God thus leads us, when at its highest flight, to 
 a theory of the vision of God. To have an idea of 
 God is not to possess a representation of God 
 (which is impossible); it is to possess God Himself, 
 in the feeble degree possible to human nature. 
 Thus has the Cartesian proof become blended with 
 Malebranche’s own system. He no longer deduces 
 the existence of God from the idea of God. He 
 refuses to make a distinction between the idea of 
 God and God Himself. ‘‘The infinite is its own 
 idea.’’ 
 
 Therefore the existence of God is the first of all 
 truths, is truth itself, and the substance of all other 
 truths, which subsist in it; we perceive them in 
 the divine understanding. As truth is the natural 
 goal of the soul, Malebranche may justly say that 
 the soul is united to God far more closely than to 
 its own body. The soul hears God within itself, in 
 its inmost depth. When it hushes the tumult of the 
 senses, it hears this divine voice which shows to it 
 the absolute truth and goodness as the substance of 
 its own truth and welfare. Reviving Plato’s well- 
 known comparison, Malebranche calls God the sun 
 of the world of mind. ‘‘The sun that lights the 
 mind is not like the sun which lights the body. It 
 is never eclipsed and penetrates all things without 
 its light being refracted.’’ Unfortunately, in our 
 present condition, being corrupted by sin, we often 
 hide ourselves from that light and rather seek the 
 darkness of the senses. 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 59 
 
 We have an immediate perception that God is; 
 but we do not perceive what He is. For our sight is 
 limited, and God’s perfection is infinite. His sub- 
 stance contains an endless number of perfections 
 and realities. Nor do we see it in its simplicity. 
 God illumines us through certain of His perfections 
 only, without showing Himself to us as He really 
 is. Our minds can reach up to Him only as to the 
 cause or substance of this or that reality, as for 
 instance, of material extension. But God is, in His 
 essence, the infinite Being in every way, the in- 
 finitely infinite Being. Therefore, God alone can 
 conceive God. When we endeavor to understand 
 Him we limit Him, and by this very act we deny 
 Him part of His essence. The most that man can 
 say is: ‘‘God is the One who Is.’’ All particular 
 beings exist only in so far as they participate in 
 Him; but all created and all imaginable beings can- 
 not fill the immensity of the Being. We behold the 
 multitude of creatures in the infinity of the uncre- 
 ated Being, but we do not see His unity dis- 
 tinctly. This comes from our seeing Him not so 
 much according to His absolute reality as according 
 to what He is with regard to all possible creatures, 
 the number of which He may increase ad infinitum 
 without their ever being equal to the reality which 
 represents them. * * * An essential character- 
 istic of the Infinite consists in being one and all 
 things at the same time, composed, so to speak, of 
 an infinite number of different perfections, and yet 
 
60 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 so very simple that each of these perfections con- 
 tains all the others without any real distinction. 
 This seems to border very closely upon Spino- 
 zism, a doctrine which Malebranche himself deemed 
 ‘“monstrous.’’ In what does this God, who is at 
 once a unity and an infinite multiplicity of infinite 
 attributes, and who comprises in Himself all real and 
 possible creatures, differ from the divine substance 
 which, according to Spinoza, is the one only being? 
 Is the difference that Malebranche conceives God as 
 spiritual, whereas Spinoza admits of no hierarchy 
 among the attributes of the divine Being? But Male- 
 branche himself confesses that reason alone cannot 
 teach us that God is spirit; this is taught us by the 
 Holy Scriptures. Moreover, when we speak of the 
 divine intelligence, we should carefully abstain from 
 thinking it to be akin to our own. Let us not fall 
 into the error of the ‘‘anthropomorphists.’’ Evenas 
 God comprises within Himself all the perfections of 
 matter, without being material, thus also does He 
 comprise all the perfections of created spirits, with- 
 out being a spirit such as we conceive spirits to be. 
 Yet however remote Malebranche may be from 
 ‘“anthropomorphism,’’ and however severely he may 
 blame those who ‘‘make the infinite Being human,”’ 
 he had a right to protest against the charge of 
 Spinozism. Though his system appears to border 
 closely upon that of Spinoza, it is really far re- 
 moved from it. He seems to say the same things, 
 but while using the same terms, he gives them a 
 very different meaning, for it is a Christian mean- 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 61 
 
 ino. When |\he; readsminwopinoza )).Deus, vszve 
 natura,’ he is indignant at such horrible blas- 
 phemy; but when he himself says that he sees the 
 multiplicity of creatures in the infinity of the uncre- 
 ated Being, he congratulates himself on being led by 
 his reason to repeat the saying of Paul the apostle: 
 In Himwe live and move and have our being. Listen 
 to the first words of the Méditations chrétiennes: 
 ‘“‘As I am convinced that the eternal.Word is the 
 universal Reason of spirits, and that this same Word, 
 when incarnate, is the author and perfector of our 
 faith, I believe I ought to have Him speak in these 
 Meditations as the true Master who teaches all men 
 by virtue of Fis authority and by the evidence of His 
 lights.’’ 
 
 We thus have two revelations confirming each 
 other: the one was manifested in the Scriptures, 
 the other is expressed to every man by his own 
 reason. Thence, though God may be incompre- 
 hensible as regards His substance, He has revealed 
 to us enough of Himself for us to adore Him. In- 
 asmuch as He illumines us, and lets us participate 
 through our reason in the realm of pure intellect, 
 and in the love He causes us to have for Him, loves 
 Himself, He becomes once again a God of wisdom, 
 goodness and justice. The moral idea of order did 
 not occur in Spinoza, since, according to him, God 
 is necessarily all that He may be, and all his attri- 
 butes are equal. Malebranche, on the contrary, 
 says that God esteems and loves all things in pro- 
 portion as they are lovable and estimable. He has 
 
62 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 an invincible love for the immutable order which 
 consists and can consist only in the relations of 
 perfection between His attributes and the ideas 
 which He comprises within His substance. In this 
 we are far from Spinoza and again very near Leibniz. 
 Like the latter, Malebranche appeals to the principle 
 of sufficient reason (though he does not yet call it 
 by this name) in order to explain, so far as the mys- 
 tery of creation permits, the choice made by the 
 divine will among an infinity of possible worlds. 
 He then proceeds to explain the relation between 
 the order of nature and that of grace; he shows 
 how God foresaw from all eternity that the fall of 
 man would be followed by the redemption, and how 
 the supernatural or miraculous order does not dis- 
 turb the natural order, but makes it complete. The 
 transition from metaphysics to Christian theology 
 is made imperceptibly, and it is the very character- 
 istic of Malebranche’s system that we cannot tell 
 the moment when this transition takes place. 
 
 There is but one cause in the universe, and that 
 is God. For a cause is that which produces or en- 
 genders an effect, and brings it to pass. Being a 
 cause, then, means creating something, a power 
 which belongs to God alone. Therefore, to sup- 
 pose that a creature may be the cause of anything 
 whatever is to make it divine and to participate 
 in the most dangerous error of the ancient philoso- 
 phy. It means falling into the sin of pride, and 
 failing to recognize the dependence of all creatures 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 63 
 
 upon God. This appears evident enough if we 
 consider only the essence of God, that of creatures, 
 and the notion of cause; but it may also be shown 
 by means of the principles laid down by Descartes. 
 
 The universe known to us is composed of spirits 
 and bodies; that is to say, of thinking souls, and of 
 objects with the quality of extension. Malebranche 
 argues that a spirit never acts upon a body, nora 
 body upon a spirit, nora body upona body. Spirits 
 indeed communicate with one another, but only 
 through God; for God encompasses all spirits as 
 space encompasses all bodies. 
 
 To say that the spirit never acts upon the body 
 seems contrary to experience. If I wz//to move my 
 arm, I move it; is not my volition the cause of the 
 motion of my arm? No, answers Malebranche, 
 unless you simply mean by ‘“‘cause’’ the antecedent 
 which regularly precedes a given phenomenon. But 
 what produces 
 
 é¢ 9 
 
 if the word ‘‘cause’’ means to you 
 the phenomenon, then when you say that your 
 volition is the cause of the motion of your arm, 
 you go beyond what is known to you. All that 
 you are conscious of is your volition, accompanied 
 by a confused feeling of effort, and then the motion 
 of your arm. But ow the volition produces the 
 motion is so little evident that you have no idea 
 of it. In order to move your arm, you must have 
 animal spirits, and send them through certain 
 nerves into certain muscles which they swell or 
 shorten, for this is how the arm attached to them 
 moves, or else we do not yet know how it is done, 
 
64 +. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 as some others think. And we see that men who 
 do not even know whether they have spirits, nerves 
 and muscles, move their arms, and indeed move 
 them more skillfully and easily than those who are 
 most versed in anatomy. ‘Therefore, to say that 
 my volition is the cause of the motion of my arm, 
 is to give for the fact an explanation which I do not 
 even understand, and which isa wrong one. But 
 to say that God has willed that every time I 
 have this or that volition, this or that motion is 
 to take place in my arm, is an intelligible and 
 satisfactory explanation, for it is certain that God 
 is an efficient cause. So my volition is but the 
 occasional cause of the motion of my arm. God 
 is the real cause. A true cause, Malebranche says 
 with deep meaning, is a cause between which and 
 its effect the mind perceives a necessary connection. 
 Now, this necessary connection I do not perceive 
 between my volition and my movements. Experi- 
 ence alone makes it known to me. 
 
 A similar demonstration is given concerning the 
 alleged action of the body upon the mind. A pin 
 pricks my finger; is it not evident that this prick 
 is the cause of the pain I immediately feel? Not 
 at all, answers Malebranche. All that experience 
 teaches me is, that when a pin pricks me I feel pain; 
 but it does not teach me that the pin acts upon my 
 mind, or has any power whatever. Here again a 
 relation of constant succession is wrongly trans- 
 formed into one of causality. And we are not to 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 65 
 
 bring forward, as an explanation of the action of 
 the body upon the soul, a ‘‘power resulting from 
 their union,’’ as Descartes had done. Malebranche 
 opposes Descartes by means of Descartes himself. 
 This ‘‘ power’ 
 to the ‘‘occult qualities’’ of scholastic philosophers? 
 In fact we cannot understand how a substance, the 
 
 b) 
 
 is not a clear idea; are we to return 
 
 whole nature of which is to have extension (the body) 
 can produce the slightest modification in another 
 substance (the soul), which has no extension. And 
 since the fundamental principle in the Cartesian 
 method is to hold nothing as true unless we conceive 
 it clearly and distinctly, we must not accept the 
 notion of the body acting upon the soul, which 
 notion must needs be a confused one. It is an in- 
 stinctive feeling, says Malebranche, which persuades 
 me that my soul is united to my body, or that my 
 body is a part of my being; I have no evidence 
 of it. If philosophers were to judge by the evi- 
 dence and light of reason, they would soon recog- 
 nize that the mind and the body are two things of 
 exactly opposite kinds; that the mind cannot through 
 itself be united to the body, and that only through 
 the union between ourselves and God is the soul 
 wounded when the body is struck. 
 
 Lastly, the body does not act upon the body. 
 For, if the essence of the body is extension, it is 
 evident that bodies may be moved, but cannot 
 move of their own accord. The notion of force or 
 power has no connection whatever with the defini- 
 tion of the body. So that we never really see a 
 
66 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 body modifying the state of another body. We 
 see the modification following the meeting of the 
 two bodies. We may say correctly that this meet- 
 ing is the constant antecedent of the phenomenon. 
 But we have no right to say that it is the cause of 
 it, for we do not even understand how it could pos- 
 sibly produce it. 
 
 Such then is the greatest, the most fruitful and 
 the most necessary of all principles. We find in 
 the universe but the occasional causes of the effects 
 which God Himself produces. And as God does 
 not act by means of particular volitions, He has 
 regulated all the ‘‘infinitely infinite’’ combinations 
 of physical with physical and of physical with moral 
 things in such a way that phenomena appear to us 
 as subjected to necessary laws, and that like causes 
 always produce like effects. We may indeed go on 
 using the current language; we may say that the 
 soul moves its body; that it is influenced by the 
 impressions the body receives, and that bodies in 
 motion transmit to each other part of their momen- 
 tum. We may do this, just as we say that the sun 
 rises or sets. It is enough if we know that all the 
 causes we speak of are purely occasional, and that 
 the only real cause is God. 
 
 This remarkable theory marks a decisive stage 
 in the history of philosophy. With regard to the 
 past, it completes the Cartesian revolution, and con- 
 summates the defeat of scholastic physics. Des- 
 cartes, in his conception of nature, had gone so far 
 as to dispense with the ‘‘nutritive soul,’’ the ‘‘loco- 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 67 
 
 motor soul’’ and the ‘‘sensient soul,’’ but chose to 
 explain all phenomena by the laws of motion only. 
 It is the very idea of “‘nature’’ that Malebranche 
 attacks. The religion of the ancients made nature 
 divine. The philosophy of Aristotle saw in the 
 giots the inward power which gives to beings their 
 shape and growth, and builds the ascending scale 
 of genera and species. Malebranche shows that 
 nature is but a word, a delusion, which the philoso- 
 phy of clear ideas drives away. ‘“‘I owe nothing to 
 my nature, nothing to the imaginary nature of phi- 
 losophers. I owe everything to God and His de- 
 crees.’’ Natural causality is the last of the ‘‘occult 
 qualities’’; it must disappear like the others. God 
 has linked His works together, but He has not 
 created any linking entities between them. In short, 
 as a worthy successor of Descartes, Malebranche 
 replaces the confused scholastic notion of cause by 
 the clear scientific notion of daw. 
 
 In this he forestalls the future. Before Leibniz, 
 Hume or Kant he showed the importance of the 
 idea of causality in metaphysics. His criticism 
 of the common notion of cause is a masterly one. 
 Not even Hume excels him in showing that the con- 
 nection between cause and effect escapes us pre- 
 cisely where we think we lay hold of it, and there- 
 fore that it is not a notion due to experience. 
 
 Malebranche speaks a metaphysical and theo- 
 logical language. ‘Strip his thought of this form, 
 preserve the substance and give it a definite expres- 
 sion, and no theory of causality agrees better than 
 
68 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 his with the spirit and practice of modern science. 
 Bacon, and after him Descartes, had already recog- 
 nized that the science of nature is not concerned 
 with final causes. Malebranche goes a step further. 
 He exempts it even from seeking after efficient 
 causes, or after any causes whatever. Henceforth 
 science will only have to determine constant suc- 
 cessions, “‘reciprocal modalities,’’ and to state how 
 such and such a phenomenon varies when a cer- 
 tain other phenomenon undergoes a given change. 
 Now, this is exactly the point of view of modern 
 physics. This science has wisely ceased to inquire 
 why opium makes us sleep, and restricts its atten- 
 tion to phenomena and the laws of phenomena. 
 What Malebranche says of the relation between 
 body and soul, and of the action which bodies 
 exercise upon one another, is no less apt to please 
 our scientific men. On this point none ever con- 
 tributed more than this great metaphysician to 
 purge positive science of the popular metaphysics 
 which for so long a time falsified its definitions and 
 paralyzed its progress. In this sense, the theory 
 of occasional causes is a worthy sequel to the 
 Cartesian theory of science. 
 
 Although we may see all things in God, it does 
 not follow that we do so. We see in God only 
 things of which we have an idea; and there are 
 things which we see without any ideas. Among 
 the latter, Malebranche reckons the soul. The 
 soul knows itself through feeling, or, as he calls it, 
 
MALEBRANCHE. 69 
 
 through consciousness. We know of our soul only 
 what we feel taking place within ourselves. Male- 
 branche here differs from Descartes, and the reasons 
 he gives for doing so are interesting. 
 
 The soul, Descartes had said, is more easily 
 known than the body. In a certain sense Male- 
 branche admits this, but he wishes to make a dis- 
 tinction. True, the existence of the soul is 
 more easily known than that of the body, and up 
 to this point Descartes is right. For it is sufficient 
 for the soul to think in order to know that it exists, 
 whereas the soul may have a clear notion of the 
 body without proving the existence of the latter. 
 But, on the other hand, the nature of the soul is 
 not so well known to us as that of the body. For, 
 turning away from the senses and the imagination, 
 let us conceive bodies in their essence, i. e., in their 
 idea, which is one of extension; there is no clearer 
 and more perfect knowledge than this. This 
 idea permits us to construct every figure which may 
 be drawn in space, and to evolve all the properties 
 of these figures; a science is opened to us which 
 has no other limits than those set by the weakness 
 of our intellect. This idea is ‘‘a quite luminous 
 one.’’ What is wanting to our knowledge of ex- 
 tension of figures and of motion is not a defect of 
 the idea which represents them, but of our mind 
 that considers them. 
 
 Can I say the same thing concerning the knowl- 
 edge of the soul? Can I undertake to build such a 
 science a priort, as I do geometry? Can I form a 
 
7O MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ““quite luminous’’ idea of this? Impossible. Ex- 
 perience alone informs me of what is taking place 
 within my soul, and I have no means of ascertain- 
 ing what it does not reveal to me. My inward con- 
 sciousness teaches me that I am, think, will and 
 suffer; but it does not inform me what I am, the 
 nature of my thought, of my will, of my feelings, 
 of my passions, of my pains. Even the facts of 
 which consciousness advises me, it does not show 
 me clearly and distinctly. I do not understand, 
 for instance, the relation between one state of my 
 soul and the concomitant or following state, be- 
 tween a given idea and the pain following it; I 
 cannot analyze a state of the soul and reduce it to 
 its constituent elements as I might reduce to its 
 elements a figure in space and determine its proper- 
 ties a priort. When I feel a pain, I feel it without 
 knowing it; God, who has the idea of my soul, 
 knows that pain without feeling it. 
 
 If I had this idea, which God in His wisdom has 
 denied me, if the substance of my soul were “‘lu- 
 minous’’ to me, I should only have to examine this 
 idea in order to know, independently of and previ- 
 ous to experience, what I should feel in a given 
 contingency. I should not require to hear a con- 
 cert in order to know how sweet harmony is, or to 
 taste a fruit in order to know its flavor. How many 
 modifications of the soul are known to me? A 
 very limited number, no doubt, in comparison with 
 all those that are possible. A mere piece of wax 
 may undergo an endless number of modifications, 
 
MALEBRANCHE. Wo 
 
 since it may assume every geometrical shape known 
 to us, and an infinite number of other shapes be- 
 sides. Is it not likely that the soul, ‘“‘which is far 
 nobler than the body,’’ may undergo innumerable 
 modifications, but that I am ignorant of these be- 
 cause the substance of the soul is hidden from me? 
 
 Thus we do not know all the modifications of 
 which our soul is capable; we know only a part of 
 them, and that an infinitely small one. And the 
 little that we know does not enlighten us concern- 
 ing its nature, for, to use Malebranche’s powerful 
 expression, whereas ideas are ‘‘light,’’ our modali- 
 ties are ‘‘darkness.’’ 
 that darkness; it is meant for our own good. 
 If we had as clear a notion of the soul as we 
 have of the body, it would show us too plainly how 
 different the former is from the latter, thus weaken- 
 ing the union between soul and body which was 
 designed by God. The very contemplation of the 
 idea of space is to the geometrician a source of in- 
 comparable delight; what pleasure would not have 
 been afforded to man by a similar contemplation of 
 the idea of the soul! In an ecstacy of delight he 
 would have forgotten to “‘lead his body out to 
 pasture.’’ Therefore, God has done wisely in giv- 
 ing us but a very imperfect view of our soul, though 
 sufficient for this life. We know enough about it 
 to be persuaded of the spirituality of the soul, of 
 its immortality, of its freedom, and of a few other 
 attributes which we must not ignore. We know 
 but little, but what we know is not false. In this 
 
 But let us not complain of 
 
72 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 way we escape from another great danger. If we 
 knew our soul through an idea, if its substance were 
 cognizable by us, we might believe we were ‘‘our 
 own lights,’’ and thence fall into the worst mistake 
 a creature can commit—i. e., to believe ourselves 
 able to do something of our own power, attributing 
 to ourselves an impious independence, and infring- 
 ing upon the prerogatives of God, who alone is a 
 cause. puch eaathought > ise borible, ato eNlales 
 branche. Hereafter, when our body shall be clad 
 in immortality, when we are freed from sin, God will 
 probably grant us the contemplation of spirits in 
 their essence. 
 
 Let us lay aside these considerations, which 
 border upon theology. Malebranche’s theory of 
 the self-knowledge of the soul teemed with philo- 
 sophical consequences. It led his successors to 
 reflect on the nature, limits and range of conscious- 
 ness; it even forestalled the distinction which Kant 
 was to establish later on between “‘empirical con- 
 sciousness,’ which merely informs us of the phenom- 
 ena of our soul, and the strictly intellectual function 
 of the understanding, that is, the thought’s con- 
 sciousness of itself. Finally, by showing the slight 
 and fragmentary nature of our knowledge of mental 
 facts, Malebranche opened the way for the theory 
 of the unconscious life of the soul, which was to 
 receive so much attention. 
 
 Malebranche’s ethics is closely linked to the 
 rest of his system, being, like the latter, both ra- 
 
MALEBRANCHE. vies 
 
 tional and Christian. Silence your senses, imagin- 
 ation and passions, and you shall hear the pure 
 voice of the inward truth, the clear and evident 
 answers of ourcommon Master. He teaches us not 
 only what we are to believe, but also what we are 
 to do. He reveals to us, along with what is true, 
 what is beautiful and good, for he shows us the re- 
 lations of perfection among things, and the order 
 in which we should prefer them one to another. 
 Above all, he shows us the very principle of order— 
 i. e., the supremely wise and kind Being who gives 
 us existence, thought and will. When we lavish 
 upon finite beings, save by His express command, 
 the love which God intends for Himself: in a word, 
 when we disobey him, we do wrong and we are sinful. 
 Shall we say that it is God—being the only cause 
 in the universe—who acts within us, and that.we 
 are not responsible for our sins; that He has per- 
 mitted, if not decreed them? Malebranche replies 
 to this formidable objection. It is true we have no 
 existence or activity save by God’s will. His will, 
 to be sure, makes us seek our own happiness, but it 
 does not make us seek it in the gratification of the 
 senses rather than in obedience to Himself. If being 
 able to sin is a power, this power we have. We have 
 sufficient liberty not to cast on the all-perfect Being 
 the responsibility for our sins. God is just, and we 
 were all born under the curse of original sin. 
 
 We shall not follow Malebranche through his 
 theological explanations. Let us come back to the 
 purely human domain of moral things, and ob- 
 
74 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 serve that he has spoken of these with remarkable 
 aptness and penetration. This ‘‘meditative’’ man 
 is a keen observer of human nature. Those parts of 
 the Recherche de la Vérité which treat of the errors 
 caused by our imagination, our inclination, or our 
 passions are justly celebrated. Being pleasant and 
 lively, they contributed in no small degree to the 
 success of the work. They won to it a great many 
 readers who, though not engrossed in metaphysics, 
 were charmed by the originality and liveliness of the 
 author’s moral reflections. 
 
 Malebranche often opposes his ethics to that of 
 the Stoics. The latter in his eyes represent hea- 
 then pride, and their virtues are but vices to a 
 Christian soul that knows nature to be powerless 
 without God. He combats their paradoxes, he 
 maintains that pain is an evil, and that men must 
 needs seek happiness. Nor does he agree that man, 
 in his present state, being closely bound to the 
 body, can suppress its passions; and this indeed 
 is no duty, as the passions are not essentially evil. 
 Only we do not make use of our passions as we 
 should. There are beneficent passions, as, for in- 
 stance, the desire to discover the truth, to acquire 
 sufficient light to regulate our behavior, to be useful 
 to others, etc.; there are also wrong or dangerous 
 ones, as a desire to acquire reputation, to gain cer- 
 tain standing, to rise above our fellow-creatures. 
 * * * And it often happens that even our most 
 irrational passions more strongly urge us to seek 
 the truth, and afford us more pleasant consola- 
 
MALEBRANCHE. gis 
 
 tions for the pains we find therein than the most 
 righteous and rational passions would. Male- 
 branche excels in discovering the hidden motives of 
 human actions; in pointing out the means of com- 
 bating them when we must, and of turning them to 
 good account when we can. He has a most deli- 
 cate psychological sense, and his clear-sightedness 
 may even occasionally pe merciless. The passage 
 in which he perforates the vanity of Montaigne is a 
 little masterpiece. 
 
 A general view of Malebranche’s works shows 
 that he carried out the program he had set for him- 
 self. He established the conformity of his rational 
 doctrine with the Christian dogma, without the lat- 
 ter being altered, and without reason being obliged 
 to give up its rights. This agreement is not 
 brought about by dialectical tricks, by prodigious 
 feats of dexterity and suppleness, leaving upon the 
 reader’s mind an uncomfortable feeling of perplex- 
 ity. We do not wonder, as we sometimes do with 
 Leibniz, whether the author is entirely sincere, 
 ‘and whether he does not seek the reconciliation 
 merely for the sake of peace. Malebranche pro- 
 duces quite another impression, and a perfectly 
 genuine one. We feel that he clings with his whole 
 soul to his faith and his philosophy. ‘‘O! Theo- 
 dore,’’ he exclaims in one of his finest Autretiens 
 sur la Métaphysique, ‘‘how clear your principles are, 
 how solid, how worthy of a Christian! And how 
 lovely and touching they are also!’’ Malebranche’s 
 
76 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 philosophical thought is perfectly sincere. He is 
 checked by no after-thought and paralyzed by no 
 timidity. He shrinks from no correctly deduced 
 consequences. What need has he to fear, since 
 reason and the divine Word are one? Hence reason 
 cannot, if its method is sound, come to any conclu- 
 sion which may alarm a Christian conscience. 
 
 An admirable metaphysical system was the fruit 
 of such candid boldness and pious temerity. Male- 
 branche was thereby enabled to say, as a Christian, 
 a great part of what Spinoza said as a free-thinker. 
 He could, at the same time, be the idealist that had 
 not distinctly appeared in Descartes; and this he 
 was, with a fine logical passion. He paved the way 
 for Berkeley, Hume and Kant. His glory was 
 great while he lived, and his influence remained 
 considerable in the eighteenth century in France 
 and in England. In our days, his doctrine seems 
 to have sunk somewhat into the background, be- 
 tween Descartes, from whom he proceeds, and the 
 idealistic philosophers who came after him. But 
 aside from the fact that these philosophers owe to 
 him many of their leading ideas, Malebranche still 
 has the merit, rare in-all countries and unique in 
 France, of having built up a religious philosophy 
 which is not merely a philosophy inspired by 
 religion. 
 
CHAP IE Ker ht I. 
 
 PASCAL. 
 
 It seems equally difficult to decide whether to 
 include Pascal among the French philosophers or 
 not. The object of his life’s chief work is both by 
 persuasion and by demonstration to bring lost souls 
 back to the Christian belief. Philosophical spec- 
 ulation in itself has very little interest for him, 
 since unaided it cannot lead to faith. Therefore he 
 cultivates it only in so far as it can serve his purpose. 
 It is to him one of many means, not an end in itself. 
 
 Pascal has been called a skeptic. But such an 
 interpretation of the Pexsées is scarcely regarded as 
 warranted to-day. If to make human reason con- 
 scious of its own weakness and limitations, to make 
 it realize that its knowledge is but relative, and that 
 the absolute is beyond its reach, is to be skeptical, 
 there are few philosophers but deserve the name. 
 Pascal never questioned the validity of human reason 
 in its own proper domain. He even trusted it so 
 far as to believe it capable of realizing its own inad- 
 equacy when confronted with the problem of human 
 destiny and the necessity of a special revelation. 
 Pascal wants us to believe, but he is also desirous 
 of having reason acknowledge that it is necessary to 
 believe. This attitude is not that of a skeptic. 
 
 77 
 
78 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Others have termed him a mystic. It is true, 
 his passionate and ecstatic faith sometimes found 
 expression in brief mystical effusions. But nothing 
 is less mystical than Pascal’s habits of thought. 
 Mystical philosophers, as a rule, are obscure, im- 
 petuous, full of metaphors and allegories. They are 
 poor logicians; they speak the language of passion, 
 and their influence is exercised chiefly through the 
 infectious warmth of their sentiments. Pascal is 
 clearness and precision itself. The care he bestows 
 upon his style nowise impairs the correctness of his 
 thought. The ‘‘spirit of geometry’’ and the ‘‘spirit 
 of acuteness,’’ which he analyzed so well, are both 
 his. Even when he merely wishes to persuade, his 
 ideas are linked together in strictly logical sequence, 
 and the conclusions are drawn from the premises as 
 in a demonstration. One can easily imagine that 
 Pascal would have admired greatly the zeal of the 
 Christian mystics for their faith, but not their 
 mysticism. When he writes: ‘‘God apparent to 
 our hearts, not to our reason;’’ or, ‘‘The heart has 
 its own reasons which are unknown to reason’’— 
 these are not the maxims of a mystical philosophy 
 which makes the understanding subordinate to sen- 
 timent. They are, properly speaking, Christian 
 maxims, unconnected with any philosophical doc- 
 trine whatsoever. Those who are in a state of grace 
 immediately perceive, without any argument, what 
 others are unable to perceive in spite of all the 
 efforts of their reason. The ‘‘heart,’’ therefore, 
 means here the nature of man, in so far as it is re- 
 
PASCAL. 79 
 
 deemed from the corruption of sin, or is saved by 
 Jesus Christ. Nothing is so incompatible with Pas- 
 cal’s general design as adherence to a system of 
 philosophy, even a mystical philosophy. 
 
 Yet it would be inconceivable for a history of 
 French philosophy to pass by Pascal’s name in 
 silence. Though he cannot be ranked in any cate- 
 gory of philosophers, nevertheless, owing to his 
 powerful mind and to the matchless splendor of 
 his style, he exercised a deep influence on French 
 fhoucht.yikle is by \farathe «ereatestof all) those 
 moralists of whom France produced such a vast 
 number, authors of ‘‘maxims,’’ /ensées, ‘“‘charac- 
 ters,’ whose chief aim was the analysis of the 
 human heart and of the working of human passions. 
 He rises above them by the whole height of an intel- 
 ligence not unequal to the most arduous problems 
 in science and philosophy; and if he did not inves- 
 tigate these problems thoroughly, if frequently he 
 cast upon them only a cursory glance, it was be- 
 cause his faith made it an imperative duty for him 
 to employ his genius in other directions. 
 
 In this respect the history of his mind is an in- 
 structive one. ‘‘I devoted much time to the study 
 of the abstract sciences,’’ he says in the Pensées, 
 ‘‘and the little information to be found in them 
 made me sick of them.’’ But this was not the only 
 reason for his choice. If he abandoned his geo- 
 metrical and physical researches for religion, it was 
 not merely because what we know of these sciences 
 
80 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 is nothing in comparison with that of which we 
 shall be forever ignorant; it was also because he 
 deemed such an occupation not the most suitable 
 one for a Christian. Malebranche frequently ridi- 
 cules men of science who spend their lives at a 
 telescope watching the course of a star, or become 
 lost in the depths of erudition in order to elucidate 
 a point in ancient history, but who, during that 
 time, forget to study themselves, and even to live. 
 Pascal also thinks such an occupation a vain and 
 futile one. He adds that it is dangerous, and in 
 some cases even sinful. Curiosity or a craving for 
 knowledge, as well as lust, or a craving for enjoy- 
 ment, is a consequence of sin; and though the vices 
 engendered by the former may be less ignoble than 
 those resulting from the latter, the temptation is all 
 the more to be dreaded, and they lead the soul no 
 less surely into perdition. 
 
 No science of outward objects can console me in 
 times of affliction for my ignorance of morals; but 
 the science of morals can always console me for my 
 ignorance of objective sciences. By “‘a science of 
 morals’’ Pascal most certainly did not mean the 
 moral science of philosophers. The latter science 
 was never able to discover more than partial and 
 incomplete aspects of the truth; it mistook these 
 for the entire truth, and therefore drew false con- 
 clusions from them. Pascal meant to designate by 
 the term such knowledge of himself as man can 
 obtain by reflecting upon his own nature, his piace 
 in the universe and the destiny he may expect; for 
 
PASCAL. SI 
 
 such reflection, carefully followed out, leads him to 
 the threshold of the true religion. This is the only 
 science of real importance to man, the only one 
 which bears upon what is indispensable for him to 
 know. It is only because we know not how to 
 study it that we seek after other things. Those 
 who have faith are the happiest of men; for not 
 only are they in no need of human science, but 
 when they do apply their minds to it, they deal 
 with it as it should be dealt with, and far from its 
 being a danger to them, they turn it to the advan- 
 tage of religion. Those who have no faith, and 
 yet are not sunk in stupid indifference, should try 
 to understand themselves, and if unable to do so, 
 then to discover why this is impossible for them. 
 This is the only human means to bring them nearer 
 to salvation. 
 
 We shall therefore distinguish two periods in Pas- 
 cal’s life: the first, in which he busied himself with 
 mathematical and physical sciences, and the sec- 
 ond, in which, being thoroughly convinced of the 
 vanity of these sciences, he confined himself to the 
 science of morals. 
 
 As a natural philosopher Pascal was one of the 
 most pronounced in his advocacy of the rights of 
 experience and reason as against the method of 
 authority. The fragment of the Traité du Vide ex- 
 presses, in a wonderfully eloquent style, ideas which 
 Bacon, Descartes and many others had previously 
 advocated. Pascal's method of demonstrating them 
 is decisive; by his very analysis of the notions of 
 
82 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 science and of antiquity he determines in what case 
 and in what measure respect is due to the opinions 
 of the ancients. 
 
 Here Pascal even throws light upon a point 
 already touched by Bacon, but neglected by Des- 
 cartes. In laying down the first rule of his method, 
 ‘‘To hold nothing as true unless one clearly knows 
 it to be such,’’ Descartes based his reasons entirely 
 upon the abstract idea of science and upon the 
 model of mathematics. To him these were suffi- 
 cient grounds for regarding everything that preceded 
 him as null and void, and for ignoring tradition 
 absolutely. He proposed to build up a philosoph- 
 ical system as if none had ever existed before him. 
 Pascal, on the contrary, analyzes this confused idea 
 of tradition, and derives thence the idea of progress. 
 He represents mankind in its entirety as a single 
 man living forever and learning continually. Had 
 not Descartes been so wholly taken up with his 
 desire to abolish scholastic philosophy, he also 
 might have noticed, were it but in geometry and as- 
 tronomy, the onward march of scientific knowledge, 
 which is the most luminous illustration of progress 
 that can be obtained. Pascal's idea is a remarkable 
 one, inasmuch as it implies the continuity of prog- 
 ress. We shall find it reviving in the eighteenth 
 century, under various forms, until the natural sci- 
 ences, and particularly biology, substitute for this 
 rather elementary notion of uninterrupted progress 
 the more complex conceptions of evolution and 
 adaptation. 
 
PASCAL. 83 
 
 Pascal’s views of scientific method betray at 
 almost every point the influence of Descartes. Like 
 Descartes, he has but little esteem for formal logic; 
 true logic is to be found in mathematics. A method 
 of avoiding error is sought by every one. Logicians 
 profess to know the way to it, but geometricians 
 alone reach it, and real demonstrations do not exist 
 outside their science and its attendant branches. 
 Geometry therefore is the only true science, and this 
 distinction it owes to the ‘‘order’’ which it follows. 
 (Descartes had said similarly, ‘‘The method consists 
 wholly in the order to be observed,’’ etc.) Lastly, 
 even as mathematics furnished Descartes with the 
 idea of his philosophical method, so geometry sug- 
 gested to Pascal that of a “‘still loftier and more 
 finished’’ one. But, unlike Descartes, who thought 
 he had found the demonstration of the true philos- 
 ophy, Pascal believes that a perfect method is be- 
 yond the reach of man. Geometry has to take for 
 granted the definitions from which it proceeds and 
 the axioms on which it rests, whereas a perfect 
 procedure would define and demonstrate everything. 
 Geometricians, however, are quite justified in not 
 demonstrating that two quantities which are equal 
 to a third are equal to each other, and in not giv- 
 ing a definition of space, time, and number, for 
 such explanations as they might give of these no- 
 tions would create obscurity rather than enlighten- 
 ment. It is sufficient if their definitions and axioms 
 be so perfectly clear and evident as absolutely to 
 preclude denial. But still it is an imperfection in 
 
84 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 their science that these things have to be taken for 
 granted. 
 
 Thus geometry, although the least imperfect of 
 human sciences, can demonstrate nothing save by 
 admitting undemonstrable principles, and define 
 nothing save by using undefinable terms. The 
 question, whence these principles and notions are 
 derived is a serious subject of discussion among phil- 
 osophers. Some ascribe their origin to experience, 
 others to the independent activity of the mind. 
 According to Pascal, these principles spring from 
 the “‘heart;’’ that is, we believe.in them instinc- 
 tively, and such a belief is as firm as any which 
 reasoning can engender inus. The “‘heart’’ tells us 
 that there are three dimensions in space, and that 
 the succession of numbers is infinite. Principles we 
 feel, propositions we infer, and both with certainty, 
 although by different means. And it would be as 
 absurd for reason to ask the heart for proofs of its 
 first principles before accepting them as for the 
 heart to ask reason to feel all the propositions it 
 demonstrates before conceding their correctness. 
 
 This is therefore no drawback to geometry. It 
 merely takes for granted that we know what is meant 
 by the words motion, number, space. Without stop- 
 ping for useless definitions, it penetrates into the 
 very nature and discovers the wonderful properties 
 of these three things, “‘which,’’ says Pascal, speaking 
 as a true Cartesian, ‘‘comprise the whole universe.’’ 
 But if we try to carry our reflection higher, and to 
 apply it to these principles themselves, we are 
 
PASCAL. 85 
 
 stopped at the very first step and obliged to confess 
 our ignorance. ‘‘Our soul is placed in our body, 
 where it finds number, time, dimension; it calls 
 this nature or necessity, and cannot think other- 
 wise. Seldom was Pascal more profound than in 
 these few words. He outlines here the idea of 
 the relativity of knowledge. He intimates that 
 the necessity of natural laws may possibly be only 
 the necessity of the laws of our own thought, and 
 that these fundamental laws, both of thought and 
 of nature, may also, in some way unknown to us, 
 proceed from our human constitution. Therefore, 
 ‘‘what goes beyond geometry is beyond our reach.’’ 
 
 Accordingly, not only are the sensible qualities 
 of bodies relative to the sentient mind (as Descartes 
 had already shown in contrasting sensation with 
 the knowledge of the understanding, which sees 
 things as they really are), but this very knowledge 
 of the understanding cannot be looked upon as 
 absolute; it also is relative to the intelligent sub- 
 ject. For our most urgent reason for acknowledg- 
 ing the truth of its principles is that we cannot 
 think without them. Kant says, afterward, that, 
 by the very nature of our understanding, things-in- 
 themselves are beyond our reach, and that all our 
 knowledge is confined to the world of phenomena. 
 Pascal is certainly very far from anticipating the 
 Critique of Pure Reason, and he doubtless would 
 have seen no necessity for undertaking so enormous 
 a work, but he nevertheless touched here upon 
 one of its most important problems. 
 
 mh) 
 
86 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 The critique of the faculties of the human un- 
 derstanding, which was not in Pascal's plan, is partly 
 represented in his Pensées by the consideration of the 
 Infinite, the idea of which plays an important part 
 in his philosophy. According to him, we know that 
 the Infinite exists, but we are ignorant of its nature. 
 We know the existence of infinite number and of 
 infinite space, but we are quite unable to form con- 
 ceptions of them. We know, at least, that the finite 
 is incommensurable with the infinite. Therefore, 
 man, being finite, has no standard for the idea of 
 the infinite; is lost and swallowed up in it. In this 
 infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere 
 and the circumference nowhere—where do we 
 stand? The question is of course unanswerable. 
 ‘‘For what is man in nature? Nothing as com- 
 pared with the infinite, everything as compared 
 with nothingness—a mean between nothing and 
 everything. Being thus utterly powerless to com- 
 prehend the extremes, for him the end and the 
 principle of things are forever wrapped in impene- 
 trable mystery. He is incapable, in fine, of con- 
 ceiving either the nothingness from which he is 
 derived, or the infinite in which he is ingulfed.’’ 
 
 From this it follows that Nature is as incompre- 
 hensible as God Himself who created it. It is 
 therefore useless to reduce the science of nature to 
 the basis of geometry, as Descartes does (Pascal does 
 not question here the legitimacy of the procedure); 
 it is useless to establish a geometrical ‘‘order,’’ as 
 the most perfect that man can attain to. It must 
 
PASCAL. 87 
 
 still be admitted that between infinite space and the 
 space which we conceive there is a great gulf fixed, 
 and that this clearest of all our sciences is based on 
 principles which we do not understand. And if, 
 instead of reflecting upon the object of science, we 
 reflect upon the mind which makes science, the 
 notion of the infinite brings us to the same confes- 
 sion; for we then perceive that our understanding, 
 in the order of intelligence, holds the same place as 
 our body in the order of nature. 
 
 This parallelism (a genuinely Cartesian one) in- 
 volves conclusions which Pascal draws at once. 
 Even as our body is but an imperceptible speck in 
 comparison with infinite space, so our understand- 
 ing, in spite of all its exertions, is infinitely remote 
 from the perfect comprehension of things. Whether 
 contemplating them from above or from below, it is 
 still equally far from the end. We are sequestered 
 in an unknown region of the universe, from which 
 it were sheer madness to think of escaping. We 
 are likewise confined to a certain degree of intelli- 
 gence, above which our human faculties prevent 
 our rising. In the range of thought, as well as of 
 Space, we are a mean between nothing and every- 
 thing, infinitely remote both from lifeless, unthink- 
 ing matter and from that Absolute Thought which 
 comprehends Being while creating it. Our knowl- 
 edge is subject to certain conditions. Man’s pre- 
 tension to absolute knowledge can spring only from 
 an absurd—one might almost say, infinite—pre- 
 sumptuousness. 
 
88 MODERN PHILCSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 If, therefore, in speaking of science, Pascal is 
 now sympathetic and admiring, now scornful and 
 derisive, the diversity of his language is easily ex- 
 plained, and we need not suppose that Pascal, after 
 admitting the validity of human reason in the earlier 
 part of his life, despaired of it in the latter and 
 abandoned himself to skepticism. It is sufficient to 
 observe that in some passages Pascal views science 
 from the standpoint of the finite and in others from 
 that of the infinite. In the first passages, when 
 considering science from a purely human point 
 of view, he finds it to be logically unassailable (at 
 least as regards geometry) and he extends this 
 praise to “‘what imitates it,’’ probably alluding to 
 a philosophy of the nature of Descartes’s, which vies 
 with mathematics in precision. But when consider- 
 ing science and philosophy from the point of view 
 of the infinite, their vanity, weakness and _ useless- 
 ness appear obvious to him directly, for there is 
 no proportion between the human mind, which is 
 finite, and the infinite object with which science is 
 concerned. Thus Pascal may say, without reference 
 to moral or religious considerations: ‘‘ Philosophy 
 (that is the science of nature) is not worth an hour’s 
 pains. “ieee elo write against thosemvho pur 
 sue the sciences * * * to scoff at philosophy 
 —that is to be the true philosopher.’’ 
 
 For the same reasons, and without being self-con- 
 tradictory, Pascal shows himself alternately favorable 
 and hostile to Cartesianism; yet this is no reason 
 for inferring that he has changed his opinion. If 
 
PASCAL. 89 
 
 there must be a science of physics, he evidently 
 prefers that of Descartes to that of Aristotle. 
 What he thinks ridiculous is the expectation of 
 attaining to a complete and definitive explanation of 
 nature. Therefore, he does not hesitate to praise 
 the Cartesian doctrine when speaking of it as a geo- 
 metrician or natural philosopher; he even admires 
 the cogzto and the conclusions inferred from it by 
 Descartes. But when he compares this philosophy 
 with the infinity of nature, which is the object of 
 its study, he finds it no less bold and presumptuous 
 than the others. The more closely he considers the 
 infinite, the less interested he becomes in geometry 
 and natural sciences; not that they seem to him less 
 true than they did before, but that he sees the 
 vanity of them more clearly. Another science 
 attracts him—the science of man, in which all his 
 dearest concerns are at stake. 
 
 As we know, the philosophers of old achieved 
 no true science of man, or of morals. Pascal, 
 however, was far from rejecting as worthless all that 
 they had said on the subject. Two sects appeared 
 to him particularly worthy of esteem, for each of 
 them had partly descried the truth: the Stoics, rep- 
 resented by Epictetus, and the Epicureans, repre- 
 sented by Montaigne. 
 
 Epictetus knew the duties of man admirably 
 well. He repeatedly stated that man’s only study 
 and desire should be to recognize and obey the will 
 of God. He wished man to be persuaded that God 
 
go MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 governs all things with justice, to submit to Him 
 willingly, and always to have before his eyes the 
 thought of death and of the most unbearable misfor- 
 tunes, thus triumphing over mean thoughts and 
 immoderate desires. But after speaking of the 
 duties of man in language such as would befit a 
 Christian, Epictetus fails to acknowledge man’s 
 powerlessness. He is carried away by pride. He 
 falls into serious error by presuming too much on 
 man’s strength. He does not perceive that the 
 nature of man, alone and unaided, is incapable of 
 fulfilling its duty toward God. He boasts of man’s 
 liberty, whereas he is really a slave to sin; he extols 
 man’s power, likening it to that of the gods, whereas 
 he has been corrupt and miserable ever since the 
 original fall. And so this admirable system of ethics 
 leads to doctrines of ‘‘diabolical pride.’’ 
 
 Montaigne falls into the opposite error. This 
 philosopher has an incomparable faculty of making 
 men realize their own weakness. He overthrows 
 by imperceptible degrees all that is looked upon by 
 men as most certain, not in order to establish the 
 contrary, for certitude is his especial aversion, but 
 merely to show that, since appearances favor equally 
 both conclusions, we cannot possibly know whereon 
 to ground our belief. He shcws how reason lends 
 itself to all purposes and how hollow its principles, 
 even those which are regarded as firmest and most 
 natural, shows the errors into which man is inevi- 
 tably allured by his imagination, the tyranny exer- 
 cised over him by custom and example, and his 
 
PASCAL. gI 
 
 ridiculous self-assumption. Thus reason, being 
 ‘irretrievably foiled by its own weapons,”’ is re- 
 duced to silence, and so abased that it can no longer 
 decide whether it is superior or equal to the instinct 
 of animals. 
 
 But Montaigne, too, thinks like a heathen. He 
 shows admirably man’s natural helplessness, which 
 Epictetus ignored; but with a laxity doubly shame- 
 ful in a Christian, he neglects the duties of man, 
 which Epictetus knew so well. He follows custom 
 and instinct, and thus, even as the Stoic is led astray 
 by his pride, the Epicurean is led astray by his sloth. 
 
 Would, then, the solution consist in accepting 
 both Epictetus’s and Montaigne’s conclusions, 
 merely placing them in juxtaposition? Shall we 
 obtain the true science of morals by regarding the 
 duties of man as Epictetus did, and his helplessness 
 as Montaigne did? No; such a solution is impos- 
 sible. Montaigne does not complete Epictetus; 
 he directly contradicts him. Placing them together 
 would result in nothing except strife and mutual 
 destruction; for as the one has established certitude 
 and the other doubt, and the one has depicted the 
 grandeur of man and the other his weakness, both 
 their errors and their truths are mutually nullified. 
 To reach an acceptable solution, we must discover 
 a higher point‘of view, from which the contradictory 
 elements will be reconcilable. 
 
 In spite of the diversity of the problems in ques- 
 tion the method here followed .by Pascal offers a 
 striking analogy to that employed afterward by 
 
g2 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Kant in overcoming the antinomies of pure reason. 
 In the third antinomy especially, Kant shows that 
 reason cannot decide between two conflicting propo- 
 sitions. Reason cannot give up the idea that there 
 are free causes in the universe, as for instance, 
 man’s will; but it also does not think it possible to 
 give up the idea of the necessary concatenation of 
 causes and effects. The interest of morals forbids 
 that liberty should be sacrificed; the interest of sci- 
 ence demands determinism. How does Kant over- 
 come the antinomy? By showing that the two 
 statements are not absolutely contradictory, but 
 are only so ina certain sense, and that, from differ- 
 ent points of view, they are both true. Jz time it 
 is true that every phenomenon must needs be the 
 result of antecedent phenomena. But out of time 
 the law of causality is no longer necessary, and 
 nothing justifies us in asserting of ‘‘things-in-them- 
 selves’’ what we know to be true as regards phe- 
 nomena. So that determinism remains true in the 
 world of experience, while liberty also is possible in 
 that of absolute reality. The antinomy is overcome. 
 
 In the same way the moral science of philoso- 
 phers, according to Pascal, results in a seemingly 
 insoluble antinomy. Mancannot be incurably help- 
 less, as Montaigne says, and at the same time have 
 duties imposed upon him such as are pointed out 
 by Epictetus; yet both of them were right. What, 
 then, shall raise us to the higher point of view from 
 which this contradiction disappears? Reason by 
 itself is unable to do so. Its most strenuous exer- 
 
PASCAL. 93 
 
 tions may carry it as far as Epictetus or Montaigne, 
 but not beyond them. This the Gospel alone can 
 do. It reconciles these contradictions by a purely 
 divine art; and by uniting all that is true, and by 
 rejecting all that is false, makes of the result a truly 
 celestial body of wisdom, wherein the opposites 
 which to human doctrine were irreconcilable are 
 found to agree. And the reason of this success is 
 that the philosophers of the world have always put 
 contrary things together in one and the same category, 
 the one attributing man’s grandeur to nature, and 
 the other his weakness to the same source—a 
 formal contradiction; whereas faith has always 
 taught us to place them zz different categories, attrib- 
 uting all infirmities to nature, and all perfections 
 to the grace of God. Man in the helpless state 
 conceived by Montaigne is man fallen and cor- 
 rupted by sin. Man able to fulfill the duties con- 
 ceived by Epictetus is another man, regenerated 
 and redeemed by Christ, supported by God’s grace. 
 Here also the antinomy is overcome. 
 
 There remains, however, an essential difference 
 between the case of Kant and that of Pascal. 
 Never for a moment does Kant abandon the ground 
 of philosophy, and the elements of his solution are 
 supplied to him by his own Crztigue of Pure Rea- 
 son. But according to Pascal the antinomy of the 
 science of morals would have remained forever in- 
 soluble, had not God condescended to enlighten us. 
 Pascal abandons the domain of reason and appeals 
 to faith. In order to justify such a serious step he 
 
94 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 had to show its absolute necessity; in other words, 
 he had to demonstrate that the antinomy could not 
 possibly be solved in any other manner. The science 
 of man must appear as evident and easy to grasp 
 from Pascal’s Christian point of view as it is absurd 
 and unintelligible from any other point of view. 
 
 In this sense, Pascal’s Entretzen avec M. de Sact 
 sur Epictéte et Montaigne may be looked upon as 
 a sketch, afterward to become a completed picture 
 in the Pensées. We see him, in this latter work, 
 expatiating on the grandeur and misery of man with 
 such intensity that the strokes never seem to him 
 strong enough or the contrast sufficiently conveyed 
 to the reader. ‘‘What a chimera man is, what a 
 strange monster, what a chaos, what a bundle of 
 contradictions, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, 
 and a miserable worm; a depository of truth, anda 
 sink of uncertainty and error; at once the glory and 
 themscum of theyuniverse!l, gia wobec, extens 
 himself, I humble him; if he abases himself, I exalt 
 him, and always I contradict him, until he compre- 
 hends that he is an incomprehensible monster.’’ 
 Dhen, “butwonly \then,| couldyePascal tpraposeor 
 rather impose, the only solution which, according 
 to him, was to throw light into this darkness: 
 ‘‘Hearken unto God.’’ 
 
 Thus does theology become, in Pascal’s eyes, 
 the center of all truths. His recourse to a super- 
 natural light in order to acquaint men with their 
 nature and destiny has in itself nothing extraor- 
 dinary. It was aconstant habit with the Fathers 
 
PASCAL. 95 
 
 of the Church, with Augustine, for instance, a 
 favorite author among Pascal's friends, the Jansen- 
 ists. The transition from philosophy to theology 
 is also found in Malebranche, though in another 
 sense, and something of the same kind has often 
 occurred in the religious philosophy of Germany. 
 But Augustine speaks as a bishop and in the name 
 of faith; Malebranche rises by imperceptible degrees 
 from the truths of reason to those of religion; while 
 in Germany metaphysics and Protestant theology, 
 as a rule, lend each other mutual support and ex- 
 change whatever enlightenment they may have. 
 Pascal's way of proceeding is quite different, unlike 
 any other, and singularly bold. Man’s nature, he 
 says in substance, being an insoluble enigma, Reve- 
 lation alone gives us the key to it, and that through 
 the dogma of the Fall and the Redemption. But 
 in its turn this key is another enigma, no less in- 
 comprehensible than the first. For nothing can be 
 more offensive to reason than that the sin of the first 
 man should involve beings who, having been quite 
 remote from that source, seem incapable of having 
 shared in it. ‘*‘What could be more contrary to our 
 puny conceptions of justice than to damn for eternity 
 a child without will of its own, for a sin committed 
 six thousand years before its birth?’’ Nothing 
 could shock us more than such a doctrine; and yet, 
 but for that mystery, the most incomprehensible of 
 all, we should be incomprehensible to ourselves. 
 ‘Man is more inconceivable without that mystery 
 than that mystery is inconceivable to man.’’ 
 
96 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 It is easy to understand why the defenders of 
 the Christian belief who came after Pascal did not 
 dare to follow his process of demonstration. They 
 preferred more prudent courses. Pascal leaves 
 us to choose between a mystery offensive to our 
 reason and distasteful to our conscience, and the 
 impossibility without the help of that mystery of 
 understanding the nature of man. This is putting 
 timorous souls into a state of terrible perplexity; 
 and it is to be feared that most of them would 
 come to a decision opposite to that assumed by 
 Pascal as the most rational. 
 
 From Pascal’s strenuous exertions to prove that 
 we must admit a supernatural revelation, and that 
 but for Jesus Christ man would be both helpless and 
 incomprehensible, we can imagine what he thought 
 of ‘natural/@religion. °» «Thesé stwoy swords) he 
 asserted, clash painfully when coupled; one might 
 as well deny religion outright as to speak of natural 
 religion. Atheism and deism are two things almost 
 equally detested by the Christian religion. If you 
 maintain that you can know and serve God by the 
 sole power of your reason, without any mediator, 
 redemption then becomes superfluous. You then 
 no longer believe that Christ came down upon earth 
 to redeem us from the sin of Adam; you relapse 
 into the blindness of heathenism; you are no longer 
 a Christian. 
 
 Pascal therefore looks at the connection between 
 reason and faith quite otherwise than Leibniz. He 
 
PASCAL. Q7 
 
 cannot admit of any conformity between reason and 
 faith whereby each, following a different path, 
 arrives at the same common center—the possession 
 of truth and the worship of God. Were it so, one 
 of them might possibly be sufficient if the other 
 were lacking: faith without reason with the vulgar, 
 reason without faith in the philosopher. Such was 
 perhaps the notion of Leibniz; it was surely that 
 of many in the eighteenth century. Pascal looks 
 upon such a thought as untenable and impious. To 
 such a doctrine, which ignores the weakness of rea- 
 son, one might justly oppose the arguments of the 
 skeptics. Pyrrhonism will serve to correct this 
 excessive presumptuousness, and to show that ‘‘rea- 
 son confounds dogmatic philosophers.’’ In fact, 
 faith and reason do not converge to a common cen- 
 ter. Reason reaches only to a certain point, which 
 it cannot pass. Faith alone carries us beyond it. 
 ‘“We must be able to doubt when necessary, to be 
 positive when necessary, and to submit when neces- 
 sary ;’ and in still more explicit terms: ‘‘One should 
 have the three following qualities: One should be a 
 Pyrrhonian, a geometrician, and a submissive Chris- 
 tian.’’ Now, there is nothing to prevent a deist 
 from being a geometrician, but he is surely not a 
 Pyrrhonian, and it is in vain for him to assert his 
 respect for revealed religion; he is no longer a sub- 
 missive Christian, for he can dispense with Christ. 
 Thence it follows that the proofs of the existence 
 of God given by philosophers are in themselves far 
 from sufficient. ‘‘I marvel,’’ says Pascal, ‘‘at the 
 
98 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 boldness with which these persons dare to speak of 
 God when they address the impious.’’ Prove 
 divinity by the works of nature! Why, such a 
 proof, even though the most accessible of all and 
 the only one that can produce anything like a vivid 
 impression upon souls, has no validity except for 
 those who have already looked upon nature with 
 the eyes of faith. To others it gives the impression 
 that the proofs of religion are frail in the extreme, 
 and nothing is more calculated to make them scorn 
 it. As to the metaphysical arguments, properly 
 so called, such as those given by Descartes, they 
 are so complicated as to have little or no immediate 
 efficacy; and granting they should prove effective 
 with some people, their efficacy would last only so 
 long as the demonstration was before them; an 
 hour later the same people would be filled with mis- 
 givings lest they had been mistaken. In a word, 
 without Jesus Christ these proofs are useless and 
 barren. 
 
 The light of nature therefore reveals to us neither 
 the existence of God, nor, still less, His nature. 
 Should Pascal concede otherwise, he would under- 
 mine his own doctrine.’ Those who maintain that 
 reason can rise unaided to a knowledge of the true 
 God lay the way open to unbelief, whether inten- 
 tionally or not, and are no less harmful to religion 
 than her open enemies. This is one of the reasons 
 why Pascal distrusted the philosophy of Descartes. 
 He criticised it even for presuming to give a complete 
 explanation of everything in the universe by the 
 
PASCAL. 99 
 
 working of natural laws alone. ‘‘God has spun the 
 world into motion, after which we have nothing 
 more to do with Him.’’ No less strongly does 
 
 Pascal object to the claim that one can give demon- 
 strations of the existence of God and the spirituality 
 of the soul as conclusive as those of geometry. But 
 he refuses to pass criticism on these demonstrations. 
 What would be the use of wasting his time thus? 
 it awouldim bes sufficientaguiy necessary, © tovcrefer 
 Descartes to Montaigne and the Pyrrhonian phil- 
 osophers. 
 
 In the eyes of a man who has realized how fool- 
 ish is the pride of our reason, and who acknowl- 
 edges that the condition of man would be incom- 
 prehensible but for the dogma of the fall, reality 
 presents itself in the shape of three distinct 
 ‘ orders,’ overlying but not touching one another. 
 In the lower ‘‘order,’’ or sphere, lies the world of 
 bodies; in the middle, the world of spirits; at the 
 summit, the world of Christian love. From all 
 bodies taken together one cannot produce even the 
 smallest thought; it is impossible, for thought be- 
 longs to another sphere. From all bodies and spirits 
 together one cannot extract the least manifesta- 
 tion of true love; it is impossible, for love belongs 
 to another order, a supernatural order. Is not this 
 Wworder ‘of ‘love’ identicalgwith ithe) cityof (God, 
 which figures in Leibniz under the name of ‘‘The 
 Realm of Grace,’’ and in Kant under that of ‘‘The 
 Realm of Ends?’’ No doubt it is, but with one 
 reservation, viz., that Leibniz and Kant arrived at 
 
 6 
 
I0O MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 the result by efforts of pure reason, whereas Pascal 
 reached it by the self-renunciation of reason. ‘‘The 
 crowning act of reason is to acknowledge that a 
 multitude of things are beyond its reach. It is 
 weak, unless it reaches this conclusion. And if 
 natural things are beyond its reach, what of super- 
 natural things?’ Therefore, no true love can exist 
 without God’s grace. Happy are those chosen by 
 God to receive it! All that man can do is to try 
 to make himself worthy of it; and even then his 
 endeavors will be fruitless unless pleasing to God. 
 Love sHimjRobey’ Him, ‘prayiton Himyinvorder 0 
 obtain faith. God alone can put His divine truths 
 into the soul, and in the way that pleases Him. 
 
 Pascal’s method was that of persuasive demon- 
 stration, which he adopted after mature meditation, 
 and from which he never swerved. The criticism 
 of the dogmatic and Pyrrhonian doctrines, the pic- 
 ture of man’s incomprehensible condition, of his 
 grandeur and his misery, the examination of social 
 ethics, the analysis of the proofs of Christianity, all 
 tended to one object—namely, to showing that belief 
 is rational, and that, if it knows its own nature, it 
 finally submits to revelation. But the Pensées have 
 been handed down to us in a fragmentary and unfin- 
 ished form; and though one can restore the leading 
 ideas and even the main lines of the plan followed 
 and desired by the author, one can likewise regard 
 the book as a simple collection of reflections and 
 maxims without reference to their hidden links and 
 
PASGAL: IOL 
 
 connections, and so emphasise only certain parts of 
 them to the relative neglect of the others. This has 
 been done, for instance, by those who, being chiefly 
 impressed by what Pascal says of the weakness of 
 human reason, have mistaken him for a skeptic. 
 Thus, also, the Pensées have often been read for 
 their own sake, without much regard for the end 
 which Pascal wished them to serve. And thus it 
 has happened also that their influence, which has 
 been great, has not fulfilled the intentions of their 
 author, and by this not unparalleled irony of fate 
 the great apologist of the Christian religion has sup- 
 plied its enemies with a whole arsenal of weapons. 
 
 His very theory of the reason, which he considers 
 as impotent beyond certain limits, was in itself dan- 
 gerous to the cause he wished to uphold. It was 
 quite a different thing from Montaigne’s skepticism. 
 The latter was a means employed by Montaigne to 
 combat fanaticism and the evils engendered by it; 
 but it was only a means, and did not prevent Mon- 
 taigne from preserving a certain number of moral 
 convictions to which he was wedded; the argu- 
 ments on which that skepticism was grounded had 
 nothing original about them. Pascal’s more pro- 
 found genius raised the question of the legitimate 
 use of human reason itself, and sought to fix its 
 limits. On the one hand, he acknowledges the 
 value of positive science (provided it admits the 
 derived nature of its principles), and in this he is 
 unlike the traditional and improbable skeptic in- 
 vented by philosophers. But, on the other hand, 
 
102 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 he affirms that ‘‘what goes beyond geometry is be- 
 yond our reach,’’ and also that we know that science 
 derives its principles from a superior domain, access 
 to which is denied us. We are aware of the exist- 
 ence of the infinite, and ignorant of its nature, and 
 we must be forever ignorant of it, since there is no 
 common scale between us and the infinite. Pascal 
 here opened the door to agnosticism, of which our 
 century has beheld numerous and various forms. 
 Now agnosticism may be, and often is, found associ- 
 ated with religious tendencies; but it may also be 
 antagonistic to religion. At any rate, it is nowise 
 connected especially with the Christian belief or the 
 Roman Catholic dogma. History shows that the 
 abandonment of rational metaphysics has not been 
 beneficial to revealed religion. 
 
 Thus, as regards the relations between reason 
 and faith, which interested Pascai so deeply, the 
 result of his exertions ran diametrically counter to 
 his purpose. When he says that the Christian 
 dogma is a vain folly in the eyes of the world; that 
 the original sin condemning thousands of guiltless 
 beings to eternal damnation is revolting to our sense 
 of justice, the philosophers of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury are loud in approval. Many also approve 
 when Pascal calls the philosophical proofs of the 
 existence of God inadequate to convince hardened 
 atheists. They readily grant that reason is one 
 thing, that faith is another thing, and that there is 
 no natural connection between the two. But when 
 he thence infers that one must be a Christian, he is 
 
PASCAL. 103 
 
 no longer followed. His premises are retained and 
 his conclusions dropped, to the great advantage of 
 unbelief and of natural religion, which he detested 
 almost equally. 
 
 It was next in the order of Pascal’s method of 
 demonstration to prove, as Montaigne had done, 
 that man’s reason is powerless to regulate his con- 
 duct, and that custom and prejudice alone regulate 
 morals. He went about this proof with such 
 earnestness and energy that even his friends were 
 dismayed, and did not dare to publish this part of 
 the FPensées without extenuating, in almost every 
 sentence, the boldness of his thought and the harsh- 
 ness of his words. Yet there remained in it reflec- 
 tions on justice, on law, on property, on social dis- 
 tinctions and privileges, and even on sovereignty, 
 the daring of which was not surpassed in the eigh- 
 teenth century. Pascal concluded that all these 
 social institutions are mere conventions, indefensible 
 by reason. Not being able to make the just strong, 
 men have made the strong just. These conventions, 
 though not respectable in themselves, become so in 
 the life of a Christian; so that the frame of the 
 social order indirectly serves to prove the truth of 
 Christianity, since on this truth the validity of the 
 social order depends. But the philosophers of the 
 eighteenth century neither were nor wished to be 
 Christians; they merely gathered from Pascal’s argu- 
 ments that social institutions were a heap of rubbish, 
 nonsense and injustice. 
 
 Lastly, admitting no other direct proofs of super- 
 
104 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 natural religion than supernatural facts, Pascal 
 grounds his faith on prophecies and _ miracles. 
 ‘Were it not for miracles,’’ he says, ‘‘I should not 
 be .a. Christian, A dubiousisaying, ibecausessit 
 was liable to be interpreted quite otherwise than 
 Pascal intended. Pascal does not mean that if 
 miracles appear incredible to a man he is thereby 
 exempted from being a Christian. He means, on 
 the contrary, that whoever has faith finds in mir- 
 acles the means to explain his faith, to himself at 
 least. He means to say that prophecies and miracles 
 prove the truth of Christianity, and if the demon- 
 stration has no effect on certain minds, it is because 
 God has willed them to remain blind. It is not be- 
 cause the demonstration is insufficient; it is because 
 they are not in a fit state to receive it. 
 
 Still Pascal was here again opening a dangerous 
 path. Hitherto the discussion of the outward 
 proofs of Christianity had seldom extended beyond 
 the world of theologians. Pascal was among the first 
 to transfer it to the public realm of philosophers 
 and men of letters. He was as poorly equipped 
 for such a discussion as can be imagined, though it 
 is true that very few men in his time were better pre- 
 pared. The supposed divine nature of the sacred 
 texts had prevented even the thought of a critical 
 examination wofsithem... Buti the), adversarieseior 
 Christianity, although rather inexperienced in this 
 style of criticism, soon felt that they might take 
 advantage of the example set by Pascal. The part 
 played in their controversy by the discussion of 
 
PASCAL. 105 
 
 prophecies and miracles is sufficiently well known. 
 Voltaire was inexhaustible on the subject of sacred 
 history. And we may question whether the scien- 
 tific, disinterested and impartial exegesis which came 
 later did not deal an even heavier blow than these 
 gibes and taunts to the beliefs which Pascal would 
 fain have strengthened! 
 
 Sometimes unwittingly, Pascal had thrown into 
 all his writings, and especially into his Pensées, seeds 
 which were to grow and bear fruit in the future. 
 He undesignedly marked out for himself a place in 
 the history of French philosophy. This cannot be 
 asserted of certain other Christian thinkers who by 
 their position in the church were more closely con- 
 fined to tradition. Neither Bossuet nor Fénelon 
 ever felt tempted to depart from it. Fénelon, in- 
 deed, entered upon a famous quarrel in defense of 
 certain mystics, but the debate was only remotely 
 connected with philosophy, and remained exclu- 
 sively a theological one. If Fénelon, by his polit- 
 ical schemes and by his partiality for social reforms, 
 inaugurates the eighteenth century, it is after all 
 from a statesman’s point of view. When he tries 
 to be a philosopher he is a follower of Descartes 
 and the latter’s enthusiastic disciple, and if he ceases 
 to follow him, he occasionally goes astray. Thus, 
 when he undertook to refute Spinoza, he opposed 
 his doctrine by one far more akin to real Spinozism 
 than the imaginary Spinozism which he was com- 
 batting. 
 
106 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 As to Bossuet, he is admirably serene in his pos- 
 session of truth. He therefore does not seek after 
 what he has already received from a divine source. 
 His philosophical works proper are important only 
 as they show us one of the forms which have been 
 assumed by the reconciliation of Cartesianism with 
 the doctrine taught by the Church. His Duzscours 
 sur l’ Histoire Universelle shows both the extent of 
 his mind and the limitations within which he moved; 
 as, for example, when he saw in the history of the 
 Jewish nation the clue to the destiny of mankind. 
 But at the same time another wind was beginning 
 to blow. One might already feel, with Fontenelle 
 and Bayle, the advent of a new era, when all that 
 had hitherto been considered as sacred would be 
 submitted to criticism, and when an audacious phi- 
 losophy would test the titles of the moral, social and 
 religious inheritance handed down by the past. 
 
CHARPERE LV: 
 
 BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 
 
 THE philosophy of the eighteenth century in 
 France, taken as a whole, presents so striking a 
 contrast with that of the seventeenth century that 
 the passage from the one to the other would be 
 hardly intelligible did we not meet, as early as the 
 end of the seventeenth century, with thinkers who, 
 though of secondary rank, were yet bold and orig- 
 inal, and who distinctly heralded the approaching 
 change. In the seventeenth century speculative 
 reason, having finally freed itself from scholasticism 
 and the authority of the ancients, declared its abso- 
 lute independence and made the freest use of it. It 
 attempted a rational interpretation of the universe 
 by intimately uniting metaphysics and physics and 
 endeavored to realize the ideal of an intuitive and 
 deductive science which should be to the totality of 
 natural phenomena what mathematics is to num- 
 bers and figures. In religion it was independent in 
 fact but respectful in form. With Descartes and 
 Gassendi, it refrained from touching upon sacred 
 subjects; with Malebranche and Leibniz it flattered 
 itself upon having established the conformity of 
 reason with faith. Political and social problems, at 
 least in France, it carefully abstained from entering 
 
 107 
 
108 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 upon — doubtless from caution, but also because 
 it felt that it lacked the method for doing so prac- 
 tically. 
 
 The eighteenth century presents a very different 
 aspect. It is here difficult to discover what the 
 prevailing philosophy really is, for the precise rea- 
 son that philosophy is everywhere—in tragedies, 
 novels, history, political economy. Every one is 
 more or less of a philosopher. Yet no one makes 
 the least original effort to conceive the unity of the 
 whole world of phenomena. Metaphysical prob- 
 lems are neglected, or at most are dealt with 
 separately, without a thought of their mutual de- 
 pendence and without any controlling idea to give 
 them unity and to render the results harmonious. 
 They are no longer attractive in themselves; the 
 interest people seemingly take in them conceals an 
 ulterior object. At the same time, the attitude of 
 philosophers toward religion: has totally changed. 
 The majority, instead of seeking a peaceful com- 
 promise with revealed religion, assail it openly, 
 many of them going so far as to attack natural reli- 
 gion, while they nearly all proclaim morals to be 
 independent of religious dogma. Political, social 
 and pedagogical problems become the chief objects 
 of study with philosophers. As the Church had 
 given undisputed solutions of these questions from 
 time immemorial, the matter was, so to speak, a 
 new one. People took to it eagerly. They were 
 anxious to occupy this wide domain, which was but 
 just opened, and rushed forward to take complete 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 109 
 
 and immediate possession of it. At the same time 
 the influence of the natural sciences, which were 
 progressing more slowly but more surely, increased 
 as new discoveries were made and gradually pre- 
 pared the way for a new form of philosophical 
 speculation. 
 
 The principles of Descartes were, as we have 
 seen, in great measure responsible for the formation 
 of a philosophy so different from his own. Des- 
 cartes himself sedulously avoided the discussion of 
 political and social questions; but that his succes- 
 sors should have so applied the philosophy of 
 ‘Clear ideas, ° was inevitable?’”In the’ same way 
 the precaution he had taken to ‘“‘set apart’’ the 
 truths of faith was not equivalent to a treaty of 
 peace with theology, definitive and accepted on 
 both sides. It was merely a truce, destined soon 
 to be broken. The conflict was so inevitable that, 
 even had theologians been perfectly reconciled to 
 Cartesianism, the strife would nevertheless have 
 broken out soon thereafter, by the natural develop- 
 ment of philosophical thought alone. In fact, this 
 is about what happened. If Cartesianism was 
 looked upon suspiciously by Pascal, it did not 
 alarm his friends at Port Royal: Arnauld and Nicole, 
 in their Logic, showed themselves stanch Carte- 
 sians. Nor did the most illustrious of the leaders 
 of the French Roman Catholic Church, Bossuet and 
 Fénelon, conceal their sympathy for the philosophy 
 of Descartes, being, as it seems, more desirous of find- 
 ing Cartesianism consistent with the teaching of the 
 
TIO . MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 orthodox doctrine than of combating it in the name 
 of the latter. It was from the ranks of the philoso- 
 phers themselves that serious hostilities began. 
 Pure Cartesians these opponents were not; but they 
 followed, more boldly than Descartes himself, the 
 way he had opened, and if they differed from him, 
 it was chiefly in applying his method and principles 
 at the very points where he had abstained from so 
 doing. 
 
 On the other hand, there had been running 
 throughout the seventeenth century a more or less 
 hidden but uninterrupted undercurrent of opposition 
 to the spiritualistic philosophy which was then pre- 
 dominant, and above all to Christian philosophy. 
 Being Epicureans in spirit, taste, and often in 
 morals, and unbelievers in matters of religion, the 
 ‘libertines’ 
 which were in accordance with their tendencies. 
 They welcomed the empiricism of Gassendi; they 
 would readily have espoused materialism, had the 
 latter openly declared itself, and the most intelli- 
 gent among them were not long in foreseeing the 
 advantage which the cause of unbelief would draw 
 from the method and physics of Descartes. All 
 this, however, was not worked out, made clear and 
 openly presented to the public. To find the real 
 precursors of the philosophy of the eighteenth 
 century, we must go to the last quarter of the sev- 
 enteenth. There appeared at that time two minds 
 quite different from each other in all things save 
 one: that they both sowed many seeds which were 
 
 ’ 
 
 were naturally drawn to doctrines 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 1) 
 
 soon to bear fruit. These men were Bayle and 
 Fontenelle. 
 
 If by ‘‘philosopher’’ we understand a man whose 
 ideas concerning the great metaphysical problems 
 form a definite system, Bayle must be refused that 
 name, for he pleads the natural weakness of the 
 human mind, and takes refuge in a modest kind of 
 scepticism. He should rather be called a scholar, 
 a commentator on the ancients, a historian of the- 
 ological controversies, and, above all, a critic of cur- 
 rent events. Nothing interests and diverts him 
 more than the Nouvelles de la République des Let- 
 tres. Hewas born a Protestant, was converted to 
 Roman Catholicism, but almost immediately after 
 returned to Protestantism, on which account he 
 could not live in France, and finally fixed his resi- 
 dence in Rotterdam, that city from which were to 
 come in the eighteenth century so many bold books 
 and pamphlets. He was not a daring man, at least 
 in no respect did he appear so. His aspect was 
 rather that of a person of the sixteenth century 
 than of one of the eighteenth. He published large 
 folios full of learned discussions, and loved to point 
 out and correct the mistakes of other scholars whose 
 works nobody read. He liked not only history, 
 but the crumbs of history, half buried in the dust 
 of dictionaries. Such a universal and voracious 
 curiosity cannot but seem harmless; and if perad- 
 venture a bold expression here and there causes the 
 reader to prick up his ears he is soon reassured. It 
 
112 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 required a keen insight to discover amid such inex- 
 haustible and minute erudition constantly preoccu- 
 pied with almost forgotten things, an engine of 
 war destructive of nearly all that the seventeenth 
 century held certain and sacred. Nevertheless that 
 engine was there, or at least it came from that 
 source. And Voltaire had good reason for eulogiz- 
 ing the immortal Bayle as ‘‘the pride of the human 
 Sspeciesis 
 
 One neither can nor ought to give a systematic 
 account of ideas which their own author explicitly 
 refused to unite into asystem. But Bayle’s ideas, 
 though not closely linked together, are yet coherent. 
 They center about certain leading points to which 
 Bayle always reverts even when we least expect him 
 to do so; and these points themselves have as a 
 common center the relation between revelation and 
 reason, with all the consequences which the solution 
 of that question involves. 
 
 Bayle boldly asserts at times that it is impossible 
 to avoid the clear conclusions of reason. For there 
 is, he declares, a distinct and vivid light which 
 shines upon all men the moment they open the 
 eyes of their attention; it is God Himself, the 
 essential and substantial Truth, who then enlightens 
 them directly. It is in vain for one to try to deny 
 this light. There are axioms which we cannot ques- 
 tion, however hard we may try. We cannot believe 
 that the whole is not greater than the part. Even 
 though the opposite statement should be cited in 
 Scripture a hundred times, man, being what he 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. Tiss 
 
 is, would not believe it. Therefore let nobody 
 say that theology is a queen to which philosophy is 
 a serving-maid merely; for the theologians them- 
 selves by their very behavior confess that philos- 
 ophy is the queen and theology the servant. 
 Hence the exertions and contortions which they 
 inflict upon their minds to avoid being accused of a 
 conflict with genuine philosophy. They would 
 certainly not exert themselves so much if they did 
 not tacitly admit that the authority of any dogma 
 not confirmed, examined and recorded in the 
 supreme parliament of reason and natural light is 
 ‘‘wavering and fragile as glass.”’ 
 
 Had Bayle always spoken thus he would have 
 not only presaged but forestalled the eighteenth 
 century. But then he would have shocked the 
 great majority of his contemporaries. Condemned 
 as irreligious and impious, he would have been far 
 less read, and his influence would have been infi- 
 nitely more restricted. He usually speaks a much 
 more cautious language. Not only is he a believer, 
 but he repudiates utterly the accusation of heresy. 
 He objects to being classed with the Socinians, who 
 refuse to believe in the Trinity and the Incarnation 
 as contrary to natural light. 
 
 Hes goes. even further, Incase of .asconflict 
 between revelation and reason, the latter must 
 yield. For could reason lead us to a knowledge of 
 truth, evidence would be our guide. Now there 
 are things entirely evident which a Christian rejects 
 as false. Thus, says Bayle, you reject the axiom 
 
IIl4 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of identity in accepting the Trinity, the Eucharist 
 and Transubstantiation. Certain very evident 
 propositions were unhesitatingly accepted as true 
 by those who lived before the Gospel; but the mys- 
 teries of our theology have shown that these propo- 
 sitions, in spite of their evidence, are false. Let 
 us profit by this lesson, and, in order not to fall 
 into errors like those of the heathen, and thus less 
 excusable, let us hold nothing as certainly true, 
 save what is taught by Scripture. 
 
 But let us notice the very special motives which 
 Bayle gives for this attitude, apparently so submis- 
 sive. Let us hear him speak successively to philos- 
 ophers and theologians. ‘‘Do not try to understand 
 mysteries,’’ he says to the former; “‘if you could 
 understand them they would be mysteries no longer. 
 Do not even try to lessen their apparent absurdity. 
 Your reason here is utterly powerless; and who 
 knows but that absurdity may be an essential ingre- 
 dient of mystery? Believe as Christians; but as 
 philosophers, abstain. And, turning to theolo- 
 gians: ‘‘You are quite right in demanding that 
 we should believe; but make this demand in the 
 name of authority only, and do not be so imprudent 
 as to try to justify your belief in the eyes of reason. 
 God has willed it so, God has done so; therefore it 
 is good and true, wisely done and wisely permitted. 
 Do’ not 'venture’any further: Ifyou Venter. into 
 detailed reasons for all this you will never see the 
 end of it, and, after a thousand disputes, you will 
 be compelled to fall back upon your original rea- 
 
 >? 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. I15 
 
 son, authority. In this matter, the best use to 
 make of reason is not to reason. Moreover, if you 
 consent to discuss the point, you will be beaten. 
 You wish that truth—that is, revelation—should 
 always have the best reasons on its side. You wish 
 this to be so, and you imagine it to be so. What 
 a gross mistake! How coulda theologian’s answers 
 regarding mysteries, which are superior to reason, 
 be as clear as a philosopher's objections? From 
 the very fact that a dogma is mysterious and 
 utterly incomprehensible to weak human _ under- 
 standing, it inevitably follows that our reason will 
 combat it with very strong arguments, and can find 
 mo other satisfactory solution than the authority of 
 God. 
 
 ‘“This is precisely what theologians do not often 
 admit. Because I think the reasons they give in 
 favor of the dogma are weak, they conclude that 
 Imaomnot .pbclieve insthemaogmanm lishould not 
 believe, indeed, if God had not bidden me to do 
 so; but He commands and I submit. But He does 
 not bid me regard demonstrations as sound when 
 they are not. Theologians must choose: either 
 they must affirm their dogmas in the name of a 
 supernatural light, without discussion; or, if they 
 discuss them, they must not assume that they have 
 a monopoly of the truth. But they nearly always 
 adopt a third method: they choose to discuss, and 
 claim to be right beforehand. If any one candidly 
 and in good faith points out the strength of the 
 contrary opinion, they hate and suspect him.  In- 
 
116 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 deed, even theologians themselves hesitate to state 
 the strongest arguments urged against them, lest 
 these should produce too forcible an impression 
 upon the reader. These arguments they conceal 
 out of charity and zeal for truth. Was not Cardi- 
 nal Bellarmin reproached for his candid statement 
 of the arguments urged by heretics, on the ground 
 that it was prejudicial to the cause of religion?’’ 
 
 If, therefore, a theologian desires to act pru- 
 dently, while remaining sincere, he must abstain 
 from entering upon discussion in which he is sure 
 to be beaten. He must present mysteries as they 
 are—that is, asincomprehensible and absurd. The 
 Christian will nevertheless believe in them, since 
 they were revealed by God Himself. It is his sole 
 reason for believing in them: but fortunately this 
 reason is indisputable. One does not raise objec- 
 tions against God. 
 
 Yet Bayle did raise objections; and the stric- 
 tures which he offered upon Providence elicited, as 
 everybody knows, the Théodicée of Leibniz. 
 According to Bayle, if we look upon things in a 
 human way—i. e., from the point of view of mere 
 reason, the advocates of Providence find it difficult 
 to prove that everything in the universe is the work 
 of Providence, and equally difficult to defend them- 
 selves against the Manicheans, who maintain that a 
 principle of good and a principle of evil are contin- 
 ually at strife in the universe, and that neither is 
 able to triumph over the other. No doubt, as God 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. I17 
 
 is all-powerful and all-bounteous, His work cannot 
 fail to be the best possible, and we thence naturally 
 infer the existence of Providence. But does experi- 
 ence confirm this reasoning? It does not; we see 
 that man is wicked and miserable. Was the Creator 
 unable or unwilling to make him otherwise? In 
 either case it is very difficult to defend Providence. 
 Were there nowadays, says Bayle, Marcionites as 
 skilled in disputation as are either the Jesuits or the 
 Jansenists, they would not have advanced three 
 syllogisms ere they had compelled their adversary 
 to confess that he did not understand his own 
 assertions, and that here we come to the verge of 
 the unfathomable abyss of the sovereignty of the 
 Creator, in which our reason is lost, there remain- 
 ing nothing but faith to uphold us. A pagan phi- 
 losopher would have here an advantage over the 
 Christian. 
 
 It is evident that evil should be prevented, if 
 possible. Now God does not prevent all the dis- 
 orders in the world, and yet it was most easy for 
 Him to do so. It is also evident that a non-exist- 
 ent creature cannot be an accomplice in an evil 
 deed, and that he ought not in justice to be pun- 
 ished therefor. And yet, does not God allow all 
 men to suffer the consequences of the original sin? 
 Can this sin justify all the sufferings in the world? 
 The conclusion is: Believe in Revelation. ‘°‘Rev- 
 elation is the only storehouse from which arguments 
 can be produced against such people; by it alone can 
 we refute the alleged eternity of the evil principle.”’ 
 
118 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Leibniz had much ado to refute Bayle’s objec- 
 tions. He shows indeed that the hypothesis of the 
 Manicheans is shallow and that nothing is easier and 
 shallower than to postulate a special principle in 
 order to explain facts which puzzle us. But Bayle 
 is perfectly willing to grant him this. Does Leib- 
 niz in his turn succeed in proving man’s liberty and 
 in vindicating Providence? Hardly. The liberty 
 which Leibniz concedes to man is a form of deter- 
 minism merely; and his proposed explanation of 
 the existence of evil in the universe, perhaps the 
 least unsatisfactory that could be given, has but 
 one fault; but the fault is a serious one. It forces 
 its readers into pessimism. If this world be indeed 
 the best of all possible worlds, Candide is not wrong 
 in thinking it bad. We must therefore agree with 
 Bayle that Revelation is our only resource here, 
 and that reason, pure and simple, does not bear out 
 the same conclusion. 
 
 But, one might object, the origin of evil, the 
 cause of sin, and the relation of God to the world, 
 are purely speculative questions, raised only by 
 metaphysicians; and if reason finds it no easy thing 
 to agree with Kevelation on these points, it has 
 quite as much difficulty in agreeing with itself when 
 thrown on its own resources. Human reason, says 
 Bayle, is a principle of destruction and not of edifi- 
 cation; it is fitted only for raising doubts and for 
 evasions. It therefore matters little if on problems 
 which are beyond its reach it runs counter to 
 Revelation. At least we see clearly that the two 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 11g 
 
 agree on questions connected with practical life, 
 that faith engenders virtue, and that religion sanc- 
 tions the supreme rule of conduct. Here no diffi- 
 culties or objections appear. 
 
 True, says Bayle, but on one condition: religion 
 must teach nothing contrary to morals. To be 
 sure, it is unlikely to do so; yet sometimes it does. 
 Indeed, have we not heard Fathers of the Church 
 declaring, and contemporary priests repeating after 
 them, that compulsion should be used to bring 
 refractory people to the orthodox faith? Hence 
 sprang the persecutions against heretics, the dragon- 
 ades; hence the Protestants were hunted, pillaged, 
 imprisoned, sent to the galleys, their children kid- 
 naped, and their clergymen hanged; hence all the 
 other methods of violent conversion set in motion 
 when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. Now, not 
 only are these proceedings absurd and even preju- 
 dicial to their own end; not only are these persecu- 
 tions cruel and abominable, but the maxim that 
 justifies them is based on a wrong principle. God 
 cannot have said ‘‘ Compelle intrare.’’ Just as there 
 is no right against right, there is no Revelation 
 against Revelation. Now, in moral matters, the 
 first revelation is that of. the conscience, ‘‘the true 
 light which lighteth every man which cometh into 
 the world.’’ 
 
 Bayle is here decidedly more affirmative than 
 usual, and the cause is evidently the indignation he 
 feels at the sight of persecutions. ‘‘If anybody pre- 
 sumes to assert that God has revealed to us a moral 
 
120 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 maxim in direct opposition to the first principles of 
 all morals, we must deny the assertion, and main- 
 tain that such a person is misinterpreting the text 
 and that one ought rather to reject the testimony 
 of one’s criticism and grammar than that of one’s 
 reason.’’ God cannot contradict "Himself: If the 
 Scripture does not agree with our conscience, it is 
 because we misunderstand the Scripture. And 
 whatever contests may arise, conscience must 
 always have the last word. For instance, it tells us 
 that honest ignorance is guiltless, and that a man 
 cannot be responsible for a fault which he commits, 
 without knowing that he commits it. We cannot, 
 therefore, believe that a heretic or even an infidel, 
 if he is sincere, can be punished by God for any- 
 thing but for evil deeds which he may have done 
 while knowing them to be evil. As for the deeds 
 he may have done with a clear conscience—I mean 
 a conscience which he has not himself maliciously 
 blinded—I cannot be persuaded that they are 
 crimes. 
 
 Likewise the stories in the Bible are not always 
 edifying. If they shock my conscience, shall I 
 abstain from condemning them? Because David, 
 for instance, partook of God’s inspiration, shall I 
 any the less regard him as a murderer, an ingrate, 
 an adulterer? If the Scripture, in relating a deed, 
 blames or praises it, nobody is at liberty to appeal 
 from its judgment; we must all make our praise and 
 blame conform to the pattern of the Scripture. 
 But if the Holy Ghost has not characterized it we 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. I2n 
 
 must not hesitate to censure what we think is a 
 Crime: mea nere iS no middiem path i weither these 
 actions are bad, or actions like them are not wrong. 
 Of these alternatives, our conscience can accept only 
 the first. 
 
 Further, coming to the essence of the question, 
 religious faith does not seem to have any influence 
 whatever upon men’s conduct. We have only to 
 look about us. If we examine the morals of Chris- 
 tians, their lewd deeds, their slanders, their tricks, 
 and all that they do in order to procure money, or 
 to obtain offices, or to supplant competitors, we 
 shall find that they could hardly be more licentious 
 even if they did not believe in immortality. We 
 shall find, as a rule, that they abstain only from 
 such deeds as would expose them to infamy, or to 
 the gallows, two checks which might restrain the 
 corruption of a godless man as easily as theirs. <A 
 great many rogues and scoundrels believe in the 
 immortality of the soul, whereas many godly and 
 righteous men do not. Soldiers may be irreproach- 
 able in their faith, and yet indulge in all sorts of 
 excesses. This is also seen in some women. There 
 is nothing inexplicable about it. It is not the 
 general opinions of the mind which determine our 
 actions: it is the present passions of the heart; and, 
 as the English psychologists of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury very rightly say, ‘“‘coguttion does not produce 
 action.’’ Thus (always excepting those who are 
 led by God’s spirit), the faith a man has in a reli- 
 gion is no guaranty for his conduct. On the con- 
 
I22 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 trary, it is often quite apt to rouse in his soul anger 
 against those who think differently, fear, and a kind 
 of zeal for devotional ceremonies, in the hope that 
 these outward actions and a public confession of the 
 true faith will screen his disorderly life and gain 
 pardon for it some day. 
 
 Thence arise momentous consequences, as Bayle 
 very successfully maintains. If believing in certain 
 dogmas has no necessary influence on the conduct 
 of man, we may truly say that morals are inde- 
 pendent of that belief. If Christians who are 
 ‘‘irreproachable as regards faith’’ lead an evil life, 
 we must needs infer that righteous conduct is not 
 inseparable from orthodoxy. We may therefore 
 imagine a state composed of men believing neither 
 in the existence of God nor in an after-life. Were 
 they, however, zealous in caring for the public 
 good, in repressing malefactors, in preventing quar- 
 rels, in upholding the rights of widows and orphans, 
 in encouraging fairness in business, who can doubt 
 but such a state would bea highly civilized one? 
 Throughout the eighteenth century this hypothesis 
 of a “‘society of atheists’’ proposed by Bayle is dis- 
 cussed, and though some, as Voltaire for instance, 
 were annoyed by it, it still remains for many others 
 a sort of ideal. 
 
 Recapitulating Bayle’s views of the mysteries of 
 religion and of belief in the supernatural, it appears 
 that from the point of view of knowledge such 
 mysteries are offensive to reason and seem absurd; 
 from the point of view of morals, they do not make 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 123 
 
 man any better, and are, to say the least, useless. 
 What is to be inferred from this? That we may 
 dispense with the belief in the supernatural and 
 with mysteries; that we must seek what is good and 
 true by human reason alone? Far from it. Bayle’s 
 conclusion is the very opposite of this. Behold, 
 he says in substance, the weakness and helplessness 
 of human reason! If God did not teach us the 
 truth, would our reason bring us to it? Reason is 
 very far from it, and is ignorant of the ways that 
 lead to it. Therefore, how much gratitude do we 
 owe to Divine Goodness, which has especially 
 revealed to us through the Scripture what we 
 should never have discovered by ourselves and what 
 would even seem to us absurd and unacceptable 
 were it not corroborated in this way! 
 
 One cannot carry submissiveness farther. How 
 can a man be suspected of impiety who does not 
 hesitate a moment to silence reason when Revela- 
 tion speaks? Still we may question whether this 
 submission is without reserve, whether this respect- 
 fulness comes from the heart or only from the lips. 
 If he is sincere why does not Bayle, after the 
 example of Malebranche, seek to make the inward 
 revelation, which is conscience, agree with the 
 outward revelation, which is the Scripture? Why 
 does he purposely insist on the impossibility of 
 making acceptable to reason what religion com- 
 mands us to believe? And if insincere, his lan- 
 guage becomes a dreadful irony. In this case 
 Bayle’s defense of religion looks like a deliberate, 
 
124 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 organized attack upon it; when he speaks of the 
 “‘weakness and helplessness of reason,’’ he really 
 means the incomprehensibility and absurdity of 
 revelation. In a word, with a show of deep 
 respect, he patiently destroys one after another all 
 the reasons for believing in the dogmas of religion. 
 When he has finished, revealed religion can no 
 longer hold its own; it is on the verge of ruin. 
 
 Therefore the works of Bayle, particularly his 
 Dictionary, were an inexhaustible store for the unbe- 
 lievers of the eighteenth century. To take but one 
 instance among a thousand, this is the way he fore- 
 shadows those who took advantage of the defects 
 in the sacred texts. ‘‘Were such an account to be 
 found in Thucydides or Livy, all critics would 
 unanimously conclude that the copyists had trans- 
 posed the pages, forgotten something in one place, 
 repeated something in another, or inserted spurious 
 passages amidst the work of the author. But we 
 must beware of such suspicions when the Bible is in 
 question. Nevertheless, there have been persons 
 bold enough to maintain that not all the chapters 
 or verses in the First Book of Samuel occupy the 
 place they originally: had.’’ Suffer this cautious 
 remark to pass and all of modern Biblical exegesis 
 follows. 
 
 It accordingly matters little that Bayle is inca- 
 pable of systematic thought; that he appears now as 
 a Cartesian and now as a Pyrrhonian; that at one 
 time evidence dispels his doubt and that again his 
 doubt attacks all evidence; and that he actually 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 125 
 
 seems to take pleasure in these contradictions. The 
 eddies do not prevent us from perceiving clearly 
 the direction’ of the streams Bayle is \bent’ ‘on 
 nothing less than breaking up the system of belief 
 and principles commonly accepted by his predeces- 
 sors and contemporaries, the system of “‘Christian 
 rationalism.’’ Bayle shows that a choice is imper- 
 ative: either one must be a rationalist and cease to 
 be a Christian; or be a Christian, and forego reason 
 altogether. Scriptural texts had been relied on; 
 Bayle gives us to understand that these texts are not 
 proof against criticism. Religion had been looked 
 upon as the basis of morals; Bayle proves that 
 morals depend solely upon the conscience, and that 
 religion, even genuine religion, has no influence 
 whatever upon men’s conduct. It was thought—at 
 least in France—that royalty was of divine right: 
 but, says Bayle, ‘‘if we do not more often see kings 
 dethroned, it is because the nations have not been 
 worked upon by clever enough intrigues.’’ We 
 might make the enumeration longer, for the estab- 
 lished opinions and hereditary privileges that Bayle 
 questioned were not few. No one, indeed, was to 
 go further than this precursor of Rationalism. And 
 even in our days his conception of morals as inde- 
 pendent of religion and metaphysics seems to many 
 people dangerously bold. 
 
 Between Bayle and Fontenelle there is the 
 greatest conceivable difference, and this difference 
 is noticeable even in their fortunes and modes of 
 
126 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 life. Attentive only to his work and heedless of 
 everything else, in Rotterdam Bayle endured with 
 fortitude both poverty and the insulting attacks 
 of his enemies. Fontenelle, a provincial wit crav- 
 ing for literary success in Paris, fairly ‘‘elbowed his 
 way’’ into the world, and rose to a dominant posi- 
 tion in the academies. Bayle knew almost every- 
 thing that could be learned from the books of the 
 past, and on this vast material he exerted his inde- 
 fatigable and subtle powers of dialectic. Fonte- 
 nelle looked almost with disdain upon the rubbish 
 of erudition, but, on the other hand, he was a 
 mathematician. He had a taste for the exact 
 sciences; he had reflected upon them, and had a 
 clear presentiment of what they were very soon to 
 become. Thus the work of the one completes in 
 some sort the work of the other. 
 
 Fontenelle is a Cartesian, but an independent 
 one, who does not regard himself bound to adhere 
 to all the doctrines of Descartes. Thus we shall 
 see that he rejects the doctrine of the automatism 
 of animals, and also that he deems the Cartesian 
 system of metaphysics untenable. But he fol- 
 lows Descartes implicitly in his conception of 
 method and of science, which above all require 
 clearness, as well as in the part which he assigns 
 to mathematics. ‘‘What is true is simple and 
 clear; and when our way of arriving at the 
 truth is intricate and confused, we may say the way 
 leads to the truth, but that it is nevertheless not 
 the true way.’’ The right method requires that 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 127 
 
 we begin with principles and that the consequences 
 spring directly from them. Fontenelle therefore 
 looks upon mathematics as ‘‘the universal instru- 
 ment.’ This instrument cannot be made too far- 
 reaching or too flexible. Mechanics, optics, acous- 
 tics, in short, all the sciences which reveal definite 
 relations between measurable quantities are ad- 
 vanced farther and more surely according as the art 
 of discovering relations in general grows more 
 perfect. 
 
 nispis’ exactly )tiemenitn ofthe. \ Cartesian 
 method, and therefore it is not surprising that 
 Fontenelle should also have declared for that con- 
 ception of the universe upheld by the disciples of 
 Descartes. We do not belittle the universe, he 
 says, when we maintain that it is ona large scale 
 what a watch is in miniature. On the contrary, it 
 is beautiful to contemplate that the order of nature, 
 marvelous as it is, rests on such simple principles. 
 Everything in it takes place according to the laws of 
 mechanics and geometry; and as to matters in 
 physics which cannot be brought to such a degree 
 of clearness—for instance the fermentation of 
 liquors, the diseases of animals, etc.,—it is not that 
 geometry does not dominate them, but that it 
 there becomes obscure and almost impenetrable on 
 account of the too great complexity of the figures. 
 
 All his life Fontenelle adhered to that corpuscu- 
 lar philosophy which admits clear ideas of figures 
 and motions only. If we reject this philosophy, we 
 shall fall into thoughts which may be ever so plaus- 
 
128 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ible, noble, or brilliant, but which will not fail to 
 be wanting in clearness. This was an evident allu- 
 sion to the system of Newton. The Newtonian 
 system is essentially based upon ‘‘attraction, 
 which is ‘‘a very obscure and questionable prin- 
 ciple;’’ whereas the Cartesian system is based on 
 purely mechanical principles, which are acknowl- 
 edged by everybody. While to the last giving 
 full credit to the mathematical genius of Newton, 
 Fontenelle maintains against him the Cartesian 
 
 >? 
 
 hypothesis of vortices. 
 
 And indeed he had been indebted to this hy- 
 pothesis for the great success of his youth. His 
 fintretiens sur la Plurahté des Mondes had made the 
 meaning of this hypothesis accessible to society 
 men and even to women; it was a work of elegant 
 popularization, in which Fontenelle’s faults were no 
 less useful to him than his excellences. 
 
 On the other hand, Fontenelle ignores Des- 
 cartes’s metaphysics, which he knows but slightly 
 and does not care to understand better. Not that 
 he prefers any other system of metaphysics: it is 
 metaphysics itself which seems to him of little im- 
 portance. He already speaks of it as many scien- 
 tific men did afterward, with an indifference half 
 politeness, half contempt; as if metaphysicians were 
 a species of ingenious and inoffensive artists who took 
 delight in constructing more or less plausible sys- 
 tems, but could not claim to be earnest seekers of 
 truth. Fontenelle compares metaphysicians to his- 
 torians, which with him is equivalent to placing 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. I29 
 
 them as far as possible from the mathematician or 
 physicist—that is, from the real man of science. 
 s bacitusvand , Descartes; #ahe says; I. take to:be 
 two great inventors of systems of very different 
 kinds, equally bold, of equally lofty and fruitful 
 genius, and by these very tokens equally liable to 
 error.’’ Soon after this, we find Voltaire calling 
 the philosophy of Descartes a “‘romance,’’ and 
 criticising him for his excess of imagination. 
 Furthermore Fontenelle himself says, as Voltaire 
 does afterward, that Descartes proved by his own 
 example the uselessness of metaphysical research. 
 ‘‘Should the systems of Descartes and of Leibniz 
 both sink under hostile objections, it would be 
 necessary for philosophers— and a very painful 
 necessity for them—to cease puzzling over the 
 union of the soul with the body. The example of 
 Descartes and Leibniz both would justify them in 
 seeking the secret no longer.’’ 
 
 But there remains one metaphysical problem in 
 which Fontenelle does not cease to take an interest; 
 it is that of the existence of God, to which he 
 recurs on several occasions. And here again he is 
 less a follower of Descartes than a precursor of 
 Voltaire. He rejects metaphysical proofs as too 
 subtle. He proposes a different mode of demon- 
 stration, which he thinks is new, and which is taken 
 from the origin of animal species; in general, we 
 may say, he endeavors to prove the existence of 
 God «by the ‘consideration; of nature;\, ‘“Drue 
 physics,’’ he says, “‘rises to the point of becoming 
 
130 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN -FRANCE. 
 
 a@sortiot theology. 1S wtnicmiurerely "dur arial 
 phrase, a canopy to hide his wares, or one of those 
 popular opinions ‘‘which must be treated tenderly 
 and’ considerately?) "lt asm dincult” to i decide, 
 Nothing proves Fontenelle to have been insincere 
 on this point. As he accepts literally the compar- 
 ison of the universe to a watch, it is but natural 
 that the comparison of God to a supreme watch- 
 maker should satisfy him. ‘‘This great work,’’ he 
 says, ‘“‘which grows more wonderful as it becomes 
 better known, gives us an exceedingly lofty idea of 
 Him who wrought it.’’ A perfectly clear repre- 
 sentation of the physical universe here leads Fonte- 
 nelle to a representation, likewise perfectly clear 
 but rather puerile and superficial, of the relation 
 between God and the world. It is, so to speak, 
 the price of clearness, in a subject which does not 
 admit of it. But the successors of Fontenelle in 
 the eighteenth century are not conscious of this 
 drawback, and most of them prefer Fontenelle’s 
 conception of Divinity to the incomparably deeper 
 and finer one which they might have found in Des- 
 cartes or Spinoza. 
 
 As in his successors, there is noticeable in Fon- 
 tenelle also a covert spite against the priesthood, 
 and a tendency to explain positive religions by 
 stupidity, ignorance, error, a childish taste for the 
 marvelous and man’s natural imbecility, exploited 
 by his shrewder fellows. ‘‘Wholesome _ philoso- 
 phy,’’ by spreading light, baffles these clever folks 
 and dispels superstition. Fontenelle, indeed, does 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. Dai 
 
 not openly attack the Christian religion. In his 
 Fiestotre Wes Oracles he assails only the pagan 
 priests. In this work he summarizes a ponderous 
 Latin book, written by a Dutchman, who seeks to 
 prove that oracles were never inspired by demons, 
 and that they disappeared, as they had arisen, 
 solely as the result of natural causes. 
 
 But what motives had Fontenelle or his readers 
 to feel interested in the disappearance of oracles 
 that had already veen silent for more than fifteen 
 centuries? Instead of ‘‘oracles’’ read ‘‘miracles,’’ 
 and the work of Fontenelle will at once have a 
 modern meaning, and at the same time seem singu- 
 larly aggressive. We understand, then, what he 
 means when he explains that a belief in ‘‘oracles”’ 
 musoeber attributed \tomthemtaste of men) forthe 
 supernatural, and to the cravings of an imagination 
 not yet regulated by reason; or when he says that 
 supernatural phenomena cease to be produced as 
 soon as there are witnesses of a somewhat critical 
 
 turn of mind. ‘‘When oracles began to appear in 
 the world, philosophy, fortunately for them, had not 
 yet appeared.’’ Fontenelle dwells at length upon 
 
 the impostures and artifices of priests. Everything 
 centered about them, and had any one dared to 
 breathe a word against them he would have been 
 cried down as an atheist and a blasphemer. ‘‘The 
 priests in the temples repudiated kinship with the 
 mountebanks in the streets because they were them- 
 selves mountebanks of a nobler and more serious 
 stripe— which makes a great difference in that 
 
132 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 trade.’’ Notice, pray, the tone of scorn and hatred 
 in these words; it will often resound again in the 
 eighteenth century. It is true, I repeat, that Fon- 
 tenelle is speaking here only of pagan priests. But 
 as he observes in the same work, that by feigning 
 to maintain a thing one insinuates the contrary as 
 cunningly as one can, ‘‘because of the regard one 
 must needs have for popular opinion,’’ it is hardly 
 possible to misapprehend his intentions. 
 
 Fontenelle has not by any means a historical 
 turn of mind. But, unlike the pure Cartesians, 
 who neglected history outright, he devoted much 
 attention to it; and in his reflections on this subject 
 two contrary tendencies counterbalance each other, 
 both of which we shall meet again in the course of 
 the century. Sometimes he considers man as being 
 always and everywhere identical in his essence, 
 and when this abstract idea of humanity is upper- 
 most historical events are to him but of secondary 
 interest and serve only to confirm what he infers 
 from his general conception. At others, induced 
 by physics and incipient physiology to take into 
 account the great complexity of the facts of reality, 
 and thus put on his guard against systems, he 
 evinces curiosity concerning primitive and savage 
 humanity, and foresees the possibility of comparative 
 ethnography, of scientific anthropology, and finally 
 of extending to sociology the method of the natural 
 sciences. These two tendencies do not express 
 themselves clearly enough in his mind to be antag- 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. ny Pete) 
 
 onistic; rather they co-exist. They mingle together 
 as best they can, and express themselves by indi- 
 cations as yet uncertain, but bound to develop in 
 the future. 
 
 The first of these tendencies shows itself in a 
 very curious way in Fontenelle’s idea of construct- 
 ing history a priort. ‘‘A man of great skill,’’ he 
 says, ““simply by considering human nature, might 
 guess all past and future history, without ever hav- 
 ing heard of a single event. Such a man would 
 say: ‘Human nature is composed of ignorance, 
 Gredulity wand: vanity, nere) and) thereta 
 little kindness, etc.” He would call up before his 
 mind the details of a multitude of facts which either 
 have actually happened, or are quite similar to facts 
 that have happened. This method of learning his- 
 tory would assuredly not be a bad one; one would 
 be at the fountain-head of things, and would 
 thence, as a mere diversion, behold the consequences 
 which had been foreseen.”’ 
 
 That such a treatment of the subject is imprac- 
 ticable, Fontenelle is very well aware; yet he men- 
 tions it more than half seriously, and rather as an 
 ideal than as a jest. He seems to take no account 
 of the widely different conditions in which the 
 development of the various nations really takes 
 place; the surface of the globe is simply conceived 
 in an abstract way as so much space inhabited by 
 a homogeneous population called mankind. Where- 
 fore this paradox? Because only in this way can 
 history approximate the form of a science as con- 
 
134 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ceived by Descartes, and become what was after: 
 ward called sociology. All real sciences imply a 
 prophecy of the future, based on the analysis of 
 present reality. And if sociology ever becomes a 
 science, it will enable us in some measure to foresee 
 the future and so to prepare for it. Fontenelle 
 had a distinct vision of that sociology, and he was 
 aware that it depended on a knowledge of the laws 
 which govern the progress of the human mind, 
 He holds that we ought to study the process by 
 which tastes, customs and opinions succeed one 
 another in the minds of men, and above all the law 
 which governs the process, for in most cases it is not 
 by mere chance that one taste succeeds another; there 
 is generally a necessary, though hidden, link. ‘‘One 
 would then conceive a history of the human mind as 
 a succession of thoughts which spring up among the 
 Nationsone jaiter another, Vorrather, one) irom 
 another, the concatenation of which, being duly 
 observed, might give rise to some sort of prophecy.’’ 
 
 This was in the days of Fontenelle quite a new 
 idea, and it was destined to bea fruitful one. It 
 led Fontenelle to wonderfully correct views of 
 mythology, the profundity of which has been noted 
 by Mr. Andrew Lang in his recent book, Wyths, 
 Cults and Religions. Fontenelle observed the child- 
 ish and crude character of Greek myths, and found 
 that they did not differ in this from those which are 
 to be met with in the infancy of all other nations. 
 He concluded that they were a spontaneous pro- 
 duction of ignorant and untutored imaginations, 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 135 
 
 and that in order to explain them there was no need 
 to have recourse to anything else than the simple 
 elements of human nature. ‘‘Wecan hardly realize 
 nowadays the state of ignorance and barbarism of 
 the primeval times. Let us picture to ourselves 
 the. Kaffirs, the. Laplanders, the Iroquois, and let 
 us remember at the same time that these peoples, 
 being already ancient, must have attained to a cer- 
 tain degree of knowledge and cultivation which 
 ne Gone 
 sequently, when we are shocked by the revolting 
 immorality of these fables, it is preposterous to seek 
 for a moral interpretation of them, or, when struck 
 by their childish absurdity, to suppose therein any 
 primitive symbolical explanation of certain natural 
 phenomena. We must not attribute to the authors 
 of these fables our own habits of thought; on the 
 contrary, we must go back, if we can, to the intel- 
 lectual state which gave rise to them, and which 
 humanity everywhere went through as a necessary 
 state of its evolution. Thus can we explain ‘‘the 
 wonderful similitude between the fables of the 
 
 9 
 
 were wanting in men of the earliest ages. 
 
 Greeks and those of the primitive Americans.’ 
 Men of all countries have pictured to themselves the 
 Unknown under the shape of what was known to 
 them, and represented beings more { owerful than 
 themselves, yet like themselves. As man becomes 
 civilized, his gods become less brutal and shocking. 
 This philosophy of the earliest ages had, then, its 
 foundation in human nature itself. ‘‘It is not sci- 
 ence,’’ Fontenelle concludes, ‘‘to fill our heads full 
 
136 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of the extravagant beliefs of the Phoenicians and 
 Greeks, but it is science to know what led the Phe- 
 nicians and Greeks to these extravagant beliefs.’”’ 
 True; but to establish comparative mythology we 
 must have an exact knowledge of the different 
 series of myths. Too often did the French philos- 
 ophers of the eighteenth century see what was to 
 be done, and fail to do it because they hastily tried 
 to interpret before they were in full possession of 
 what was to be interpreted. 
 
 Fontenelle was thus quite prepared by his habit- 
 ual turn of thought to intervene in the famous con- 
 tention between the ancients and the moderns, 
 which broke out at the end of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. The comparative merits of Homer, Pindar, 
 Sophocles, Corneille, Racine, Moliére, etc., were 
 then generally discussed from a purely literary point 
 of view. Fontenelle deals with the question asa 
 philosopher and sociologist. He inquires whether 
 there has been any progress since ancient times, 
 and how progress is to be understood. Like Pas- 
 cal, he compares the succession of men of all times 
 to a single man living forever and learning continu- 
 ally. This man was a child when he was busied 
 only with the more pressing needs of life; and a 
 youth when his imagination principally was exer- 
 cised. He has now attained to manhood when he 
 has more reasoning power. But the comparison 
 here comes to an end, for this symbolical man would 
 have no old age. Progress will be unlimited. 
 
 Fontenelle makes use of two principles to solve 
 
BAYLE AND FONTENELLE. 137 
 
 the question of the ancients and moderns, at least 
 as regards the sciences. | 
 
 In the first place, he lays down the doctrine of 
 the natural equalty of minds. We have seen that, 
 according to Fontenelle, humanity always remains 
 uniform in its essence. Centuries, therefore, cause 
 no natural differences between men. The climate 
 of Greece or Italy and that of France are too similar 
 to cause any obvious differences between the Greeks 
 and Latins and the French. And should they give 
 rise to differences, these would be easily canceled 
 and would not be more to their advantage than to 
 ours. We are, then, perfectly equal, be we ancients 
 or moderns, Greek or French. But may not nature 
 favor certain centuries by producing in them a 
 greater number of superior men? This is unlikely. 
 There might be at most some imperceptible inequal- 
 ity; but the general order of nature seems to be 
 quite constant. The oaks and poplar trees in our 
 fields are like to those which stood there in the 
 olden times. It is not otherwise with mankind. 
 
 The difference, therefore, proceeds only from 
 the necessary succession of discovertes. The ancients 
 could not do more in their time. They did what 
 our best minds would have done in their place, 
 and, were they in ours, it is probable that they 
 would have the same views as we have; for there 
 is a necessary order which regulates our progress. 
 Every stage of knowledge is developed only after a 
 certain range of preceding knowledge has been 
 attained, and when its turn hascome. Fortunately 
 
138 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 this law was for a long time ignored. Men con- 
 ceived unreasonable hopes, which encouraged them 
 to work. Chemistry would not have existed but for 
 alchemy; and should we possess the discoveries 
 made by the alchemists if they had not fancied they 
 would succeed in making gold? ‘‘Men must have 
 an imaginary goal to allure them. But now the 
 sciences are in a fair way to succeed, and when we 
 behold the progress they have made during the last 
 century, in spite of prejudices, obstacles and the 
 small number of scientific men, we might almost be 
 tempted to let our hopes for the future rise too 
 high. We shall see new sciences springing out of 
 nothingness, while ours are stillin the cradle.’’ On 
 the subject of the future of science the cold mind of 
 Fontenelle is kindled almost to enthusiasm. He 
 even goes so far as to say in the eulogy of a mathe- 
 matician, that ““with good logic and good medicine 
 men would need nothing more.’ 
 
 Therefore August Comte, who adopted several 
 of these ideas into his system, was not wrong in 
 looking upon Fontenelle as a precursor of modern 
 times. True, his mind, though most lucid, was 
 lacking in extent and. power. He was incapable of 
 even a moderate degree of synthesis. He could 
 produce nothing beyond pamphlets and fragments. 
 We may expect of him only views of details. But 
 these views are sometimes strangely strong, bold 
 and deep. It is not to be denied that Fontenelle 
 was among the first who had a distinct notion of 
 scientific progress and of the intellectual develop- 
 ment of mankind under fixed laws. 
 
 > 
 
CHAPTER IV: 
 
 MONTESQUIEU. 
 
 The eighteenth century in France, at least as 
 regards philosophy, may be divided distinctly in 
 the middle. It was about 1750 that Rousseau, 
 Diderot, Buffon and Condillac began to produce 
 their chief works. It was in 1751 that D’Alembert 
 published the preliminary discourse to the Excyclo- 
 pedia. Voltaire covers nearly the whole of the 
 century. But Montesquieu belongs only to the 
 first half. He was born in 1689, and saw the end 
 Oretiereion of; Louis wUViee Lhe Lees, Persanes 
 appeared under the Regency, and are full of allu- 
 sions to the king, who had just passed away. 
 Montesquieu’s last and most important work, 
 Herispric aes /.01S,. GatcsmiLommnn7 4c. , cre) diednin 
 1755. 
 
 Accordingly, Montesquieu exercised an influence 
 upon the other ‘‘philosophers’’ of the age without 
 feeling theirs, especially as he spent the latter years 
 of his life almost uninterruptedly in his mansion at 
 La Bréde. Paris, though loved in his youth, then 
 palled upon him, and his visits there were but 
 brief. He thus ceased to be in direct contact with 
 his fellow-writers, a fact which he does not seem to 
 have very much regretted. To tell the truth, he 
 
 139 
 
I40 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 always occupied a distinct and separate place in 
 the literary world. In those days a man of letters 
 was usually a poor devil who scribbled for bread 
 and aspired to a pension, and whose language on 
 some subjects too often reflected his obligations, 
 his hopes, or his disappointments. Voltaire, who 
 early comprehended the necessity of being inde- 
 pendent, succeeded in this by acquiring wealth; but 
 that wealth came rather late, and the period which 
 preceded was not without troubles and bitterness. 
 Montesquieu, on the contrary, was exempted from 
 the two-fold struggle for existence and for position. 
 He belonged to an honorable family of magistrates. 
 He was heir to one of his uncles, who bequeathed 
 to him, together with his name, his judicial office 
 in Bordeaux. He made money on his vineyards, 
 and left to his children a fortune which had pros- 
 pered in his hands. 
 
 The personal circumstances of Montesquieu had 
 their significance. Bold assertions, which would 
 have seemed more offensive in the mouth of a man 
 not so ‘‘well-to-do,’’ were more easily tolerated 
 coming from him. He uttered them in a calmer 
 tone, with more gravity and moderation. Even 
 after he had sold his office, the fact of having been 
 a magistrate left him some authority. When he 
 expresses the opinion that a reform of the penal law 
 or of criminal jurisprudence would be desirable, it is 
 quite another thing than if the reform were demanded 
 by an “‘unqualified individual’’ who ran the risk of 
 being sent to the Bastille if his ideas offended a 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 141 
 
 minister of state. There is, however, another side 
 to the picture: Class-prejudices are evident in 
 Montesquieu. He supports the privileges of the 
 nobility, and endeavors to defend the sale of judi- 
 cial’ offices. — But he ‘wasjafori all, that, liberal- 
 minded, devoted: to the public good, and desirous 
 of advancing his contemporaries towards Justice and 
 humanity. 
 
 The Lettres Persanes undoubtedly owed much of 
 their swift and brilliant success to their vivacious 
 style and pungent satire, as well as to their descrip- 
 tion of scenes of harem life; but at the same time 
 they@utoretell the.‘authommoter.: Lsjrzt, des. lors: 
 Reflections on the nature and principles of govern- 
 ment, on the foundations of society and on natural 
 justice, on the law of nations, on Roman policy, 
 on the English constitution, and on penal laws, are 
 all cunningly introduced into the Lettres Persanes. 
 If we read them over after LZ’ Zstrit des Lois we seem 
 better able to see through the complex and rather 
 secretive nature of Montesquieu, who never quite 
 reveals himself. Voltaire, who had no sympathy 
 with him, and yet devoted considerable attention to 
 him, not kindly but discerningly, characterizes 
 Montesquieu as a statesman, a philosopher, a wit 
 and a citizen. The philosopher, the statesman, the 
 citizen already show themselves in the Lettyves Per- 
 sanes; the wit also appears in L’£sprit des Lots, 
 though he occupies there a subordinate place. 
 
 It took Montesquieu twenty years to work out 
 the plan and gather the materials of what he calls 
 
142 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 his masterpiece. He prepared himself for it by 
 wide and varied reading, which became more fruit- 
 ful as he grew surer of what he wished to do. He 
 traveled over a great part of Europe, made a long 
 stay in Italy, and a longer one in England. He 
 undoubtedly did not derive from these travels all 
 the profit one might expect. The account of his — 
 journey to Austria and Italy, recently published by 
 Baron de Montesquieu, was rather disappointing; 
 and though we have no account of his journey to 
 England, he has said enough on the subject else- 
 where to show that even on things he was most 
 interested in he did not gather information with the 
 accuracy and precision of a man of science. But 
 at that time most writers were less particular in this 
 respect than in our days. In England Montesquieu 
 frequented a society dissolute in morals, infidel in 
 religion, skeptical in philosophy, but  withal 
 extremely intelligent. He was able to see and to 
 understand what he saw. Inaccuracy in the details 
 did not prevent his observations from giving a gen- 
 eral impression of veracity which was not disputed 
 by his contemporaries. Every one knows that 
 Montesquieu was nowhere better appreciated than 
 in England. 
 
 L'Esprit des Lois is a grand, lofty and enigmatic 
 title. It is interpreted, at least partially, by the 
 sub-title: ‘‘Of the relation which the laws should 
 bear to the constitution of each government, to 
 manners, climate, religion, trade, etc.,’’ although 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 143 
 
 the unfinished enumeration leaves some perplexity 
 in our minds. It is nothing less than a political 
 and social philosophy, conceived after a new plan, 
 and Montesquieu was quite justified in choosing as 
 the motto of his book: Prolem sine matre creatam. 
 
 His predecessors, to whom he alludes in his 
 preface, had not the same object in view. Some, 
 . as Grotius and Pufendorf, treated especially the 
 theory of the law of nations. Others, like Hobbes, 
 spoke as philosophers on the origin of society and 
 the nature of the state; or like More and other 
 Utopian dreamers of the sixteenth century, set up 
 an ideal city in contrast tothe real states they had 
 before their eyes. Harrington, Algernon Sidney 
 and Locke had written entirely from an English 
 point of view. Locke’s two treatises On Civil Gov- 
 ernment go back to first principles only in so far as 
 it was necessary to vindicate the Revolution of 
 1688 and the conditions imposed upon the Prince 
 of Orange, afterwards William ITI. 
 
 The work of Montesquieu is entirely different. 
 It deals with political realities, and takes its mate- 
 rials from history and from observed facts; herein 
 Montesquieu stands apart from the dreamers, but 
 he differs also from Locke in not devoting his atten- 
 tion to the practical, or at least immediate, appli- 
 cation of his theories. His aim is to study, asa 
 philosopher, and in a strictly methodical way, that 
 body of realities which was afterwards to become 
 the subject of social science or sociology. Thus 
 L'Esprit des Lois is, properly speaking, neither a 
 
144 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 philosophy of politics nora philosophy of history, 
 nor a philosophy of law, nor a philosophy of polit- 
 ical economy; for none of these sciences is here 
 considered by itself, but all of them are studied in 
 their natural relations so as to deduce the princi- 
 ples which are common to them. Montesquieu’s 
 originality consists in having fully perceived in the 
 various series of social phenomena that solidarity 
 by which each of these contributes to limit the 
 others, and is in its turn limited by them: For 
 instance, if the government of a country is a mon- 
 archy, the laws concerning education, luxury, 
 trade, the condition of women, the liberty of citi- 
 zens, etc., will necessarily be adapted to that 
 political form; in a republican country they will be 
 different. Social phenomena are thus subject to 
 fixed attendant conditions, and can form only defi- 
 nite systems. 
 
 In a word, there are /aws of laws: the political, 
 civil and penal laws of any society are regulated, 
 in their nature, their development, and even their 
 form, by natural laws—that is, according to Mon- 
 tesquieu’s celebrated definition, by the necessary 
 relations derived from the nature of things. <A 
 profound thought, which tends to nothing less 
 than subjecting to scientific form and method a vast 
 domain hitherto neglected or regarded as inacces- 
 sible. A profound thought also, to seek the mani- 
 festation of those ‘‘laws of laws’’ in the mutual 
 dependency of the various orders of social phe- 
 nomena. Montesquieu thus assumes a point of 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 145 
 
 view superior to that of the jurist, the historian and 
 the politician, and from which he overlooks them 
 all. He shows, by means of history, how laws are 
 modified in accordance with political forms—and in 
 accordance not only with these, but also with the 
 climate, the nature of the soil, the facilities for 
 trade, etc. This was already a remarkable attempt 
 . towards a sociologic synthesis. Well could Mon- 
 tesquieu speak of the ‘‘majesty’’ of his subject. 
 The conception is a fine one, and we may easily 
 understand that it produced a deep impression at 
 the time of its appearance. 
 
 Unfortunately the performance did not equal 
 the conception. It undoubtedly has great merits. 
 Despite a subject so austere and so unfamiliar to 
 the very great majority of his readers, Montesquieu 
 succeeded in not seeming dull to his contemporaries. 
 He avoids the danger of being a doctrinaire and the 
 no less formidable one of seeming partisan. He 
 really looks upon all this political and social mate- 
 rial with the eyes of a philosopher. Uneven as the 
 work is, it is full of things both new and striking, 
 which command attention and bear the impress of 
 vigorous thought. All this is true, but it must be 
 confessed it does not prevent L’Asprit des Lots from 
 being but a poor fulfillment of the beautiful plan 
 stated in the preface and the first chapters. There 
 are several reasons for this incongruity. Some are 
 in the very nature of the subject; others in the 
 character and spirit of Montesquieu himself. 
 
 Auguste Comte has clearly shown that Mon- 
 
146 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tesquieu’s attempt could not have been successful, 
 because it was premature. In order that scientific 
 sociology might be established it was essential that 
 biology should be sufficiently advanced: for social 
 phenomena, although not reducible to physiological 
 phenomena, are yet closely united with the latter. 
 In order to study social phenomena to any purpose, 
 it is indispensable to be already reasonably well 
 acquainted with the laws of the development of the 
 human race and of its organic, intellectual and 
 moral functions—laws which biology alone can dis- 
 cover. Now, at the time when Montesquieu 
 wrote, biology as a science did not exist; hardly 
 had chemistry, on which biology in its turn is 
 immediately dependent, begun to bea science. It 
 was therefore inevitable that Montesquieu should 
 be ‘unacquainted with the method which would 
 have been suitable for the science of which he had 
 conceived the idea; that he should seek a model 
 among the methods of sciences already existing in 
 his time—i. e., among the mathematical and 
 physical sciences; and, as such a method is wholly 
 unsuited to the investigation of sociologic laws, 
 that there should be a sort of perpetual contradic- 
 tion between Montesquieu’s right apprehension of 
 the subject he treats and the wrong method he 
 applies to it. 
 
 That Montesquieu knew and admired the 
 method of Descartes is beyond doubt. To be con- 
 vinced of this, one only need to remember the 
 lectures on physics and physiology which he deliv- 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 147 
 
 ered ,beforey the Academy? ofyBordeaux.\ In *ithe 
 Lettres Persanes, many a maxim reveals the Cartesian 
 infiuence; this’ one; forsinstances, / bhenmakerw of 
 nature gave motion to matter; no more was 
 needed to produce the wonderful variety of effects 
 we behold in the universe.’’ Finally, in his pre- 
 face to L'Esprit des Lots, Montesquieu explicitly 
 _ announces his intention of using the deductive 
 method. ‘“‘I have laid down the general princi- 
 ples, and I have seen that particular cases adapt 
 themselves to these as of their own accord, that 
 the histories of all nations are but the conse- 
 quences of them, and that each particular law is 
 connected with some other law, or depends upon 
 some more general ones) Wea e Alter, bhad found 
 out my principles, all that I was seeking came to 
 me.’’ Montesquieu therefore really places, as 
 Descartes does, the essential part of his method in 
 the process which derives the particular from the 
 universal, the complex from the simple, the conse- 
 quence from the principle, in short, in deduction. 
 
 In fact, however, nothing is less deductive than 
 L’ Esprit des Lois. The reader will rather think him- 
 self in the presence of something badly put 
 together, fragmentary and desultory. This impres- 
 sion is somewhat lessened as we look closer, but it 
 does not disappear altogether. It may be so vivid 
 that competent judges (not to mention Voltaire 
 himself) have gone so far as to compare Mon- 
 tesquieu to his fellow-countryman, Montaigne, and 
 to say that these two Gascons, though extremely 
 
148 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 witty and deeply skilled in the art of style, were 
 unacquainted with the art of composition. This is 
 going too far, at least as regards Montesquieu; 
 nevertheless, the mere fact of its having been pos- 
 sible, without any absurdity, to draw a comparison 
 between Montaigne and a writer who piqued him- 
 self upon following the Cartesian method is signifi- 
 cant enough. Shall we say that Montesquieu 
 wished, at any cost, to avoid monotony, to keep 
 awake the reader’s interest, and to puzzle him by 
 the curious arrangement of books and chapters? 
 This may be, but a deeper reason may explain the 
 condition of Montesquieu’s book. If it is wanting 
 “in continuity, it is because the deductive reasoning, 
 on the one hand, and the facts, on the other hand, 
 do not connect. The deduction remains purely 
 abstract, while the facts, of which Montesquieu col- 
 lected such a vast number and the importance of 
 which he duly felt, have little to do with the 
 demonstration. Montesquieu usually infers a con- 
 sequence from a given principle by reasoning alone. 
 For instance, from the notion of a despotic or 
 republican government, he infers the condition of 
 women to be thus and so. In support of his con- 
 clusion, he quotes indifferently either a law in 
 China, orfonesamone the ancient Greeks, “onan 
 anecdote borrowed from the Travels of Chardin. 
 He does not perceive that a fact thus set apart 
 from its surroundings has no scientific or sociologic 
 value whatever. 
 
 Montesquieu therefore lacked a method enabling 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 149 
 
 him to treat of sociological facts in the proper way. 
 How can we wonder at this, when sociologists in 
 our days have not yet been able to agree on their 
 method? And yet they have before their eyes the 
 comparative method employed in biology, which 
 has given such favorable results, but which was 
 unknown in the time of Montesquieu. As he had 
 - no idea of this comparative method (the only one 
 applicable, however, when we study organic beings), 
 he conceives social facts to be of the nature of 
 physical phenomena, which are the same in all 
 times and places. A given physical experiment, 
 being performed under the same conditions, must 
 give the same result, be it in London, in Paris or 
 in Pekin. From this beginning Montesquieu thinks 
 himself justified in borrowing his examples indiffer- 
 ently from Tacitus or Confucius. He arrives in 
 this manner at the abstract idea of mankind as 
 always and everywhere like unto itself, an idea 
 which continued to prevail during the eighteenth 
 century in France, though it was opposed by the 
 celebrated theory of the influence of climate, a 
 theory of which Montesquieu himself is the author. 
 
 Thus, if Montesquieu often seems to lack sys- 
 tem, it is not for want of endeavor to acquire it. 
 One might even reproach him with being too sys- 
 tematic (for instance, in his theory of constitutions) 
 hadshe not; fortunately faitaste tor facts): In him 
 the historian and the keen observer of political 
 things happily compensate for the philosopher badly 
 prepared to build asociologicsystem. The original 
 
I50 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 conception of the whole belongs to the latter; but 
 it was the former who wrote the more permanent 
 parts of L’ Esprit des Lots. 
 
 It is hardly necessary, Montesquieu says, to 
 seek the origin of society. Man lives only in soci- 
 ety: this is a primitive fact, from which we must 
 start, and the reason of which is in the very nature 
 of man. Hobbes wrongly asserts that the natural 
 state is that of war, and that justice and laws are 
 purely matters of agreement. Were it. really so, 
 we ought to be in a state of continual terror, and 
 ‘“to pass by men as by lions.’’ According to Mon- 
 tesquieu, on the contrary, no one is gratuitously 
 bad, and in every human soul lives a principle of 
 
 , 
 
 natural equity, which personal interest may indeed 
 hide, but not smother. This principle, which 
 underlies humanity, underlies also the social 
 instinct: it makes it possible for states to be 
 founded and maintained. We are surrounded with 
 ‘men stronger than ourselves; these can harm us in 
 a thousand different ways. What a relief for us to 
 feel that in the hearts of all those men there is an 
 inward principle which is our ally and shields us 
 from their attacks! 
 
 Montesquieu began the Lettres Persanes with his 
 apologue of the Troglodytes. These people were 
 so wicked and ferocious that they were ignorant of 
 all principles of equity and justice. They refused 
 to help one another in need, and they perished, 
 victims of their own injustice. Only two families 
 
MONTESQUIEU. Ger 
 
 survived, for “‘there were two very strange men in 
 that country. They were humane, had a sense of 
 justice and loved virtue. This virtue consisted in 
 being charitable and helpful. A new race issued 
 from them, that became prosperous, and defended 
 itself victoriously, because it was just and virtuous.”’ 
 The apologue is remarkable on more accounts than 
 -one. We first see, as early as 1721 the abuse of 
 the words ‘“‘virtue’’ and ‘‘beneficence,’’ which was 
 to go on increasing as the century progressed, and 
 the idyllic picture of a humanity gentle and sensible 
 in a state of nature. Then again, Montesquieu 
 bases human society on what he called equity, 
 which was afterwards to be called altruism. Later, 
 indeed, in L’ Esprit des Lots, he asserts that there is 
 a rational basis of justice and injustice, antecedent 
 to experience, “‘just asvall@the:radii in a circle are 
 equal, even before the circle is drawn.’’ Mon- 
 tesquieu does not choose between the two theories, 
 or rather, he does not distinguish them. He deems 
 it sufficient to oppose both of them to Hobbes, 
 whom he is anxious to combat. Besides, he does 
 not dwell much upon such hypothetical questions, 
 and hastens to seek more solid ground. 
 
 In his purely political philosophy Montesquieu 
 begins by distinguishing between the nature and 
 the principle of each kind of government. ‘‘Its 
 nature is what causes it to be such, and its prin- 
 ciple is that which causes it to act. The one is its 
 individual structure, the other the human passions 
 which stir it.’’ This distinction, broadly speaking, 
 
152 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 corresponds to that between the anatomical and the 
 physiological points of view. We may see in it 
 Montesquieu’s remarkable anticipation of the help 
 he might have received from biology had it been 
 sufficiently advanced in his time. Unfortunately, 
 it was impossible for him to carry this idea very far 
 and to draw from it scientific conclusions. His 
 division of the forms of government shows already 
 signs of preoccupation of a different kind. If he 
 fails to consider the classifications of Plato and 
 Aristotle, which he knew very well, and makes a 
 distinction between republican, monarchical and 
 despotic government, it is that he may not be 
 reproached with attacking the existing order of 
 things. He therefore says concerning despotism 
 many things which he thinks apply to the French 
 monarchy; the readers will catch the hints, and 
 the official censors can wink at them. He is so 
 thoroughly conscious of the artificial character of 
 his classification that he almost directly endeavors 
 to remedy it by subdividing republican govern- 
 ments into democracy and oligarchy. Besides, 
 Montesquieu always has concrete examples present 
 to his mind, even when he does not quote them. 
 Despotism is Persia or Turkey, and occasionally 
 also France under Louis XIV. His republic is the 
 ancient city, Sparta, Athens or Rome. His mon- 
 archy means ordinarily the French monarchy, but 
 sometimes the English, and lastly, his oligarchy is 
 nearly always Venice. 
 
 By means of a minute and keen observation of 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 153 
 
 the historical types which Montesquieu takes to 
 represent the various “‘forms’’ of government, and 
 of the manners which predominate in each of them, 
 one can find what he calls their principles. Thus 
 virtue is obviously the mainspring of the ancient 
 city, if we understand by this word, as the ancients 
 did, unlimited devotion to the public cause. Fear 
 _is the principle of an absolute government, such as 
 that of the Sultan or of the Shah of Persia, whose 
 most arbitrary caprices are instantly obeyed without 
 any discussion or opposition. And, lastly, honor 
 is the mainspring of a monarchy such as the king- 
 dom of France, in which everybody is jealously 
 guarding the prerogatives and offices of the order to 
 which he belongs. 
 
 Even while enunciating these forms and princi- 
 ples of government in a tone of gravity which leaves 
 no doubt as to his impartiality, Montesquieu does 
 not forbid himself some innuendo or satire when 
 occasion prompts, and above all, he lets us see 
 that he does not give the same weight to all 
 these principles. Lowest of all in the scale 
 stands despotism. Montesquieu purposely over- 
 draws the picture, and one might sometimes 
 imagine that he is speaking of Dahomey or Ashantee 
 tather, thant of, Turkey orersia:s (Hichest: of “all 
 in rank stands the republic. To pass from the 
 republican to the monarchical form—i. e., from vir- 
 tue to honor as a principle—is deterioration. This 
 idea already appears in the apologue of the Troglo- 
 dytes. The latter, weary of freedom, wished to 
 
154 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 have a king. They applied to a venerable old 
 man, who answered: ‘‘I see how it is, O Troglo- 
 dytes! Your virtue begins to lie heavy on you. 
 In your present state, having no ruler, you must 
 needs be virtuous, or else you could not exist, or 
 you would relapse into the misfortunes of your 
 forefathers. But your think the yoke too heavy, 
 and you prefer submitting toa prince. You know 
 that then you will be able to gratify your ambition, 
 and that, provided you avoid falling into 
 great crimes, you will have no need of virtue.’’ 
 This passage seems to throw light upon many 
 others which recur frequently in L’ Esprit des Lois: 
 such as that monarchy maintains itself merely by 
 the effect of laws, that in it virtue is not necessary, 
 and that every one serves the public good while 
 thinking to serve his private interests; that ambi- 
 tion, which is hurtful in a republic, has good effects 
 inva; monarchy, etc.) Monarchismeeis set jover 
 against republicanism, as an inferior to a superior 
 form; for the latter assumes men to be righteous— 
 that is, just, charitable and devout—while monarch- 
 ism supposes men to be selfish, but governs their 
 mutual relations in such a way that their egotism 
 serves the same ends as altruism. In a republic 
 the common interest is everything. The word 
 ‘‘fatherland’’ may be spoken there; and the love 
 of it is inseparable from sound morals and disinter- 
 estedness. Everyone seeks only the welfare of all. 
 No ambition is felt, no riches are coveted; all is 
 perfect simplicity and frugality. 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 155 
 
 But this admirable state has not been seen on 
 earth since antiquity, and the ancients themselves 
 realized it but rarely, and for brief periods. It has 
 become fabulous, like the Troglodytes. Mon- 
 tesquieu sees about him monarchies, furnished with 
 hereditary nobility, caste-spirit, privileges and 
 distinctions among men. Here ambition takes the 
 
 place of patriotism. The state subsists independ- 
 
 ently of that sentiment, of a desire for true glory, 
 of self-renunciation, of the sacrifice of one’s nearest 
 concerns. . . . Laws supply the place of all these 
 dispensable virtues. We here perceive not only the 
 excessive reliance upon the fabric of laws, which 
 is one of Montesquieu’s errors, but also the sublime 
 and touching picture of the civic virtue of the 
 ancients, which was destined later to become so 
 commonplace. Every one knows how great a place 
 was filled in the French Revolution by that romantic 
 rather than historical ideal character, by that sort 
 of composite figure, in which were blended. the 
 features of Regulus, Cincinnatus, Phocion, Epami- 
 nondas and other heroes of Plutarch or Livy. 
 Rousseau has been severely criticised for having 
 extolled this fictitious character; in justice the 
 criticism should fall first on Montesquieu. 
 
 However that may be, this republic, the home 
 of righteous men, is to Montesquieu a remote ideal. 
 Despotism, on the other hand, seems to be con- 
 fined to warm countries, among spiritless people, 
 depressed by long ages of tyranny. There remains 
 to consider the aristocratic or oligarchic republic, 
 
156 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 and the monarchy. But aristocratic government, 
 if it does not presume ‘‘virtue’’ among the people, 
 does presume it among the nobility, which is an 
 ideal as difficult to realize as that of the republic. 
 In fact, Montesquieu judges very severely the oli- 
 garchies which he had seen. The Italian republics, 
 he writes in his notes of travel, are but puny aristoc- 
 racies which exist only on sufferance, and in which 
 the nobles, devoid of all feelings of grandeur and 
 glory, have no other ambition than to preserve 
 their idleness and their prerogatives. The chief 
 subject of his political meditations must therefore be 
 the monarchy, which, under different laws, in 
 France and in England, has raised these two nations 
 to a high degree of prosperity and power. 
 Monarchy is the state, ‘‘in which one man gov- 
 erns, but under fixed and established laws.’’ 
 These laws are the very constitution of the state, 
 which lives and prospers so long as they are 
 respected. They establish in it classes, every one 
 of which has its privileges and obligations corre- 
 sponding to these privileges. Such government 
 attains a state of perfection when the monarch and 
 the classes, while pursuing their several objects, 
 act nevertheless in concert, without trying to 
 exceed their several functions. If the prince seeks 
 to make his power absolute, he changes the nature 
 of the monarchy; if the nobles deprive him of his 
 power, the monarchy tends to become an aristo- 
 cratic republic. The essential character of a mon- 
 archy is constituted inequality. In a despotic state 
 
MONTESQUIEU. I5$7 
 
 all men are equal, because everybody is nothing, 
 the master alone is everything. Again, in a 
 republic, all men are equal, because they all seek 
 the public good alone, and have no private ambi- 
 tions or privileges. But in monarchies men are 
 necessarily unequal, from the king down to the 
 lowest citizen, on account of their birth and of the 
 _ class to which they belong. The power of the king 
 meets a barrier in the party spirit of each class; 
 and a nobleman who will unhesitatingly sacrifice his 
 life to his king will refuse to sacrifice his honor. 
 This is an ideal of moderate government which 
 Montesquieu seems to prefer to all others when he 
 thinks of France, and which France did indeed 
 enjoy at the time when ‘Gothic government’’ 
 reached its perfection—i. e., the time of St. Louis. 
 This explains the hatred he evinces in the Lettres 
 epanese toward? Richelictumana) louis) XuViwkthe 
 expression of which reappears in L’Lsprit des Lots. 
 Richelieu made it his aim to reduce the power of 
 the nobility, to take from them their privileges and 
 their function in the state, and to make the king’s 
 power absolute. Louis XIV completed the work 
 of Richelieu, and did all in his power to annihilate 
 Parliament and to reduce this ‘‘depository of laws’’ 
 to a purely administrative and judicial office. Both 
 of them endeavored to destroy all ‘‘intermediate, 
 surbordinate and dependent powers.’’ But if these 
 powers disappear, there is an end of constitution, 
 “fundamental laws,” and ‘‘mediate channels through 
 which power may be applied.’’ There is no longer 
 
158 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 any barrier standing against the capricious will of 
 the one man: we havea despot. ‘‘No nobility, 
 no monarchy,’’ is to Montesquieu a maxim with 
 the force and effect of an axiom. Therefore abol- 
 ishing the right of landed proprietors to administer 
 justice, wiping out the last traces of the feudal sys- 
 tem, abolishing the prerogatives of the nobility, of 
 the clergy, of parliament (which had been the 
 unchanging polity of the French kings for a cen- 
 tury) is equivalent to ‘‘changing the constitution 
 and transforming the monarchy into a despotism.’’ 
 And Montesquieu asks whether this is a wise thing 
 to do. 
 
 The danger is all the greater because the trans- 
 formation can be effected without a sudden revolu- 
 tion, and by an imperceptible transition, since in 
 both governments, according to Montesquieu’s own 
 expression (which Voltaire did not fail to empha- 
 size) ‘‘the power is the same.’’ But in a mon- 
 archy the more mighty a king is made by the 
 prestige of his crown, the more carefully should he 
 abstain from abusing his power, and respect the 
 rights of the classes established by the “‘funda- 
 mental’’ laws: for he is no less concerned in their 
 preservation than they are in his. The picture of 
 despotism drawn by Montesquieu is a sort of bug- 
 bear, a supreme and solemn warning to the French 
 people and the French king. ‘‘Beware! this is 
 what you are tending to! Do not wantonly 
 destroy with your own hands the very conditions of 
 existence of monarchy in France!’’ Montesquieu 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 159 
 
 is therefore, from his very liberalism, deliberately 
 conservative. It is from fear of despotism to come 
 and hatred of despotism already existing that he 
 undertakes the defense of political inequality, for 
 he sees in it the surest guaranty of the liberty to 
 which the French have been accustomed. 
 
 Of course, there are other forms of liberty, for 
 instance, that of the Spartans and Romans, but 
 this was adapted only to the city of antiquity; and 
 that of England, but this is inseparable from the 
 spirit and character of the English race. Now Mon- 
 tesquieu does not propose to naturalize foreign 
 institutions in France, an extremely delicate and 
 perhaps impossible undertaking. The form of gov- 
 ernment in question is one that the French have 
 actually had, and still have nominally; it would be 
 sufficient, he thinks, that its spirit should be well 
 understood, and that there should be an earnest 
 endeavor to restore it. The reformation of the 
 French monarchy, in his mind, would consist in 
 bringing it back to the purity of its type, an ambi- 
 tion apparently more modest and in fact more 
 impracticable than the demand for even a radical 
 transformation of existing institutions. Had soci- 
 ology existed in the days of Montesquieu, it would 
 have shown him that the French monarchy of the 
 sixteenth century was an organic unity of morals, 
 beliefs, traditions—in short, of outward and inward 
 conditions which had changed irrevocably, and that 
 the monarchy, along with these conditions, now 
 belonged to the past. 
 
160 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 The seventh chapter of the eleventh book of 
 LEsprit des Lots, which treats of the English con- 
 stitution, is perhaps the part which has been most 
 read, and the influence of which has been most 
 lasting. The object of this constitution, he main- 
 tains, is liberty. The whole array of laws, and the 
 famous separation of the three functions: executive, 
 legislative and judicial, all tend to preserve the 
 liberty of the citizens. Weneed not examine here 
 whether Montesquieu gave an accurate description 
 of the English constitution in his time, and 
 whether he had closely observed its structure and 
 working, and in what measure he was inspired by 
 Algernon Smith or by Locke. Besides, he seems 
 to have tried above all to imitate what he greatly 
 admired in the Germama of Tacitus. He wanted 
 not so much to give a scrupulously faithful picture 
 of the English constitution as to offer his readers, 
 as a lofty lesson in politics, the example of a free 
 people under a monarchical government. It is the 
 counterpart of his picture of despotism. In both 
 cases the details are slightly exaggerated in order 
 to attain the end which the author had in view; 
 and just as despotism becomes a bugbear, the Eng- 
 lish constitution becomes an ideal. It is not alto- 
 gether his fault if the lesson, being misinterpreted, 
 called forth clumsy and unfortunate attempts at 
 imitation. We see, in his Notes on England, that 
 he judged the English society of his time severely, 
 and thought it threatened with imminent degenera- 
 tion. He nevertheless discerned and appreciated 
 
MONTESQUIEU. IOI 
 
 the essential features of the English character, and 
 I question whether, after all, the picture he drew 
 of it (Book 19, chapter xxi of L’Esprit des Lots,) is 
 not still among the best—and, at any rate, more 
 accurate than that of Taine. 
 
 Among the ‘‘English things’’ for which Mon- 
 tesquieu roused a desire on the Continent we must 
 reckon first judicial organization, especially penal 
 judicature. Montesquieu showed that in England 
 the judicial power, ‘‘so awful among men,’’ be- 
 comes, so to speak, invisible and nugatory, and is 
 never an instrument of arbitrary oppression in the 
 hands of the executive power. Every person 
 accused of crime is judged by his peers, and has 
 the right to challenge his judges. Nobody can be 
 imprisoned without being examined at once, and, 
 ifnexpedient, réleasedwonmballiiy(Torture is (never 
 employed. In one word, man is free. It was not 
 by any means the same in France, where still 
 existed a shameful inconsistency between the com- 
 paratively mild manners and the arbitrary and bar- 
 barous criminal procedure. Chancellor d’Aguesseau 
 still thought torture indispensable. Every one knows 
 with what spirited indignation Montesquieu speaks 
 Oiitce) ly hear, | thevvoice of; nature |) cryiney out 
 against me.’’ And nobody did more than he in 
 behalf of the introduction of trial by jury. 
 
 Penalties need reformation quite as much as does 
 procedure, for “‘cruelty in penalties does not cause 
 the laws to be better obeyed. In countries where 
 
162 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 punishments are moderate, they are dreaded as 
 much as in those where they are tyrannical and 
 terrible. The imagination adapts itself to the cus- 
 toms of the ‘country’yone™ lives ain." A’ “weeks 
 imprisonment, or asmall fine, or the despair brought 
 on by the disgrace of being convicted, produce as 
 much effect upon a European as the most cruel 
 punishment does upon an Asiatic.’’ Cruel penal- 
 ties even thwart their own aim. If you punish 
 mere theft as severely as theft combined with man- 
 slaughter, murder will multiply: with equal risk 
 the thief finds it to his advantage to put witnesses 
 out of the way. Therefore, public interest, nature 
 and the liberty of the citizens agree in demanding 
 ‘‘that arbitrariness should cease, that the penalty 
 should not originate in the caprice of the legislator, 
 but in the nature of the case; in short, that crim- 
 inal laws should derive each penalty from the par- 
 ticular nature of the offence.’’ A suggestive 
 maxim, the happy consequences of which have not 
 yet all been drawn by criminal law, even in our own 
 time, and which, if fully understood, would require 
 us to take into account not only the particular 
 nature of the transgression, but also that of the 
 
 ’ 
 
 transgressor. 
 
 But can it also be applied to offences against 
 religion? Without the least doubt. Among these 
 crimes, those which consist in disturbing public 
 worship are really offences against the peace and 
 safety of the citizens, and should be punished as 
 such. Real offences against religion are direct 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 163 
 
 attacks made upon it; and the only punishment 
 suited to the nature of the case (according to the 
 above principle) is exclusion from the privileges of 
 religion, or excommunication. Where there is no 
 action witnessed by the public, there is no cause 
 for criminal process; it is a matter between the 
 individual and God. The evil here has sprung 
 - from the idea that we must avenge divinity. Now 
 we should pay honor to divinity, but never avenge 
 it, otherwise there would be no end of tortures. In 
 this spirit Montesquieu wrote his “‘Most humble 
 remonstrances to the Spanish and Portuguese 
 Inquisitors.’’ 
 Montesquieu’s plea for toleration, to say noth- 
 ing of the force of the arguments and of the 
 eloquence of the writer, attracted public attention 
 all the more strongly as Montesquieu was not sus- 
 pected of any anti-religious sentiment. It is true, 
 there was biting satire in the Lettres Persanes against 
 monks and worldly abbés. But in L’Esprit des Lots 
 all religious subjects, as a rule, are treated with 
 gravity and moderation. Montesquieu speaks as a 
 philosopher and a statesman, who has learned from 
 the philosophy of history the part played by reli- 
 gion in the evolution of mankind. He observes 
 that he must look at things from the statesman’s 
 point of view, which does not coincide with that of 
 the theologian, and that public policy recommends 
 toleration in the well-contrived interest of the state. 
 Whatever his inmost feelings may be as regards 
 Christianity in particular, his public attitude is irre- 
 
164 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 proachably respectful. In this point, as in many 
 others, his prudence was perfect. Being often as 
 bold as most of the ‘‘philosophers’’ of the eight- 
 eenth century, having like them, and before them, 
 touched upon the most burning and forbidden 
 questions, he nevertheless preserved a reputation 
 for wisdom and moderation. Conservatives have 
 always been wont to contrast him with Rousseau; 
 and yet modern socialists might also claim him as 
 one of their precursors. Did he not write that ‘“‘the 
 state owes to every citizen a sure living, food, 
 suitable clothes and a method of life not inconsist- 
 ent with health?’’ 
 
 We cannot here enter into the details of Mon- 
 tesquieu’s historical, political and judicial views, 
 but it is impossible to pass over in silence his the- 
 ory of public international law, which was new and 
 significant of his time. This branch of law, he had 
 said in the Lettres Persanes, such as it now is, is a 
 science that teaches princes how far they can vio- 
 late justice without injuring their own interests. 
 It is iniquity reduced to a system. But there are 
 not two kinds of justice, and the relations between 
 nations should be regulated by the same laws in 
 principle as the relations between private persons. 
 ‘‘Public international law is the civil law of the 
 world.’ «JAti the end: ofs the (century, ‘Kantiinanse 
 celebrated pamphlet, ‘‘ Zum ewigen Frieden,’’ declares 
 precisely the same principles, adding that he con- 
 ceives indeed the possibility of submitting interna- 
 tional politics to the moral law, but not of regulating 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 165 
 
 morals by politics. These theories are connected 
 with a system of ideas current at that time, accord- 
 ing to which the various nations were looked upon 
 as members of one family. “Should I know,”’’ 
 says Montesquieu,’ “‘of something which was useful 
 to my country but prejudicial to mankind, I should 
 regard the divulging of it as nothing less than a 
 wenimetw 
 
 At the foundation of this philosophical cosmo- 
 politanism, if we lay aside the sentimental and 
 optimistic element in it, we may discern two im- 
 portant ideas which we shall meet more than once 
 inuthescourse” of \thetciahtcenth vcentury //7i\One 
 represents humanity as being always and every- 
 where the same, and consequently entitled to a 
 likerespect’: in’ every mhumanibeing.: They other 
 makes universality a characteristic of truth. The 
 certitude of mathematical truths comes from their 
 being obvious to all minds; in a like way, what is 
 just in politics must satisfy every human conscience, 
 independently of all interests, even those of our 
 country. French philosophy and literature were 
 the vehicles of these ideas throughout the world; 
 and wherever the ascendancy of French writers and 
 philosophers decreased, this cosmopolitanism suf- 
 fered a corresponding decadence. 
 
 In less than two years L’F-spritdes Lots ran 
 through twenty-two editions. It was immediately 
 translated into the chief European languages. 
 Montesquieu’s death, in 1755, was a public grief, 
 
166 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 not only for France, but for all thinkers abroad. 
 And yet it is a fact that L’Asprit des Lots, though 
 much admired, was never popular even in 
 France. This disfavor does not include either the 
 Lettres Persanes, which still amuse and interest in 
 our day, or the Constdérations sur les Causes de la 
 Grandeur et de la Décadence des Romains, which have 
 maintained a place among French literary classics. 
 There must, therefore, be in L’ Esprit des Lots, not- 
 withstanding the beauties of the work, something 
 peculiar which repels, or at least fails to attract, the 
 reader iltsurely ‘cannot be\thetsubject, forthe 
 French public in general is fond of political and socio- 
 logical topics. It seems rather to be the fluctuant 
 and indecisive method, neither frankly abstract nor 
 positively historical. French minds are fond of 
 “‘trenchant styles of writing.’’ They may also 
 have been puzzled by the way in which the books 
 and chapters are broken up and scattered. They 
 are accustomed to books composed in a simpler and 
 more lucid way. 
 
 Let us make haste, and say that the influence of 
 a work of this kind is to be measured not by the 
 number but by the quality of its readers. The 
 influence of L'Esprit des Lots was wonderfully great. 
 Governing statesmen, as a rule, take little notice of 
 political philosophers, whom they look upon as 
 dreamers, lacking in common sense and ignorant of 
 practical politics; and they are little disposed to 
 take into account any unsolicited advice. Mon- 
 tesquieu had the rare good fortune to become an 
 
MONTESQUIEU. 167 
 
 authority in their eyes, and to be often quoted by 
 them. Many of his views on political liberty, on 
 constitutional monarchy, on the distribution of 
 powers, on penal procedure, on religious toleration, 
 etc., have found their way into the laws of several 
 European countries. His prestige did not suffer 
 as much as that of the other philosophers of the 
 ‘eighteenth century from the reaction which set in 
 towards the beginning of the nineteenth. Many 
 sound minds even thought they found in him the 
 happy medium which they were seeking between the 
 Revolution and the equally untenable counter- 
 revolution. He became the patron saint of liberal 
 doctrinaries. 
 
 From a scientific point of view, he really intro- 
 duced the philosophy of government which was to 
 have such a great development in France. True, 
 he stands distinctly apart from the ‘‘philosophers’”’ 
 who were to succeed him. He does not, like 
 nearly all of them, despise everything between the 
 Roman period and the sixteenth century. He does 
 not look upon the Middle Ages as a disgrace to 
 humanity. On the contrary, he speaks of the feudal 
 laws with esteem, and even with a warmth which 
 was rare in him. He would have liked to study 
 this ‘‘splendid subject,’’ and the word ‘‘Gothic,’’ 
 which was soon to become a synonym of all that 
 was rude and barbarous, is used by Montesquieu to 
 designate the government he most praises. His 
 education as jurist and his knowledge as historian 
 guard him here against rash and unjust assertions. 
 
168 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Others were bold where he was prudent, extrava- 
 gant where he was moderate. They attempted to 
 introduce into France the morals and principles of 
 the ancient republics. They attacked not simply 
 intolerance, but religion itself. In a word, they 
 did all that Montesquieu abstained from doing, and 
 which he would perhaps have criticised most 
 severely. 
 
 Nevertheless, it was he that opened the way for 
 them. After him, strengthened by his example 
 and by his authority, they were able without much 
 difficulty to establish themselves in the domain of 
 political and social sciences. The ‘‘philosophers”’ 
 understood this, and in spite of all differences of 
 ideas and tone, they always claimed him as one 
 of themselves. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 WE must not turn to Voltaire for an original con- 
 ception of the universe, which connects the whole 
 of reality with a first principle, or for a constant 
 concern for the metaphysical problems upon which 
 both science and action depend. It is a_ well- 
 known fact that Voltaire was not akin to such men 
 as Plato, Descartes and Spinoza. These lived only 
 to seek disinterestedly after truth. If they influ- 
 enced the world, it was from afar, and through a 
 slow diffusion of their principles—a result all the 
 deeper and more durable coming as it did from a 
 greater height. Voltaire wished for immediate 
 effects. He was not above the world; he was, on 
 the contrary, what the Germans call a Weltkind. 
 He loved wealth, success, honors; he was eager 
 for literary fame. He lived in the midst of con- 
 troversy, and was never weary of it. He was full 
 of craft and cunning, and curious regarding the 
 most trifling as well as the most important objects. 
 
 In spite of this, his contemporaries, and the 
 greatest among them—Kant, for instance, did not 
 think they ought to deny Voltaire the name of phil- 
 osopher. Let us not be more exacting than they. 
 Let us acknowledge, as they did, that the philos- 
 
 169 
 
170 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ophy of Voltaire, though not strictly reduced toa 
 system, is nevertheless diffused through his work, 
 and is the very soul of it. It is expressed in his 
 novels, in his historical works, and even in his 
 tragedies, as well as in his essays and in the philo- 
 sophical dictionary. It is, indeed, characterized 
 rather by wide range than by depth. Voltaire was 
 addressing the public at large. He preaches and 
 rails indefatigably; his satires are sermons, and his 
 sermons satires. He makes use in a thousand dif- 
 ferent shapes of the process familiar to all great 
 journalists, of whom he was the first—namely, repe- 
 tition. He is thus led to an extreme simplification 
 of his philosophy, and reduces it to a small number 
 of propositions, which require no effort to be under- 
 stood. But just as we make an effort in order to 
 grasp clearly the meaning of some abstruse meta- 
 physician in spite of his obscurity, so should we 
 endeavor to bring out Voltaire’s philosophical 
 thought in spite of the excessive zeal for clearness 
 by which it is often distorted. 
 
 Is this philosophy, as has been claimed, an 
 engine of war against the Church and the Roman 
 Catholic dogmas? No doubt it is that, but not 
 that alone. It aims not only to destroy, but also 
 to build up. As Voltaire was much better fit for 
 the former task than for the latter, he was infinitely 
 more successful init. But this is no reason either 
 for suspecting his sincerity when he seeks to be 
 constructive, or for dismissing without a word an 
 effort the effect of which has not yet disappeared. 
 
VOLTAIRE. 171 
 
 Voltaire’s religious philosophy, for instance, is 
 even in our days that of many people who do not 
 acknowledge, or sometimes even suspect, that it 
 is SO. 
 
 The philosophy of Voltaire varied, but less than 
 might have been expected in the course of so long 
 a life from such a mobile nature as his, so keenly 
 alive to every new prompting of the spirit of the 
 age. Thus, in his 7ratwé de Métaphysique (1734), he 
 admits free-will, and later on, in the Philosophe 
 ignorant (1766), he confesses that Collins had con- 
 verted him to determinism. He changed his opin- 
 ion also on the question of the eternity of the 
 world. His semi-pessimism became more bitter as 
 he grew older. But on the main points of his doc- 
 trine, on God, the soul, morals, the essential prin- 
 ciple of religion, Voltaire was always consistent with 
 himself. He saw most of the Encyclopzdists fol- 
 low after Diderot and go even much farther; in 
 spite of their urgent entreaties, and at the risk of 
 seeming a conservative and almost a reactionist, he 
 refused to swerve from his theories. Ina man so 
 careful of his popularity as Voltaire was, this is a 
 sure proof of his attachment to a body, if not a 
 system, of philosophical ideas. 
 
 Introduced when still a mere youth to the soci- 
 ety of the Zemple, Voltaire was initiated into the 
 philosophy of the ‘‘libertines,’’ and was thus in 
 direct connection with the anti-religious move- 
 ment in the seventeenth century. He was well 
 
172 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 acquainted with Fontenelle and Bayle, not quite so 
 well with Malebranche, and but slightly with Des- 
 cartes, though he often mentions him. He seems 
 to see in Descartes only the author of the hy- 
 pothesis of vortices and plenum; one wonders 
 whether he ever read the Discours de la Méthode and 
 the Méditations. He certainly did not enter deeply 
 into them. It was in England that Voltaire be- 
 came fond of philosophy. Locke and Newton were 
 his masters in the art of thinking. On his return 
 to France, full of what he had learned, he under- 
 took the introduction of Newton’s physics and 
 Locke’s empiricism. The zeal and talent of sucha 
 disciple contributed in no small degree to make 
 them known and admired. It is true, he did not 
 present to his readers the entire works of either 
 Locke or Newton; he rather ‘‘adapted’’ them, 
 according to his own taste and to the supposed taste 
 of the public. 
 
 The success was considerable, and one cannot 
 tell whether the Lettres Anglaises did more for the 
 European fame of Locke and Newton, or for the 
 reputation of him who expounded their doctrines so 
 skillfully. 
 
 Voltaire admires everything, or nearly every- 
 thing, in Locke. His book, he says, is a master- 
 piece of patience and wisdom; but what pleases 
 him perhaps above everything else is Locke’s con- 
 ception of philosophy, and the course he pursued. 
 Locke is an unassuming man, a sage, who never 
 
VOLTAIRE. 173 
 
 pretends to know that of which he is ignorant, and 
 does not grapple with problems beyond his capa- 
 city; when he meets with such problems he avoids 
 them. Such philosophical prudence, according to 
 Voltaire, marks a turning-point in the history of 
 human thought. He places on one side all philos- 
 ophers whose works are metaphysical inventions, 
 which, though ingenious, we do not feel to be expres- 
 sive of reality; and on the other, the ‘‘sage,’’ Locke, 
 cautiously going forward so long as he is guided 
 by experience, and stopping as soon as his guide 
 abandons him. ‘‘From Plato down to him, there 
 has been nothing,’’—a sweeping assertion which 
 the reader is not to take literally. We must make 
 due allowance for literary exaggeration, and for 
 the desire of striking the attention, and understand 
 that ‘‘all philosophers since Plato have written the 
 romance of the soul, and that Locke was the first 
 to write its history.’’ Locke, in short, discovered 
 the true philosophical method. Voltaire even goes 
 so far as to say that there never was a more accu- 
 rate logician, and that Locke had ‘‘a geometrician’s 
 mind,’’—which is a rather surprising statement. 
 Being in possession of the true method, Locke 
 addressed himself to the only problems which are 
 susceptible of being solved. Philosophy in his 
 hands ceased to be fantastic and arbitrary, and 
 became positive and certain. He contented himself 
 with unfolding the operations of the soul, i. e., 
 following them in their order and progress. Thus 
 ‘‘his book contains nothing but truths, and what 
 
174 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 makes the work perfect is that all these truths are 
 clear.”’ 
 
 It would be difficult to carry the hyperbole of 
 praise farther, and yet, strange to say, in a book 
 so full of truths Voltaire seems to have seen only 
 a few, to which he constantly recurs. Of the rich 
 and varied contents of Locke’s Assay, he retained 
 but a small number of propositions which he 
 accepted without question. Voltaire himself has 
 more than once given a summary of what he owed 
 to Locke, which in fact is limited to empiricism and 
 the refutation of innate ideas. But of the analysis 
 of complex ideas, the theory of language, the study 
 of the idea of power, the general definition of ideas, 
 and so many other interesting points in Locke, we 
 observe no trace in Voltaire. 
 
 On the other hand, an hypothesis which holds 
 but a small place in Locke’s Essay assumed a very 
 great importance in Voltaire’s eyes. Locke said: 
 ‘““We shall perhaps never be able to know whether 
 a purely material being thinks or not.’’ According 
 to Voltaire, nothing so sensible has ever been or 
 will ever be said about the nature of the soul. 
 Even the dubious form in which Locke expresses 
 his thought is the only suitable one. Ona meta- 
 physical question of this kind a judicious man will 
 always keep to ““perhaps. 
 cessful attempts have been required to bring philos- 
 ophers to such necessary modesty! From Plato 
 down to Descartes and Leibniz, all have assumed 
 to know what the essence of the soul is, and they 
 
 ped 
 
 But how many unsuc- 
 
VOLTAIRE. 175 
 
 all have plunged into inextricable difficulties. Car- 
 tesians, for instance, who made of the soul a thing, 
 the whole nature of which is to think, were very 
 much embarrassed when they came to animals. 
 What a pity and what a poor conception it was to 
 say that animals are machines without any knowl- 
 edge or feeling! If they are mere machines, you 
 _ certainly are to them only what a chronometer is 
 to a kitchen clock. Conversely, if you have the 
 honor of possessing a spiritual soul, animals also 
 have one. Choose, if you dare, between a machine 
 man and the immortal soul of a flea or a grub. 
 Cartesians can never get out of this dilemma in 
 which Bayle had already confined them. 
 
 Let us rather trust to experience, the only sure 
 guide; let us stop where it stops. It teaches us 
 that we exist, feel and think. But if we try to 
 take a step farther, we fall into an abyss of darkness. 
 We have no organ through which we can know 
 what the soul is. Voltaire would fain say, as 
 Hume does, that we have no idea of anything of 
 which we have not an impression. Now, there is 
 no impression which teaches us what the soul is. 
 It is as completely absent in us as are the senses 
 possessed by the man from Sirius mentioned in 
 Micromégas. We are reduced to conjectures neces- 
 sarily uncertain. What, then, must we do? What 
 Locke and Newton did. We must learn to doubt. 
 However, Voltaire does not content himself with 
 this prudent reserve. Without assuming to know 
 the substance of the soul, since we have no means 
 
176 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of gaining this knowledge, we may make conjec- 
 tures, provided we do not mistake our hypotheses 
 for certain facts. Now, the one which Locke so 
 timidly put forward pleased Voltaire very much. 
 What if God in His infinite might had endowed 
 matter with the power to think? We have no right 
 to maintain that it isso; but neither has any one 
 the right to maintain that it is not. We know on 
 the one hand that God is all-powerful, and on the 
 other hand we do not know what matter is in 
 itself; we know some of its qualities or properties, 
 but not its substance: therefore what right have I 
 to maintain that God has not granted to organized 
 substance power to feel or think? Is it fit for such 
 a limited and ignorant being as I am to determine 
 of my own authority what God may or may not 
 have done? ‘To call this hypothesis absurd and 
 contradictory is impertinent dogmatism; it is not 
 only to set bounds to the divine Power, but also to 
 presume to know the essence of matter and soul, 
 which nobody has ever known or ever will know. 
 If}itherefore, during’) all: his elife > Voltaire 
 remained attached to this hypothesis of Locke, it 
 was not at all from a secret tendency to material- 
 ism; on the contrary, it was because it permitted 
 him to reject at once and on the same ground 
 materialism and spiritualism. The former affirms 
 more than it knows; for how can it say that every- 
 thing is matter while it does not know what the 
 essence of matter is? But ordinary spiritualism is 
 no less shocking. In order to explain these phe- 
 
VOLTAIRE. 177 
 
 nomena that have no parallel in the material 
 world—thoughts, feelings, memory, etc.—it imag- 
 ines a special principle, spiritual, distinct from the 
 body and situated within it, which it calls the soul. 
 But is it not obvious that ‘ 
 word, as well as ‘‘motion’’? What is concrete is 
 thessthoushts, feelinss Vanda volitions) Al fine 
 -advantage it is to have given substance to an 
 abstraction, and to say that it is the soul which 
 thinks, feels, wills, etc.! 
 
 Thus Voltaire does not represent thought as an 
 attribute which God can at will give to matter or 
 
 2ouly isian abstract 
 
 take away from it, as we can at our pleasure mag- 
 Netizevor demagnetize! anmirony bar. i) hreed i from 
 that puerile form, his reflections on the soul deserve 
 some attention. He meant to imply that in our 
 ignorance of what is at the bottom of things, the 
 dualism of the soul and the body is an unproved 
 assertion; ‘‘that the supposition of a distinct soul 
 was not a solution, but simply another statement of 
 the problem’ 
 be contented with mere words. ‘‘A tulip ora rose,’’ 
 he says, “‘is produced by an incomprehensible 
 mechanism, and yet we suppose no soul in them. 
 Nor do we suppose any in insects, which live and 
 die. In animals we admit instinct, but we do not 
 at all know what it is. And when we suppose a 
 
 > 
 
 ; and lastly, that to accept it was to 
 
 soul in man, do we understand ourselves any bet- 
 ter?’ In modern language this means that we can- 
 not account for the functions of the soul till we see 
 their connection with organic functions. Voltaire 
 
178 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 then has here a twofold merit: he has clearly seen 
 that the metaphysical study of the soul had been 
 verbal and sterile; and he has perceived, though 
 dimly, that a positive science of the soul might per- 
 haps become possible some day when biology was 
 more advanced. 
 
 When Voltaire wished to publish his Z/éments de 
 la Philosophie de Newton, he was denied a copyright 
 because he combated Descartes. Cartesianism, 
 once persecuted, was now officially patronized. It 
 was hard for novelties to effect an entrance into the 
 Academy of Sciences. After Maupertuis Voltaire 
 was the first declared Newtonian in France. His 
 account of Newton’s system is remarkably clear and 
 sufficiently exact. He states in it, together with 
 the law of universal gravitation, Newton’s chief 
 discoveries in optics. But at the same time he 
 adds to it a part entitled Metaphysics, which, being 
 placed first, seems to command all the rest, and is 
 much more Voltaire’s metaphysics than Newton's. 
 
 And indeed, as the saying goes, Voltaire killed 
 two birds with one stone: he made Newton known, 
 and at the same time turned him to good account 
 for his own cause. He admired the genius who 
 discovered the law of universal gravitation and 
 decomposed light; but he also found in him a valu- 
 able patron for the natural religion which he 
 preached. With Newton’s name he would silence 
 all adversaries, whoever they might be, atheists or 
 Catholics. He would answer them all: “I ama 
 
VOLTAIRE. 179 
 
 religious man, as the great Newton was.’’ He 
 relates, in the Lettres Anglaises, that the accounts he 
 heard in London of Newton’s piety moved him 
 deeply. He then understood that, to use Bacon’s 
 phrase, ‘‘a little science inclineth man’s mind to 
 atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s 
 minds about to religion.’’ With Newton the ‘‘phys- 
 icist becomes the herald of Providence; a catechist 
 reveals God to children, and a Newton demonstrates 
 Him to sages.’’ The work of the universe, when 
 better known, proves the existence of One who 
 wrought it, and so many unchanging laws prove 
 that of a law-giver. ‘‘Wholesome philosophy,’’ 
 therefore, destroyed atheism, which ‘‘obscure 
 theology’’ supplied with weapons. 
 
 Voltaire loves to dwell on the affinity between 
 Newton's views and natural religion. According to 
 Newton, he says, (and also according to reason), 
 there is such a thing as a vacuum. Matter there- 
 fore does not exist of necessity. It must, then, 
 have received existence from a free cause. There- 
 fore there is a God. So that a consistent Newton- 
 ian cannot help being a deist (dest and ¢heist have 
 the same meaning to Voltaire). And that, indeed, 
 they all are. One cannot say the same of Carte- 
 sians. Their system produced that of Spinoza; and 
 many other Cartesians were led to admit no other 
 God than the immensity of things; in this they 
 were consistent, since Descartes supposes a plenum, 
 and thinks the world infinite, and most probably also 
 eternal. This did not prevent the French authori- 
 
180 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ties from rejecting, in the name of Cartesianism, the 
 new science of physics, which, on the other hand, 
 leads to a knowledge of the true God! 
 
 The strongest, or at least the most specious, of 
 the objections which the Cartesians for a long time 
 raised against Newton often occurs in Fontenelle. 
 It consists in the contention that attraction is an 
 occult quality, and that physics by accepting it 
 would retrograde toward the scholasticism of the 
 Middle Ages. To which Voltaire pertinently 
 answered: What do you understand by an occult 
 quality? Do you mean that the essence of the 
 force manifested in the phenomena of gravitation 
 and gravity is unknown to us? I confess it is. 
 But then, not only these, but also life, thought, 
 heat, capillarity and all things are occult qualities; 
 we do not know the essence of anything. Do you 
 mean that Newton simply revived a word which 
 explains nothing? You then forget the beautiful 
 demonstration he gave of his laws. Attraction is 
 but a name: the demonstrations are the essential 
 parts of his theory. 
 
 After having contributed more than any other 
 man to spread in France the discoveries of Newton, 
 Voltaire ceased to concern himself much with 
 astronomy and physics. But he never ceased to 
 seek in Newton’s physics a help for his demon- 
 stration of the existence of God. 
 
 In Voltaire’s philosophy the ontological proof 
 has disappeared, since he does not admit innate 
 
VOLTAIRE. ISI 
 
 ideas. There remain, therefore, the cosmological 
 proof and the proof by means of final causes. For 
 the former, it is precisely Newton’s physics on 
 which he relies for support. Newton in fact says: 
 ‘“There is a Being who has necessarily been self- 
 existent from all eternity, and who is the origin of 
 all other beings. This Being is infinite in duration, 
 immensity and power; for what can limit Him?’’ 
 But may not the material world be that very Being? 
 You might suppose so, answers Voltaire, should 
 you, as the Cartesians do, admit the plenum and 
 the infinity and eternity of the world. Nothing is 
 so easy as to pass from this to materialism—that 
 is, to a doctrine which makes matter the eternal 
 substance, and knows no other God. (Thus, to 
 Voltaire the words ‘‘materialist’’ and ‘‘atheist’’ are 
 almost alwayssynonymous.) But the Newtonians, 
 from the very fact of their admitting a vacuum, 
 admit that matter has had a beginning, that motion 
 needs a first cause, in short, a creating God. Still, 
 when Voltaire later on came to think that the uni- 
 verse must be eternal, as the very thought of God 
 who caused it to exist, this argument lost some of 
 its force, or at least ought to have been restated in 
 a different form. If Voltaire did not attend to it, it 
 was probably because he was fully satisfied with 
 another proof, concerning which he never changed 
 his mind—i. e., the proof based on final causes. 
 No doubt he was the first to laugh at the abuse 
 made of the argument from design. ‘‘ Noses were 
 made to wear spectacles; therefore we have spec- 
 
182 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tacles. Legs were obviously instituted that they 
 might be clad, and so we have knee-breeches; 
 stones, that they might be cut; swine, that they 
 might be eaten, and so on.’’ But never did Vol- 
 taire find anything ridiculous in the thought that 
 the whole of nature bears witness to Him who cre- 
 ated it. ‘‘When I observe the order, the prodigious 
 contrivances, the mechanical and geometrical laws 
 which reign over the universe, the innumerable 
 means and ends of all things, I am overcome with 
 admiration and awe. Nothing can shake my faith 
 in this axiom: ‘Every piece of work implies a work- 
 man.’ ’’ This workman we have already met with: 
 it is Fontenelle’s ‘‘watchmaker.’’ Voltaire uses 
 almost exactly the same expressions as Fontenelle: 
 ‘“When we behold a fine machine, we say that there 
 is a good machinist, and that he has an excellent 
 understanding. The world is assuredly an admir- 
 able machine; therefore there is in the world an 
 admirable intelligence, wherever it may be. This 
 argument is old, and is none the worse for that.’’ 
 
 Voltaire thinks to give this argument a deeper 
 basis by adding that ‘‘nature is art,’’ which means 
 that there is properly speaking no nature, since all 
 existing things are the work of some great unknown 
 Being who is both very powerful and very industri- 
 ous. He thus carries to its utmost limits the clear 
 notion of finality, which is borrowed directly from 
 the analogy between the order in the universe and 
 the productions of human art. But of what value 
 is this analogy? German philosophy, on the con- 
 
VOLTAIRE. 183 
 
 trary, likes to show that the idea of finality is an 
 obscure one, because the way in which nature 
 engenders and animates beings resembles in no wise 
 the industry of man. Man makes use of materials 
 and springs, and puts together pieces of various 
 origins; he works from the outside, whereas nature 
 works from the inside. Instead of explaining 
 ‘nature by means of art, we ought rather to inter- 
 pret art by nature; for if we do not understand 
 the organizing and restoring power of nature, neither 
 can we explain the creating genius of the poet or 
 the artist; the finality of nature is not clear, as 
 Voltaire thought it to be: it is mysterious. We 
 cannot help supposing it to exist, says Kant; but 
 neither can we understand what it is. 
 
 Voltaire was not conscious of these difficulties. 
 His proof seemed to him flawless, and he steadily 
 maintained to the last the existence of God, even 
 against his friends. This is not only because, as 
 we shall see later, God is needed for social ethics. 
 When Voltaire weighs the reasons for or against 
 atheism and theism from a purely theoretical point 
 of view, he thinks the latter preferable to the 
 former. ‘‘In the opinion that there is a God we 
 meet with difficulties, but in the contrary opinion 
 For instance, to come back 
 to Newton, who plays so large a part in Voltaire’s 
 natural theology, the atheist, as we have said, is a 
 materialist: he acknowledges the existence of infi- 
 nite matter, of a plenum; he therefore stands in 
 contradiction with Newton. Now, Newton cer- 
 
 9 
 
 there are absurdities.’ 
 
184 MODERN PHILOSOPHY “IN| FRANCE. 
 
 tainly has spoken the truth; atheism is therefore 
 untenable. Voltaire’s reasoning is perhaps over- 
 simplified, on account of his constant endeavor to 
 be clearly understood even by the most careless 
 reader. But the leading idea is an interesting 
 one: to give up such of our metaphysical ideas as 
 are incompatible with well-grounded scientific 
 truths. This is precisely what we do in the pres- 
 ent century. 
 
 The existence of God being once settled, if we 
 try to determine His attributes, innumerable diff- 
 culties arise, so great that Voltaire assumes the 
 position which was to be defended later by Demea, 
 in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 
 and which is, properly speaking, that of the deist. 
 ‘‘The existence of God is proved to me, but His 
 attributes and His essence I think I am proved 
 to be unfit to understand.’’ Philosophy does indeed 
 show us that there is a God, but has no power to 
 teach us what He is, what He does, and wherefore 
 He does so or so; He alone can know. Let us, 
 therefore, abstain from attributing our own quali- 
 ties to God and making Him in our own image. 
 Neither human justice, nor human kindness, nor 
 human wisdom can be His. It is useless to stretch 
 these ad infinitum, they will never be aught but 
 human qualities whose boundaries have been 
 extended. Thus, Clarke was wrong in attributing 
 intelligence to God because He created intelligent 
 beings. God may have created spirit and matter 
 without Himself being either matter or spirit. 
 
VOLTAIRE. 185 
 
 We have here a good example of the application 
 of the prudent method so strongly recommended 
 by Voltaire to philosophers; but Voltaire himself 
 does not always adhere to it. In another place, in 
 fact, he congratulates Newton upon having said 
 that the knowledge of God would be sterile but for 
 the knowledge of His relation to the world; and he 
 himself writes, in his Hlomélie sur [ Athétsme: ‘I 
 am told that the justice of God is not the same as 
 ours. It were just as well to tell me that 2+2=4 
 is not the same to God as it is to me.’’ Hecan 
 make nothing of a God who is not a righteous God. 
 
 But if God is just, how can there be evil, and so 
 much of it, in the world?—a formidable objection, 
 which is the strong point of atheists and puzzled 
 Voltaire very sorely. Between Bayle and Leibniz, 
 he obviously inclines toward Bayle. Candide, his 
 masterpiece, was born. out of his exasperation 
 against an optimism that was blind and deaf to the 
 wrongs, pains and evils which abound in the uni- 
 verse. But on the other hand, Voltaire feels the 
 Needvor a belief in theyusticerot’God? \Welare not 
 a little surprised to see him take up again in detail 
 most of the answers made by Leibniz to Bayle. 
 He insists that Providence does not act through 
 private volitions, but according to general laws. 
 He endeavors to prove that evil was inevitable, and 
 that there is as little of it as possible. ‘‘There cer- 
 tainly are things which the supreme Intelligence 
 cannot prevent. Evil is one of them. I had rather 
 worship a limited than a wicked God. I cannot 
 
186 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 possibly offend Him when I say: Thou hast done 
 all that a powerful, kind and wise being could do. 
 It is not Thy fault if Thy works cannot be as good 
 and perfect as Thou art.’’ In one word, whereas 
 Leibniz justifies God, Voltaire excuses Him. 
 Leibniz says that this is the best possible world; 
 Voltaire, that it is as little bad as possible. The 
 difference between them is reduced to a mere trifle, 
 especially if we agree that this world, whether the 
 best or the least bad, contains much evil anyhow. 
 But the doctrine of Leibniz is an organic part of a 
 profound metaphysics of which Voltaire had no idea 
 whatever. Voltaire does not go beyond the point 
 of view of common experience; he holds fast to what 
 we have termed semi-pessimism, being by turns 
 incensed or resigned, according as his look is fixed 
 upon the world or is lifted up to God. 
 
 Having got through this difficult passage, Vol- 
 taire comes to natural religion, which is the core of 
 his philosophy. For this natural religion, or the- 
 ism, does not go beyond the supposition that there 
 is a righteous God, and that man’s reason is capable 
 of rising up to Him. Theism consists in worship- 
 ing God, the Father of men, and in practicing 
 virtue—that is, justice to all men. These two 
 elements were sufficient, but both are necessary. 
 Neither morality nor belief in the existence of God 
 can alone constitute theism. Morality without a 
 God of justice does not sufficiently protect society; 
 belief in the existence of God, without morals, is 
 
VOLTAIRE. 187 
 
 not a religion, and remains fruitless. What is a 
 true theist? One who says to God: ‘‘I adore and 
 
 cemvomruhce one who saysaicouthe.) hurkys the 
 Chinese, the Indian and the Russian: ‘‘I love 
 you.’ He looks upon all men as his brethren, 
 
 and worships in God their common Father. 
 
 Was it, then, an ideal religion that Voltaire 
 opposed to the existing religions? If so, it would 
 have had little chance against these, and of this 
 Voltaire was fully aware. Therefore he says that 
 theism is not the work of philosophers but a real 
 religion, and, moreover, the most ancient and 
 widely spread of all. This seems a paradox not 
 easily to be reconciled with the facts. According 
 to Voltaire, wherever there is a religion theism 
 also exists, though mingled with all sorts of belief 
 and of absurd, bloody and ferocious superstitions. 
 The progress of mankind consists in this, that little 
 by little the pure ore of natural religion is freed 
 from the coarse rock in which it was buried. 
 Therein lies the fairest glory of the age which pro- 
 duced Locke and Newton. The age did not invent 
 theism, for this natural religion is as ancient as 
 thinking mankind; but brought it again to the 
 light. ‘‘Theism has made wonderful progress. 
 The Earl of Shaftesbury says that one cannot 
 respect too highly the great name of theist. A 
 multitude of illustrious writers have openly pro- 
 fessed it; most of the Socinians have at last taken 
 that position.’’ Thus did that natural religion 
 
188 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 flourish again ‘‘which was that of the Hebrew 
 nation before Moses taught them a particular form 
 of worship.’’ 
 
 Is it to be argued that this pretended antiquity 
 of theism is imaginary and invented for the sake of 
 the present need? Voltaire has a decisive reply. 
 He’ bringsmin’ the vG@hinesemmebiere is anv enimines 
 larger than the world known to the ancients, admir- 
 able for its wise and lasting institutions, and whose 
 religion happens to be precisely theism. What 
 has been the religion of the cultured classes in 
 China for so many centuries past? ‘‘Worship 
 heaven and be just.’’ Though a few superstitions 
 could not be prevented from spreading among 'the 
 rabble (which, besides, has no need of enlighten- 
 ment), all well-informed people there have been 
 theists from time immemorial. We speak wrongly 
 of the religion of Confucius, comparing it to our 
 Western religions. Confucius preached no mys- 
 teries. Hewas the prototype of the perfect theist. 
 
 Thus theism is not an imaginary religion. To 
 it, far rather than to the Church of Rome, ought 
 we to apply the noble name of catholicism; for it 
 includes not only all Roman Catholics, not only all 
 Christians, but all mankind. It unites all churches 
 in a truly universal church, which is humanity. 
 The theist’s religion is indeed the most ancient and 
 most widely spread, for “‘the simple worship of one 
 God preceded all the systems in the world.’’ 
 
 It is a great pity that we should not have been 
 as fortunate as the Chinese. How is it that theism, 
 
VOLTAIRE. 189 
 
 which among them was preserved in its purity, has 
 degenerated among the Western nations? It is 
 because upon natural religion, which comprised 
 only belief in God and the practice of virtue, dog- 
 mas were grafted,.and from them all the evil has 
 sprung. Natural religion is the beneficial product 
 of man’s reason; dogmas are the accursed work of 
 .priests and divines. Their motives may easily 
 be conjectured. Law-givers had contented them- 
 selves with laying down sensible and useful pre- 
 cepts; their disciples and commentators wished to 
 improve on them, and said: ‘‘We shall not be 
 sufficiently respected if our founder has not had 
 something supernatural and divine about him. Our 
 Numa needs must have met with the nymph 
 meeetiayy Petc. | Theseiewretched disciples,'s and 
 detestable commentators did not perceive that they 
 were perverting the whole of mankind. 
 
 This very simple hypothesis on the origin of 
 dogmas being once accepted, the great use made 
 of it by Voltaire is well known. The knavery 
 of priests who practice upon men’s foolishness and 
 credulity, their impudent quackery, their domineer- 
 ing spirit, their theological quarrels, the persecu- 
 tions, the slaughter of unbelievers and heretics, the 
 ‘‘ten millions of Christians’? who perished in wars 
 or tortures—all these things, which polluted and 
 dishonored the innocence of natural religion, made 
 their appearance in the train of dogmas. The his- 
 tory of religions, and particularly that of Christian- 
 ity, occasions in Voltaire a sort of pang and 
 
I90 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 shudder, as would a nightmare in which the gro- 
 tesque contends with the odious. Theological 
 quarrels are at once the most ridiculous farce and 
 the most dreadful plague in the world. And Vol- 
 taire wonders that there should not be one religion 
 whose precepts are not the work of a sage, and 
 whose dogmas are not the invention of a madman. 
 
 Again, universality is a token of truth. Now, all 
 dogmas are different from one another, while mor- 
 ality is the same among all men. The universal 
 character of morals was a cherished tenet with Vol- 
 taire, and he set his heart upon demonstrating it 
 with the help both of reasoning and experience. 
 Would society have existed at all if men had not 
 conceived the idea of justice, which is the link of 
 every society? ‘‘How could the Egyptian and 
 the Scythian have had the same fundamental 
 notions of justice and injustice had not God in all 
 ages given to both of them veason, which, as it 
 develops, brings into their view the same necessary 
 principles?’’ Voltaire himself does not perceive 
 that this reason is singularly akin to the innate 
 ideas he so often ridiculed. Descartes and Leibniz 
 might have contented themselves with what he here 
 admits; they said no more than he did. Voltaire 
 was at least aware that he differed here from Locke. 
 He wondered at this declared theist saying that 
 men have different ideas concerning justice. 
 ‘“There is but one science of morals, as there is but 
 one of geometry.”’ 
 
 Shall we turn to facts for an answer? In Siam, 
 
VOLTAIRE. 1gI 
 
 China and India, in classical antiquity, among the 
 savages, in all times and places, men have been 
 taught that they must be just. There are deeds 
 which the whole world thinks beautiful. The 
 round-eyed, squat-nosed negro, who will not call 
 our ladies of the court beautiful, will unhesitatingly 
 bestow that qualification upon these deeds and 
 Maxims ulhe more wl hayvemseenymen differing in 
 climate, customs, language, laws, worship, and in 
 Pheineedepree | of) \intelligencem they more). lichayve 
 observed them to have the same fundamental morals. 
 Every nation has particular religious rites and 
 most often absurd and revolting opinions on meta- 
 physics and theology; but if the question arises as 
 to whether we must be just, the whole universe is 
 of one mind. 
 
 If, then, we wish to be sensible, humane and 
 truly religious, we must be theists. But can we 
 be Christians at the same time? There is no reason 
 why we should not. Jesus himself, according to 
 Voltaire, was a theist. But it was not the pure 
 religion of Christ, ““Love God with all thy heart 
 and thy neighbor as thyself,’’ which Voltaire found 
 confronting him; it was Catholicism, with its dog- 
 mas, mysteries, symbols, articles of faith, relics of 
 saints, sacred books, writings of Fathers of the 
 Church, decisions of church councils, bulls of the 
 popes. Can theism live in peace with a system so 
 remote from natural religion? No doubt it can, 
 being by nature peaceful and tolerant. It is the 
 only sect which will never occasion any troubles in 
 
Ig2 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 a state. ‘‘Theists,’’ says Voltaire, ‘‘are, with regard 
 to the Christian religion, peaceful enemies it carries 
 in its own bosom, who renounce it without trying 
 to destroy it.’’ But he is well aware that, to use 
 Pascal’s own words, the Christian religion holds 
 atheism and deism in almost equal abhorrence and 
 will not unresistingly suffer theism to be propa- 
 gated. The conflict was therefore unavoidable. 
 In the excitement of the contest Voltaire showed 
 himself more and more violent. Not only are 
 sacred books a subject of endless scoffing, and the 
 dogmas attacked in a thousand ways in the name 
 of reason; but Voltaire no longer admits that 
 Christianity and theism can co-exist peacefully. 
 One of the two must disappear, and it will not be 
 theism. ‘‘I conclude,’’ he writes, for instance, 
 ‘“‘that any sensible and righteous man cannot but 
 abhor the Christian sect. The great name of the- 
 ist, which is not revered as it ought to be, is the 
 only name one should take. The only gospel we 
 should read is the great book of Nature, written by 
 the hand of God and stamped with His seal. The 
 only religion one should profess consists in worship- 
 ing God and being a righteous man. It is as impos- 
 sible for this pure and eternal religion to breed evil 
 as it was for Christian fanaticism not to breed it.”’ 
 Fortunately we are beginning to contend with some_ 
 success against superstition and dogma. ‘“‘It seems 
 that for the last fifty years reason, being introduced 
 among us, has begun to destroy the pestilential 
 germs which had so long infected the earth. 
 
 ’” 
 
VOLTAIRE. 193 
 
 Voltaire speaks of the Christian dogma as Metter- 
 nich was to speak afterward of the revolutionary 
 spirit. 
 
 It is perhaps this criticism of positive religions 
 and this theory of natural religion that have chiefly 
 caused Voltaire to be looked upon in our days as a 
 superficial and frivolous mind. It is certain that he 
 understood very little of the history of religions, 
 and his irrelevant taunts are extremely shocking. 
 He does not even suspect that one must first try to 
 enter with sympathy into the ideas and beliefs of 
 men of other times, instead of condemning them 
 offhand in the name of our own reason as absurd. 
 However, his error, though palpable, may be 
 explained by many more or less evident causes. 
 First, there was his general tendency to construct 
 the history of religions instead of learning it. We 
 have already observed a similar tendency in Fonte- 
 nelle, and we know that its remote source lies in 
 the Cartesian spirit. With Voltaire in particular, 
 it: 1s:related to the ideajthatya Nature is art.’ Just 
 as the world is conceived to be an immense machine, 
 built by the Supreme Maker, the whole body of 
 beliefs which constitute a religion is looked upon as 
 a work made with set purpose by law-givers and 
 priests. Voltaire in considering the material uni- 
 verse does not take into account the spontaneous 
 evolution due to natural forces and the finality 
 residing in it; neither does he take them into 
 account in the moral world. 
 
 But, one may say, the very notion he has of the 
 
194 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 essence of religion is contrary to the most obvious 
 observation. How can Voltaire maintain that 
 dogma and worship are not essential elements in it, 
 and that the whole of religion is comprised within a 
 minimum number of rational beliefs joined to the 
 practice of virtue? It is true that such a paradox 
 in our days may seem without interest or value. 
 But Voltaire, having entered upon a desperate con- 
 test with a religion which forced upon reason an 
 incomprehensible creed, was naturally impelled to 
 oppose to it a natural religion derived from reason 
 itself and fully satisfying it; and if he presented 
 this natural religion as more ancient than historical 
 religions, it was because truth, being eternal, always 
 preserves its birthright in spite of error which 
 lasts but for a time. 
 
 Lastly, it is but fair in judging of works to view 
 them from the standpoint of their author’s princi- 
 ples, and not from our own. With the intellectual 
 habits impressed upon us by our historical studies, 
 we do not understand how anybody wishing to 
 find out what religion is can dispense with observ- 
 ing how, in fact, religions were born, grew up, and 
 died. But Voltaire thought he had a right to seek 
 what religion ought to be. Likewise, we are now 
 conscious above all of the historical variety of 
 human races, customs, and religions. But French 
 writers in the eighteenth century, Voltaire included, 
 being therein the heirs of the great philosophers of 
 the seventeenth century, dwelt chiefly on the fund- 
 amental identity of human nature and delighted 
 
VOLTAIRE, 195 
 
 in discovering it through the diversity of times and 
 places. Voltaire’s theory of religion is in perfect 
 accordance with this leading idea. It may appear 
 obsolete, as are the very principles on which Vol- 
 taire grounded his statements, but it is not incon- 
 sistent. 
 
 This point settled, a new question arises: 
 What is the use of religion in Voltaire’s system? 
 Theism at bottom is merely an expression of morals. 
 This universal moral principle, according to him, 
 forms part, so to speak, of the very nature of man. 
 Why should it be linked to any religious belief? 
 No doubt Voltaire says that his religion is ‘‘the 
 most simple and easy,’’ and contains ‘‘very little 
 dogma’’; yet it does contain some, and that is 
 sufficient to admit all doubts raised by metaphysics. 
 Voltaire himself confessed that belief in the exist- 
 encewmot (rod, ‘presentedmediiicultiessiUnlh/« 
 physics is the romance of the mind,’’ if between 
 God and ourselves there is infinity, what right have 
 we to make morals, the most clear and indispens- 
 able thing in the world, dependent upon belief in 
 
 meta- 
 
 an inaccessible God? 
 
 But, Voltaire replies; beliefin'a)God, creator of 
 the world and principle of all good, is not to be 
 confounded with the subtle notions of metaphysi- 
 cians. It is as universal as ethics; it is produced 
 with the same irresistible spontaneousness, when 
 reason is ripe. Difficulties which arise afterward 
 cannot shake this belief. It lies at the bottom of 
 
196 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 all religions, and is the soul of truth. Therefore 
 Voltaire brings the same zeal to the defense of this 
 universal belief, sole dogma of natural religion, that 
 he shows in combating the superstitions, the unin- 
 telligible dogmas and the bloody rites that have 
 multiplied in particular religions. 
 
 Moreover) this, belief asanot only. benetigias 
 but necessary. We cannot dispense with looking 
 up to a retributive and avenging God. What other 
 check could be put upon covetousness and hidden 
 and unpunished transgressions than the idea of an 
 Eternal Master who sees us and will judge even 
 our inmost thoughts? Voltaire, in his turn, asks 
 Bayle’s well-known question: Can a society of 
 atheists exist? Yes, he answers, if it be a sort of 
 academy of refined and peaceful minds; no, if it be 
 an ordinary political society. In all countries the 
 lower classes need to be strongly curbed, and if 
 Bayle had had but five or six hundred peasants to 
 govern he would undoubtedly have proclaimed 
 to them a retributive and avenging God. Voltaire 
 here speaks like his friend, Frederick II. _ To the 
 Encyclopedists, who think him timorous and over- 
 prudent, he replies by reminding them of political 
 necessities. ‘‘Philosophize between yourselves as 
 much as you please. I fancy I hear dilettanti 
 giving for their own pleasure a refined music; but 
 take good care not to perform this concert before 
 the ignorant, the brutal, and the vulgar; they might 
 break your instruments on your heads.’’ In one 
 
VOLTAIRE. 197 
 
 word: ‘‘Let a philosopher be a disciple of Spinoza 
 if he likes, but let the statesman be a theist.’’ 
 Therefore, a religion is necessary for the people. 
 Voltaire says this quite seriously. That threw sus- 
 picion upon the sincerity of his theism. When 
 he wonders how far politics will allow superstition 
 to be destroyed, one may question whether ‘‘super- 
 stition’’ to him did not mean the belief in God 
 which he himself preached. Is, then, this religion 
 also double-dealing like the others? In what 
 respect can the theist consider himself superior to 
 priests if he also stoops to fool mankind, were it 
 even for its own good? But Voltaire easily vindi- 
 cates himself from the accusation of hypocrisy. He 
 himself believes in God, and he thinks all people, 
 whether philosophers or ignorant men, should do 
 the same. Yet there remains one difference—i. e., 
 that the philosopher’s being an atheist has no seri- 
 ous consequence, whereas if “‘the populace’’ cease 
 to believe in a retributive and avenging God the 
 most frightful disorders may be expected. It is 
 with this thought in mind that Voltaire goes so far 
 as to compare the atheist to the fanatic. ‘“‘Atheism 
 and fanaticism are two monsters which may tear 
 Society. to, pieces.”’ § In (thistthe exaggerates his 
 thought, as is too often the case with him, by 
 expressing it too strongly. His attention being 
 fixed upon the social danger with which he wishes 
 ‘to impress his readers, he aims rather at striking 
 hard than at striking straight. But here is a more 
 
198 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 accurate expression of his meaning: ‘‘Teach this 
 belief (in God); no mortal has any right to contra- 
 dict you. You will say something which is probable, 
 and necessary to mankind.”’ 
 
 From what has been said, it follows that the 
 existence of a retributive and avenging God is 
 indispensable to moral principles only in order to 
 make them respected by the ‘‘brutal, the ignorant, 
 and the vulgar.’’ In fact, metaphysical discussions 
 have but little influence on man’s conduct. It is 
 with these contests as with idle table-talk. After 
 dinner every one forgets what he has said, and fol- 
 lows where his interests and tastes lead him. And 
 one may be virtuous without believing in the 
 existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. 
 ‘““Any sensible man, even though an unbeliever, 
 will conclude that it is evidently to his interest to 
 beran\upright mans.) 0 Oi hus © we Mobsemne 
 that philosophers (who are called unbelievers and 
 ‘libertines’) have in all times been the most upright 
 people in the world. Those who must have 
 recourse to religion in order to behave righteously 
 are much to be pitied.’’ Here Voltaire is very 
 near agreeing with Bayle. 
 
 However, the basis of morality cannot lie in 
 philosophical reflection, which is accessible only to 
 a small number of thinkers. According to Vol- 
 taire it lies in the very essence of human nature. 
 Reason, which is common to us all, teaches us, as 
 soon as it is mature, the universal law of justice and 
 
VOLTAIRE. 199 
 
 injustice. ‘“‘Do thou unto others as thou wouldst 
 have them do unto thee.’’ This law cannot be torn 
 away from the human heart, and as it is the foun- 
 dation of morality, it is also that of society. Man 
 is intended to live’ in society; he has therefore 
 always lived thus, and the supposition of a state of 
 nature previous and superior to the state of society 
 is a vain fancy. Voltaire does not permit himself 
 here to be influenced by Rousseau. In accordance 
 with his own principle, ‘‘Man in general has always 
 been what he is,’’ he concludes that as the basis of 
 society has always existed, there has always been 
 some kind of society. 
 
 This is all the more certain as not only reason, 
 but also man’s inclination, makes him a sociable 
 being. He is not like other animals that have only 
 the instincts of self-love and of pairing. He has 
 also a feeling of kindness toward his fellow-men. 
 This feeling is born with us and is always at work 
 in us unless combated by our self-love, which must 
 needs always prevail over it. Voltaire therefore 
 differs from Helvetius and other philosophers who 
 would admit no original motive of our actions but 
 self-love. He thinks altruism is no less natural 
 than egotism. ‘‘We have,’’ he says, “‘two feelings 
 which are the basis of society: commiseration and 
 justice. Let a child see its fellow-creature torn to 
 . pieces, he will feel a sudden pang.’’ This altruism 
 is not strong enough to withstand alone the violent 
 assaults of selfish desires; but fortunately it hap- 
 pens that these very desires often contribute to the 
 
200 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 preservation and progress of society. Passions are 
 the main causes of the order we now behold upon 
 earth. Pride above all is its chief instrument, but 
 envy and covetousness also play a partinit. ‘‘Pas- 
 sions are the wheels that set all these machines in 
 motion.’’ One can see that Voltaire had read 
 Mandeville. 
 
 It is likewise from a social point of view that he 
 reaches his definition of virtue and vice. Moral 
 good and evil in all countries are what is beneficial 
 or hurtful to society; in all places and times he 
 who makes the greatest sacrifices to the public is 
 called the most virtuous. There is no absolute 
 gvood or evil. These are relative notions like those 
 of sweetness and bitterness. It follows that indi- 
 vidual virtues are, strictly speaking, not virtues at 
 all. What do I care whether you are temperate? 
 You are observing a precept of health. You will 
 feel: the better for it, and Ticongratulate youwaees 
 recluse may be a saint, but I shall not call him vir- 
 tuous till he has done a virtuous deed which is of 
 some use to other men. 
 
 This moral philosophy, which leaped with one 
 bound from the individual to mankind, could not 
 but end in cosmopolitism; and, indeed, in the 
 article Paine of the Dictionnaire philosophique, V oltaire 
 wrote a very sharp attack on patriotism. He 
 pointed out that it is in most cases an artificial, 
 selfish and hurtful feeling. He would leave to the 
 heroes of Plutarch their conception of patriotism, 
 and wished that the age of reason would unite all 
 
VOLTAIRE. 201 
 
 separate countries into the one great jpatrie of 
 humanity. Kant, Goethe and Herder shared his 
 opinions on this point, and nobody would have 
 thought of calling them unpatriotic men on that 
 account. Public opinion on the Continent was then 
 leaning toward the humanitarian ideal extolled by 
 the philosophers. If it became hostile to this 
 ideal later on, it was under the pressure of events 
 which obliged nations to fight for existence and 
 roused in them a feeling of self-consciousness. 
 Again, the idea of humanity is the basis of 
 Voltaire’s philosophy of history. As early as 1737, 
 in his Conseils aun Journaliste, he expressed the wish 
 that a universal history should really correspond to 
 its title, and that in it the whole of mankind should 
 be studied. It would be desirable for Orientalists 
 fOpcive sus outlines. ofmticmeastern books.) The 
 public would not then be so totally ignorant of the 
 history of the larger part of the globe; the pompous 
 name of universal history would not be bestowed 
 upon a few collections of Egyptian fables, of the 
 revolutions of a country called Greece, not larger 
 than Champagne, and of those of the Roman 
 nation, which, vast and victorious as it was, never 
 ruled over so many states as the people of 
 Mahomet, and never conquered one-tenth of the 
 world. Later on, in the preface to his Assaz sur les 
 Meurs, he openly criticises Bossuet. He reproaches 
 . him with forgetting in universal history the uni- 
 verse itself, with mentioning only three or four 
 nations, which have now disappeared from the 
 
202 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 earth, with subordinating these three or four pow- 
 erful nations to the insignificant Jewish people, 
 which occupies three-fourths of his work, and lastly, 
 with passing over Islam, India and China without a 
 word. Voltaire wished to secularize universal his- 
 tory, which had been hitherto subordinate to theo- 
 logical dogma. 
 
 But his own conception of universal history 
 remains practically incomplete, since what he knows 
 of the history of the New World is next to nothing. 
 And above all, he lacks a central principle that 
 would enable him to understand this universal his- 
 tory in its unity. Hecan but repeat that ‘‘man 
 has always been what he is.’’ He implicitly be- 
 lieves in this uniformity of the species, which pre- 
 vents him from understanding the little he knows 
 of remote antiquity. Some of the religious rites of 
 the Babylonians are offensive to our idea of moral- 
 ity. Voltaire does not hesitate to assume that his- 
 torians lied in reporting them. The men that he 
 sees everywhere are perfectly similar to those 
 around him, though disguised, some as Greeks or 
 Romans, others as Chinese, Persians, Turks or Hin- 
 doos. He sees everywhere the public credulous 
 and deluded, and the world going on its usual way, 
 at once tragic and ludicrous. His romances are the 
 exact counterpart of the Fssaz sur les Meurs. 
 Candide, Zadig, la Princesse de Babylone, complete 
 the idea of humanity given in Voltaire’s historical 
 works. He does not derive his knowledge of man- 
 kind from history; on the contrary, he transfers to 
 
VOLTAIRE. 203 
 
 history the humanity that he already knows from 
 observations of his contemporaries. 
 
 He does not, however, deny progress; but he 
 has a most peculiar notion of it. The idea of slow 
 and gradual evolution, of successive stages that 
 must needs be traveled in order to reach a certain 
 point, does not appear in his works. Progress, 
 with him, does not consist in a law of development. 
 It began less than a century before with the awaken- 
 ing of natural philosophy, and above all, with the 
 enfranchisement of reason. No doubt antiquity 
 possessed great thinkers, but it was nevertheless a 
 prey to superstition. ‘‘There is not a single ancient 
 philosopher who now serves to instruct young peo- 
 ple among enlightened nations.’’ As for the Mid- 
 dle Ages, he dispatches them in short order. 
 “‘Imagine the Samoyeds and the Ostiaks having 
 read Aristotle and Avicenna: this is what we were.’’ 
 Ignorance, misery, and theology; the whole of the 
 Middle Ages is expressed in these three plagues, 
 and Voltaire cannot tell which of the three is the 
 worst. According to him, scholasticism, the wars 
 of religion, the plagues, famines and autos-da-fe are 
 all intimately related; and we are hardly yet rid of 
 them. Witches had been condemned to the stake 
 in Germany as late as the seventeenth century. 
 There were still in France trials like that of Calas 
 -and La Barre. Therefore, when Voltaire speaks of 
 the Middle Ages it is never in the tone of the his- 
 torian; passion always intervenes. He is little 
 acquainted with this period, but what he knows of 
 
204 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 it is sufficient to make him loathe and despise it. 
 Nor does he study it, being persuaded beforehand 
 that such study would only confirm him in his 
 feeling. 
 
 Is it surprising that Voltaire, being thus dis- 
 posed, misapprehended the art of the Middle Ages, 
 and was unaware of the grandeur of the age of 
 Saint Louis, and of the prosperity of France before 
 the Hundred Years’ War, etc.? However, it seems 
 we must also acknowledge that his prejudice did not 
 prevent him from giving a picture which is often 
 accurate of the general history of Europe since 
 Charlemagne. And though the Essaz sur les Meurs 
 may not be adequate to the idea of a philosophy of 
 history, the very conception of the work was an 
 original one, and many of the views expressed in it 
 by Voltaire were fruitful for the historians who 
 came after him. 
 
 This is not the proper place to speak of Voltaire 
 as an economist, a criminalist and commentator of 
 Beccaria, a writer on the theory of taste, and lastly, 
 as the author of the Questions sur Lf Encyclopédie, 
 which manifest his eager curiosity regarding the 
 most varied subjects. Though it is difficult to draw 
 the line between his philosophy, properly so called, 
 and the rest of his works, we must here content 
 ourselves with stating his philosophical ideas in so 
 far as they may be grouped into a system. Now, 
 from all that we have said it appears that his princi- 
 
VOLTAIRE. 205 
 
 ple is empiricism tempered by the idea of universal- 
 ity. Voltaire thinks, as Locke does, that nothing 
 is given us beyond and independent of experience. 
 But at the same time he is, perhaps unconsciously, 
 faithful to the Cartesian tradition, and maintains 
 that nothing is theoretically true or practically just 
 unless it be universally accepted by reason. The 
 union of these two elements is effected in the idea 
 of humanity, which is both an empirical and a uni- 
 versal one. From this point of view, Voltaire’s 
 philosophy, in spite of its gaps and inconsistencies— 
 which, by the by, are less serious than they are 
 often said to be—offers a real unity. Science, 
 morals, history, religion, politics, are all subjected 
 by him to acriticism, which is sometimes hasty and 
 partial, but which proceeds from an unchanging 
 principle: To oppose to the products of an histor- 
 ical evolution which varies according to places and 
 times and is often irrational and absurd, the stand- 
 ard of what is purely human and universally 
 accepted by reason. 
 
 Thus, over against the positive religions, he sets 
 up natural religion, which contains nothing but the 
 human ideal of morality. The real name of Vol- 
 faire s.God 1s’ |usticedupleniceay noble: name, We 
 may venture to believe that the great German 
 philosophers of the end of the eighteenth century, 
 _influenced like everybody else by Voltaire’s pres- 
 tige, retained something of his thought on this 
 point. No doubt the influence of Rousseau told 
 
206 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 still more strongly upon them; no doubt they 
 went more deeply into the ideas of experience, 
 reason, justice, and truth, which Voltaire did not 
 sufficiently analyze. But though he was too little 
 of a philosopher to build a system as they did, he 
 succeeded in spreading critical and humanitarian 
 ideas all over Europe, and even in gaining for them 
 a temporary ascendency. 
 
CHAP Thay 
 
 THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 
 
 VOLTAIRE was, indeed, in his tendencies, both 
 confessed and secret, in his likes and his dislikes, 
 in his good qualities and his defects, “‘the repre- 
 sentative man’’ of French philosophy in the eight- 
 eenth century. We have therefore been obliged 
 to give a somewhat detailed account of his doc- 
 trines, in which we find the average of the philo- 
 sophical ideas professed by most of his contempo- 
 raries. Around him was arrayed an army of 
 ‘“philosophers,’’ full of zeal but undisciplined and 
 sometimes unruly, whose best lieutenants were the 
 most independent. In spite, however, of the dif- 
 ferences in their natures, tempers, aptitudes and 
 talents, the public feeling was not mistaken in 
 grouping them all together under one name, from 
 La Mettrie to Condorcet, from Condillac to Abbé 
 Raynal. Sometimes unthinkingly, but in most 
 cases quite consciously, they worked together ona 
 common task. Most of them used every exertion 
 in combating the Roman Catholic Church, and ina 
 general way Christianity itself. They rejected its 
 conception of the universe and of man, which 
 appeared to them false and superstitious; they con- 
 demned the social order which the Catholic hier- 
 
 207 
 
208 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 archy contributed to maintain, and which they 
 thought unjust and oppressive. Against this 
 double tyranny all weapons were lawful. They 
 would preserve nothing of this religion except its 
 moral teaching, and even this they reduced to its 
 essential elements, and held it to be human rather 
 than specifically Christian. 
 
 In the constructive part of their work likewise, 
 in spite of inevitable divergencies, they are quite 
 akin to one another. Eager to lose no time in put- 
 ting something in the place of that which they 
 thought they had destroyed, they set to work with 
 great haste, and their want of experience appears 
 so constantly as to be almost monotonous. There 
 is a continual recurrence of the same paradoxes, 
 accepted without discussion, and of the same dubi- 
 ous formule looked upon as axioms. Their common 
 stock consisted of a limited number of theories, 
 often superficial and rudimentary, concerning psy- 
 chology, morals, politics and history, and of certain 
 ideas and views which were often both profound 
 and fruitful—building stones, as it were, intended 
 to fit into an edifice which they were as yet unable 
 toerect. For the £zcyclopedia, which they thought 
 of as destined to be this edifice, represents a work- 
 yard rather than a building. It has no unity, save 
 in the spirit which animates it, and in the persever- 
 ance of Diderot, who, in spite of obstacles and at 
 
 the cost of untold trouble and sacrifice, finally — 
 
 brought it to completion. 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAIDISTS. 209 
 
 La Mettrie, by the date of his works, somewhat 
 precedes the main body of the philosophical army. 
 He died in 1751, four years before Montesquieu, 
 and before Diderot, D’Alembert and Rousseau 
 had produced their masterpieces. Being a disciple 
 of Boerhaave, who sought to explain the phenomena 
 of life by the mechanism of physical and chemical 
 phenomena, being also acquainted, though some- 
 what superficially, with the doctrines of Descartes 
 and Locke, he composed, with elements derived 
 from widely different sources, a system which he 
 thought scientifically proven. It was a kind of 
 materialism, based on the idea which often reap- 
 Peatedmin’ the’ course ofsethescentury, (that ithe 
 diversity in the orders of phenomena is due to the 
 more or less complex organization of matter. As 
 this organization is not the same in animals as in 
 plants, nor (in certain points) in man as in animals, 
 the functions which exist in plants, animals and in 
 man must also be different; there is no need what- - 
 ever of a special principle to explain certain of these 
 functions rather than others. In opposition to 
 spiritualistic dualism, which sets an abyss between 
 the substance of the soul and that of the body, La 
 Mettrie advanced, in his A/zstotre Naturelle de 
 !’Ame, the ancient peripatetic and scholastic con- 
 ception which makes of the soul the form of the 
 body. Like some Aristotelians of the Renaissance, 
 he slipped his own materialism into this theory. 
 He openly expounded it in the Homme-Machine. 
 While he praised Descartes for saying that an ani- 
 
210 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 mal is a machine, he reproached him for not having 
 dared to say the same of man. Not that La Met- 
 trie denied the existence of feeling or thought in 
 animals or in man; such a paradox would seem to 
 him absurd. He means that feeling, thought, con- 
 sciousness, are all produced by the machine; the 
 whole soul is explained by it, depends upon it, and 
 in consequence disappears when it gets out of order 
 or is decomposed. As a physician he quotes in 
 support of his theory definite facts borrowed from 
 mental physiology and pathology, and he declares 
 that he will accept as his judges none but scientific 
 men, acquainted with anatomy and with the phi- 
 losophy of the body. 
 
 La Mettrie’s reputation in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury was very bad. In our days some have tried 
 to rehabilitate him. No doubt a philosopher may 
 have been a declared materialist and atheist, have 
 written insipid defenses of physical voluptuousness, 
 and have died from eating too freely of patties, and 
 yet may none the less have been a sincere man and 
 have honestly sought after truth. No doubt also 
 La Mettrie more than once served as a scapegoat 
 for the philosophers who followed him and perhaps 
 from time to time imitated him. The nearer they 
 came to him the more fiercely they expressed their 
 indignation against his abominable doctrines, for 
 he, being dead, had nothing to fear either from the 
 police or the parliament. His good name may have 
 suffered from this maneuver. Yet if we examine 
 his works closely, we shall conclude that he has not 
 
THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 211 
 
 been seriously wronged. He does not sufficiently 
 distinguish between what is proved and what is 
 merely asserted; he has no absorbing concern for 
 close reasoning and exact expression, and his lan- 
 guage is often rash'in proportion to the looseness 
 of his demonstrations. Let us grant that he intro- 
 duced French materialism in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, but let us acknowledge at the same time that 
 he too often presented it under an aggressive and 
 unacceptable form. 
 
 In 1751 appeared the Dzscours Préliminaire of 
 the Encyclopedia. Diderot had acted wisely in 
 asking D’Alembert to write it, and in contenting 
 himself with drawing up the prospectus of his great 
 enterprise. He had already been at odds with the 
 authorities, and had spent several months in Vin- 
 cennes on account of his Lettre sur les Aveugtles,; in 
 a word, he was looked upon as a suspicious charac- 
 ter. D’Alembert, a great mathematician, renowned 
 for his Traité de Dynamique, and a member of the 
 Academy of Sciences, was just the man to present 
 the Encyclopedia to the public, and his name insured 
 it against the ill-will of the enemies of philosophy. 
 
 This discourse was much admired, but we now 
 find it rather difficult to understand this admiration. 
 Though we do not refuse our homage to the dig- 
 nity of its tone and the elevation of its thought, we 
 are rather disappointed as we read it. This is 
 owing to several causes. Ideas which were new in 
 those days have now become familiar and common- 
 
212 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 place. Several important points in D’Alembert’s 
 philosophy do not appear in the Dzscours, or are 
 merely. hinted. at. ,Others? jon gthes contrary mare 
 developed which do not express his real thought; 
 but he believed this concession to be indispensable 
 in order to gain acceptance for the rest. ‘‘In the 
 accursed country in which we write,’’ he said to 
 Voltaire, ‘such phrases as these are notarial style, 
 and serve only as passports for the truths that we 
 wish to establish. Moreover, nobody is deceived 
 by\themeya....) Tamerwill teqchemen ato wdice 
 tinguish what we have thought from what we have 
 said.’’ D’Alembert never would deviate from this 
 prudent course. Accordingly we see in the works 
 offered to the public a D’Alembert whose attitude 
 is irreproachable and whose irony is hidden under 
 the forms of respect. But the letters to Voltaire 
 and to Frederick the Great show us a quite different 
 sortiofpaman,, eager for! the tray, anduastinuen 
 incensed against parliaments, Jesuits, Jansenists, 
 priests in general and religion as the most deter- 
 mined ‘‘philosopher.’’ 
 
 Being a fervent admirer of Bacon, D’Alembert 
 borrowed from him his classification of sciences, 
 with a few alterations which he himself explains. 
 To tell the truth, the Dzscours Préliminaire contains 
 not one but three classifications of human knowl- 
 edge, from three different points of view. D’Alem- 
 bert first examines ‘‘the origin and development of 
 our ideas and sciences from the philosophical or 
 metaphysical—i. e., psychological—point of view.”’ 
 
THE*ENCYCLOPAIDISTS. 213 
 
 Like a true disciple of Locke and Condillac, he 
 divides all our knowledge into direct ideas and 
 ideas derived from reflexion. Our direct knowledge 
 is only that which has come to us through our 
 senses; in other words, to our sensations alone do 
 we owe our ideas.: The classification here consists, 
 therefore, in tracing our complex ideas back to 
 simple ones—that is, to those derived from sensa- 
 tion. 
 
 The “‘encyclopzdic order of sciences,’’ which 
 comes next, is a logical order. It must not be 
 confused with the order which the human mind has 
 actually followed in the production of the sciences. 
 In all likelihood man, spurred on by his bodily 
 wants, must first have set out to meet the most 
 urgent needs, and then, as he met with difficulties, 
 have tried another way, then have retraced his 
 steps, etc. If so, the sciences which we look upon 
 as containing the principles of all others, and which 
 must come first in the encyclopedic order, were not 
 the first to be developed. Moreover, in the histor- 
 ical order of the progress of the human mind, the 
 various sciences can be viewed only in succession, 
 one after another, whereas the encyclopedic order 
 consists in embracing all sciences at one glance, as 
 if from a height one should perceive at one’s feet a 
 maze of interweaving paths. Or, again, this ency- 
 clopedic order may be compared toa map of the 
 world, on which we see at one glance the whole 
 surface of the globe. And just as in preparing 
 such a map we may choose among various systems 
 
214 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of projection, so we may also conceive the encyclo- 
 pedic order in several different ways. None of 
 these ways is necessarily to be adopted to the 
 exclusion of all others, and if D’Alembert chose 
 that of Bacon it was because, without being more 
 defective than the others, it has the advantage of 
 suggesting with tolerable accuracy the genealogy 
 of human knowledge. 
 
 Lastly, a third order considered by D’ Alembert 
 is that according to which our sciences have been 
 historically developed since the Renaissance. It 
 differs from the order which the human mind would 
 follow if left to its own lights. In this order, 
 then, the sciences of erudition came first, owing to 
 the prestige of antiquity, which after long ages of 
 barbarism and ignorance was rising again fair and 
 luminous before the delighted eyes of men. 
 
 Thus D’Alembert had a clear perception of the 
 psychological genesis of our knowledge, of the log- 
 ical order of the sciences, and of their historical 
 succession. Could not these three orders have been 
 combined to forma higher one? Comte later on 
 attempted such a combination, but D’Alembert 
 contented himself with a rapid criticism of each of 
 the sciences, and a summary appreciation of the 
 great minds who had created or developed them. 
 
 And, first of all, in the already formidable mass 
 of our knowledge, how few branches deserve the 
 name of sciences! History, according to D’Alem- 
 bert, is in no wise entitled to it. It is only of 
 practical interest. Why should we not, for instance, 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAIDISTS. 215 
 
 cull from it the best catechism of morals that could 
 be given to children, by collecting into one book 
 the really memorable deeds and words? It would 
 be particularly useful to philosophers and to the 
 ‘‘unfortunate class’’ of princes, to teach them by 
 what they learn of men who lived in former times 
 to know the men with whom they live. Metaphys- 
 ics should be strictly limited to what is treated of 
 in Locke’s &ssay. Nearly all the other questions 
 it proposes to solve are either beyond solution or 
 idle. It is the food of rash or ill-balanced minds— 
 Inwnone word: ‘4a \vaini ana contentious, science: 
 D’Alembert is not allured, like Voltaire, by the 
 hypothesis which attributes to matter, under certain 
 conditions, the power to think. To him it appears 
 uncalled for and dangerous. If it inclines toward 
 materialism, we fall back into a metaphysical doc- 
 trine no more clearly proven than any other. Is it 
 not better for us to confess that we do not know at 
 all what substance, soul and matter are? Like- 
 wise, as regards the existence and nature of God, 
 skepticism is the only reasonable attitude of mind. 
 And we should be compelled to say the same of the 
 existence of the outer world and of man’s liberty, 
 did not instinct here supplement the deficiency of 
 reason; whether the outer world exists or not, we 
 have such a strong inclination to believe in it that 
 everything appears to us asif it existed; and, in 
 the same way, everything appears to us as if we 
 were free. 
 
 Even in the natural sciences, how limited did 
 
216 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 man’s knowledge appear! Physiology had hardly 
 yet begun to exist. Of medicine D’ Alembert speaks 
 as a man who has measured all its risks; in his 
 eyes it isa purely empirical science. The physi- 
 cian who builds systems and clings to a theory is 
 most dangerous; that one is least to be feared who 
 has seen many patients and has learned to make an 
 accurate diagnosis and not to dose at random. 
 Physics is more advanced and its conquests are 
 lasting. Here we stand on firmer ground, but 
 progress is slow and the human mind has to guard 
 against itself. D’Alembert insists upon the pru- 
 dent advice already given by Bacon: we should 
 distrust even the most probable explanations, so 
 long as they have not been tested by experience, 
 and if possible, by calculation. 3 
 
 Sciences in the highest sense of the word, 
 D’Alembert called those he had been studying all 
 his lifetime, and to which he owed the best of his 
 glory—the mathematical sciences, which he divides 
 into pure mathematics, mixed mathematics and 
 physico-mathematical sciences. Certitude, prop- 
 erly so called, which is founded upon principles 
 necessarily true and self-evident, does not belong 
 equally or in the same way to all these branches of 
 mathematics. Those which rest on physical prin- 
 ciples, that is, on experimental truths or on phys- 
 ical hypotheses, have, so to speak, only an experi- 
 mental or hypothetical certitude. 
 
 One might infer from this that D’ Alembert looks 
 upon pure mathematics, in opposition to physico- 
 
THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 217 
 
 mathematical sciences, as being really a priorz and 
 independent of experience. But how could he have 
 harmonized such a conception with the principle 
 borrowed from Locke, according to which all our 
 knowledge comes, either directly or indirectly, from 
 experience? D’Alembert did not fall into this con- 
 tradiction. He avoided it by means of a theory of 
 mathematics which was consistent with his sensa- 
 tionalistic principles, and much clearer than the 
 ones to which Hume and Condillac_ resorted. 
 Mathematics, in his opinion, belongs to natural 
 philosophy. ‘‘The science of dimensions in gen- 
 eral is the remotest term to which the contempla- 
 tion of the properties of matter may lead us. 
 Experience shows us individual beings and particu- 
 lar phenomena, the sun, the moon, rain and wind. 
 
 ayy 
 
 By means of successive abstractions and of more 
 and more comprehensive generalizations, we sepa- 
 rate the qualities common to all these phenomena 
 and beings, till at last we reach the fundamental 
 properties of all bodies: impenetrability, extension 
 and size. We cannot further subdivide our percep- 
 tions, and we find at this point a subject for sci- 
 ences which, in virtue of the simplicity of this 
 subject, may be made deductive. Thus, in geom- 
 etry, we strip matter of nearly all its material 
 qualities, and consider, so to speak, only its ghost. 
 ‘‘Thus,’’ says D’Alembert in language that fore- 
 shadows Stuart Mill, “‘it is merely by a process of 
 abstraction that the geometrician considers lines as 
 having no breadth, and surfaces as having no thick- 
 
218 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ness. The truths he demonstrates about the prop- 
 erties of all are purely hypothetical truths. But 
 they are none the less useful, considering the conse- 
 quences that result from them.’’ This empirical 
 theory of mathematics, which stands in such direct 
 opposition to that of Plato and Descartes, has made 
 its appearance again in our century, and is anything 
 but abandoned at the present day. Even such 
 men as Helmholtz, though reared under the influ- 
 ence of Kant, have deemed it indispensable to 
 accept the statement that geometry contains ele- 
 ments derived from experience. 
 
 As the certainty of mathematics rests on the 
 evidence of ideas so closely related that the mind 
 perceives the connection between them at a glance, 
 so the certainty of morals rests on the ‘‘heart’s 
 evidence’ which rules us as imperiously. D’Alem- 
 bert’s theory of morals is almost entirely identical 
 with Voltaire’s. The only original feature about 
 it is the personal accent that D’Alembert gives it, 
 especially in his letters. To him sympathy for the 
 hapless, indignation against the “‘monstrous in- 
 
 , 
 
 equality of fortunes’’ are not mere commonplaces, 
 hackneyed expressions of a trite sentimentality, and 
 homage paid to the reigning fashion. They are 
 the words of a man who has seen the poor, who 
 has lived among them, who has witnessed their 
 sufferings, and to whom misery is a living reality, 
 not a theme for literary amplification. D’Alembert 
 goes so far as to ask himself whether, when driven 
 
 to despair and reduced without fault of his own to 
 
THE -ENCYCLOPAIDISTS. 219 
 
 the verge of starvation, a man is morally bound to 
 respect the surplus that another has beyond his 
 needs. 
 
 In dignity of life and independence of character, 
 as well as in genius, D’Alembert was among the 
 glories of the party of philosophers. He more than 
 once dared to contradict Voltaire. His friendship 
 with Frederick never cost any sacrifice of his pride, 
 and he fell out with Catherine of Russia because she 
 rather haughtily rejected his intercession on behalf 
 of some Frenchmen who had been taken prisoners 
 in Poland. His two great passions were for mathe- 
 matics and against “‘priests’’; and it is character- 
 istic of the times that the latter should have 
 contributed no less than the former to constitute 
 him a * 
 
 >? 
 
 a9) 
 
 philosopher. 
 
 Diderot was as adventurous, expansive and 
 lyrical as D’Alembert was prudent, reserved and 
 methodical. But his disorder is rich in ideas. 
 Diderot was one of the most extraordinary mind- 
 stirring writers that the world has ever seen. The 
 brightness and charm of his conversation seem to 
 have been prodigious. He was called ‘‘the phil- 
 osopher.’’ It must indeed be admitted that if we 
 always meant by this word a man whose methodical 
 and persevering meditation does not rest satisfied 
 till it has found out a first principle from which it 
 can deduce the whole world of reality, Diderot 
 would occupy but a low place among philosophers. 
 Not that he was incapable of reducing his ideas to 
 
220 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 a system; but the starting-point of his attempts at 
 such a synthesis was variable, depending on a 
 chance encounter, conversation or reading. Before 
 his reason went deep into things, his imagination 
 had to be stirred. But on the other hand, he was 
 without a rival in rising from an apparently insig- 
 nificant point to general ruling principles, and in 
 discovering from that vantage ground many roads, 
 some of which led him to new points of view; his 
 curiosity was indefatigable, his reflection sometimes 
 profound and always suggestive. 
 
 Unfortunately, though all this be sufficient to 
 exercise a considerable influence upon contempora- 
 ries, it may easily fail to produce many durable 
 works. All Diderot’s writings wear an air of 
 improvisation, due to his ready and sudden enthusi- 
 asm, and to the facility with which he could put 
 together ex tempore a vast structure of ideas. It can 
 therefore hardly be said that the Aucyclopedia, by 
 compelling him to scatter his labors for twenty 
 years upon an infinite and varied task, prevented 
 him from bringing forth the great masterpiece 
 which his intelligence, if concentrated, might have 
 produced. It was rather because Diderot felt no 
 strong desire to concentrate himself thus that he 
 poured into the Exzcyclopedia and into a multitude 
 -of pamphlets his wonderful gifts for quick assimila- 
 tion, and uninterrupted but fragmentary produc- 
 tion. 
 
 Diderot was at first a deist, after the manner of 
 Voltaire, and, like him, under the influence of the 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAIDISTS. 221 
 
 English, particularly of Locke and Shaftesbury. 
 He then thought, as did Voltaire, that modern 
 physics had dealt materialism and skepticism a fatal 
 blow. “‘The discovery of germs in itself has dis- 
 pelled one of the strongest objections of atheism.’’ 
 But this style of philosophy soon ceased to satisfy 
 him, and he gradually inclined to what he himself 
 called the most attractive form of materialism—that 
 which attributes to organic molecules desires, aver- 
 sions, feeling and thought—to end at last in a sort 
 of pantheistic naturalism. 
 
 Several paths led Diderot to this goal. First of 
 all, he perceived that the irreducible dualism of 
 soul and body was generally upheld for religious 
 quite as much as for philosophical reasons; and 
 this alone was sufficient to drive him away from it. 
 Then, in his Lettre sur les Aveugles and Sur les 
 Sourds Muets, he insists upon the relative character 
 of our metaphysical conceptions. Fora blind man, 
 what becomes of the proof of the existence of God 
 based upon final cases? Diderot attempted, as 
 Condillac did afterward, to work out the psycho- 
 logical development of sensationalism. All our 
 knowledge comes from the senses; how does it 
 come from them? What do we owe to each of our 
 senses? Can we analyze their data, and afterward 
 from them reconstruct the whole? Cheselden’s 
 experiment and Molyneux’s problem were known; 
 Diderot wished to go beyond these, to carry this 
 kind of ‘‘metaphysical anatomy’”’ still farther, and 
 to take in pieces, so to speak, the senses of man. 
 
222 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 He imagined the ‘‘conventional mute,’’ and the 
 conclusions that he drew from his psychological 
 analysis alarmed many a Christian. 
 
 But Diderot’s pantheistic tendencies seem to 
 have been chiefly determined by the discoveries 
 made about this time in natural science. These he 
 followed with passionate interest, and his imagina- 
 tion soon swept him on to bold hypotheses con- 
 cerning life andthought. ‘‘We are,’’ he says, ‘‘on 
 the verge of a great revolution in science.’’ In 
 mathematics such menas Bernoulli, Euler, D’ Alem- 
 bert, Lagrange, have “‘set the pillars of Hercules.”’ 
 Nobody will go further. The natural sciences, on 
 the other hand, have only just been born; and 
 already the little that is known about them entirely 
 changes our view of the world. For instance, to 
 a mathematician studying abstract mechanics a 
 body may undoubtedly, by convention, be looked 
 upon as inert; but if we examine the facts, the 
 inertia of bodies is a ‘‘fearful error,’’ contrary to 
 all sound principles of physics and chemistry. In 
 itself, whether we consider its particles or its mass, 
 a body is full of activity and strength. The distinc- 
 tion between inorganic and living matter is there- 
 fore superficial, and strictly speaking, even false; 
 for do we not plainly see that the same matter is 
 alternately living and not living, according as it is 
 assimilated or eliminated by a plant or an animal? 
 Nature makes flesh with marble, and marble with 
 flesh. Therefore, is it not very rash to assert that 
 sensibility is incompatible with matter, since we do 
 
THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 223 
 
 not know the essence of anything whatever, either 
 of matter or of insensibility? But, it is said, sensi- 
 bility is a simple quality, one and indivisible, and 
 incompatible with a divisible subject. ‘*Meta- 
 physico-theological gibberish,’’ answers Diderot. 
 Experience show that life is everywhere; who 
 knows but feeling may be everywhere, too? 
 
 One of the most serious objections raised against 
 such a doctrine rests on the stability and perma- 
 nence of living species, which seem to set an insur- 
 mountable barrier between man and other animals, 
 between any two living species, and above all, be- 
 tween the realm of life and that of inorganic matter. 
 Diderot was aware of this difficulty. He answered 
 it by asserting the natural evolution of all the spe- 
 cies that ever appeared on the globe. It does not 
 follow because of the present state of the earth, and 
 consequently of the living species and of the inani- 
 mate bodies which are to be found thereon, that 
 this state has always been similar in the past, or is 
 to remain similar in the future. What we mistake 
 for the history of nature is only the history of an 
 instant of time. Just as in the animal or vegetable 
 kingdom an individual begins to exist, grows, 
 matures, decays and disappears, may it not be the 
 same with an entire species? Who knows what 
 races of animals have preceded us? And who 
 knows what races of animals will succeed ours? 
 Let us then waive the apparently unanswerable 
 question of the origin of life. If you are puzzled 
 by the question of the egg and the owl, it is because 
 
224 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 you suppose animals to have been originally what 
 they are now. What folly! We do not know what 
 they have been any more than we know what they 
 are to be. 
 
 To Diderot’s eager, universal and insatiable sci- 
 entific curiosity was joined a conception of science 
 itself which might already be termed “‘positivism.’’ 
 We know little; let us be contented with what we 
 can know. Our means of gaining knowledge reach 
 as far as our real needs do, and where these means 
 are denied us, knowledge is probably not very 
 necessary for us. I might as well feel seriously 
 grieved at not having four eyes, four feet, and two 
 wings. We must accept the fact that we are as we 
 are, and not aspire to a science that would be 
 beyond our comprehension. If men were wise, 
 they would at last give their attention to investiga- 
 tions that would promise to promote their comfort, 
 and no longer deign to answer questions which are 
 idle because they are unanswerable. For a similar 
 reason they would cease to aim at a greater degree 
 of precision in science than practical considerations 
 demand. In a word, ‘‘utility is the measure of 
 Utility will a few centuries hence 
 
 4 
 
 everything.’ 
 set limits to experimental physics, as it is on the 
 point of doing with regard to geometry. ‘‘I will 
 allow centuries to this study (physics), because its 
 sphere of utility is infinitely wider than that of any 
 other abstract science, and because it is unquestion- 
 ably the basis of our real knowledge.”’ 
 
 The same fervent love of humanity which ani- 
 
THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 225 
 
 mates and limits Diderot’s idea of science, is also 
 to be found in his polemics against the Christian 
 religion. Of course his language varied according to 
 circumstances. When he did not intend to publish 
 he gave free rein to his bold tongue. In this way 
 he wrote the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 
 Le Neveu de Rameau (his masterpiece), the Evxtzre- 
 piemmavecmaniaréchalec dai hi.) ineprivate 
 letters he sometimes vents his rage in invectives 
 against that religion, ‘‘the most absurd and atro- 
 cious in its dogmas, the most unintelligible, meta- 
 physical and intricate, and consequently the most 
 liable to divisions, schisms and heresies, the most 
 fatal to public peace and to sovereigns, the 
 most insipid, the most gloomy, the most Gothic, the 
 most puerile, the most unsociable in its morals, 
 the most intolerant of all.’’ In the Eucyclopedia 
 he makes a show of respect. Yet significant sallies 
 will sometimes escape him: “‘The Hebrews knew 
 what Christians term the true God; as if there were 
 any false one!’’ 
 
 His ethics, extremely lax as regards the union 
 of the sexes, is unfortunately influenced by the 
 lachrymose sentimentality of the times. The mo- 
 ment that virtue is mentioned Diderot gets excited. 
 Tears come into his eyes, his heart throbs, he gasps, 
 he must embrace his friends, and they must share 
 his transports. This overflow of feeling seriously 
 impairs the precision of his ideas. Diderot taught 
 his daughter that every virtue has two rewards: the 
 pleasure of doing good, and that of winning the good 
 
226 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 will of others; and every vice has two punishments: 
 one in our inmost hearts, the other in the feeling 
 of aversion which we never fail to excite in others. 
 He wished her to have no prejudices, but to have 
 morals and principles ‘“‘common to all centuries and 
 nations.’’ Here we recognize ideas dear to Vol- 
 taire. Like him, also, Diderot considered that jus- 
 tice was rooted in the very nature of man, and not, 
 in spite of Locke, variable according to times and 
 places. ‘“‘The maxims engraved, so to speak, on 
 the tables of mankind are as ancient as man and 
 preceded his laws, for which they ought to furnish 
 the guiding principles.’’ But Diderot, in accord 
 here with Rousseau, added that nature has not cre- 
 ated us wicked, and that it is bad education, bad 
 examples and bad legislation that deprave us. 
 
 The originality of Diderot must not therefore be 
 sought in his ethics; it lies elsewhere, in the mass 
 of ideas set in motion by this indefatigable mind, a 
 real precursor on many points of the present cen- 
 tury, which has justly shown a predilection for him. 
 He anticipates the progress of the natural sciences 
 and the change they were to bring to the general 
 conception of the universe, and consequently to the 
 whole life of mankind. He was among the first to 
 recognize the social importance of the mechanic 
 arts, by giving them the place they were entitled 
 to in the Excyclopedia. He raised in public esteem 
 the men who practice these arts, and thus did for 
 the workman what the physiocrats were at the same 
 time doing for the husbandman. At the same time 
 
THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 22 
 
 his Salons were making the beginnings of art criti- 
 cism, and teaching his contemporaries how to look 
 at pictures and statues. On dramatic art and the 
 art of the comedian he brought forward many 
 ingenious and profound ideas—and finally he 
 revealed in many articles of the Euxcyclopedia a 
 searching knowledge of the history of philosophy, 
 then neglected and almost unknown in France. 
 
 Goethe, who greatly admired him, said that his 
 was ““the most Germanic of French heads.’’ Indeed 
 very few French philosophers have had as keen a 
 sense of the great pulse of universal life and of the 
 creative power of nature, or as sound and penetrat- 
 ing an insight into manifold reality. He occupies 
 a special place, which we must almost despair of 
 defining in a satisfactory manner. We can neither 
 set forth his philosophical thoughts without exhibit- 
 ing their shortcomings, nor yet point out these 
 drawbacks without running the risk of being unjust 
 to this vast, powerful and unrestrained genius. 
 
 Even as compared with lesser men than D’Alem- 
 bert and Diderot, Helvetius is not the most original 
 of the ‘‘philosophers,’’ yet his book, De?’ Esprit, 
 created a wonderful sensation, both in France and 
 abroad. This success was partly due, at least in 
 France, to the personality of the author, who was 
 a great financier and a kind, generous, hospitable 
 and friendly man, who approached very near to the 
 most esteemed type of man of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury: the man of feeling who is virtuous and made 
 
228 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 happy by his virtue. The success was undoubtedly 
 also due in part to a captivating style; easy to read, 
 composed with a manifest concern for the favor of 
 women, and weaving in short stories and anecdotes 
 De l Esprit did not repel even the most indolent 
 reader. Lastly, its success was due to the appar- 
 ent boldness of the paradoxes, which however were 
 nothing but the fashionable opinions carried to 
 their logical conclusions. The strange thing was 
 that the success of Helvetius lasted for a long time, 
 and at the end of the century it was still thought 
 worth while to refute him. 
 
 Apart from the current doctrine of sensational- 
 ism, for which Helvetius was evidently indebted to 
 Condillac or to some other contemporary writer, 
 his two main paradoxes are the following: (1) That 
 personal interest or the pursuit of happiness is the 
 only principle, whether confessed or not, of human 
 actions; (2) that education can do everything. The 
 first paradox was not new. Many a moralist, not 
 to mention La Rochefoucauld, had already shown 
 the infinite cunning of self-love, and concluded that 
 men, even in the actions that seem most disinter- 
 ested actions, are always more or less hypocritical. 
 But Helvetius gives. his argument a quite different 
 turn. There is no pessimism or bitterness about 
 him; he is full of kindness. ‘‘It was not the love 
 of paradoxes,’’ he writes, ‘‘that led me to my 
 conclusion, but solely a desire for men’s happiness.”’ 
 And he flatters himself that his doctrine may con- 
 tribute to it. Indeed, if it be once granted that 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAIDISTS. 229 
 
 man never seeks anything but his own interest, let 
 law-givers so contrive that the general interest shall 
 always agree with private interests, and all men 
 will be good and happy. Everything, therefore, 
 depends upon the laws. Wherever private interest 
 is identified with public interest, virtue in each indi- 
 vidual becomes the necessary effect of self-love 
 and personal interest. ‘‘All the vices of a nation 
 - almost invariably originate in some defects of its 
 legislation.’’ 
 
 Diderot justly observed that this omnipotence 
 attributed to the laws repeats in an exaggerated 
 form the conception of Montesquieu, who saw an 
 inseparable connection between morals and the sys- 
 tem of government, and thus attributed to political 
 laws an influence not always confirmed by experi- 
 ence. Furthermore, with Montesquieu the forms 
 of government depend, in their turn, upon climate 
 and a multitude of conditions, whereas Helvetius 
 expressly opposes Montesquieu’s theory of cli- 
 mates. He maintains that the action of the law- 
 giver is supreme everywhere, and that no obstacles 
 are insuperable if this action be properly directed. 
 If it be objected that the pursuit of personal interest 
 is rather a narrow basis to sustain the whole edifice 
 of human society, he answers that as all things 
 come from experience, the feeling which was after- 
 ward to be called altruism is no exception to the 
 rule. The soral instinct, the moral sense, the 
 natural capacity for beneficence and benevolence, 
 appealed to by the English, are not to be admitted. 
 
230 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ‘““The vaunted system of the morally beautiful is 
 really nothing but the system of innate ideas, 
 demolished by Locke, and brought forward again 
 under a somewhat different form.’’ No individual 
 is born good, no individual is born wicked. Both 
 goodness and wickedness are accidents, being the 
 result of good or bad laws. 
 
 Thence logically follows the second paradox, 
 according to which education alone creates differ- 
 ences among men. Since nothing is innate or 
 hereditary, every human soul is at first a blank 
 page, and all souls are identical at birth. Inequal- 
 ity among minds is therefore due to the various 
 circumstances in which men have been placed, to 
 the passions aroused by these circumstances, to the 
 power of attention that these passions produce, in 
 short, to a thousand causes, but above all to educa- 
 tion. Pedagogy is to individuals what political 
 science is to nations. Error is an evil which, like 
 vice, may be avoided. To insure the happiness of 
 mankind, it will only be necessary to bring the art 
 of education to perfection. Education will make 
 enlightened men and even “‘men of genius as 
 numerous as they have hitherto been scarce.’’ The 
 enormity of the paradox did not prevent its making 
 an impression upon the public. It had at least the 
 merit of calling attention to the then quite new sci- 
 ence of pedagogy, and of preparing the public to 
 welcome Rousseau’s Emile. Besides, the influence 
 of Rousseau was already quite perceptible in Helve- 
 tius. ‘‘Everything is acquired’’ is, indeed, accord- 
 
THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 231 
 
 ing to Locke’s conception, the negation of innate 
 ideas; but it is also, according to Rousseau’s con- 
 ception, the assertion that the errors, sufferings and 
 crimes of men are their own work, and that it is for 
 the educator and the law-giver to cure them. 
 
 Le Systeme de la Nature, by Baron D’ Holbach, 
 which appeared in 1770, is a less superficial and 
 more vigorous work than the writings of Helvetius. 
 Being a confessed materialist, D’Holbach defines 
 man as a material being, organized so as to feel, 
 think and be modified in certain ways peculiar to 
 himself—that is, to the particular combinations of 
 substances of which he is composed. The intellec- 
 tual faculties may be reduced to changes produced 
 by motion in the brain. The word ‘‘spirit’’ has no 
 meaning. The savages admit the existence of 
 ‘‘spirits’’ to explain effects for which they cannot 
 account, and which seem to them marvelous. Such 
 an idea of spirit is preserved only by ignorance and 
 sloth. It is more useful to divines, but most harm- 
 ful to the progress of society, which keeps pace with 
 science. The immortality of the soul is a religious 
 dogma which never was of any use except to 
 priests, and is not even a check upon the passions 
 if they are at all violent, as experience sufficiently 
 proves. And as necessary laws govern all natural 
 phenomena, intellectual and moral phenomena 
 included, moral freedom is quite out of the question. 
 
 So far this materialism had nothing remarkable 
 about it unless it be its perfect frankness. But on 
 
2 32 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 the question of the existence of God, D’Holbach 
 subjected deism and theism to a searching criticism, 
 obviously directed against Voltaire’s natural reli- 
 gion, and worthy of some notice. People make a 
 wrong use of physics in behalf of metaphysics, says 
 D’Holbach, and the study of nature should have 
 nothing to do with moral or theological interests 
 lest a new chance of errors be added to all those we 
 already have to guard against. But even if we 
 overlook this point, the argument based on final 
 causes does not prove what it is thought to prove. 
 First of all, the idea of order is relative to human 
 canons of propriety, and if we leave these out of 
 account, disorder is in itself no less natural and 
 normal than order, nor illness than health; all phe- 
 nomena being produced by virtue of the same laws. 
 Then) 4) tovbe ‘surprised, thatthe heart, the:bram: 
 the arteries, etc., of an animal should work as they 
 do, or that a tree should bear fruit, is to be sur- 
 prised that an animal or a tree should exist.’’ 
 What we call finality is but the total sum of the 
 conditions required for the existence of every being. 
 When these conditions are found combined, the 
 living being subsists; if they cease to be so, it dis- 
 appears; and this very simple proposition, which is 
 true as regards individuals, is no less so as regards 
 species and even suns. There is nothing in this 
 which compels us to have recourse to a Providence, 
 the author and maintainer of the world’s order. 
 The divine personality, upheld by theists, is 
 untenable. Newton, the vast genius who divined 
 
THE ENCYCLOPADISTS. 233 
 
 Nature and its laws, is only a child when he leaves 
 the domain of physics; and his theology shows that 
 he had remained in bondage to the prejudices of his 
 childhood. What is that God, lord and sovereign 
 of all things, who rules the universe, but an anthro- 
 pomorphic conception, which was only a reminis- 
 cence of Newton's Christian education? And what 
 is Voltaire’s retributive and vengeful God but a 
 reminiscence of precisely the same kind? 
 
 The deists’ God is useless, the theists’ God is 
 full of contradictions. If we nevertheless accept 
 him, we have no right to reject anything in the 
 name of reason, and we are inconsistent if we 
 refuse to go further and to submit to religious 
 dogma. Theism is liable to as many heresies and 
 schisms as religion, and is, from a logical point of 
 view, even more untenable. So there will always 
 be but a step ‘‘from theism to superstition.’’ The 
 least derangement in the machine, a slight ailment, 
 some unforeseen affliction, are sufficient to disturb 
 the humors, and nothing more is required. Natural 
 religion is only a variety of the other kind of religion, 
 and speedily comes back to the original type. It is 
 fearand ignorance of causes that first suggested toman 
 the idea of his gods. He madethem rude and fierce, 
 then civilized, like himself; and nothing bnt science 
 can cause this instinctive theology to disappear. 
 
 The appearance of this book, in which the 
 author (though under an assumed name) so boldly 
 carried his principles to their utmost logical conclu- 
 sions, created great commotion among the ‘‘phi- 
 
234 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 losophers.’’ Though they did not all feel indignant, 
 they nearly all thought it advisable to simulate indig- 
 nation. Voltaire strongly protested, and this time 
 he was sincere. Diderot, who was suspected of 
 having had a hand in the work, kept very quiet. 
 D’Alembert confessed that the Systeme de la Nature 
 Was. a stetrible book.wen Bredentckeall avery mace 
 shocked, wrote a refutation of it. He clearly per- 
 ceived the revolutionary ideas lurking in it, and 
 became out of humor with the Encyclopzdists, 
 who were friends and intimates of Baron D’ Holbach. 
 As for Rousseau, he had already broken with them 
 long before, and had not waited for this book 
 before opening the battle against materialism and 
 atheism, which he ‘‘held in abhorrence.”’ 
 Nevertheless Rousseau had contriouted to the 
 Encyclopedia in the first years of its publication; 
 Condillac, Turgot, Quesnay had likewise written 
 articles for it, and unfortunately other men besides, 
 who were unworthy of such neighbors. In spite 
 of Diderot’s efforts there are strange incongruities 
 in the Encyclopedia, and we easily understand Vol- 
 taire’s frequent indignation at the vapid or high- 
 flown nonsense which Diderot was compelled to 
 insert. D’Alembert, who ceased in 1757 to be 
 associated with him in publishing the Encyclopedia, 
 though he went on contributing to it, often pleads 
 extenuating circumstances in his Letters to Voltaire. 
 It was he who, in his Descours Préliminaire, gave 
 perhaps the best characterization of this undertak- 
 ing in which the philosophical spirit of the age 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAIDISTS. 235 
 
 7 
 
 found its expression: ‘‘The present century,’’ he 
 said, “‘which thinks itself destined to alter laws of 
 all kinds and to secure justice i 
 
 The philosophers proceeded to 
 with an eagerness, a confidence in their own reason 
 and in their paradoxes and a power of self-delusion 
 that were extraordinary. The government they 
 controlled existed only in imagination, and there 
 was no check of experience to bring them to a halt 
 in time. The work which they did too hastily now 
 seems to us rather poor and out of proportion to 
 their claims; but it does not follow that this work 
 was not necessary, or that they were wrong in 
 undertaking it. On the contrary, their impulse on 
 the whole was generous, and for this reason, in 
 spite of all their failings, it proved irresistible and 
 carried away the very men who ought to have been 
 its natural adversaries. Hatred of falsehood, super- 
 stition, oppression, confidence in the progress of 
 reason and science, belief in the power of education 
 and law to overcome ignorance, error and misery, 
 which are the sources of all our misfortunes, and 
 lastly warm sympathy for all that is human were 
 shed abroad from this focus to the ends of the civil- 
 ized world. Events followed which left an indelible 
 mark upon history. And though a clear-sighted 
 reaction showed the weaknesses, inconsistencies and 
 lapses of this philosophy, it may well be believed 
 that its virtue is not yet quite exhausted, and that 
 by laying its foundations deeper it may yet rise 
 again with new strength. 
 
 alter the laws’’ 
 
 c¢ 
 
CHAR TE Ra Nala 
 
 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 
 
 ROUSSEAU’S personality exhibits so much complex- 
 ity, and yet at the same time so much unity, that it 
 is no easy thing to study in him the philosopher 
 apart from the man of letters. His philosophical 
 tenets are the very soul of his talent as a writer. 
 They are_not merely the result of his mind’s reflec- 
 tions upon the great problems, but rather of his 
 heart’s inmost tendencies. Rousseau the philos- 
 opher is Rousseau’s entire self. Yet this very fact 
 gives to his philosophical doctrine, if we try to 
 examine it separately, a certain character of unity. 
 His solutions of the essential questions are in har- 
 mony with one another, and it is not impossible to 
 discover the general principles from which all the 
 rest springs. 
 
 The chief philosophical problem, according to 
 Rousseau, is the moral problem from the two-fold 
 point of view of the individual and of society. He 
 feels but little curiosity for theoretical questions, 
 properly so called. Though a subtle and some- 
 times rigorous dialectician, it never occurs to him 
 to reflect upon logic. Exact sciences have but little 
 interest for him. The strong liking for botany 
 which he manifested in his later years came from 
 
 236 
 
ROUSSEAU. 237 
 
 an esthetic, and in a certain sense religious, feeling. 
 On the other hand, everything relating to man’s 
 conduct and destiny moved him deeply. He was 
 led to philosophical reflection by the discomfort, 
 suffering and often indignation bred in him either 
 by his intercourse with other men, or by the sight 
 of men’s intercourse with one another. Morals, 
 institutions and beliefs all hurt him, and appeared 
 to him false and different from what they should 
 be. Whence comes it that the immense majority 
 of men are sunk in poverty, in order to maintain in 
 luxury the few who in their turn suffer from having 
 no rule of life and nothing more to desire? Whence 
 comes it that the weak and the powerful are equally 
 dependent upon one another, and equally unhappy? 
 Why do we find lurking beneath the apparent 
 refinement and mildness of manners the cold rage 
 of envy, base covetousness, desperate pursuit of 
 personal interest, indifference to public good, hard- 
 ness of heart and cruelty? Why does the develop- 
 ment of arts and sciences, notwithstanding the 
 excellence of a few individuals, seem to have made 
 mankind worse and more miserable still? And 
 lastly, why is hypocrisy universal, making it possible 
 for Rousseau to appear original merely because he 
 said what was as clear as daylight to everybody? 
 In short, to reduce all these questions to two essen- 
 tial ones, is it necessary that man and society should 
 be what they are? If wecan conceive the possibility 
 of their being otherwise, by what means can man 
 be brought back to truth, virtue and happiness? 
 
238 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 To the first of these two questions there is a very 
 simple answer, supplied by Christian theology: 
 Man fell though sin. His nature is corrupt, and it 
 is not a surprising thing that what springs from 
 such a nature should be corrupt also. Rousseau 
 did not content himself with this appeal to mystery. 
 Had he done so, he might have been a more ortho- 
 dox Christian, but his effect upon his contempo- 
 raries would have been far less great, and he might 
 have had none whatever. How could the theologi- 
 cal solution be proposed again to minds feverishly 
 longing for enfranchisement, and impatient to apply 
 reason to the treatment of those subjects which 
 theology had kept to itself for so many centuries? 
 And then, had he borrowed his argument from the 
 doctrine of the fall of man, what could he have said 
 on morals that had not been well said already by 
 Nicole and Malebranche? Instead of simply taking 
 human perversity as a fact, Rousseau, by a stroke 
 of genius, set himself to the study of its genesis. 
 Instead of supposing it to be innate, he sought to 
 
 discover how it was acquired. ‘‘AIl you can see is 
 man in the hands of the Devil,’’ he writes to the 
 Archbishop of Paris; ‘‘but I see how he came 
 
 there. The cause of evil, according to you, is 
 man’s corrupt nature; but this corruption is itself 
 an evil, and what ought to have been done was to 
 seek its cause. We both agree that man was cre- 
 ated good, but you say he is wicked because he has 
 been wicked, while 7 demonstrate how he came to 
 be wicked.’’ In short, according to Rousseau, the 
 
ROUSSEAU. 239 
 
 dogma of original sin is not so much a solution as a 
 statement of the problem. He attempted to sup- 
 ply a real solution and to offer an explanation 
 instead of a dogma. | 
 
 The undertaking.was a bold one, and character- 
 istic of the age which asserted that in man ‘‘every- 
 thing is acquired,’’ and which, in its desire to set 
 the individual man wholly free from all sense of 
 solidarity with his fellows, except in so far as he 
 himself freely accepted it, endeavored with Condil- 
 lac and Helvetius to belittle and even to deny the 
 influence of heredity. In the same way, Rousseau 
 attacked the formidable problem of the origin of 
 evil in the human soul, still unsolved save in reli- 
 gious metaphysics, without stopping to ask himself 
 whether it was not beyond the reach of his reason. 
 That reason set the problem, was for him sufficient 
 ground for believing that reason was capable of 
 solving it. Though Rousseau was an adversary of 
 the philosophers and out of patience with their 
 misuse of reason, it did not occur to him, any more 
 than to them, to submit reason itself to criticism 
 and to measure its power. 
 
 The search for the genesis of moral and social 
 evil implies that man was once innocent and good. 
 If we thus admit a ‘‘contradiction’’ (a word Rous- 
 seau was wont to use with the meaning of ‘‘opposi- 
 tion’’) between man’s primitive nature and our 
 social order, we shall see that it is sufficient to 
 explain all the vices of men and the evils of society. 
 
240 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 But it is no light task to discern what is original 
 and what is artificial in the present nature of man. 
 How can we know his “‘primitive state, which 
 exists no longer, may never have existed, will prob- 
 ably never exist again, but of which we must, never- 
 theless, have some precise notions in order to judge 
 rightly of our present state?’ We see that Rous- 
 seau does not fora moment claim for his researches 
 the character of historical investigations. He 
 makes no pretension to anthropological science. 
 He does not even seek to discover what primitive 
 man may actually have been. The genesis he 
 undertakes to seek is an analytical one, like those, 
 attempted in psychology by Diderot, Condillac and 
 Buffon, to which the public had given a very favor- 
 able reception. Just as Condillac, in tracing our 
 knowledge back to its first elements, did not have 
 recourse to direct observation, but by a sort of ideal 
 analysis, eliminated in imagination all the senses save 
 one, in order to establish the special data of that 
 one, after which he brought back the other senses 
 one by one, so Rousseau proceeds, as he himself 
 says, by means of ‘‘hypothetical and conditional”’ 
 reasoning. He first considers the nature of man as 
 he now is, and determines all that may be explained 
 by the influence of social intercourse, of surround- 
 ings, education, etc. Then, suppressing all that is 
 thus explained, he infers that what remains must 
 have been the original nature of man. 
 
 Those who objected that Rousseau’s ‘‘man in a 
 state of nature’’ had never existed, failed therefore 
 
ROUSSEAU. 241 
 
 very egregiously to understand him. It is as if one 
 should object that Condillac’s animated statue 
 never existed. Rousseau’s method is quite a psy- 
 chological one. It was ‘‘by meditating upon the 
 first and simplest operations of the soul’’ that he 
 endeavored to deduce the feelings and ideas of the 
 natural man. Nature, whose voice cannot be com- 
 pletely hushed, was to tell him by means of an 
 - inward feeling, whether his hypotheses were accept- 
 able. Hehadin her a means, if not of verification, 
 at least of control. 
 
 In order to separate at once from man’s present 
 nature all that the successive generations have 
 acquired in the course of the centuries, Rousseau 
 supposes the original man to have lived alone. 
 Even the family did not yet exist; it was a first 
 revolution that brought about the establishment of 
 families and the distinctions between them.  Origi- 
 nally man did not live in society any more than 
 wolves and monkeys do; he occasionally joined his 
 fellow creatures, but usually kept aloof from them. 
 He was an animal, inferior in certain respects to 
 some, but upon the whole superior to all others. 
 His body was robust, and mainly unacquainted 
 with other ills than wounds and old age. The 
 innumerable diseases to which civilized man is a 
 prey were unknown to men ina state of nature; 
 moreover, as the sway of natural selection was 
 undisputed among them, every weak and deficient 
 individual, not being able to get beyond childhood, 
 
242 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 was eliminated at the outset. As regards his mind, 
 his first state, in common with all animals, must 
 have been that of simple perception and feeling; to 
 will and to be unwilling, to desire and to fear— 
 these must have been the first and almost the only 
 operations of his soul. He felt no curiosity, and his 
 mind stagnated indefinitely. As he wandered 
 through the forests, without industry and without 
 speech, neither at war with his kind nor bound by 
 any ties to them, having no need of his fellow-crea- 
 tures and at the same time no desire to harm them, 
 he had only so much feeling and enlightenment as 
 belongs to such a state; there could be no educa- 
 tion and no progress. The species was already old, 
 and man remained still a child. His only passion 
 was the love of his own person (not self-love, which 
 supposes a distinction between personal interest and 
 the interest of others—that is, of society). He had 
 a natural inclination to pity, when he beheld one 
 of his fellow-beings in distress. 
 
 But this harmless animal, apparently so nearly 
 like the others, had that within him which could 
 create between him and them an almost boundless 
 difference. He was ‘‘perfectible.’’ He possessed 
 the potentiality of reason, and of everything that 
 comes in its train—language, civil society, morality 
 and progress. The difficulty is to understand how 
 the solitary man became sociable, and what started 
 that extraordinary evolution of which modern soci- 
 eties are the outgrowth. Rousseau confesses that 
 the transition puzzles him; he has recourse to ‘‘the 
 
ROUSSEAU. 243 
 
 spur of necessity,’’ to the presence of want, occa- 
 sioned apparently by the increase of population. 
 How did man begin to think? ‘“‘The more we 
 meditate upon this subject, the greater the distance 
 between pure sensations and the most simple form 
 of knowledge’ appears. And how are we to ex- 
 plain the origin of language? Rousseau thinks the 
 problem insoluble: he does not know which was the 
 more indispensable prerequisite for the creation of 
 the other—a society already in operation or a lan- 
 guage already invented. 
 
 Having reached this point, the author sketches 
 a sort of hypothetical pre-history, in which man, 
 having once left the state of nature behind him, is 
 constantly led on to new inventions by new wants. 
 His intelligence and sensibility developed, the fam- 
 ily is constituted, and groups of families are formed ; 
 common tradition, knowledge and beliefs are estab- 
 lished. Finally, when the last traces of the state 
 of nature are obliterated, the idea of property 
 appears. This idea, dependent as it is upon many 
 other previous ideas, which could have arisen only 
 one after another, was not formed all at once in the 
 human mind; many improvements had to be made 
 and much industry and enlightenment to be acquired 
 before it could occur to men. 
 
 Property implies the organization of civil soci- 
 ety, of penal justice and the legal recognition of 
 inequality. Henceforth there must be rich men and 
 poor men; and by a prodigious piece of dexterity, 
 those who have possessions have managed to get 
 
244 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 their wealth insured and protected by those who 
 have none. Soon there will be powerful men and 
 weak men, and in the end masters and slaves. 
 Inequality thus reaches its last stage. In the state 
 of nature men were all equal, save for a few phys- 
 ical differences, since they all led the same peaceful 
 and solitary life. . In the present state someé/are 
 starving, while others are wallowing in superfluous 
 wealth, and all become crafty, jealous and wicked. 
 
 But, one might object, was it not by virtue of 
 his very nature that man developed his reason and 
 eradually formed the family, property and civil 
 society? If the social man existed as a germ or 
 potentiality within the original man, is it fair to 
 oppose them to each other? Rousseau forestalled 
 the objection. Such an evolution, he says, was 
 not inevitable. It might possibly not have taken 
 place. Nature had but meagerly endowed men for 
 sociability. She had very little share in all that 
 they did to. make fast its bonds. She had made 
 him rather for solitude. Perfectibility, social virtues 
 and all other potentialities which the natural man 
 had received could never have developed of them- 
 selves; they needed the chance conjunction of sev- 
 eral causes which might never have occurred; man 
 would then have remained forever in his primitive 
 condition. But when once this evolution had 
 begun, and above all, when once society had been 
 established, every step taken brought man farther 
 from his original type. 
 
 Thus the long toil of civilization, which gave us 
 
ROUSSEAU. 245 
 
 arts, sciences and industry, also brought upon us 
 diseases, misery, sufferings of all kinds, and espe- 
 cially vices. Society is an assemblage of artificial 
 men, preyed upon by factitious though only too 
 real passions, for which in the primitive state there 
 was no occasion. ‘Therefore, if man’s nature is 
 now corrupted, we must not infer therefrom that it 
 has always beenso. This corruption is his own work, 
 _and the ransom to be paid for his release from sav- 
 agery. 
 
 Thus did Rousseau solve the first problem he had 
 set himself, and trace the genesis of social evil. 
 Where are we to seek a remedy for it? This rem- 
 edy, if it exists, can be found only in a system of 
 education that would rehabilitate man depraved by 
 the morals and institutions of to-day. But sucha 
 system of education implies a whole system of phi- 
 losophy, for it presupposes a thorough knowledge 
 of man’s nature, of the laws of his mental develop- 
 ment, of his private and public intercourse with his 
 fellow-creatures, of his place in nature, of his future 
 destiny, and lastly of the first cause of all things. 
 This philosophy Rousseau was to undertake, and 
 ’’ as opposed to everything ficti- 
 tious or conventional, was to be the clew that he 
 followed in his researches. 
 
 the idea of ‘‘nature 
 
 9 
 
 Though an adversary of the ‘‘philosophers,’ 
 Rousseau had at first been their friend, and to a 
 certain degree their disciple. We have observed 
 that the influence of Condillac and Diderot had left 
 
246 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 upon him a lasting impression. If he fell out with 
 them and began combating them, it was because 
 the doctrines in which they delighted were most 
 revolting to him. At the outset and before argu- 
 ing the matter at all he was thoroughly convinced 
 that these doctrines could not be true. He felt 
 sure of this from the feeling of repulsion they 
 aroused within him, a feeling as spontaneous and 
 irresistible as an instinct. Afterwards he sought 
 reasons for it, but these justified his certitude and 
 did .notvadd /to it.) i) -Not onlyyamul not. a amateni- 
 alist,’’ he wrote towards the latter part of his life, 
 ‘“but I do not even remember having been tempted 
 for an instant to become one.’’ Goethe, in a cele- 
 brated passage of his Memoirs, has depicted in 
 
 ’ 
 
 striking terms the impression of repugnance and 
 disgust produced upon him by the book of Baron 
 D’Holbach; these were the very feelings of Rous- 
 seau. Materialism—that is, in the language of the 
 time, the philosophy of the Encyclopedists when 
 they speak out their minds—needs only to be 
 stated in order to be refuted. The heart rejects it, 
 conscience condemns it, and from this verdict there 
 is no appeal. It matters little that its deductions 
 appear to be closely reasoned. ‘‘When a philos- 
 opher tells me that trees feel and rocks think, it 
 will be in vain for him to beguile me with his subtle 
 arguments; I can see in him but a disingenuous 
 sophist, who would rather give feeling to stones 
 than grant a soul to man.’’ 
 
 Most certainly, were demonstration possible in 
 
ROUSSEAU. 247 
 
 such matters, we should have to keep to truths 
 that are proved; but the extraordinary variety of 
 doctrines is sufficient to show that none of them is 
 evident. Philosophers only multiply the causes 
 for doubt. The more we read them the less we are 
 able to come toaconclusion. Their whole art con- 
 sists in giving the appearance of truth to paradoxes 
 which one is at first tempted to reject without 
 examination. Are we, then, to suspend our judg- 
 ment indefinitely? But this I cannot do, says 
 Rousseau. Doubt is too violent a state for my 
 soul. My soul longs to be convinced and thirsts 
 after belief. It takes a serious view of life, and 
 therefore it must know what life is. Since the phi- 
 losophers cannot tell me, I will inquire elsewhere. 
 “Let me consult the inward light; it will not lead 
 me so far astray as they do, or at least the error will 
 be mine, and I shall be less depraved if I trust to 
 my own illusions than if I am led away by their 
 lies.’’. This inward light is ‘“‘natural,’’ whereas 
 philosophers nearly always come to conclusions 
 extremely remote from what nature suggests to us. 
 They seem to take pleasure in adopting the reverse 
 of what the majority of men think and believe. 
 This, according to Rousseau, is at once a token of 
 pride and a risk of error. The first and most com- 
 mon notion is also the simplest and most sensible, 
 and often would only need to be the last proposed 
 in order to win universal approbation. 
 Metaphysical truth is therefore accessible to all 
 men, but to the philosopher less than to any other 
 
248 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 on account of his taste for abstruse researches and 
 difficult solutions. A simple and sincere man will 
 trust to natural light and be content with the con- 
 victions it furnishes him. Thus, whatever Locke 
 may say to the contrary, I need to know of matter 
 only that it has extension and divisibility to feel 
 assured that it cannot think. Matter in itself seems 
 to me indifferent to motion and rest. Therefore it 
 has’ inyutself:.no- powersto actt fli it acts, wits 
 because either motion or life has been communi- 
 cated to it.’’ With still better reason shall I 
 refuse to admit that feeling and thought depend 
 simply upon a certain organization of matter. ‘“‘I 
 have earnestly endeavored to conceive the exist- 
 ence of a living particle, but without success. The 
 idea of sentient matter that has no senses appears 
 to me unintelligible and contradictory. In spite, 
 therefore, of all arguments (no doubt those set 
 forth by Diderot in Le Réve de D’ Alembert, which 
 Rousseau must have heard from the author’s lips), 
 I shall persist in believing that the soul isa sub- 
 stance distinct from the body.”’ 
 
 If matter is essentially inert, the soul, on the 
 contrary, is essentially active. Sensationalism 
 seeks to reduce this activity as much as possible. 
 It is not contented with saying that whatever enters 
 our understanding comes by the way of our senses; 
 this Rousseau admitted, as did all men of his time; 
 it furthermore asserts that all operations of the 
 mind may be reduced to sensation. Even judg- 
 ment would seem to be only a comparison between 
 
ROUSSEAU. 249 
 
 two sensations, a comparison not made by the 
 mind, but produced init. It would never be pro- 
 duced, answers Rousseau, if the mind had not an 
 active part in the operation. ‘“‘In my opinion the 
 distinctive faculty of the active and intelligent 
 being, is that he can attach a meaning to the word 
 ‘is.’ I seek in vain in the being of pure sensation 
 this intelligent force which first compares and then 
 ’ judges.’’ Rousseau did nothing more than point 
 out this theory of judgment, but he no doubt 
 touched here one of the weak points of his adver- 
 saries. 
 
 The same method was used by Rousseau con- 
 cerning the existence of God. Here again he begins 
 by criticising the materialists. Matter is inert. To 
 account for the motion of the universe we therefore 
 need an intelligent motive power. How does this 
 force move matter? I do not know, and the prob- 
 ability is that I shall never know. But am I better 
 acquainted with the soul’s way of moving the body? 
 Yet I cannot doubt that it does move it. 
 
 The proof taken from final causes appeals to 
 Rousseau still more strongly than the proof taken 
 from the necessity of a moving cause. The spec- 
 tacle of nature, and above all, the sight of organ- 
 ized beings, delighted him. He compares the 
 special ends of every species, its means for attaining 
 them, and the order of its settled relations, and the 
 ‘‘inward testimony’’ tells him that all this would 
 not exist if supreme wisdom did not preside over 
 the order of the universe. No doubt this proof, 
 
250 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 like the preceding one, is open to objections, and 
 what is worse, to unanswerable objections. But 
 Rousseau was not afraid of these, and had some- 
 thing better than arguments to oppose against 
 them. What is the use of silencing me, he said to 
 his adversaries, if you cannot persuade me; and 
 how can you take from me the involuntary feeling 
 which contradicts you in spite of myself? Cold 
 reasoning cannot prevail against my ardent convic- 
 tion. Thus, I believe that the world is presided 
 over by a wise and powerful Will; I see this, or 
 rather, I feel it, and it is the only important thing 
 for me to know. Do not ask me whether the world 
 is eternal or was created, or what are the metaphys- 
 ical attributes of God. It is sufficient for me to 
 have an unshaken conviction that He exists, that 
 He moves the universe, that He ordains all things, 
 and that He is therefore intelligent, powerful and 
 good. Let philosophers search further; my heart 
 and reason are contented with this. 
 
 Therefore the problem of evil, which Voltaire 
 thinks so formidable, causes Rousseau but little 
 anxiety. In along letter, addressed to none other 
 than Voltaire, on the occasion of his Poem on the 
 Earthquake at Lisbon, Rousseau resolutely defends 
 optimism. If we admit that there is a powerful, 
 wise and good God, and that the world is His work, 
 how can we, without contradicting ourselves, say 
 that this work is bad? God's designs may be 
 inscrutable, but they must needs be perfect like 
 Himself. Then, if we examine the different kinds 
 
ROUSSEAU. 2m 
 
 of evils from which we suffer, moral evil is unques- 
 tionably our own work, and physical evil would be 
 nothing but for our vices, which have given it its 
 poignancy for us. ‘‘O man!’’ exclaims Rousseau, 
 "seek no; more the, authomot/evil; itis thyself.’ 
 Nature had not raised in Lisbon four-storied houses 
 to crush their inmates in their fall when the earth 
 quakes. Nature intended man to live in the open 
 air; man has built cities—abysses which engulf 
 mankind. Moreover, here again the arguments of 
 philosophers are powerless against the strength of 
 inward feeling, which bears as strong a testimony 
 to God's goodness as to His existence. In matters 
 so far above the reach of human understanding, 
 shall an objection which I cannot refute, vanquish 
 at one blow a body of doctrines so compact, so 
 closely linked together, formed after such careful 
 meditation, so well suited to my reason, my heart 
 and my whole being, and strengthened by the inward 
 assent which I feel is withheld from all others? 
 The same inward assent makes us sure that we 
 are free; no other demonstration is needed. In- 
 deed liberty is the most essential characteristic of 
 mankind. It is not so much man’s understanding 
 that specifically distinguishes him from other ani- 
 mals as his being a free agent. But from his freedom 
 it follows that the soul must be immortal; for if we 
 are free, the soul must be immaterial and essentially 
 independent of the necessary laws which rule over 
 matter. ‘‘It is especially in the consciousness of 
 liberty that the spirituality of the soul is shown; 
 
252 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 for physics offers a kind of explanation of the 
 mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; 
 but in the power to will, or rather to choose, and 
 in the consciousness of this power, we find only 
 purely spiritual activities, and nothing therein can 
 be explained by the laws of mechanics.’’ More- 
 over, belief in another life is inseparable from belief 
 in a good and just God. Should I have no other 
 proof of the immateriality of the soul than the tri- 
 umph of the wicked and the oppression of the just, 
 this alone would prevent my doubting it. The 
 physical world offers to my contemplation an admir- 
 able order, which persuades me of the wisdom of 
 its author; can I believe that the moral order, 
 whose author is the same, is less perfect, or that it 
 does not even exist? Now this order requires 
 everyone to be treated according to his deserts. 
 Therefore we shall live after death. The union of 
 the soul and the body is a forced condition; when 
 they cease to be united they both resume their 
 natural state. 
 
 From metaphysics to religion the transition is 
 imperceptible; : In ‘facty? they icoincide) ands tthe 
 ‘“Vicaire Savoyard’’ does not separate the one from 
 the other. Rousseau’s religion is based on a double 
 natural revelation. God has manifested Himself 
 to men both in the universe, by His works, and 
 within themselves, in their hearts. Christians 
 ostensibly mistake this natural religion for atheism 
 or irreligion, exactly the opposite doctrine. They 
 are unjust, for natural revelation is enough to make 
 
ROUSSEAU. 263 
 
 us religious. Nothing warns me that any other is 
 necessary. How can I be guilty if I serve God 
 according to the lights He puts into my mind and 
 the feelings with which He inspires my heart? It 
 is not on a few stray leaves that we must seek 
 God's law, but within the heart of man, where His 
 hand deigned to write it. 
 
 If, therefore, Rousseau calls himself a sincere 
 Christian, it is on the express condition that he shall 
 be allowed to frame his own creed. He is a Chris- 
 tian, not as a disciple of priests, but as a disciple 
 of) Jesus Christ. The (majesty) of the Scriptures 
 astounds him, the holiness of the Gospel speaks to 
 his heart. But this same Gospel is full of incred- 
 ible things, offensive to reason, and both inconceiv- 
 able and inadmissible to every sensible man; 
 Rousseau therefore will not believe them. Vainly 
 dremwerurced to’) /keepioummeason) under.) One 
 who deceives us might say the same. We must 
 have reasons wherewith to keep our reason under. 
 Moreover, the Gospel is the most sublime of all 
 books, but still it is a book, a book unknown to 
 more than three-quarters of the world; can I 
 believe that a Scythian or an African is less dear to 
 our common Father than you or I? The only 
 indisputable revelation is the one that is given uni- 
 versally to all men. And when Rousseau added 
 that all religions are good, so long as God is fitly 
 served, and worship is essentially from the heart, 
 he could not but expect both Catholic bishops and 
 Protestant clergymen to excommunicate him. 
 
254 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Rousseau’s natural religion, however, stands dis- 
 tinctly apart from that of Voltaire and his friends. 
 Though it diverges from historical religions, it is 
 conscious of its close affinity with them, nor does 
 Rousseau fail to appreciate the part they have played 
 in the life of mankind. He will not denounce as 
 impostors the founders of religion who say they are 
 sent by God. He never inveighs against the crafti- 
 ness and hypocrisy of priests. He does not cast 
 ridicule upon Christian dogma, or scoff and jeer at 
 the Bible. He simply says that supernatural 
 revelation seems to him unnecessary, and that as 
 he sees objections to it, he remains in ‘‘respectful 
 doubt.”’ 
 
 But above all—and this is the essential differ- 
 ence—Voltaire’s natural religion remained a purely. 
 philosophical belief. Voltaire acknowledged the 
 existence of God because it was still more difficult 
 to deny than to assert it, and especially because a 
 retributive and avenging God is necessary. Rous- 
 seau agrees to this; but to him religion is also some- 
 thing quite different; it is a living element of his 
 consciousness, the very foundation of it. ‘*With- 
 outiitaithino. real )virtuescanwexisty mogw) hiseiome 
 phrase which none of the Encyclopedists would 
 have written, or perhaps understood. The cold 
 natural religion of the ‘“‘philosophers,’’ a religion 
 without faith, could not but seem vain and blas- 
 phemous to all believing souls; the natural religion 
 of Rousseau, though no more orthodox than that 
 of Voltaire, had the power to move many pious 
 
ROUSSEAU. 255 
 
 souls even to enthusiasm. The philosophers speak 
 of religion with indifference, if not with hatred and 
 scorn, as men who do without it and at most desire 
 it only for others. Rousseau speaks of it impres- 
 sively, as a man who practices it, loves it and could 
 not live without it. 
 
 As Rousseau’s religion is inseparable from his 
 metaphysics, his ethics also is closely linked to 
 his religion. It is wholly based on the ‘‘inward 
 ’* which is called conscience, and which 
 dictates to us what we ought to do. If a conflict 
 
 revelation 
 
 arises between it and our reason, conscience is what 
 we must unhesitatingly follow. Far from believ- 
 ing that whoever judges according to its light is apt 
 to err, I believe that it never leads us astray, and 
 that it is the light which guides our feeble under- 
 standing when we try to go beyond what we can 
 conceive. Reason too often deceives us, and we 
 have only too good a right to impeach its authority. 
 But conscience never deceives us; it is man’s true 
 cuide; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body. 
 It would be sufficient to guide our steps in inno- 
 cence were we always willing to listen to it. 
 
 This is the light that ‘‘lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world.’’ Cast your eyes upon every 
 nation, search every history: among so many 
 strange and inhuman forms of worship and such 
 prodigious variety of manners and characters, you 
 will find everywhere the same ideas of justice and 
 probity, everywhere the same moral principles, the 
 
256 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 same notions concerning good and evil. There 
 must therefore be in the innermost depths of the 
 soul an innate principle of justice and virtue, accord- 
 ing to which, in spite of our own maxims, we judge 
 our own and others’ actions to be good or bad. 
 Accordingly all the morality of our actions lies 
 in our own judgment of them. While, according 
 to the philosophers, the social utility of our actions 
 is the measure of their morality, and according to 
 Voltaire social virtues are the only ones there are, 
 Rousseau conceives morality to be entirely inward 
 and essentially independent of the material content 
 of our actions. It was in this way that he was 
 enabled, without any hypocrisy, to make a distinc- 
 tion between his actions, some of which he himself 
 judges to be culpable and base, and his heart, which 
 never had any wrong intentions. He makes an 
 effort to assign to morality within the conscience 
 a sphere of superior dignity where nothing else in 
 the universe could rival it. One of the most serious — 
 errors of modern civilization, and perhaps the most 
 serious of all, consists precisely in having misappre- 
 hended the pre-eminence of morality and having 
 made it subordinate to knowledge. ‘‘One may 
 observe,’’ he says, ‘‘in the arguments of my adver- 
 saries such marked enthusiasm for the wonders of 
 the understanding, that this other faculty (con- 
 science), though infinitely more sublime and more 
 capable of exalting and ennobling the soul, never 
 counts for anything.’’ Kant, in a well-known 
 passage, relates that it was Rousseau’s protest that 
 
ROUSSEAU. 27, 
 
 opened his eyes. He had thought until then, as 
 did all men of his time, that the differences between 
 men were chiefly due to their degree of intellectual 
 culture. Rousseau taught him a better opinion. 
 Any man whose conscience speaks within him is 
 worth as much as any other, and the best man— 
 that is, the one who is most worthy of admiration 
 and respect—is the one who best knows how to 
 obey this inner voice. 
 
 But Kant recognizes in man a natural principle 
 of wickedness, which he calls radical evil, and 
 which is very much like original sin; whereas Rous- 
 seau, on the contrary, takes it for granted that man 
 is naturally good. According to him this is an 
 indisputable maxim, and the fundamental principle 
 of all morals. But we must understand just what 
 it means. Rousseau does not mean to say that 
 man is born with a natural tendency to merciful, 
 generous and charitable deeds, and an instinctive 
 dislike of all the opposite ones. Nothing could be 
 more contrary to the general principles of his phi- 
 losophy; for the moral teaching founded on innate 
 benevolence and sympathy, then widely current in 
 England, supposes man to bea naturally sociable 
 being, whereas Rousseau thinks man intended by 
 nature to live alone; it measures the moral worth 
 of actions by their social value, whereas Rousseau 
 places it entirely in the intention. 
 
 When, therefore, Rousseau says that man is 
 naturally good, this formula has two distinct mean- 
 ings according as we consider man in a state of 
 
258 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 nature or man in’a state of society. In the state 
 of nature man’s only passion is the love of his own 
 person; it is useful for the preservation of the 
 individual, but is itself indifferent both to good and 
 to evil. Suppose—and the supposition is by no 
 means absurd—suppose that man had never 
 emerged from this condition; he would never have 
 had any other relation with his fellow creatures than 
 those that are needful for the preservation of the 
 species; he would have lived a solitary life, being 
 all in all to himself; he would have been guiltless. 
 Therefore there is no original perversity in the human 
 heart; nor does it now contain a single vice for whose 
 presence there we cannot account. It is therefore 
 true that man in a state of nature is not wicked. 
 
 But in a state of society reason and language 
 are developed, and men become virtuous and 
 vicious. How is moral conscience, this infallible 
 inward guide, to emerge from the state of xon-wick- 
 edness which is characteristic of the original man? 
 Rousseau’s solution of this difficulty is as follows: 
 The love of his own person (the only passion of | 
 man in a state of nature) is not a simple passion. 
 It is twofold, like man himself, who is composed of 
 a soul and a body. Tending to the welfare of the 
 body, it is the love of his own person, the appetite 
 of the senses; tending to the welfare of the soul, it 
 is the love of order. The latter, developed and 
 made active, bears the name of conscience. In 
 man in a state of nature—that is to say, solitary— 
 this love of order, still aimless, is not more visible 
 
ROUSSEAU. 259 
 
 than is the stem of the future plant in the seed. 
 Conscience is developed and becomes active only as 
 man attains knowledge. It is non-existent in a 
 man who has never compared objects nor become 
 aware of his relations. But when men begin to 
 look upon their fellows, they begin to conceive 
 ideas of order, fitness and justice; then conscience 
 acts. So long as there is less opposition of inter- 
 - ests than mutuality of help, men are essentially 
 good. This is why Rousseau has so much regard 
 forsavages. The moral consciousness, still dormant 
 in man in the state of nature, isawake in them, and 
 they are not yet corrupted as civilized manis. But 
 society, as it develops, multiplies the causes of con- 
 flict between contrary interests, and natural good- 
 ness—i. e., love of order—is thrust aside by the 
 perverse suggestions of egotism. 
 
 Thus, according to Rousseau, man’s original 
 goodness is identified with the rational revelation 
 of order and justice. It is therefore closely allied 
 to the revelation of God, since God is the very 
 principle of order. Man is capable of morality in 
 the same manner as he is capable of religion. 
 Society and intercourse between men bring the 
 moral conscience to light, but do not produce it. 
 Ideas of order and justice are therefore so far from 
 arising out of the development of social life that 
 society itself cannot be right and respectable unless 
 ideas of order and justice preside over its organiza- 
 tion. Political principles will follow naturally from 
 moral principles. 
 
260 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 In a state of nature each individual is in himself 
 a perfect and solitary whole. The social state 
 makes him part of a larger whole, from which he 
 will, as it. were, receive life and being. Man 
 becomes a‘‘fractionary unit,’’ whose value resides in 
 its relation to the whole, which is the social body. 
 A+‘ partial\ and moral \ existence -succeedsmrne 
 ‘‘physical and independent’’ existence that we 
 receive from nature. Thus good social institu- 
 tions are those which are best able to change the 
 nature of man—that is, to make the community 
 his only real self, so that each individual no longer 
 believes himself to be a unit, but a part of the 
 single whole. 
 
 Our modern societies are very remote from such 
 an ideal. Each man there pursues his own private 
 interest at the expense of the interests of others, and 
 zeal for the public good is assumed merely in order 
 to make sure of personal advantages. There is no 
 more patriotism, there are no more citizens. But 
 things have not always been thus. When we read 
 ancient history, we seem to be carried away into 
 another universe and among other beings. The 
 strong souls of the Romans and Greeks seem to be 
 historical exaggerations. Yet they really existed, 
 and they were men like ourselves. What, then, 
 prevents us from being like them? Our prejudices, 
 our base philosophy, our selfish passions. And 
 above all, modern societies have had no ‘‘legislat- 
 ors.’ Tradition takes the place of reason, and 
 acquired rights that of justice. 
 
ROUSSEAU. 261 
 
 Let us leave history out of consideration, and 
 consider society in its essence. It is based on an 
 initial pact, agreed to by all, the sole aim of which 
 is to make lawful, by means of organization, the 
 relations between men; not in order to destroy 
 natural equality, but on the contrary to substitute 
 moral and lawful equality for whatever physical 
 inequality nature may have put between them; so 
 that, although they may be unequal in strength or 
 genius, they all become equal by agreement and in 
 point of rights. To carry out this compact a form 
 of association must be found that will defend and 
 protect, with the united strength of all, the person 
 and possessions of each associate, and in which 
 every man, uniting with the others, yet obeys no 
 one but himself and remains as free as he was 
 beipve wwe) he.) clauses ommnismecompact, vmay \ be 
 reduced to one: the total surrender of each associ- 
 ate, together with all his rights, to the whole com- 
 monwealth. Surrender here does not mean 
 subjection. On the contrary, this contract is a 
 safeguard for the individual. It is “‘an advan- 
 tageous exchange of natural independence for lib- 
 Cri 
 
 Whus: society is, coustitutedspyian act (ol tree 
 will; by such an act is it also maintained. Con- 
 straint here is legitimate only because it is consented 
 to even by him who endures it. All men are free, 
 all men are equal, in the sense of having an equal 
 share in the fundamental contract. And if from 
 society we pass on to the state, it follows from the 
 
262 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 principles laid down that the sovereign is the people 
 considered as a whole; for the source of political 
 power can evidently be found only in the same gen- 
 eral and free will which is the foundation of civil 
 society. 
 
 Two contrary tendencies here act upon Rous- 
 seau’s thought. One, inspired by the ancients, 
 makes the citizen subordinate to the city, the wel- 
 fare of which is the supreme aim; it finds expression 
 in Rousseau’s enthusiastic admiration for the 
 heroes of Plutarch and for the laws of Lacedemon. 
 The other, of Christian origin, recognizes in the 
 human person an absolute value, and, to use Kant’s 
 expression, will have man considered always as an 
 end and never asa means. To reconcile these two 
 tendencies is what Rousseau seeks in his idea of 
 law. Law is the most sublime of all human insti- 
 tutions. It is a means of binding men down in 
 order to make them free; it re-establishes on a foun- 
 dation of right the natural equality of men. It is 
 the expression of the will of the sovereign—that is, 
 of the people, when this will is universal both in its 
 source and in its object. If, in fact, only a part of 
 the people made the law, the other part, being 
 compelled to obey it, would not be free and the 
 social compact would be violated. If the sovereign 
 gives orders in view of an individual end, this is no 
 longer a law but a decree; it is not an act of sov- 
 ereignty but of magistracy. Only when the matter 
 decided upon is general, like the will that decides 
 upon it, is the act a law. The people which makes 
 
ROUSSEAU. 263 
 
 it so exercises its sovereignty, which is absolute, 
 unalienable, sacred and always rightful; for the gen- 
 eral will is the expression of the social compact 
 itself, which bases all civil intercourse between men 
 upon justice. 
 
 Perfection in a state would therefore consist in 
 finding a form of government that would place law 
 above men. This was what the ancient legislators 
 sought. If a people merely promises to obey a 
 family or a prince, it is dissolved by this very act 
 and ceases to be a people. From that moment 
 there is a master; there is no longer a legitimate 
 sovereion. i ),On ‘thet othenmhand a people’ is)'free 
 whatever its form of government, so long as the 
 governing man is looked upon not as a man but as 
 the instrument of the law. In one word, there is 
 no liberty without law, or where there is any one 
 who is above the laws. 
 
 We cannot here enter into the details of Rous- 
 seau’s political views or try to discover how far he 
 may have been influenced by reminiscences of the 
 constitution of Geneva. It is sufficient to observe 
 that the method followed in his politics is the same 
 that he used throughout his philosophy. He 
 purposely eliminates all that is acquired, in order to 
 determine what comes “‘from nature.’’ He there- 
 fore puts aside whatever institutions and constitu- 
 tions the course of historical events may have 
 brought. He supposes man just emerging from the 
 “state of nature’’ to live with his fellow-creatures, 
 and he asks himself of what sort the conventions 
 
264 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 agreed upon between them will have to be in order 
 to be acceptable and right. He shows that these 
 conventions are reducible to a social compact, 
 based upon the ‘‘general will,’° and having as its 
 expression the law. Subject to the law and to 
 that alone, men will enjoy all the advantages of the 
 social state without losing thereby either equality 
 or liberty; justice then would be respected. Ina 
 state where all men should respect the law, the 
 expression of their own will, and have nothing to 
 apprehend but from it, there would be neither mas-. 
 ters nor slaves, neither weak nor powerful; there 
 would be only citizens, equal before the law, equal 
 in fact, vying with one another in virtue and all 
 devoted to the public interest. 
 
 If we are far from this ideal the fault lies with 
 our customs, institutions, prejudices, and particu- 
 larly with the inequality of fortunes. The rich 
 derive infinitely more advantage from the social 
 organization than the poor and misuse it in many 
 ways. Their vices are the punishment for their 
 injustice and for the abject state in which they 
 keep those who have nothing. Thus does the 
 social order become more and more corrupt, and 
 man, the sport of his passions, spoiled by luxury or 
 degraded by penury, is as different from what he 
 would be in a properly-organized society as from 
 the inoffensive being he would be by nature. 
 
 We are thus brought back, after a long but 
 inevitable circuit, to the question proposed in the 
 
ROUSSEAU. 265 
 
 beginning. Knowing what was the state of nature 
 which man has left for ever, knowing what his pres- 
 ent social state is and what it ought to be, what 
 education ought man to receive? What is he to 
 be taught, and how? 
 
 As a principle, education should be national and 
 puplicny Uhere’: lies *theriessential cause); of ithe 
 ‘“superhuman grandeur’’ of Sparta. There are 
 opened the ways unknown to the moderns, by 
 which the ancients brought men to such fortitude 
 and patriotic zeal as are unexampled among our- 
 selves, but the germs of which are in the hearts of 
 allmen. To train citizens is not the work of a day, 
 and in order to have men good citizens they must 
 be taught when children and accustomed from their 
 earliest years to regard themselves only as members 
 of the state and to consider their own existence, 
 so to speak, as part of that of the state. Evidently 
 this can be obtained only by public education 
 entirely directed to this object. Public education 
 is, therefore, one of the fundamental maxims of 
 popular and right government. 
 
 But as nothing is more unlike Sparta than the 
 states of the eighteenth century, our ambition shall 
 not be to train citizens, and we shall turn from the 
 question of public control. We must limit our 
 task, which even then will be difficult enough, to 
 preventing the social man from being entirely arti- 
 ficial. ‘‘Conformity with nature’’ is the motto of 
 Rousseau’s pedagogy. In accordance with this 
 principle, he advises mothers to suckle their children 
 
266 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 themselves; in devotion to the same principle he 
 waits before speaking of religion to his pupil till 
 the latter is able to understand the twofold revela- 
 tion of conscience and of the universe. The good 
 teacher is he who assumes no other function than to 
 present matters in such a way that the lessons of 
 experience may be clear, striking and calculated to 
 produce a durable impression upon the child’s mind. 
 He leaves it to nature to educate by degrees the 
 child’s senses, understanding, and conscience; he 
 sometimes encourages nature, but never forestalls 
 her. Thus the child escapes the many prejudices 
 insidiously instilled into his mind by the customary 
 methods of education, which are afterwards so 
 difficult to eradicate. 
 
 Thus, Emile shall not be a man made by man; 
 he shall be one made by Nature. This does not 
 involve making him a savage, nor confining him inthe 
 depths of the forests; but though absorbed in the 
 vortex of society, we ask only that he be'not led 
 away by man’s passions or opinions, that he see 
 with his own eyes, feel with his own heart, be gov- 
 erned by no authority save his own reason. To be 
 one’s self: nothing is more rare, difficult and even 
 impossible, unless one has been prepared for it from 
 childhood. As soon as he is born, man is wrapped 
 in swaddling clothes; when dead, he is sewed up in 
 a shroud; all his life long he is pinioned by laws, 
 manners, and customs, decorum and professional 
 obligations. Nobody ever suffered more than did 
 Rousseau from social tyranny and hypocrisy; nor 
 
ROUSSEAU. 267 
 
 did any cry of revolt ever echo so far and so long 
 as the cry he uttered against them. 
 
 . Does this mean that he dreams of bringing man 
 back to his primitive state? Certainly not, for 
 there is a wide difference ‘‘between the natural man 
 living in a state of nature, and the natural man liv- 
 
 ing in a state of society.’’ The latter must adapt 
 himself to his situation. He is a ‘‘savage destined 
 for life in towns.’’ He must therefore receive a 
 
 systematic education and be instructed in all 
 accomplishments. Mingling with other men, he 
 must learn to live not like them but with them. 
 Our race does not like to be half finished. In the 
 present state of things, a man left to himself among 
 other men would be the most distorted of all. 
 Whence it follows that in a well-regulated republic 
 the state owes to every man not only the possibility 
 of living by his own work, but also such education 
 as will make of him a free man and a good citizen. 
 
 No philosopher, and more broadly speaking, no 
 writer for a century past has had an influence com- 
 parable to that of Rousseau. But the very strength 
 and durability of this influence, which is still deeply 
 felt in our times, has often prevented him from 
 being studied and judged with impartiality. He 
 has enthusiastic admirers and intense opponents, 
 and both sides have maintained legends often very 
 far from true. Thus many people still believe that 
 to Rousseau must in an especial manner be 
 ascribed the responsibility for the excesses committed 
 
268 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 during the Revolution, and that the worst terrorists 
 were inspired chiefly by his doctrines. But the 
 responsibility of Rousseau in this connection is 
 neither greater nor less than that of other philos- 
 ophers of the eighteenth century, and he even con- 
 tributed, as Auguste Comte clearly perceived, to 
 bring on the religious reaction which combated 
 these very philosophers. The error may have arisen 
 from the fact that other French philosophers from 
 motives of policy met the temporal power with 
 deference and with flattery, whereas Rousseau, 
 being a Genevese citizen, boasted of his republican 
 feelings. But for all that he is not a revolutionary 
 Spirit On the: contrary, ney counscled@ puntics) 
 moderation and prudence. Even the unhappy 
 Poles, who were on the point of perishing, he 
 exhorted not to lay their hands rashly upon their 
 national constitution, and he predicts most profound 
 misfortunes for the French if they try to change the 
 institutions under which they have lived for so 
 many centuries. Though the inequalities of for- 
 tune are monstrous, though “‘the demon of prop- 
 erty pollutes whatever it touches,’’ yet Rousseau 
 does not mean to lay hands on vested rights, and it 
 is in the future only that he perceives means of 
 opposing the ever-increasing social inequality. 
 
 But having said this much, we must acknowl- 
 edge that Rousseau’s philosophy was big with con- 
 sequences. The opposition between what is natural 
 and what is artificial, which is its leading idea, was 
 apt to lead minds in love with logic and justice a 
 
ROUSSEAU. 269 
 
 very great way, if applied to every aspect of human 
 life. This opposition was, of course, not discov- 
 ered by Rousseau. It had been known ever since 
 there had been moralists; and especially since the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century the ‘‘good 
 savage’ and ‘‘nature’’ had been quite in fashion. 
 Rousseau’s achievement lies in making of this 
 
 opposition the principle of a whole moral and social 
 doctrine, and of finding therein a means of distin- 
 guishing between what is and what ought to be, by 
 declaring nature to be good, and evil to have 
 sprung from human conventions. Therefore, if the 
 evils under which we labor are of social origin, the 
 finding of remedies depends upon us. For this it 
 is sufficient to ‘‘see with our eyes, to feel with our 
 hearts, and to judge with our reason;’’ to free our- 
 selves from traditional preconceptions and preju- 
 dices. We shall then plan for man, not a chimerical 
 return to an impracticable state of nature, but a 
 social organization more in conformity with order 
 and justice. 
 
 The very foundation principles of the present 
 state of society are thus called into question. The 
 lawfulness of individual property, the excessive 
 inequality of fortunes, the sovereignty of the peo- 
 ple, the reciprocal rights and duties of the individ- 
 ual and the state, the relation between the church 
 and political powers, are so many problems pro- 
 posed by Rousseau in such a way that it became 
 thenceforth impossible not to take an interest in 
 them. He thought the solutions more simple and 
 
270 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ‘ 
 
 easy than they really are: witness the ‘‘civil reli- 
 gion’’ he wished to establish in the name of the 
 state, which was often so entirely misunderstood. 
 But the thought that led him to ask these questions 
 was after all just, and many of his ideas were orig- 
 inal and suggestive. In spite of his connection 
 with the ‘‘philosophers,’’ he really follows none of 
 them. How many others, friends and adversaries, 
 have followed him! 
 
CHUN PREG x 
 
 CONDILLAC. 
 
 IN order to characterise Voltaire, Rousseau, and the 
 - Encyclopedists from the point of view of philos- 
 ophy, the Germans often use a rather significant 
 phrase. They call them philosophers fur die Welt, 
 popularisers. They consider them quite as desirous 
 of spreading their doctrines among the public as of 
 testing them thoroughly. But was there not one 
 among them, or very near them, with whom the 
 speculative interest stood foremost, a philosopher 
 without any qualification and in the strictest sense 
 of the word, a thinker, in fact, who joined together 
 into a system the body of the philosophical ideas 
 which prevailed in the latter half of the eighteenth 
 century? 
 
 This demand was met by Abbé de Condillac. He 
 was, as he has been called, the ‘‘ philosophers’ phi- 
 losopher.’’ Being loved and admired by most of 
 them, he was for some time a contributor to the 
 Lincyclopedia. He made a long stay in Italy, as 
 tutor to the son of the Duke of Parma, and then 
 fetuined to) Mrance vandilived’ peacetully ini ithe 
 country, apart from literary and philosophical quar- 
 rels. He never appeared in the French Academy 
 except on the day when he made his inaugural 
 
 271 
 
272 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 address. Yet he was personally acquainted with 
 nearly all the distinguished men of the time, and 
 the continual succession of his published works did 
 not permit the public to forget him. These works 
 were numerous and bulky, from the Essaz sur 
 l’ Origine des Connatssances Humatines (1746), in 
 which many of the ideas which he was to develop 
 later on were already sketched, down to the Langue 
 des Calculs, which did not appear until after his 
 death. He touched not only upon every phase of 
 philosophy proper, but also upon pedagogy, gram- 
 mar, history, political economy, and social science, 
 the most original portion of all this considerable 
 body of work being that on the theory of knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 Condillac proposed studying the human mind, 
 not as a metaphysician, but as a psychologist and a 
 logician; not in order to discover the nature of it, 
 but to understand its operations. He wished to 
 observe the art with which they are combined, and 
 how we are to manage them in order to acquire as 
 much intelligence as we are capable of receiving; 
 and, therefore, he wished to trace back the origin 
 of our ideas, to discover their birth, to follow them 
 as far as the limits set them by nature, and in this 
 way to “‘determine the extent and boundaries of 
 our knowledge and to renovate the human under- 
 standing altogether.’’ 
 
 Condillac’s leading idea therefore is derived from 
 Locke, but not from Locke only. Hostile as he 
 was to innate ideas and Cartesian metaphysics, 
 
CONDILLAC. Due 
 
 there is in him clearly something of the Cartesian 
 spirit. Locke had inquired chiefly into the contents 
 of the human mind; Condillac endeavored to con- 
 struct a system. He sought an ‘‘unassailable first 
 Principle; suficientuto) éexplaingalletherrest! (1 He 
 sought it, it is true, in the primitive data of the 
 senses, whereas Descartes had found it in the intu- 
 
 ition of thought; but the opposition between their 
 - doctrines does not exclude a certain analogy in their 
 conceptions of the proper method. 
 
 Condillac never concealed his indebtedness to 
 Locke, but his estimate of the philosophy of his 
 predecessor varied. In his first work he seems to 
 follow him faithfully and to recognise, as Locke 
 did, two sources to our ideas: sensation and reflex- 
 ion. Later on, when more thoroughly master of 
 his own thought, he asserted sensation to be the 
 only source of our ideas. He considers Locke to 
 have erred in not carrying the analysis far enough. 
 Locke did not realise how indispensable it is that 
 we should learn how to feel, see, hear, etc. All the 
 faculties of the soul he thought to be innate qual- 
 ities, and he did not suspect that they might pos- 
 sibly originate in sensation itself. He thought that 
 we naturally make use of our senses by a sort of 
 instinct. Most of the judgments which are min- 
 gled with our sensations escaped him. In one 
 word, it was in the very name of empiricism that 
 Condillac criticised Locke’s empiricism. It is not 
 sufficient to reduce the whole of our knowledge to 
 sentient knowledge. We must find out how this 
 
274 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 sentient knowledge is produced, resolve it into its 
 elements, and show how these elements can account 
 for every form of activity in the human soul. 
 
 Let then our starting point be sensation, isolated 
 by analysis and separated—or at least Condillac 
 thought it so—from all judgments mingled with it. 
 This sensation does not bring us out of ourselves. 
 It merely consists in a modification of conscious- 
 ness which may be keen or weak, pleasurable or 
 painful; but it teaches us nothing of what is out- 
 side ourselves, or even whether anything exists 
 outside ourselves. This would be true as regards 
 all our sensations, if we had not touch. The sen- 
 sations of touch have the singular property of sug- 
 gesting to us the idea of objects distinct from 
 ourselves. They are at the same time feelings and 
 ideas: feelings in their relation to the soul which 
 they modify, ideas in their connexion with some 
 outward thing. Being accustomed to ascribe all 
 the sensations of the sense of touch to external 
 objects, we fall into like habits with our other 
 senses. Thus our sensations become objective; 
 they appear to us no longer as modifications of the 
 state of the ego, but as qualities of bodies around 
 us. They have become ideas. 
 
 Let us now suppose a sensation more vivid than 
 others to force itself upon our consciousness so 
 powerfully as to throw all others, at least tempo- 
 rarily, into the shade: this exclusive sensation will 
 be what we call attention. But attention may just 
 as well be directed to a past sensation, which recurs 
 
CONDILLAC. 27% 
 
 again to the mind, astoa present sensation. Mem- 
 ory is therefore nothing but a transformed sen- 
 sation. We are thus capable of a twofold kind of 
 attention, exercised on the one hand by memory, 
 on the other by thé! present sensation.: Once 
 given a twofold kind of attention, and there results 
 comparison; for, attending to two ideas and com- 
 
 paring them are one and the same thing. Now, 
 "we cannot compare them without perceiving some 
 difference or resemblance between them. To 
 perceive such relations is to perform an act of judg- 
 ment. Thus does sensation, as it undergoes trans- 
 formations, become successively attention, memory, 
 comparison, and judgment. Having reached this 
 point we have explained the whole human under- 
 tanding, which is, in fact, nothing but a collection 
 or combination of the operations of the soul. 
 
 By looking upon sensations as representative we 
 have observed that all our ideas and the faculties of 
 our understanding issue from them. Now if we 
 consider them with regard to their pleasurable or 
 painful character, we shall behold the birth of all 
 the operations usually ascribed to the will. Con- 
 dillac lays it down asa principle that there are no 
 neutral sensations, but that each of them gives us 
 either pleasure or pain, and makes us inclined to 
 continue it) or) to ’escapepituay Wereait not iforthis 
 property of our sensations, intellectual activity 
 would not be aroused,—attention and memory, and 
 therefore understanding, would be left undeveloped. 
 But nature has made us very sensible of the rela- 
 
276 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tive character of the sensations that affect us. We 
 cannot be uncomfortable, or less comfortable than 
 we have been before, without comparing our pres- 
 ent state with the states we have formerly been in; 
 and this comparison makes us feel some uneasiness, 
 or disquiet, and as soon as there is added to this 
 the idea of the object we think likely to contribute 
 to our happiness, the action of our faculties is 
 determined in the direction of this object. This is 
 what we call desire. But from desire spring pas- 
 sions: love, hatred, hope, fear, volition. Again, 
 all these are but transformed sensations. 
 
 In order to illustrate his theory, Condillac, in 
 his 7razté des Sensations, had recourse to the cele- 
 brated fiction of an animated statue, shaped inter- 
 nally like ourselves, in which he awakens the senses 
 in succession, beginning with smell and ending with 
 touchsij Next ,we ‘seesthe ifaoultissiot the msout 
 springing one after another from the progressive 
 transformations of sensation. Similar fictions are 
 to be found in Diderot and Buffon, which is suffi- 
 cient to prove that they suited the taste of their 
 contemporaries and answered their idea of the 
 development of the mind. To-day, on the con- 
 trary, we are chiefly struck by the artificial and 
 arbitrary character of such a supposition. We see 
 in it an involuntary confession of the fact that this 
 theory of knowledge proceeds in a purely abstract 
 Way. 
 
 Yet it would be unfair to condemn their doctrine 
 summarily on that account. It is with Condillac, 
 
CONDILLAC. 279 
 
 as with many other French philosophers of his 
 time, between whose minds and his there was evi- 
 dent affinity. The solutions he unhesitatingly pro- 
 poses are hasty and often rash; the problems he 
 sets and the general method he indicates for their 
 solution are highly interesting. In his theory of 
 transformed sensation, Condillac seeks to account 
 for the evolution of the human mind by starting 
 microm atirreducible / first factiiy As Buflon\ tried to 
 explain the genesis of our solar system, as Rousseau 
 sought afterwards to explain the genesis of society, 
 Condillac endeavors to trace back the genesis of the 
 ifcuiticsw ot the, human wiminesnon 'thecway. he 
 notices many interesting psychological facts. He 
 shows the part played by the association of ideas, 
 which causes us to look upon notions that are really 
 acquired and complex as being natural and simple; 
 he sees that the association of ideas is a particular 
 case of habit. And thus the task of the philoso- 
 pher, according to Condillac, consists chiefly in 
 dissociating, by means of analysis, the elements 
 which habit has joined together so closely that we 
 can no longer see where they are welded. 
 
 Analysis, therefore, does not stop where reflexion 
 and memory can separate or resolve no further. 
 It is true we have a tendency to believe that part 
 of our knowledge is born with us. But this is be- 
 cause we can remember a time when we did not 
 know a given thing only in case we can remember 
 having learned it; and in order to be conscious of 
 learning we must know something already. How 
 
278 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 then could we remember having learned to see, 
 hear, or touch? And yet it is certain that we have 
 learned these things. Consequently, we are driven 
 to suppose only that to be innate the acquisition of 
 which we cannot otherwise account for. All the 
 rest is the product of experience. For instance, if 
 some faculty happens to be perfected (as the judg- 
 ment of distance by sight), it is therefore acquired; 
 it was in its beginning, at a time beyond the reach 
 of our memory, a first improvement upon some 
 earlier state. Thus Condillac applied to psychology 
 Pascal’s well-known saying: ‘‘Nature itself is only 
 a first habit, as habit is a second nature. 
 
 From these principles naturally follows the the- 
 ory of instinct. We can distinguish two “‘selves’’ in 
 every man: the self of habit and the self of reflex- 
 ion. ‘‘The self of reflexion is its own master, and 
 
 249 
 
 is conscious of its own operations while performing 
 them. It endeavors to know or reach the objects 
 which it has in view, and which it may give up for 
 other objects when it pleases. The ‘‘self of habit’’ 
 acts in a reflex way, so to speak, without the inter- 
 vention of consciousness being needed. It touches, 
 it sees, and it directs the animal faculties; it guides 
 and preserves the body. If we suppress in a 
 grown-up man the “‘self of reflexion,’’ the ‘‘self of 
 habit’’ which remains suffices for such needs as are 
 absolutely necessary for the preservation of the 
 animal. Instinct is nothing but habit szzus reflex- 
 ion. But, Condillac adds immediately after, it is 
 by reflecting that beasts acquire it. As they have 
 
CONDILLAC. 279 
 
 but few wants, a time soon comes when they have 
 done all that reflexion can teach them. They 
 daily repeat the same actions, and their habits 
 become automatic. 
 
 Yet does not instinct often appear to be innate 
 and hereditary?—It does, says Condillac, but it is 
 not so; for we find it subject to improvement; now, 
 whatever is subject to improvement is acquired. 
 All these consequences are most logically inferred 
 from Condillac’s own principles. Therefore he had 
 a right to answer those who reproached him with 
 having drawn his inspiration from the celebrated 
 passage in which Buffon represents man awakening 
 to life and admiring nature around him: ‘‘ Monsieur 
 de Buffon supposes his imaginary man to possess in 
 the beginning habits which he ought to have had 
 him acquire.’’ To treat as acquired habits faculties 
 which appear to be most inherent in our nature, is 
 Condillac’s favorite maxim. We all know how it 
 prospered in the present century. It was one of 
 the ruling principles of psychology, as long as the 
 philosophy of association was in favor, in England 
 as well as in France. 
 
 The sum of our reflexions over and above our 
 habits constitutes our reason. But language is 
 necessary for the development of reason. Were 
 our thought limited to the representation of indi- 
 vidual and concrete objects and unable to form 
 abstract and general ideas, it would remain forever 
 in arudimentary state. Now such ideas are simply 
 denominations and designations of classes. For 
 
280 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 instance, the idea of ‘‘animal’’ connotes character- 
 istics common to man, the lion, the horse, and the 
 totality of animals, and these characteristics only. 
 This idea I can fix only with the help of the word 
 which expresses it. We see therefore how indis- 
 pensable words: are: tow us DUP Morothem, athere 
 would be no abstract ideas. Had we no abstract 
 ideas, we should have neither genera nor species, 
 and had we neither genera nor species, we could not 
 reason upon anything. To speak, to reason, to 
 form general or abstract ideas, are at bottom one 
 and the same thing. 
 
 Therefore, to communicate thought is not the 
 only function of language. Whenever man thinks, 
 even though he should not express his thought out- 
 wardly, he speaks. This has been called “‘inward 
 language.’’ The ‘‘first advantage’ of language, 
 according to Condillac, is to separate thought into 
 its elements by means of a series of signs which 
 
 Lye) 
 
 successively represent the same. Whenever I 
 reason, all the ideas which constitute this reasoning 
 are present in my mind at once. I should not be 
 able either to enter upon the reasoning or to bring 
 it to a close if the series of judgments of which it is 
 composed were not grasped all together by my 
 mind. It is not, therefore, by speaking that I 
 judge and reason, and these operations of the mind 
 necessarily precede discourse. But discourse is a 
 real analysis which resolves these complex opera- 
 tions and separates their successive stages. It leads 
 the mind from one thought to another, and from 
 
CONDILLAC. 281 
 
 one discovery to another. The more limited the 
 faculty of thinking is in one who does not analyse 
 his own thoughts, and who, in consequence, does 
 not observe all that he does while thinking, the fur- 
 ther this faculty must reach in one who does 
 analyse his thoughts and observes even their min- 
 utest details. 
 
 Consequently, ‘‘the art of reasoning is equiva- 
 ‘lent to the art of speaking.’’ In this sense well- 
 constructed Janguage is akin to well-constructed 
 science. Nearly all our errors originate in defects 
 or misuse of our language. If we treat abstrac- 
 tions as realities, that is, if we mistake for a thing 
 actually existing what is merely the designation of 
 an assemblage of qualities, is not that a misuse of 
 language? How often do we make use of words 
 before we have determined their meaning, and even 
 without having felt the need of determining it! 
 Such confusion in language necessarily implies con- 
 fusion in thought. Error thus begets error, and 
 language lends itself no less easily to false systems 
 than to true analysis. 
 
 There is then but one way of restoring order to 
 the faculty of thinking, and that is to forget all 
 that we have learned, to return to the origin of our 
 ideas, to follow them as they develop, and, as 
 Bacon says, to make over the human understand- 
 ing. ‘‘Go back to nature,’’ is Condillac’s motto, 
 as it was also to be that of Rousseau. Error is our 
 own doing. We think and speak erroneously, and 
 therefore we blunder; but we have only ourselves 
 
282 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 to blame. The spirit of the rising generation is 
 modelled after that of the preceding one, and erro- 
 neous systems are handed down together with the 
 languages which are their vehicles. Such are the 
 effects of bad education, and education is bad only 
 inasmuch as it is contrary to nature. ‘‘ Nature has 
 begun all things, and always aright: this truth can- 
 not be repeated too often.’’ 
 
 We imagine that languages would be more per- 
 fect if they were the work of philosophers, which is 
 a serious mistake. The languages of the sciences 
 (algebra excepted) have no advantage over other 
 languages. According to Condillac, the earliest 
 vulgar languages must have been the best fitted for 
 reasoning. The development of the ideas and 
 faculties of the soul must have been perceptible in 
 these languages, in which the first acceptation of 
 each word was still known, and in which analogy 
 supplied all the others. They were transparent 
 things, so to speak, through which one could watch 
 the progress of the composition of thought. Their 
 syntax was crystallised logic, and the science of the 
 mind thus spontaneously revealed itself in the 
 structure of language. ‘‘Sound metaphysics began 
 before languages, and they owe to it their best qual- 
 ities. But this metaphysics. was then not so much 
 a science as an instinct. It was nature guiding 
 men without their knowing it, and metaphysics 
 became a science only after it had ceased to be 
 sound.,’’ 
 
CONDILLAC. 283 
 
 There is therefore, according to Condillac, a 
 natural method which is the soul of language and 
 science. If we followed it properly, it would lead 
 us infallibly to truth. This method he calls ‘‘an- 
 "> In his first work, he contented himself 
 with saying that analysis consists merely in combin- 
 ing and separating our ideas in order to make differ- 
 ent comparisons, and thus to discover their mutual 
 ‘relation and the new ideas to which they may give 
 rise. This analysis is ‘‘the secret of discoveries,’ 
 because it always takes us back to the origin of 
 things. ‘‘It consists,’’ he says again, ‘‘in tracing 
 our ideas back to their origin, and in studying their 
 development.’’ 
 
 We see even by these definitions that in Con- 
 dillac’s thought analysis is not opposed to synthesis 
 
 alysis. 
 
 as decomposition is to composition. It compre- 
 hends both processes; there is no reasoning which 
 is not a succession of compositions and decomposi- 
 tions, and the two operations are inseparable. Yet 
 the distinction between analysis and synthesis sub- 
 sists in Condillac, but in a special sense. To pro- 
 ceed analytically, in his view, is to start from the 
 simple, the primitive, and the particular, proceed- 
 ing with the help of observation and experience, 
 and reproducing the ‘‘development’’ of things. To 
 proceed synthetically is to start from general and 
 abstract principles, aiming thence to deduce the 
 particular and the concrete—an ambitious and faulty 
 method which has too often led metaphysicians 
 astray. 
 
284 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 If our minds were powerful enough to perceive 
 distinctly, at one glance, a collection of objects or 
 all the qualities of an object and the connexions 
 between these, we should have no need of analysis. 
 Our knowledge would be intuitive and perfect from 
 the first. But it is not so; we first have collective 
 impressions, and in order to transform these into 
 knowledge we must decompose them. We there- 
 fore consider one after another the objects which 
 form part of a whole, and compare them in order 
 to judge of their mutual connexion. When we 
 have thus become acquainted with their respective 
 positions, we observe in succession all those that fill 
 the intervals; we compare each of them with the 
 nearest principal object, and thus we determine its 
 position. In this way we make out all the objects, | 
 the form and situation of which we have discovered, 
 and take them all in at one glance. The order 
 assigned to them in our mind is no longer succes- 
 sive, it has become simultaneous. It is the order 
 in which the objects really are situated, and we 
 perceive them all at once distinctly; whence this 
 specific definition of analysis: “‘To analyse is simply 
 to observe in successive order the qualities of an 
 object, in order to assign to them in the mind ¢he 
 simultaneous order in which they exist.’’ 
 
 But there are many ways of conceiving this suc- 
 cessive order that leads to a view, both simultane- 
 ous and distinct, of the relations between objects; 
 can it be said that any one of these many is the 
 pre-eminently analytical order? ‘‘The whole diffi- 
 
CONDILLAC. 285 
 
 culty,’’ says Condillac, ‘‘consists in finding how to 
 begin in order to apprehend ideas in their most 
 essential connexion with one another. I assert that 
 the only combination by which this is to be found 
 is the one which is in accordance with the very 
 genesis of things. We must start from the first 
 idea which must have produced all others.’’ The 
 analytical order is the genetic order. If we knew 
 a sufficient number of facts, and had studied them 
 closely enough, systems would in some sort be 
 self-made, as facts would group themselves of their 
 own accord in such an order as to explain one 
 another in succession. We should then find that in 
 every system there is a first fact, which is the begin- 
 ning of it, and which for this reason might be called 
 the principle, for principle and beginning are two 
 words which have originally the same meaning. 
 Any system which does not thus exactly reproduce 
 the order of the evolution and composition of facts, 
 any system resting on general and abstract princi- 
 ples is arbitrary, and consequently false. The 
 logical order of science coincides with the order in 
 which phenomena are produced in the course of 
 time. In one word, in this empirical conception 
 of analysis the mind is methodically made subor- 
 dinatesto thines.. Vitm@isminethineswthat orders 
 inherent, and the function of the mind consists in 
 reflecting back this order as faithfully as possible, 
 and in being, to use Bacon’s expression, a perfect 
 mirror. 
 
 The stumbling-block to empiricism of this kind 
 
286 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 is generally to be found in mathematics and meta- 
 physics. As regards mathematics, Condillac got 
 out of the difficulty by reducing every demonstra- 
 tion to a succession of equivalent propositions ‘‘the 
 identity of which is obvious, 
 perceived when we use algebraical signs. Nor was 
 metaphysics embarrassing to Condillac, no doubt 
 because he took but little care to make it fit in with 
 the rest of his system. He proves dogmatically 
 the existence of God from the necessity of a first 
 cause and from the existence of final causes. We 
 again meet in him the argument of the watch and 
 the watchmaker, which Voltaire thought decisive. 
 Without knowing the essence of the soul and of the 
 body, Condillac knows that they are two distinct 
 substances. ‘“‘The body may be defined as an. 
 extended substance, and the soul as a sentient sub- 
 stance. It is sufficient to consider extension and 
 
 >” 
 
 and is more easily 
 
 sensation as two incompatible properties, to be con- 
 vinced that the substance of the soul and that of 
 the body are two widely different substances, 
 Locke was wrong in declaring that it will perhaps 
 be forever impossible for us to know whether God 
 has not endowed some heap of matter shaped ina 
 certain way with the faculty of thinking. For the 
 subject that thinks must be one. Nowa heap of 
 matter is not one; it isa multitude. The soul thus 
 being a different substance from the body, we can- 
 not understand how the latter would act upon it. 
 The body can be only an occasional cause. We 
 must therefore acknowledge that the senses are but 
 
CONDILLAC. 287 
 
 the occasional source of our knowledge. Free 
 access is thus left for idealism. 
 
 There’ is no reason why we should question Con- 
 dillac’s sincerity as regards his spiritualistic meta- 
 physics; but the very fact of its occupying so small 
 a place in his system, and being so loosely con- 
 nected with it, is characteristic. It means that 
 psychology was beginning to live an independent 
 life and trying to rely solely on observation and 
 experience. Locke had shown the way; Condil- 
 lac advanced farther. True, his solutions are still 
 far from perfect. He gives bad definitions of the 
 terms he uses, and commentators in our days are 
 not of one mind as to what he understands by 
 Peacdy Acre. NO 
 doubt, when he tries to analyse facts, to discover 
 
 mocisation.. «perceptions: 
 
 their origin, and to trace back their genesis, he 
 most often construes them with the aid of factors 
 in themselves very complex. Nevertheless he has 
 a precise conception of empirical psychology, and 
 attempts to study the especial share of each of the 
 senses in our knowledge, to analyse habit and 
 instinct, to define the function of the association 
 of ideas, and, in short, to discover the genesis of 
 psychological phenomena. All these points were 
 to be taken up again later on, in accordance with a 
 more prudent and safer method. But at last the 
 questions had been raised, and often with remark- 
 able clearness and pertinency, so that the influence 
 of Condillac upon French thought was long-lived 
 and persistent. To-day it would not be impossible 
 to find traces of it in what is taught in our schools. 
 
CEU Gal Ea ee 
 
 CONDORCET. 
 
 TOWARDS the end of the eighteenth century the 
 rapid progress of the sciences presaged a general 
 revolution of opinions. Not only had mathematics 
 gained by the impulsion given in the early years of 
 the century, but also physics, chemistry, and above 
 all, the natural or biological sciences, had devel- 
 opedy wondertully... (Not stommentionmines breton 
 mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, and physi- 
 ologists who rivalled Bradley, Bernoulli, Euler, 
 Haller, and Franklin, natural history was revived 
 by Buffon and Jussieu, who extended it beyond the 
 narrow sphere within which specialists had hitherto 
 confined it. By laying before the public the great 
 questions on natural history they became valuable 
 auxiliaries to the “‘philosophers,’’ even when refus- 
 ing to be considered as allies. 
 
 This is particularly true of Buffon, who was led 
 by the plan of his great work to treat of ‘‘the gen- 
 eral theory of the globe we live on, the distribu- 
 tion, nature, and formation of the substances it pre- 
 sents to our view, the great phenomena which 
 occur on its surface or within its bosom; the his- 
 tory of man and the laws which preside over his 
 development, life, and destruction. 
 
 288 
 
 9? 
 
CONDORCET. 289 
 
 Among these problems, which Buffon looked upon 
 as unquestionably belonging to natural history, 
 there are a good many which only a century earlier 
 belonged to theology. The change wrought in 
 men’s minds was therefore nothing else than a revo- 
 lution. Theology was henceforward confined within 
 its own domain; even metaphysics was no longer in 
 good standing, and little was accepted under that 
 name beyond psychological and moral researches, 
 or at the utmost a remnant of speculation on the 
 existence of God and the nature of the soul. Every- 
 where else the scientific spirit asserted its supremacy. 
 Constant use was made of positive methods, mathe- 
 matical formule and analysis, whenever the phe- 
 nomena admitted of them; and the experimental 
 processes applied to the study of the genesis and 
 formation of animate and inanimate things. To 
 analyse, to trace things back to their origins, was 
 the very spirit of the age which after having strug- 
 eled in the first half of the century had become vic- 
 torious in the latter half. 
 
 We find a rather striking picture of this great 
 movement in the E/oges, written by Condorcet for 
 them vcademy of) ocienceswaltenmnys2)),Condorcet 
 was a true son of the age, and a grateful son. An 
 enthusiastic admirer of Voltaire, a friend of Turgot 
 and D’Alembert, imbued with the ideas of Condil- 
 lac, of the Encyclopedists, and even, on some — 
 points, of Rousseau, perpetual secretary of the 
 Academy, of , Sciences.) andwuintroduced into, ithe 
 French Academy with the help of the ‘‘philos- 
 
290 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ophers,’’ Condorcet showed even in what he wrote 
 before the Revolution what he was to be when 
 fully developed in his last and most important 
 work, the Esguisse dun Tableau des Progrés de 
 LEsprit Humain: a passionate upholder of the 
 philosophy of his time, convinced that under its 
 guidance humanity was on the way to happiness. 
 His faith was so immovable that, when outlawed 
 and threatened with death, his last words were to 
 be a rapturous hymn to progress as attained by 
 means of reason and science. Being an acute- 
 minded and remarkably well-informed man, he 
 combined with over-sanguine hopes and previsions 
 a clear and precise insight into the social evils of 
 his time and the means of remedying them. By 
 considering the body of his leading ideas we can- 
 draw up a summary balance-sheet, so to speak, of 
 the philosophy of the eighteenth century in France, 
 on the eve of the day when the Revolution was to 
 put it to the severe test of facts. 
 
 According to Condorcet the proper object of 
 philosophy is man, and, secondarily, the totality of 
 the actual in proportion as it concerns man’s devel- 
 opment and happiness. Such aconception may be 
 narrow or it may be wide; narrow, if we purposely 
 exclude all researches in which we do not perceive 
 man’s immediate profit; wide, if on the contrary 
 we start from the principle that all things in the 
 universe are mutually dependent, and that con- 
 sequently the science of man is inseparable from 
 
CONDORCET. 291 
 
 the study of the totality of the actual. Condorcet 
 stood half-way between these two extremes. True, 
 he had but little inclination for metaphysics. 
 Although he would not regard as invariable the 
 limits assigned by Locke to the human mind, and 
 although he considered the questions of the sim- 
 plicity, the immortality, and the liberty of the 
 human soul, he did not deviate notably from his 
 contemporaries’ point of view. ‘‘True meta- 
 physics’’ is to him, as to them, only the application 
 of reasoning to the facts observed in reflecting upon 
 our sensations, our ideas, and our feelings. 
 
 But on the other hand, he has no narrowly util- 
 itarian conception of positive science. He under- 
 stands that to seek immediate utility would be to 
 destroy the deep source of it. The most useful 
 theories practically are composed of propositions 
 which were discovered by curiosity alone, and 
 which long remained useless, while no one dreamed 
 how they could one day cease to be so. The chain 
 of truths which spring from each other, and which 
 can be successively discovered only with the aid of 
 newly-discovered methods, bears no relation to the 
 series of truths which are also to become, one after 
 another, practically useful. A discovery is not 
 made because it is needed, but because it is linked 
 to other truths already known, and because we 
 become at last strong enough to overleap the space 
 between it and us. Let us then be wary lest under 
 pretence of reducing the sciences to their lowest 
 
292 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 terms we should countenance ignorance, the great- 
 est bane of mankind and the cause of nearly all 
 our misfortunes. 
 
 Conceived in this way, positive science (the 
 principles of which Condorcet has indeed no inten- 
 tion of examining) will supply a more or less rapid 
 but a certain solution of the main problems which 
 puzzle mankind. Man.jat) thes present. timevais 
 wicked and miserable. But his vices, as well as his 
 sufferings, proceed solely from ignorance and error, 
 both of which science will dissipate. The true use 
 of science, therefore, does not consist in its applica- 
 tion to the arts, or at least this is but a small part 
 of its utility. Its most important benefit is perhaps 
 that it has destroyed prejudices, and rectified, after 
 a fashion, our human intelligence. All political . 
 and moral errors originate in philosophical errors, 
 which in their turn are connected with physical 
 errors. There is not a religious system or a piece 
 of supernatural extravagance which does not rest 
 upon ignorance of natural laws. The progress of 
 physical knowledge is all the more fatal to such 
 errors because it often destroys them without even 
 seeming to attack them. 
 
 Thus do we owe to Greece an eternal debt of 
 gratitude. The philosophers of Athens, Miletus, 
 Syracuse, and Alexandria have made it possible for 
 the inhabitants of modern Europe to excel all 
 other men. Had Xerxes been victorious at Salamis, 
 we might still be barbarians. That battle is one of 
 those events, so rare in history, in which the for- 
 
CONDORCET. 203 
 
 tune of a single day determines for a long series of 
 centuries the destiny of mankind. Fortunately the 
 danger incurred in the fifth century B.C. no longer 
 threatens us. Barbarism over the entire globe is 
 no longer possible. Printing has forever saved 
 mankind from such adanger. We shall witness no 
 more “‘disastrous ’’ epochs, such as the Middle 
 _a\ges were. Science not only frees, but it guaran- 
 tees the man it has freed against any aggressive 
 return of ignorance and barbarism. 
 
 We are thus brought to the central idea of Con- 
 dorcet’s philosophy, which is the idea of progress 
 and of indefinite perfectibility. The expression of 
 this thought constantly recurs in his works, confi- 
 dent, eager, enthusiastic as a hallelujah. Every 
 century shall bring with it new discoveries and 
 new instruments for discovery; and even as Alad- 
 din’s lamp made better those who possessed it and 
 made agood use of it, the progress of science shall 
 be accompanied by the melioration of mankind. 
 ‘“My aim,’’ says Condorcet, in the beginning of 
 the Esguzsse, ‘‘is to show, by the aid both of rea- 
 soning and of facts, that no boundaries have been 
 set to the improvement of the human faculties; 
 that man’s perfectibility is really indefinite; and 
 that his progress, now independent of any opposing 
 power, has no limit not coincident with that of the 
 globe on which fate has cast him.’’ Even our 
 bodily organism will be perfected. With better 
 hygiene, more sanitary houses, a more thorough 
 
294 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 knowledge of the animal frame, the duration of life 
 may be increased. Death would be but the result 
 of extraordinary accidents, or of the ever later 
 destruction of the vital forces. 
 
 The idea thus coming to its full development in 
 Condorcet had its roots in the philosophy of the 
 whole century. Condorcet merely drew conclu- 
 sions from principles which had been universally 
 accepted. How often had it been said that every- 
 thing is acquired; that everything comes from 
 experience; that between the primitive man and 
 the man of the present day there is a wide distance, 
 and that this distance has been covered by man 
 with the help of his own sole powers! But if these 
 have been able to lead him up to the point where 
 he is now, how far may they not lead him in the > 
 future! What may not be expected from a rational 
 system of education? MHelvetius dreams that by this 
 means we may obtain ‘‘men of genius’’ at will. Con- 
 dorcet entertains the hope that all men will thus be 
 made wise and benevolent. All ‘‘philosophers’’ 
 agreed in saying that nature ““begins aright’’and that 
 if man “‘continues badly,’’ the fault is with him, and 
 not with her. It is for him, therefore, to amend him- 
 self, and to rid himself of his errors, prejudices and 
 vices. In one word, this philosophy reduced to 
 nothing the factor of innateness, instinct and 
 heredity in man. As a necessary consequence, it 
 expected everything from education instruction 
 and laws, and on his basis looked forward to unlim- 
 ited progress. 
 
CONDORCET. 295 
 
 It is true, we are wanting in information as to the 
 prehistoric life of mankind. We can only guess 
 the steps by which man, when isolated, or rather 
 limited to such association as was necessary for 
 reproduction, was able to make that primitive prog- 
 ress, the final term of which was articulate language. 
 It is only by examining man’s intellectual and moral 
 faculties and physical constitution, that-we can con- 
 jecture howhe rose to this first stage of civilisation. 
 At least the hypothesis thus formed is not contra- 
 dicted by facts. Moreover, according to Condorcet 
 man is naturally good. Though indifferent to good 
 and evil while pursuing his own interest, he has yet a 
 natural feeling of pity and benevolence, a necessary 
 consequence of his constitution, which inclines him 
 towards kindness and justice to his fellow-creatures. 
 This feeling always works in the same direction, 
 whereas self-interest counsels most various actions, 
 so that this feeling of good-will exercises in the end 
 a considerable influence upon the conduct of men, 
 thus contributing to the progress of civilisation. 
 
 Whence comes it, then, that there are still so 
 many wicked and miserable men? Condorcet does 
 not deny the fact, but would not have it exagger- 
 ated. Humanity has already advanced far beyond 
 the animal nature from which originally it could 
 scarcely be distinguished. If ignorance and errors 
 still occasion a great many evils, it is because noth- 
 ing is so difficult as to destroy deeply-rooted preju- 
 dices, of which mankind contracted in its childhood 
 a vast number, and also because there have long 
 
296 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 been classes of men whose interest was served by 
 maintaining these prejudices, especially priests, of 
 whom Condorcet speaks much as Voltaire and 
 D’Alembert did. But mankind will eventually be 
 cured; it cannot fail to be cured. Superstitions 
 and other errors will fade away before the light of 
 science. ‘“‘It would be necessary only to enlighten 
 people upon their real interests, and a very few 
 simple truths would suffice to establish the hap- 
 piness of mankind on a solid basis.’’ 
 
 While indulging in most sanguine hopes for the 
 future progress of the sciences, it was difficult for 
 Condorcet to foretell in what this progress would 
 consist, and he was wise enough not to attempt 
 it. He contented himself with pointing out the 
 general order of their evolution, according to which 
 the simpler the facts to be studied, the speedier and 
 surer will be the progress of the science. Thus 
 astronomy was created first, and physiology last. 
 Beyond physiology, he had a glimpse of sociology. 
 Social phenomena were among his most habitual 
 themes for reflexion. He understood that these 
 phenomena, like all others, must be subjected to 
 laws, the knowledge of which depended upon the 
 observation of facts, and that this knowledge might 
 become a science which like all others would make 
 prophetic predictions possible. ‘‘The only foun- 
 dation of belief in the natural sciences is the idea 
 that the general laws, whether known or unknown, 
 which regulate all phenomena in the universe, are 
 
 a ee Pal 
 
 — 
 
CONDORCET. 207 
 
 necessary and unchanging. Wherefore should this 
 principle be less true as regards the development of 
 man’s moral and intellectual faculties than as regards 
 other natural operations?’’ Condorcet even dimly 
 foresaw, but without dwelling upon it, the distinc- 
 tion between social statics and dynamics, and the 
 preponderating importance of dynamics. On the 
 _other hand, he took up the bold idea of applying 
 mathematical analysis to social phenomena. He 
 thought he had thus found a most effective and 
 fruitful use of the theory of probabilities. 
 
 Together with social science, and with its aid, 
 social art, which is the supreme object of philos- 
 ophers, is to be developed and devoted to making 
 all men free, reasonable, and happy. First free, 
 for the better enlightened men are, the freer they 
 are. This proposition, Condorcet says, has the 
 value of an axiom. According to the natural order 
 of things ‘‘political enlightenment is the immediate 
 sequence of the: progresss ormunes sciences. s +) But 
 this truth must be published cautiously, and Con- 
 dorcet highly praises the philosophers for having 
 quieted as much as_ possible the suspicions of 
 princes. let ust note wnersays.,, «challenge the 
 oppressors to league themselves together against 
 reason; let us carefully conceal from them the close 
 and inevitable connexion between enlightenment 
 and liberty; let us not teach them beforehand that 
 a nation free from prejudice soon becomes a free 
 nation.’’ Thethrone must not know that its inter- 
 est lies in supporting the altar. 
 
298 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Again, in order that the progress of enlighten- 
 ment may produce favorable results, the progress 
 must be general, and all men must share it. Con- 
 dorcet here ventures to contradict his master, Vol- 
 taire. The latter was wrong, he says, in speaking 
 scornfully of ‘‘the mob,’’ and in thinking with his 
 friend Frederick II. that ‘‘the stupid populace’’ 
 has no need of enlightenment. Too long has intel- 
 lectual and moral culture been exclusively the priv- 
 ilege of a minority, while the ignorant mass lies 
 sunk in ignorance and prejudices. In any well- 
 governed country the people will have time to 
 acquire instruction and the few needed ideas to 
 guide them according to reason. There must be 
 public education, extending to all classes of society, 
 offering to all children not so mucha systematic 
 course of instruction as the first elements of every 
 science useful to all men, and giving to every one a 
 survey of the various objects of knowledge. Soci- 
 ety is interested in this, for in this way no man born 
 to genius can be lost to society, and moreover it 
 would be insured against the danger of seeing new 
 prejudices constantly succeeding the old ones. But 
 above all such an education would make men rea- 
 sonable and happy by acquainting them with their 
 rights, duties, and interests. 
 
 Trained by science and by the use of his rea- 
 son, man learns that ‘‘his rights are written down 
 in the book of nature.’’ It was formerly to sacred 
 books, to the bulls of the popes, to the rescripts of 
 kings, to collections of customs, to the annals of 
 
CONDORCET. 299 
 
 the church that men used to turn for maxims and 
 examples from which they might draw conclusions. 
 It is now well known, and has been declared by the 
 American republic and by France first in the Old 
 World, that reason is sufficient to show us the 
 rights of man. These are all derived from the very 
 simple maxim that, given two sentient beings, cre- 
 ated equal by nature, it is against the natural order 
 that one of them should seek his own happiness at 
 the expense of the other. The question now be- 
 comes to establish on principles derived from reason 
 alone, a system of laws insuring to man the enjoy- 
 ment of the advantages procured for him by the 
 social state, while taking from him as few of his 
 natural rights as possible. 
 
 Now most men are in fact far from enjoying 
 their natural rights. Even where there are no 
 longer any special privileges, where the equality of 
 men is recognised before the law, the extreme dis- 
 parity of fortunes very often makes the possession 
 of natural rights a vain show. Of what use is the 
 nominal enjoyment of these rights to a poor wretch 
 dying of misery and starvation? Therefore we 
 must found pension funds for old people and annu- 
 ities for widows and orphans. A certain capital 
 will be supplied to the young when old enough to 
 work for themselves; popular credit societies will 
 be established. These and many other institutions 
 of the same kind, which may be formed in the name 
 of society and become one of its greatest benefits, 
 may also be the results of private associations. 
 
300 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Penal laws will cease to be a revolting anachron- 
 ism in a society the manners of which are refined. 
 Torture will disappear. The death penalty will be 
 abolished. Natural children will be treated with 
 humanity and justice; girl-mothers will not be 
 driven to despair and crime; and, finally, we shall 
 have a new jurisprudence, freed from the idle trash 
 with which the prejudices of a score of nations and 
 a score of centuries have loaded our law. 
 
 All these improvements will take place as edu- 
 cation, guided by the social art, makes men better 
 acquainted with their real interests. The improve- 
 ment of laws, attending upon that of sciences, will 
 bring together and often identify the private inter- 
 ests of each man with the common interests of all. 
 There is no reason why the opposition between > 
 these interests, though now a violent one, should 
 last forever. Man is naturally good. It is suff- 
 cient to impart to him gentle and pure morals, to 
 enlighten his conscience, to prevent the laws from 
 creating artificial opposition between the direct 
 interests of individuals, but to cause them to develop 
 and strengthen man’s natural inclination to make 
 his own happiness dependent on the happiness of 
 others, and lastly, to prompt him to feel towards 
 mean, unjust, or cruel deeds a somewhat organic 
 and reflex dislike. Reason must form laws, and 
 laws must modify men’s manners. 
 
 Men will soon understand that national interests 
 are no more incompatible with one another than 
 
CONDORCET. 301 
 
 private interests are. According to Condorcet there 
 cannot exist, especially in a large empire, any truly 
 national interest that is not merged in the general 
 interest of mankind. All the causes which produce, 
 embitter, and perpetuate national feuds will gradu- 
 ally vanish. Wars between nations, like murders, 
 will be numbered among the extraordinary atroci- 
 ties, humiliating and revolting to nature. 
 
 One may recognise here the dream of universal 
 fraternity, the humane optimism in which the 
 eighteenth century at its close used to indulge. But 
 such optimism did not make philosophers blind to 
 the present state of misery, and their openly avowed 
 hopes were one of their forms of protest against 
 the established code of morals andlaws. This phi- 
 losophy, as we have already seen, was above all an 
 offensive weapon. The war it waged is far from 
 closed; thence the discrepancy among the opinions 
 concerning it even at the present day. According 
 to some it is a poor, narrow, paltry philosophy. It 
 understood nothing about the history of mankind, 
 and was a stranger to all religious feeling, insensible 
 to the poetry of nature, intoxicated with the prog- 
 ress of science, and practically leading to frightful 
 excesses. According to others it is the philosophy 
 of a great age; it drew conclusions from the prin- 
 ciples discovered or rehabilitated by the Renais- 
 sance and the Reformation; it restored to man the 
 consciousness of his individual dignity and respon- 
 sibility; it was passionately fond of justice and 
 
302 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 humanity; and, though it was wrong in believing 
 problems too simple, and in accepting too hasty 
 solutions, at least it disposed once for all of the 
 former social conception of inequality among men, 
 and with the subjection of reason to theology. A 
 weighty case which has not yet been completely 
 settled ! 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE IDEOLOGISTS—THE TRADITIONALISTS. 
 
 CONDORCET belonged to a group of philoso- 
 phers who, under the Republic, the Consulate and 
 the Empire, upheld the spirit and methods of the 
 eighteenth century, and who gave themselves the 
 name of ‘‘Ideologists.’’ Their doctrine has generally 
 been judged with excessive severity. It has been 
 represented as the tail of Condillacism; this philoso- 
 phy, it is said, already narrow as it came from its 
 founder, became more and more thin and poor in 
 the hands of the Ideologists, until it was reduced to 
 a mere theory of knowledge, semi-psychological and 
 semi-logical, devoid of originality and with no hold 
 on men’s minds. This picture is very much exag- 
 gerated; to be convinced of this, we need only 
 remember how strong was Napoleon’s anxiety to 
 stop the mouths of ‘‘ those ideologists.’’ He would 
 not have taken the trouble, had their philosophy 
 really been so insignificant. 
 
 According to Destutt de Tracy, who is, together 
 with Cabanis,the most noteworthy of the Ideologists, 
 we cannot know the beginning of anything, neither 
 that of men, nor that of the universe. Questions 
 of origin are unanswerable. What was formerly 
 called metaphysics is the most shallow thing in the 
 
 303 
 
304 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 world. Researches on the nature of the soul or on 
 the first principle of things are inevitably vain. 
 Whether we examine the phenomena within or with- 
 out ourselves, all that we may hope to accomplish 
 is to acquire a deeper and deeper knowledge of the 
 laws of nature. The proper object of philosophy, or 
 ideology, is to study what takes place in us when we 
 think, speak, or reason. It then becomes the basis 
 of ethics, economics, legislation and the other moral 
 sciences. 
 
 Ideology recognizes as its founder Condillac, who 
 first clearly propounded the problem of the origin 
 of our knowledge, and pointed out a suitable method 
 for its solution. But from the outset Destutt de 
 Tracy differs with him. He does not admit that 
 attention is a mere transformed sensation, and con- 
 sequently rejects the whole genesis of understand- 
 ing and will as conceived by Condillac. He pro- 
 pounds another theory according to which there are 
 four faculties of the soul, and only four: sensibility, 
 memory, judgment and volition, which he calls four 
 irreducible ‘‘modes of sensation.’’ | 
 
 Condillac ascribed to the active sense of touch 
 the acquisition of the idea of something outside our- 
 selves. De Tracy shows the explanation to be insuffi- 
 cient, and felicitously completes it: ‘‘When a being 
 organized so as to will and feel, feels within him 
 volition and action, and at the same time resistance 
 against this action willed and felt by him, he is as- 
 sured of his own existence, and of the existence of 
 something that is not himself. Action willed and 
 
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 305 
 
 felt on the one hand, and resistance on the other 
 hand—these are the links between our se/f and 
 other beings, between beings that feel and beings 
 that are felt.’’ Any other sensation than this, com- 
 mencing or terminating independently of our will, 
 would be powerless to give us this idea. De Tracy is 
 here nearer to Maine de Biran than to Condillac. In 
 a similar way, in his Logigue, Tracy does not admit, 
 with Condillac, that our judgments are equations, 
 that our reasonings are series of equations, and that 
 ideas compared in a judgment or in right reasoning 
 are zdentical. We must say, on the contrary, that 
 equations are a kind of judgment; and even in 
 equations, the ideas compared together are not 
 zdentical but eguivalent. 
 
 De Tracy is a clear, sincere, and vigorous mind, 
 holding firmly to the principles of the eighteenth 
 century philosophy, and not shrinking from any con- 
 sequences of these principles. The French Revolu- 
 tion, to which he nearly fell a victim, did not shake 
 his convictions. He will not admit that a true 
 doctrine may be immoral or dangerous for society, 
 and claims entire liberty for philosophical research. 
 Even morality is concerned in this liberty. For 
 moral principles are not innate, whatever Voltaire 
 may have said to the contrary. It is a very ancient 
 and absurd error to believe that moral principles are 
 in some sort injected into our heads, and the same 
 in every head, and to be led by this dream to attrib- 
 ute to them amore celestial origin than to all other 
 ideas which exist in our understanding. Moral 
 
306 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 science is of our own making, as all others are, and 
 similarly built up of the results of our experience 
 and reflection. But it issubordinate toa knowledge 
 of human nature, and the latter in its turn ‘‘depends 
 upon the state of physics, of which it is buta 
 part.’ So, though for his own part he made use 
 of a purely psychological method, De Tracy did not, 
 in theory, separate the moral from the natural 
 sciences. Accordingly he said that ideology was a 
 part of zodlogy, or of animal physics, and dedicated 
 his Logigue to his friend Cabanis, the celebrated 
 author of the Rapports du Physique et du Moral. 
 Cabanis has been looked upon as a materialist, 
 but without sufficient reason, for he purposely 
 abstains from expressing any metaphysical opinion. 
 Like De Tracy he declares that first causes are not 
 an object of science, not even an object of doubt, 
 and that on this point we are in a state of hopeless 
 ignorance. But from an experimental point of 
 view he ascertains that the brain is to thought 
 what the stomach is to digestion. As impressions 
 reach the brain they excite it to activity, just as 
 food, when it enters the stomach, stimulates in it a 
 secretion of the gastric-juice. The proper function 
 of the one is to perceive each particular impression, 
 to attach signs to it, to combine and compare 
 together the different impressions, and to form 
 therefrom judgments and determinations, just as 
 the function of the other is to act upon nutritious 
 substances. From this Cabanis derives the notorious 
 formula: ‘‘The brain in some sort digests impres- 
 
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 307 
 
 sions; it produces an organic secretion of thought;’’ 
 a comparison which may be regarded as more or 
 less happy, but which is meant to be nothing but a 
 comparison. . 
 
 By dint of psychological abstraction, it seemed 
 to have been forgotten that man is, to use Bossuet’s 
 words, a natural whole, composed of a soul and 
 _a body. Cabanis comes back to this idea. Being 
 at the same time a physician and a psychologist, he 
 shows, by the aid of several hundred observations 
 made upon man, both in health and sickness, the 
 reciprocal action of the body upon the mind and of 
 the mind upon the body. The physiology of 
 Cabanis is now quite out of date, but few have 
 spoken better than he of the influence of age, sex, 
 temperament, illness, diet, climate on the forma- 
 tion of ideas and of moral affections. 
 
 If there are so many points of contact between 
 the physical and the moral being, it is because they 
 rest on a common basis. The operations called 
 ‘‘moral,’’ as well as the physical ones, result 
 directly from the action either of certain particular 
 organs or of the whole of the living system. All 
 phenomena pertaining to intelligence and will take 
 their rise in the primitive or accidental state of the 
 organism as well as the other vital functions. The 
 diversity of functions is no reason why principles 
 should be multiplied. As we do not assume a 
 special principle for digestion, another for the cir- 
 culation of the blood, another for respiration, etc., 
 neither must we assume one for the intellectual 
 
308 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 functions. Iv is sufficient to recognize that all func- 
 tions, whether moral or physical, originate in sensi- 
 bility, a property common to all living organisms. 
 Indeed, physical sensibility is on the one hand the 
 utmost limit that we reach in the study of the phe- 
 nomena of life, and in the methodical investigation 
 of their connection; and it is also on the other 
 hand the most general principle discovered by the 
 analysis of the intellectual faculties and the affec- 
 tions of the soul. Thus the physical and the moral 
 life meet at their source, or rather, the moral being 
 is but the physical being considered from certain 
 special points of view. The only principle of the 
 phenomena of animal existence is, therefore, the 
 power of sensation. But what is the cause of this” 
 power, what is its essence? Philosophers will not 
 ask this question. Sensibility is the universal fact 
 in living nature. We can not get beyond it. 
 When Cabanis finds in his path any of Con- 
 dillac’s theories that are incompatible with the 
 results of his own researches, he does not hesitate 
 to reject them. Thus, Condillac maintained that 
 there are no psychological phenomena unperceived 
 by consciousness. Nothing, says Cabanis, is more 
 contrary to experience. Although it is a fact that 
 the consciousness of impressions always implies the 
 existence and action of sensibility, the latter is, 
 nevertheless, alive in many parts where the se/f 
 nowise perceives its presence; it nevertheless de- 
 termines a great many important and regular func- 
 tions, though the se/f is not at all aware of its 
 
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 309 
 
 action. There may be sensibility without sensation, 
 i. e., without an impression perceived. 
 
 Condillac said everything is acquired, even in- 
 stinct. The paradox was bold, and Joseph de 
 Maistre did not fail to laugh at it. Cabanis looks 
 upon instinct as innate, and infers therefrom that 
 external sensations are not, as Condillac declared, 
 the sole principle of all mental life. Moral ideas 
 and determinations do not depend solely upon what 
 are called sensations, that is, distinct impressions 
 received by the organs of the senses properly so 
 called. The impressions resulting from the func- 
 tions of several internal organs contribute to them 
 more or less, and, in certain cases, appear to be the 
 
 sole cause of their production. There is within us , 
 
 a whole system of inclinations and determinations 
 formed by impressions almost totally unconnected 
 with those of the external world; and these inclina- 
 tions “necessarily influence our way of considering 
 objects, the direction of our researches concerning 
 themarand) oursjudomenturofmthem wilt) is not, 
 therefore, the external world alone that shapes 
 the thoughts and desires of the ‘‘ se/f’’; it is rather 
 the latter, pre-formed by instinct and by specific 
 dispositions, that builds for itself an external world 
 with the elements of reality that interest it. Like- 
 wise, spontaneous activity precedes in us reflective 
 activity. We are first determined to act without 
 being aware of the means we employ, and often 
 without even having conceived a precise idea of the 
 end we desire to attain. 
 
 # 
 
310 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 The consideration of instinct naturally leads to 
 that of final causes. Cabanis admires the mutual 
 dependency of all parts in living bodies, and is not 
 surprised that observers of nature ‘‘who were not 
 close thinkers’’ should have been deeply affected by 
 it. But in truth, these marvels are inseparable 
 from the very organization of animals. One may 
 recognize them, and even extol them with all the 
 magnificence of language, without being forced to 
 admit in the causes anything that does not belong 
 
 1M) 
 
 to the necessary conditions of every existence. 
 What seems to us finality is merely the result of 
 natural laws, inasmuch as they make possible the 
 appearance, propagation and permanence of living 
 species; if this ordering of parts, which we think 
 wonderful and intentional, should cease to exist, 
 living beings would disappear. Sothat, even when 
 the naturalist has recourse to final causes, the phi- 
 losopher cannot without imprudence seek in them 
 an argument in favor of beliefs concerning the 
 author of nature. But such reserve must be very 
 difficult to adhere to, since Cabanis, who recommends 
 it, does not himself observe it. In his Lettre a 
 Fraurtel sur les Causes Premtéres, published after his 
 death, Cabanis inclines toward a conception of 
 nature akin to that of the Stoics, in which ideas of 
 order and finality occupy a predominant place. 
 Cabanis has been widely read, and still deserves 
 to be, were it only for the abundance and the choice 
 of the facts he brought together, the justness of 
 most of his reflections, and the pleasing elegance of 
 
THE TRADITIONALISTS. 31! 
 
 his style. His influence extended not only to 
 philosophers like Maine de Biran, Auguste Comte, 
 H. Taine, but also to novelists like Stendhal and his 
 successors. Yet he has not escaped the disrepute 
 which overtook ideology. Metaphysics, reviving, 
 threw into the shade those philosophers who had 
 thought it finally banished. The Ideologists had 
 followed the way opened by the Encyclopedists 
 and the scientific men of the eighteenth century, 
 and were the first victims of a reaction which aimed 
 higher than at them. 
 
 The name given to the traditionalist philosophers 
 exactly indicates the position they assumed over 
 against the eighteenth century. Toa body of doc- 
 trines, the common characteristic of which was that 
 they were based on the independent effort of individ- 
 ual reason, they opposed a doctrine which discov- 
 ered truth in tradition, and particularly in tradition 
 that is universally found among men, viz.: religious 
 tradition. Shall we say that this is not a philosoph- 
 ical doctrine, but the very negative of philosophy? 
 Were this true, such a negation was at least grounded 
 on philosophical reasons, that is to say, on a 
 criticism of the opposing principles. No doubt the 
 Traditionalists thought that they, as Christians, pos- 
 sessed the truth at the outset, before any discus- 
 sion. But they nevertheless meant to combat the 
 ‘‘philosophers’’ on their own ground, to unmask 
 their sophistries, to refute their errors, and finally 
 to compel them, by sheer force of demonstration, 
 
312 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 to confess the weakness of individual reason. De : 
 Bonald, De Maistre, the two most illustrious repre- 
 sentatives of this school, were looked upon by all 
 their contemporaries as formidable logicians, and 
 in the judgment of Auguste Comte, for instance, De 
 Maistre dealt the philosophy of the eighteenth 
 century some most telling blows. 
 
 Wherever this philosophy had seen ‘‘nature,’’ De 
 Bonald sees ‘‘God.’’ Nature to him is a vague and 
 equivocal expression, and can not stand for a real 
 cause. Nature is rather an effect, a system of 
 effects, a set of laws; but these laws imply a legisla- 
 tor who founded the system and who maintains it. 
 The universe is unintelligible to him without a 
 Creator who is at the same time a Providence. 
 Language, likewise, was attributed by the eighteenth 
 century philosophers (Rousseau excepted) to the 
 invention of men. Thisalsoisan untenable theory, 
 all the more absurd as these philosophers under- 
 stood perfectly well that language is inseparable 
 from thought and social life. Men never could have 
 invented language, had they not already lived in 
 society; and they never could have lived in scciety, 
 had they not already possessed language. You can 
 not, De Bonald claims, get out of this circle, unless 
 you admit this marvel (for language is no less 
 marvelous than the organism of living beings), 
 to be a gift from the Creator to rational beings. 
 And it is the same with all similar questions. The 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century looks back in 
 the series of causes up to a certain point, where it 
 
THE TRADITIONALISTS. eihie’ 
 
 stops, thinking it has reached the fundamental 
 principle; but this so-called principle explains noth- 
 ing, and must in its turn be explained. Religion 
 alone, which is a deeper sort of philosophy, attains 
 to the first principle on which all things depend. 
 
 Truth is therefore to be found in tradition. The 
 pride of individual reason, which has despised this 
 tradition, inevitably leads to error. Even sucha 
 well-balanced mind as that of Montesquieu did not 
 escape it. All his theory of constitutions is false. 
 Modern philosophy, says De Bonald, is the wisdom 
 of man and not that of society; that is to say, the 
 wisdom of the depraved man and not that of the 
 social or perfect man; it tries to make the intelligent 
 man turn to natural religion. But this philosoph- 
 ical religion, the pure worship of Divinity, of the 
 Great Being, of the Being of Beings, in a word, 
 theism, infallibly leads to atheism, as the philosoph- 
 ical government of political societies, the division 
 and balance of power in the state, or representative 
 government, inevitably leads to anarchy. 
 
 It is a mistake for man to assume the task of 
 constituting society or establishing government. 
 His intervention can only spoil the work of Provi- 
 dence. It is society, on the contrary, which, being 
 founded on necessary relations, that is, relations 
 established by God, constitutes the individual man, 
 and dictates the rules that must govern his con- 
 duct. 
 
 The same leading ideas are expressed by Joseph 
 de Maistre, but with such eloquence and passion as 
 
314 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 to have made them wonderfully impressive. The 
 eighteenth century, according to him, is one of the 
 most shameful epochs in the history of the human 
 mind. Its philosophy is a most degrading and fatal 
 system. It has robbed reason of her wings and made 
 her grovel like a filthy reptile; it has dried up the 
 divine source of poetry and eloquence, and caused 
 all the moral sciences to perish. And why did it 
 produce these frightful effects? Because this whole 
 philosophy was nothing but a veritable system of 
 practical atheism. To pronounce the name of God in 
 its presence would throw it into convulsions. It was 
 the work of the ‘‘Evil One,’’ it was ‘‘the denying 
 spirit,’’ like Mephistopheles. Moreover, according 
 to De Maistre, the eighteenth century merely applied 
 to politics the principles of the Reformation, or, as 
 he says, of the ‘‘rebels’’ of the sixteenth century. 
 The sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries might 
 be called the premises of the eighteenth, which in 
 fact was but the conclusion of the two preceding 
 
 ones. ‘‘The human mind could not suddenly have 
 risen to such a pitch of audacity as we have wit- 
 nessed. ... Philosophism could not have been 
 
 erected except on the broad foundation of the 
 Reformation.’’ | 
 
 The hostility of De Maistre is clear-sighted, and 
 he struck home when he pointed out the inconsist- 
 ency of those philosophers who praised so highly 
 the experimental method, yet had not patience 
 enough to practice it, so anxious were they to sub- 
 stitute something for the traditions they were pull- 
 
THE TRADITIONALISTS. 315 
 
 ing down. ‘‘It was a singularly ridiculous trait of 
 the eighteenth century to judge of everything 
 according to abstract rules, without regard to 
 experience; and it is the more strikingly ridiculous 
 because this very century at the same time kept 
 continually sparring at all philosophers who took 
 abstract principles as their starting point, instead of 
 first looking for them in the light of experience.’’ 
 Every one of the ‘‘philosophers’’ in turn is roughly 
 handled by De Maistre. I do not speak of Vol- 
 taire, against whom he feels a sort of fury which 
 almost overpowers him; but Locke, whom the 
 philosophers all hailed as master, is no longer ‘‘the 
 wise Locke,’’ the ‘‘greatest of all philosophers since 
 Plato;’’ he is a short-sighted, narrow-minded man, 
 not wicked, but simple, shallow, spiritless, a poor 
 philosopher, a mere pigmy beside the ‘‘Christian 
 Plato,’’ that is, Malebranche, who has been sacri- 
 ficed to him. The infatuation of which he has 
 been the object is simply ludicrous. The same is 
 said of Bacon, whom De Maistre honors with a 
 special indictment. His dislike is no less for Con- 
 dillac, ‘‘who sees the truth perfectly well, but who 
 had rather die than confess it;’’ an odious writer, 
 perhaps the one of all the philosophers of the 
 eighteenth century who was most on his guard 
 against his own conscience. 
 
 These philosophers tried to persuade individual 
 reason that it was the sovereign judge of what is 
 false and what is true, that the progress of mankind 
 depended upon that of the sciences, and that ignor- 
 
316 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ance and superstition were the causes of moral and 
 social evil. De Maistre denies all this as confidently 
 as they asserted it. He disparages reason as much 
 as they exalted it. Reason, he declares, stands 
 manifestly convicted of incompetence asa guide for 
 men, for few men are ina fit state to reason well, 
 and none can reason well on all subjects; so that, 
 generally speaking, it is advisable to begin with 
 authority. ‘‘I do not mean to insult reason,’’ says 
 De Maistre; ‘‘I have infinite respect for it in spite 
 of all the wrong it has done us; but whenever it 
 stands in opposition to common sense, we must put 
 And, indeed, the general 
 feeling of all men forms ‘‘a system of intuitive 
 truths’’ against which the sophistries of reason can- 
 
 , 
 
 it from us like poison.’ 
 
 not prevail. It is a ‘“‘mysterious instinct’? which 
 we are bound to obey. This instinct often guesses 
 aright, even in the natural sciences; it is almost 
 infallible in dealing with rational philosophy, ethics, 
 metaphysics, and natural theology, ‘‘and it is 
 infinitely worthy of the supreme wisdom, which 
 created and regulated all things, to have enabled 
 man to dispense with science in all that most greatly 
 concerns him.’’ 
 
 Science! that is the source from which proceed 
 dangerous extravagancies, rash self-assumption and 
 proud blasphemy. Not that it is bad in itself; but 
 it must be pursued only under certain indispensable 
 conditions. For want of this precaution the more 
 things our mind knows the more guilty it may be. 
 Bacon is quite ‘‘ludicrous’’ when he is provoked 
 
THE TRADITIONALISTS. ay 
 
 at scholasticism and theology. Teach young people 
 physics and chemistry before having imbued them 
 with religion and morality, and you will see the 
 result. There lurks in science, when it is not 
 entirely subordinate to ‘‘national dogmas,’’ a some- 
 thing which tends to debase man and to make him 
 a useless or bad citizen. 
 
 Science is not and ought not to be the chief 
 aim of the intelligence. Whence come, for in- 
 stance, the multiplied complaints, and, one might 
 say, revilings against Providence? From this great 
 phalanx of men called scientists, whom we have 
 not in this century been able to keep in their 
 proper place, which is a subordinate one. In 
 former times there were very few men of science, 
 and among these few only a very small number 
 were impious. Now they are legion, and the excep- 
 tion has become the rule. They have usurped a 
 boundless influence. Yet it is not for science to 
 guide men. Nothing really essential is entrusted 
 toit. Science is an intellectual pastime, and in the 
 material order of things it is capable of useful appli- 
 cations; but there its domain ends. ‘“‘It belongs 
 to the prelates, the nobles, the higher officers of the 
 state to be the depositories and guardians of saving 
 truths, to teach nations what is wrong and what is 
 right, what is true and what is false, in the moral 
 and spiritual worlds. Others have no right to 
 reason on such matters. They have the natural 
 sciences to divert themselves with; of what can they 
 complain? As to the man who speaks or writes in 
 
318 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 order to take away from the people a national 
 dogma, he ought to be hanged as one who robs the 
 hearth and home. 
 
 It would be difficult to carry the reaction against 
 the favorite ideas of the eighteenth century further. 
 Yet De Maistre is in this not merely obeying the 
 desire to restore the rights of tradition and religious 
 authority and to abate the chimerical and sinful 
 pretensions of such men as Helvetius and Con- 
 dorcet. He founds his opinion also on a conception 
 of the universe and its relation to God, which leaves 
 to positive science but limited scope and range. 
 The world of visible phenomena and of the laws 
 which regulate them is a world of appearance and 
 illusion which hides from our sight the world of true 
 and essential reality. Therefore, the closer our 
 science grasps phenomena and their laws, the far- 
 ther it is, with all its air of truth, from being really 
 true; or, at least, it is only imperfectly and com- 
 paratively true, like the appearances which are 
 its object. The religious man who sees God 
 everywhere in the world; the poet, moved by the 
 beauty of the universe and by the tragic character 
 of human destiny; even the metaphysician who 
 discovers the invisible beneath the visible, are all 
 three infinitely nearer to truth, harmony and the 
 eternal substance than the man of science measur- 
 ing and weighing atoms in his laboratory. 
 
 Consequently De Maistre has a constant ten- 
 dency to explain nothing by secondary causes, and 
 always to appeal to mystery and God’s unfathom- 
 
THE TRADITIONALISTS. 319 
 
 able designs. He gives an admirable description 
 of the struggle for life, and of the competition be- 
 tween living species; he sees clearly that war is a 
 particular phase of this great fact; but instead of 
 seeking the cause, as Diderot or Darwin did, in 
 the general laws of nature, he sees in it simply a 
 “‘divine’’ law, and founds thereupon a whole the- 
 ory of sacrifice. ‘‘The earth, continually deluged 
 with blood, is only an immense altar, on which all 
 that has life must be slain, and that without end 
 or measure or rest, till the end of all things, till 
 the death of death.’’ He likewise insists upon the 
 mutual responsibility of all the members of one 
 family, and of all the members of mankind, and upon 
 the reversibility of penalties; but instead of seek- 
 ing the origin of these beliefs in the constitution 
 and religion of primitive societies, he sees here again 
 a “‘divine’’ law. The words superstition and 
 prejudice are to him meaningless. God's directing 
 hand is everywhere in the world; if we do not see 
 it, it is because we refuse to do so. A family is 
 thought to be royal because it reigns; whereas, on 
 the contrary, it reigns because it is royal. 
 
 We shall not set forth here De Maistre’s ideas 
 on the spiritual sovereignty of the pope, the sig- 
 nificance of the French Revolution, and the con- 
 stitution best suited for modern nations. We must 
 lose no time in returning to more properly philo- 
 sophical doctrines. But more than once, in these 
 doctrines, shall we observe unquestionable traces 
 which prove the influence of the chief Traditional- 
 
320 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ists, De Maistre, De Bonald, Ballanche and Lamen. 
 nais. De Maistre, especially, made upon many 
 minds a deep and lasting impression. Even if 
 Auguste Comte had not formally acknowledged the 
 fact, his very doctrine would be sufficient to prove 
 his indebtedness to De Maistre for many of his 
 historical, social and religious ideas. 
 
CTA PA haex Ui 
 
 MAINE DE BIRAN, COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM 
 
 MAINE DE BIRAN was said by Cousin to have 
 been the first of French metaphysicians since Male- 
 branche. This is true, especially, if we understand 
 by a metaphysician, as they did in the eighteenth 
 century, a thinker who studies the origin of our 
 knowledge and the genesis of our ideas. Yet this 
 original and deep philosopher was but little known 
 to his contemporaries. Maine de Biran, though 
 he wrote much, published but little during his life- 
 time, and what he gave to the world was not suffi- 
 cient to make his thought fully understood. It was 
 Cousin, who, in 1834, and afterwardsin 1841, edited 
 part of the manuscripts left by Maine de Biran. 
 Since then other unpublished works have been 
 edited, chiefly by M. Naville. If we have not yet 
 the whole of Maine de Biran’s writings, we possess 
 _ enough to feel assured that no essential part of his 
 doctrine now escapes us. 
 
 Maine de Biran never taught. Being a life- 
 guardsman to Louis .the Sixteenth in 1789, and 
 later sub-prefect and councillor of State, if he was 
 also a philosopher it was in virtue of a strong nat- 
 ural aptitude and inclination. A sort of instinct 
 irresistibly impelled him to make a study of him- 
 
 321 
 
322 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 self. His health being delicate, he was watchful 
 of the slightest changes in his physical condition 
 and in his consciousness due to surrounding cir- 
 cumstances, and was consequently predisposed to 
 introspection. ‘‘When one has little vitality,’’ he 
 writes, ‘‘or but a faint conscious sense of vitality, 
 one is more inclined to observe internal phenom- 
 ena. This is why I became so early in life a psy- 
 chologist.’’ He heard the springs of the machine 
 creaking, and he felt his thought straining or slack- 
 ening with them. 
 
 His taste for psychology first found food in Con- 
 dillac, and then in the Ideologists. He became | 
 acquainted with Cabanis, and was afterwards his 
 friend; and though later he thought that he had 
 advanced beyond his doctrine, he never completely 
 rejected it. But he also read the Genevese Charles 
 Bonnet, and it was probably by him that he was 
 led to study the philosophy of Leibniz, and to seek 
 a psychological interpretation of it that would be 
 in harmony with his own tendencies. It was at 
 this time that he wrote his A/émozre sur 1 Habitude 
 (1805), an original and thoughtful work, which, 
 under a form that suggests Condillac, already man- 
 ifests many of his own personal and independent 
 views. In the next period he reached the clearest 
 expression of his thought and expounded what 
 he looked upon as his most important theory, to 
 wit, the theory of effort, or of the first fact of con- 
 sciousness. In this he was seconded by his friend 
 Ampére, the celebrated physicist, whose philosoph- 
 
MAINE DE BIRAN. 323 
 
 ical work is inseparable from his own. He often 
 enunciated his ideas at philosophical meetings held 
 at his house in Paris. Royer-Collard was wont to 
 be present, and also “‘ young Professor Cousin,’’ 
 who comprehended the thought of Maine de Biran 
 marvelously well. In later years, when ill, and 
 anxious to find “‘a firm and steady prop,’’ Maine 
 de Biran inclined towards a mystical and religious 
 kind of philosophy; and he had yielded himself 
 fully to it before the end of his life. 
 
 Condillac’s psychology had separated, so to 
 speak, consciousness from organism. Convinced 
 that ‘‘we never get out of ourselves,’’ he thought 
 himself thus justified in studying only what reflec- 
 tion and analysis can reach and decompose within 
 ourselves. Now this is an abstraction which Maine 
 de Biran constantly finds to be contradicted by his 
 personal experience. Our humor changes, our at- 
 tention flags, our self-confidence disappears or 
 returns without our knowing how; is it not because 
 a multitude of dim sensations are produced within 
 us, of which we are made aware only by their 
 effects? Thus experimental psychology can as yet 
 describe only the smallest portion of the soul’s 
 phenomena. This science begins with clear apper- 
 ception, and with the distinction between the 
 ‘““self’’? and its modifications. But how many 
 things take place in the soul before, during, and 
 after the first consciousness of the self, which will 
 never come within the range of our knowledge! 
 
324 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 These things Maine de Biran calls pure impressions, 
 or simple impressions; they constitute the ‘‘affect- 
 ivelife,’... [hey correspond tomlceibniz sedimmana 
 insensible perceptions; or, perhaps more exactly, 
 tol @abaniss sensibility! ty ae ineseanim persone 
 sensations, which I shall term pure affections, may 
 be considered as the most immediate results of 
 functions that underlie a general organic life 
 
 a state previous even to the birth of a 
 conscious and thinking subject.’’ This was a fruit- 
 ful thought, which experimental psychology has 
 turned: towexcellent .account#/inoumdayssw Uiis 
 science admits as a principle, as Maine de Biran 
 did, that “‘simple impressions may constitute an 
 absolute sort of existence, suz generis, apart from 
 any distinct personality or consciousness of self. 
 Me Prerre. Janet, :fon/anstance; |) hasmareturnedmeto 
 this hypothesis in order to explain many surprising 
 cases of hysterical anesthesia and amnesia, of two- 
 fold personality, etc. 
 
 This part of ourselves which escapes our knowl- 
 edge also escapes our power. The affective life is 
 independent of our will, though our will depends 
 uponit. Itis a purely passive basis of our complex 
 being, from which the ego can never be separated, 
 and which becomes tense or slack or altered with- 
 out our being able to interfere, at any rate directly; 
 asum of organic dispositions we are the less able 
 to modify since they are the very source of our 
 powers and volitions. They result from our tem- 
 perament, and what we call character is but the 
 
MAINE DE BIRAN. 325 
 
 physiognomy of temperament—a striking phrase, 
 for which we are indebted to Bichat, the physiolo- 
 gist, and which Maine de Biran made his own by 
 exploring it thoroughly. 
 
 At about the same epoch Schopenhauer in 
 Germany was saying the same thing; and though 
 he was in nowise acquainted with the works of 
 _ Maine de Biran, there is in this more than a mere 
 fortuitous coincidence. Between Schopenhauer’s 
 psychology and that of Maine de Biran there lie 
 hidden, under obvious differences, deep analogies. 
 If little attention has hitherto been paid in France 
 to this fact, it is because of a predisposition to see 
 in Maine de Biran one of the founders of contem- 
 porary spiritualism,—and he is therefore associated 
 with Cousin rather than with Bichat or Cabanis. 
 
 But this interpretation, while not false, is cer- 
 tainly incomplete, and not in harmony with history. 
 Maine de Biran owes nothing to Cousin, and was, 
 especially in his two earlier periods, imbued with 
 the doctrines of Bichat and of ‘‘the immortal 
 author of the Rapports du Physique et du Moral.”’ 
 Now this was no less true of Schopenhauer. True, 
 in Schopenhauer the ideas borrowed from Bichat 
 and Cabanis were mingled with other elements taken 
 from Kant, Plato, and Buddhist metaphysics, 
 whereas Maine de Biran contented himself with 
 investigating certain problems propounded by the 
 eighteenth century. Yet both these men alike 
 oppose to the conscious personality of the ego the 
 dim unconscious background which enfolds it, 
 
B26 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 sways it, and even directs it, and predetermines, 
 unknown to ourselves, our thoughts and actions, 
 our intelligence and character. Only afterwards do 
 their doctrines diverge. : 
 
 Affective life constitutes in us what Maine de 
 Biran calls ‘‘animality.’’ Above it, but linked to 
 it, appears “‘humanity,’’ i.e., consciousness reflect- 
 ing on itself and master of itself, personality, or 
 the ego. This latter begins to exist by itself only 
 when exercising free activity or determined effort. 
 Thus—and Maine de Biran likes to remind us that 
 he is here taking up the thought of Leibniz—the 
 idea that the human person has of itself is originally 
 thevideatonvan active force mil hescoomssnrst oneal 
 activity and liberty. In other words, the ego is the 
 soul, insomuch as it perceives its own existence, 
 but this it perceives only when its activity meets 
 (within the body) with a resistance which it endeav- 
 ors to overcome. 
 
 If this observation is correct, the whole structure 
 of Condillacism falls to pieces. Sensation is no 
 longer the first fact of consciousness, the principle 
 ofallitheysoul’s ‘life’, Thetweryiterm™ sensation « 
 is abstract and ambiguous, because Condillac did 
 not carry the analysis farenough. For, if sensa- 
 tion be conceived as simply passive, then it is only 
 an ‘‘affective impression,’’ and the ego does not yet 
 appear: sensation may take place without con- 
 sciousness being aware of it. Does sensation imply 
 a motor reaction, conscious and deliberate? Then 
 it resolves itself into a passive and an active ele- 
 
MAINE DE BIRAN. ay 
 
 ment. The latter is intentional effort. In it, and 
 not in any received impression, must we seek the 
 special origin of our active faculties, the pivotal 
 point of existence and the foundation of all the 
 simple ideas we may acquire concerning ourselves 
 and our intellectual activity. 
 
 Yet Maine de Biran does not think that the soul 
 - appears to itself just as it really is. ‘‘I was at first 
 rather inclined,’’ he says, “‘to mistake the inmost 
 feeling of our individuality, or what I called the 
 ego, for the very core of the substance of the soul. 
 But Kant has taught me better. We feel our own 
 individuality; but the real substance of our soul 
 we feel no more than any other substance.’’ No 
 doubt the ego that perceives and judges is the same 
 that is perceived and judged; but this being which 
 is perceived and judged has still an inmost core 
 of substance inaccessible to apperception. It may 
 be endowed, as Malebranche thought, with a multi- 
 tude of properties or attributes which are unknown 
 or do not come within the range of our inward 
 sense. This inward sense may indeed assure us 
 that we are thinking; and on this point Descartes’s 
 “I think, therefore I am,’’ is irrefutable. But the 
 most subtle analysis of this inward sense cannot 
 possibly throw the slightest light upon our knowl- 
 edge of ourselves, ‘‘as an object outside of 
 thought.’’ To believe that, by means of analysis 
 based on purely internal experience, we can at 
 length arrive at the notion of a substantial ego, is 
 to mistake the psychological fact of what is within 
 
328 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 us,» thats, }ourselves in, the wactual vexercisemor 
 thought, for the metaphysical notion of the sub- 
 stance which is supposed to remain the same beyond 
 and beneath thought. 
 
 Maine de Biran here agrees with Kant, as he 
 says. In Kant, however, the theory of the ego’s 
 knowledge of itself has for its basis the whole of 
 the Critique of Pure Reason, and more especially 
 the theory of sensible and intellectual knowledge. 
 Maine de Biran, on the contrary, starts from the 
 analysis of the first fact of consciousness, and on 
 that analysis he afterwards attempts to found a 
 theory of the understanding and reason. In oppo- 
 sition to the doctrine of categories, which is quite 
 a priort in Kant, he endeavors to maintain a psycho- 
 logical genesis of the general principles of thought. 
 Thus, because the ego perceives itself as a cause, 
 Maine de Biran finds therein ‘‘the pattern and model 
 of every idea of power, force, and cause.’’ Unity, 
 simplicity, existence, etc., are ideas which the ego 
 obtains by means of an abstraction wrought upon 
 itself, and which in a way isolates its own attributes. 
 If we find these attributes again in objects, it is 
 because they have been, so to speak, projected by 
 the ego. In one word, reason is thus held to be 
 the spontaneous result of a sort of self-analysis of 
 consciousness. 
 
 But this is rather a sketch thana regular theory, 
 and Maine de Biran was suspicious of everything 
 that might carry him beyond the firm ground of 
 experience. The science he seeks to establish 
 
MAINE DE BIRAN. 329 
 
 starts from a fact and must lead only to facts and 
 to the laws which they obey. The absolute, as 
 Maine de Biran does not hesitate to confess, is 
 beyond its grasp. How, he says himself, could all 
 things fail to be relative in our eyes, since the very 
 existence of the ego, the individual personality 
 which is the basis of the thinking being, is rel- 
 _ ative? The thing called ego being a compound, 
 or the result of the union and relation between two 
 substances, can conceive or feel nothing but as a 
 compound or relation. The very idea of sub- 
 stance seems suspicious to Maine de Biran. The 
 ego does not find it within itself, for it apprehends 
 itselfv'asoa’ cause, notd'as ay substancel> (This videa 
 must, therefore, originate without our knowing it, 
 in the representation of exterior things, space and 
 matter. It was this idea that caused the philosophy 
 of Descartes to tend in the direction of pantheism. 
 It is the secret enemy of personality and liberty; it 
 tends to mingle together in an obscure metaphys- 
 ical unity the ego-person in which everything has 
 its beginning, and the God-person in which all 
 things end. 
 
 Though an original and deep psychologist, 
 Maine de Biran was a timid metaphysician. No 
 doubt the study of the ego induced him to think of 
 itwacsea’ “hy perorganicumiorce. wwhile the inward 
 sense assured him of his liberty; but he was fully 
 aware that there are problems, and most essential 
 ones, to which his doctrine gives no direct answer, 
 the moral problem, for instance. Therefore he 
 
330 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 wished to complete his psychology by a reasoned 
 adherence to a general system of philosophy in 
 accordance with his inmost tendencies. In _ his 
 second period he felt himself won over to Stoicism, 
 which is, in his eyes, a moral philosophy based 
 upon the dignity of the human personality and 
 upon the energy of active effort. But Stoicism 
 expects too much from man’s will; and although 
 Christianity, in its turn, makes man too weak and 
 helpless, it was to Christianity that Maine de Biran 
 turned in the latter years of his life for the ‘‘prop’’ 
 of which he felt the need. He then wrote his 
 Nouveaux Essais a Anthropologie, which distin- 
 guish in man three lives, one above the other, as it 
 were: sensitive life, which is in us that of the ani- 
 mal; human life, that is, the life of action and the 
 struggle of the thinking principle against the in- 
 stinctive and animal principle; and lastly, divine 
 life, in which animalism is conquered and the 
 struggle ceases because love has united man to 
 the supreme source of all beings and all good. 
 And thus, in a sort of quietism, ended this philos- 
 ophy which had begun as a continuation of Condil- 
 lac and Cabanis. 
 
 Maine de Biran is one of the three masters from 
 whom Cousin acknowledges having received his 
 philosophical education. The two others are Lar- 
 omiguiére, who, as early as 1810, taught him that 
 Condillac’s psychological analysis was incomplete 
 and faulty and that attention cannot be a trans- 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 331 
 
 formed sensation, and Royer-Collard, who made 
 him acquainted with Scotch philosophy. But the 
 homage paid by Cousin to the philosophers whose 
 teaching he had followed, or whose conversation 
 he had heard, is not by any means equivalent to 
 an exhaustive list of the sources from which he 
 gathered his ideas. We shall come across others 
 (which, indeed, he has himself pointed out), as 
 we trace the general features of his doctrine. 
 
 they leading, thousht)Votimy,) life, |) 
 Cousin in 1826, ‘‘has beento rebuild eternal beliefs 
 in accordance with the spirit of the age, and also 
 to arrive at unity, but solely by the aid of the ex- 
 perimental method.’’ Thus, the philosophical 
 method employed by the eighteenth century was to 
 him the right one. Cousin seeks no other. This 
 method of observation and induction has given 
 marvelous results in the natural sciences. Why 
 has it hitherto led only to wretched ones in phi- 
 losophy? Why, in England as well as in France, 
 has it been able only to destroy, without laying 
 any new foundation? The fault lies with the men, 
 not with the method. The method is irreproach- 
 able, but the men have erred. They erred because 
 they were systematic, and their systems distorted 
 
 wrote 
 
 observation. 
 
 So Cousin, like all thinkers in his time, was 
 chiefly concerned with ‘‘rebuilding.’’ After sucha 
 formidable earthquake as the French Revolution 
 had been, after the passionate and destroying criti- 
 cism of the eighteenth century, there was no one 
 
332 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 who did not feel the need either of raising again 
 the ancient edifice or of becoming the architect 
 of a new one. But, while the Traditionalists 
 went resolutely counter to the doctrines of the 
 eighteenth century, the method and principles of 
 which they attacked, Cousin professed to follow its 
 direction, but to correct its errors. ‘‘Since,’’ he 
 says, ‘‘we are, as regards the principle to be fol- 
 lowed, in accord with the schools that we combat, 
 we shall have only to point out the wrong, narrow 
 or superficial applications that have been made of 
 itr 
 
 Three schools in the eighteenth century began 
 to apply a suitable method to philosophy: that of 
 the ‘‘wise and judicious Locke,’’ that of Reid, and 
 that of Kant, the last being far superior to the two 
 others. All three understood that philosophy must 
 begin with a strict and thorough examination 
 of the human mind and of its faculties. But this 
 examination they made only partially, and each of 
 them considered but one aspect of reality. The 
 school of Locke and Condillac sought only the 
 origin of our knowledge; the school of Reid 
 studied only its actual features, without regard to 
 its origin; lastly, the school of Kant was chiefly 
 devoted to a consideration of the legitimacy of the 
 passage from the subject to the object. A better 
 application of the method would consist in study- 
 ing at one and the same time all three problems, 
 of which each school investigated but one. In 
 order to make whole again the intellectual life 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. cele 
 
 mutilated by each system we should withdraw our- 
 selves into consciousness.and then, without any 
 spirit of system or exclusive prejudice, analyze 
 thought in its elements, and a// its elements, and 
 seek the characteristics, and all the characteristics, 
 with which it reveals itself to the vision of con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Such is the eclectic method under the first form 
 given to it by Victor Cousin. It does not mean, 
 as we see, the arbitrary juxtaposition of doctrines 
 borrowed here and there without regard to any 
 coérdinating and governing principle, and with- 
 out caring whether these doctrines are contradic- 
 tory. Eclecticism borrows no piece of doctrine 
 from previous systems. It bases itself solely upon 
 the observation of facts, and upon induction. If 
 it agrees on one or another point with a philosoph- 
 ical system that has preceded it, it is because 
 there is in every doctrine, even in an erroneous one, 
 Agiopencer says,ay “soulvotmtnuth. nt Why then, 
 did Cousin choose the name of Eclecticism, which 
 has caused so much misunderstanding? Because 
 one of the most salient features of this system, 
 which is founded upon complete observation, is 
 that it comprises all the truth to be found in the 
 preceding doctrines, which rested on incomplete 
 observation: in this sense Eclecticism unites them 
 in itself as in a common center. 
 
 The school of Condillac had found consciousness 
 to be composed only of transformed sensations, and 
 it reduced to sensation, as to a single principle, all 
 
334 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 forms of the activity of the soul. But Cousin says 
 an accurate and complete observation distinguishes 
 in consciousness three kinds of irreducible facts: 
 facts of sensation, of volition, and of intellection. 
 The analysis of the first of these had been made, 
 and correctly made, in the eighteenth century. 
 That of the others had been distorted and misrep- 
 resented, and it was precisely the latter analysis 
 which was to enable Cousin to ‘‘ rebuild eternal 
 truths.’’ The experimental method was to build 
 again what it had pulled down. It was to supply 
 ontology with a sure instrument, and with broad 
 and solid foundations. 
 
 Let us consider an intellectual fact, for instance 
 the following judgment: ‘‘ My volition moves my 
 arm.’’ In one sense this judgment is simply a fact. 
 of which consciousness informs me when it takes 
 place. But in another sense this fact implies ele- 
 ments which are beyond the range of experience; 
 for when I think ‘‘ my volition is the cause of the 
 motion of my arm,’’ I express under a concrete 
 form and apply to a particular case the following 
 general principle: ‘‘Every phenomenon implies a 
 cause.’’ Now, as soon as I consider this principle, 
 which is the soul of my judgment, it appears to 
 me to be universal and necessary; that is, supe- 
 rior to experience, since the latter relates only to 
 what is particular and contingent. Such is the 
 transition from psychology to metaphysics; or, as 
 Cousin says, from observation to speculation. The 
 philosopher starts from facts, but these serve him 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 335 
 
 only as subject-matter or occasion. Psychology he 
 uses simply as a ‘‘bridge’’ to lead him over to 
 metaphysics or ontology, from which he was other- 
 wise separated by an impassable chasm. 
 Metaphysics is the preéminent science, the sci- 
 ence of) sciences.) heresiss nomsciencey OL whatwis 
 transitory, Cousin repeats after Plato. The object 
 of science is the absolute; that is to say, that which 
 remains forever self-identical, which is not subject 
 to the necessity of coming into being or of chang- 
 ing. The eternal substance is ‘‘absolute,’’ Plato’s 
 ideas are ‘‘absolute,’’ and the principle of causality 
 is ‘‘absolute.’’ The task of science consists in 
 seeking after the absolute, and in seeking it by 
 means of observation, without which there is no 
 real science. Now, it is just when we go to the 
 bottom of the facts of consciousness which come 
 within the range of observation, that we attain to 
 principles that are absolute. The ‘‘psychological 
 method’’ thus supplies the needed transition. It 
 solves the initial problem of science, viz.: to find @ 
 postertort something whieh is a przortz. No doubt, 
 strictly speaking, neither internal nor external expe- 
 rience can supply anything @ przorz. ‘‘From the fact 
 to the principle there is no possible transition; there 
 
 bf 
 
 is an abyss between them.’’ Stilla fact may serve 
 reason as a subject-matter or occasion in conceiv- 
 ing the principle. 
 
 What is then that ‘‘reason’’ which takes me into 
 the world of the infinite and absolute, beyond the 
 
 limits of experience? It is the principle of thought; 
 
336 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 it is something within myself, but not myself; it isan 
 ampersonal faculty, although it cannot be exercised 
 unless man’s personality or ego be presupposed and 
 added” to it: *° “shall perhapsymever ‘succeed sin 
 investigating its essence; but what I know very 
 well is, that whenever it appears to me I have the 
 intuition of what is immovable, necessary and abso- 
 
 ’ 
 
 lute.’’ May notthese forms under which it is con- 
 stantly manifested to me be its very modes of exist- 
 ence, and might I not then define it as the substance 
 of necessary, universal and absolute truths, in the 
 physical as well as in the moral order of things? 
 Reason would then be the absolute and only sub- 
 stance, the source of every being and every truth; 
 in one word—God. ‘‘Reason is God looking down 
 upon man and revealing Himself to man under the 
 form of absolute truth.’’ 
 
 Cousin is here evidently anxious to go beyond 
 Kant’s point of view. He praises the latter phi- 
 losopher for having restored the necessary princi- 
 ples of knowledge rejected by empiricism in the 
 eighteenth century, and insufficiently justified by 
 Reid. But Kant in his turn made a mistake, first 
 in increasing the number of these principles, which 
 may be reduced to two (the principle of causality 
 and that of substance), and then chiefly in viewing 
 these principles only as constituent forms of the 
 human understanding. Kant thus leaves to reason 
 but a relative value, and ends ina sort of scepti- 
 cism. In order to escape this scepticism we must 
 show that reason has an absolute value, that it is not 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 33:7. 
 
 only man’s reason, but Reason in itself, and that 
 man merely participates init. Thisis met, in Cou- 
 sin, by the theory of “‘impersonal’’ reason revealed 
 to man by necessary principles. This revelation 
 he calls pure apperception, or the first and last fact 
 of consciousness: it is what makes of us rational 
 beings, and in virtue of it the most trifling of our 
 judgments contains the absolute, and is an act of 
 faith in God. 
 
 In whatever way we may conceive this ‘pure 
 apperception,’’ the absolute is in itself and not in 
 us. ‘‘The absolute soars above humanity and 
 nature, dominates and rules over them both eter- 
 nally, with only this difference: the one knows it 
 and the other does not.’’ These brilliant expres- 
 sions throw a light both upon Cousin’s thought and 
 upon its origin. We recognize in them Schelling’s 
 metaphysics. The latter’s ‘‘intellectual intuition’’ 
 nearly corresponds to Cousin’s ‘‘pure appercep- 
 tion. \ It. was naturali.thaty.Gousin, désirous).of 
 going beyond Kant’s point of view, should feel 
 attracted towards Schelling’s doctrine, which was 
 born of the same need, and was then greatly in 
 favor in Germany. Yet, though he is wonderfully 
 in accord with the German philosopher in his theory 
 of the absolute, he persists in differing from him in 
 his method. Schelling proceeds 4 priorz ; Cousin 
 maintains that his statements are founded on 
 psychological observation. It is experience, he 
 says, which, when applied to consciousness and 
 carried to a certain degree of depth, yields what is 
 
338 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 apparently most completely opposed to it, 1.e., the 
 revelation of the absolute. 
 
 Yet, one might object, are you sure that your 
 method gives all that you attribute to it? If you 
 really ground your statements on observation, you 
 start from the fact, that is, from what is relative 
 and conditioned, and however deep you may go, 
 you can never do anything more than go from one 
 condition to another, without ever reaching what is 
 absolute or unconditioned. You have yourself said: 
 ‘“*One cannot pass over from the fact to the prin- 
 ciple; there is an abyss between them.’’ How do 
 you span this abyss? It is not sufficient to say that 
 the fact is the occasion which leads to the concep- 
 tion of the principle; this is answering the question 
 with the words of the question itself. The diffi- 
 culty is a serious one. Cousin, though he does not 
 answer it, at least narrows it down by the distinc- 
 tion, —all-important with him,—between the spon- 
 taneous and the reflective point of view. 
 
 No doubt, he says, from the reflective point of 
 view, which is that of the understanding, we are 
 driven from one cause to another, without being 
 able to reach a supreme cause, and the phenomena 
 that we apprehend in ourselves never represent the 
 absolute substance. Had we no other way of look- 
 ing at things, metaphysics would be an impossi- 
 bility. But the reflective point of view cannot be 
 the only one at our disposal, for whatever is 
 reflected implies something primitive. For instance, 
 our voluntary gestures we have already made spon- 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 339 
 
 taneously. It is the same with the sounds we emit 
 in language; and how could we deliberate upon the 
 reflective use we are to make of our liberty had not 
 a spontaneous use of it first made us aware of its 
 existence? In like manner, in the intellectual order, 
 reflective judgment presupposes a spontaneous oper- 
 ation, which is precisely the pure apperception of 
 reason. ‘‘It is our lot to seek for the spontaneous 
 point of view by the help of reflection, that is, to 
 destroy it by our very search.’’ The light of the 
 understanding, which proceeds from the distinct- 
 ness and definiteness of our ideas, makes the deeper 
 region of spontaneity, in which pure appercep- 
 tion apprehends the essential being without dividing 
 or defining it, seem a little dark to us; so that the 
 light of the understanding, which is a mere reflec- 
 tion, appears to us superior to the more real, but 
 indistinct, light of pure apperception, without 
 which, however, reflective judgment itself would 
 be impossible. Pure apperception does not ex- 
 plicitly contain any idea of the limited or the unlim- 
 ited, of the relative or the absolute, of the finite 
 or the infinite; it contains all these things implic- 
 itly, and reflection forthwith converts them into 
 distinct and necessary truths. 
 
 This theory is not only interesting on account 
 of its obvious connection with those of Plato and 
 Plotinus, as well as with those of Schelling and Hegel; 
 it is also one of the most significant tokens of the 
 growing philosophical reaction against the spirit of 
 the eighteenth century: a token all the more deci- 
 
340 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 sive as Cousin himself does not seem to have under- 
 stood all its significance. He flattered himself that 
 he had been a faithful follower of the experimental 
 method and had practiced it better than the cen- 
 tury that had itself so loved and extolled it. 
 Now the principle of that method consisted in car- 
 rying analysis as far as possible, in resolving into 
 its parts even what seemed at first indivisible, in 
 seeking out the genesis of all that is in the soul, 
 and in considering nature itself as an earlier custom: 
 in one word, in supposing even that to be acquired 
 which represents itself as spontaneous. Does Cousin 
 remain faithful to the method when, on the con- 
 trary, he explains the reflective by the spontaneous 
 and exalts a sort of rational instinct above analysis? 
 Does he not rather agree with the adversaries of 
 that method, such as De Maistre, who reproached 
 the philosophers of the eighteenth century with 
 destroying all life and poetry, and tried to explain 
 by some mysterious, unfathomable, divine spon- 
 taneity, the development of human thought, of 
 societies, languages, and civilizations? 
 Romanticism in Germany had violently risen 
 against the French spirit of the eighteenth century. 
 Over against the cold and chilling light of analysis it 
 set the fruitful chzaro-oscuro of natural spontaneity; 
 against the observation of zsthetic rules, the un- 
 trammelled liberty of creative genius; against the 
 conscious processes of reflection, the imperceptible 
 movement of living nature. This romantic phil- 
 
COUSIN; ANDSECLECTICISM. 341 
 
 osophy found its way into the teaching of Fichte 
 and Schelling, with which Cousin became acquainted 
 in his youth, while with one of its chief representa- 
 tives, A. W. Schlegel, he had in Paris opportuni- 
 ties for intercourse. In his lectures from 1818 to 
 1828, Cousin was full of this philosophy. He was 
 then really a romantic philosopher, and this chiefly 
 accounts for the enthusiasm with which the youth 
 of the time ‘received. hismlessons.. | Perhaps they 
 did not understand very thoroughly such abstruse 
 metaphysics, but a genuine feeling apprised them 
 that Cousin’s brilliant yet obscure precepts sprang 
 from the same soil as the poetry of Hugo, Lamar- 
 tine, and De Vigny, or the pictures of Scheffer and 
 Delacroix. 
 
 The eighteenth century had hoped for the great- 
 est results from the personal action of the legislator, 
 the sage, and the philosopher; romantic philosophy, 
 on the contrary, in this as in everything else re- 
 duced the rédle ascribed to conscious reflection, and 
 looked for the progress of mankind only from a 
 spontaneous evolution within the souls of men. 
 From this again Cousin drew his inspiration. Phi- 
 losophers, in his thought, are but the interpreters 
 of humanity, and their teaching is to the dim 
 feeling of the mass of mankind what reflection is to 
 spontaneity. It creates nothing; its function is 
 merely to make things clear by dividing and sub- 
 dividing them, and to express them by means of 
 analysis. Mankind as a whole is ‘‘ inspired.’’ 
 
342 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 The beliefs of the masses are ¢vue; what they lack 
 is only the knowledge of the secret meaning of their 
 beliefs. 
 
 We shall not, therefore, be very much surprised 
 to detect here a point of contact between Eclecticism 
 and Traditionalism, and to find that Cousin agrees 
 with Lamennais as to the idea of “‘inspired man- 
 kind.’’ But Lamennais, like De Maistre and De 
 Bonald, openly attacks the eighteenth century in its 
 principle and in its method, whereas Cousin claims 
 to combat it in the very name of its principle and 
 method. He does not perceive that, by setting 
 spontaneity above reflection, he has adopted an 
 entirely contrary principle and method. His Eclec- 
 ticism breaks here upon the irreducible contra- 
 diction between the elements he tries to bring to- 
 gether. Between the method of the eighteenth 
 century and the metaphysics of Romanticism a 
 choice had to be made. 
 
 God is the one infinite and absolute substance. 
 Indeed, says Cousin, if He be not all things He is 
 nothing. For this pantheistic maxim he was after- 
 wards severely reproached, when he had become the 
 responsible director of philosophical teaching in 
 France. As much as he could he attenuated the 
 force of its meaning, and at last substituted for it the 
 following: ‘‘ If God be not zz all things, He is noth- 
 ing’’—a bootless concession, which did not disarm 
 his Catholic adversaries. It was not only this maxim, 
 but the very spirit of his philosophy that seemed to 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 343 
 
 them suspicious, and also his way of understanding 
 the relation between reason and faith. Had he not 
 dared to say, in his course of lectures in 1828, that 
 man advances from the twilight of religious faith to 
 the full light of philosophical truth? Is religion, 
 then, a sort of metaphysics for the people, and are 
 dogmas only more or less accurate symbols of that 
 _ truth which finds its full expression in rational doc- 
 trines? Hegel had indeed said something similar, 
 but under a veiled form, and less likely to cause a 
 scandal because in a Protestant country. Cousin 
 was violently attacked. He stubbornly withstood 
 the storm, and when he had to give way he pre- 
 ferred to give up this or that point of his doctrine 
 rather than to endanger the very existence of philo- 
 sophical teaching. After 1830 Victor Cousin must 
 be judged as a politician, and no longer as a 
 philosopher. 
 
 Furthermore, of this absolute substance we can 
 say nothing, except that it exists. Reason, or “‘the 
 Word’’ serves as mediator between it and us, and it 
 is manifested by the three great ideas of the Beauti- 
 ful, the Good and the True. Herein is the three- 
 fold principle of science, art and morals. These 
 superior ends of human activity are thus connected 
 with a divine source, and at the same time the sen- 
 sualistic and materialistic explanations given of them 
 in the eighteenth century are refuted. Art seeks to 
 realize in plastic beauty a suprasensible ideal. Science 
 pursues beyond the knowledge of what is relative 
 the possession of its true object, which is the Abso- 
 
344 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 lute. Lastly action, freeing itself from selfish 
 motives, none of which can fully satisfy a reasonable 
 being, yields to moral obligation, and conscience 
 recognizes in duty the bidding of God Himself. 
 
 Cousin has read the Crztzque of Practical Reason, 
 and makes a frequent use of Kant’s “‘sublime’’ doc- 
 trine. Yet he does not feel constrained to follow 
 its principle rigorously. He does not acknowledge 
 that man owes to “‘the categorical imperative”’ 
 absolute and almost passive obedience. There are 
 cases, he says (no doubt influenced by Jacobi), 
 when the decision of the soul, being neither blind 
 nor deliberate, but spontaneous, is self-inspired, and 
 attains to heroism and self-sacrifice from its own 
 first impulse. In the domain of action as well asin 
 that of knowledge, the creative and original func- 
 tion belongs not to reflection but to free spon- 
 taneity. 
 
 As to the soul, it is undoubtedly the first object 
 of philosophy, since our observation is first con- 
 cerned with the facts of consciousness, which alone 
 are directly given to us. But the essence of the 
 soul is not directly known to us. Cousin thinks 
 with the Scotch school, that ‘‘the real and sub- 
 stantial ego does not come under the eye of con- 
 sciousness.’’ If we get some knowledge of it, it is 
 by applying the principle of substance; an applica- 
 tion not reflective and logical, but primitive and 
 spontaneous. This is our first step outside of con- 
 sciousness. The ego then appears to us as thought, 
 sensibility and activity at one and the same time. 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 345 
 
 If we seek what constitutes its inmost nature, we 
 find it is neither thought nor sensibility. The ego 
 in its essence is liberty, and it is just because it is 
 free that it is capable of knowing and feeling. 
 “The privilege and grandeur of liberty! Where 
 that is wanting, intelligence is stifled, and where 
 intelligence dies, sensibility perishes. ... The ego 
 _is free: that is its inmost essence.”’ 
 
 Cousin was not embarrassed by the objections 
 raised against man’s free-will. This free-will is 
 sufficiently proved in his eyes by the testimony of 
 conscience which charges us with the responsibility 
 for our own actions, and by the absurdity of conse- 
 quences that follow from the contrary supposition. 
 But he conceives liberty under two forms: one 
 reflective, the other spontaneous. Liberty is exer- 
 cised with reflection when the ego sets before itself 
 an act to be accomplished, deliberates, and finally 
 comes to adecision. This form of liberty implies 
 another, which is accompanied neither by delibera- 
 tion nor by choice; a purer form although far less 
 clear to the understanding, and one in which the 
 very essence of the soul’s activity is manifested. 
 Here again, as in his theory of knowledge and as in 
 his theory of morals, Cousin does not hesitate to 
 subordinate reflection to spontaneity. Liberty, 
 like reason, participates in the absolute; and this 
 participation, though it remains amystery to the 
 understanding, is yet in us the source of every light 
 and every virtue. 
 
346 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 The course of lectures delivered by Cousin in 
 1828 marks the culminating point, and, as M. Janet 
 says, the end of the development of his theoretical 
 philosophy. In the lectures of 1817 and 1818 the 
 influence of Schelling had been predominant, while 
 in 1828 that of Hegel had become most important. 
 During his long stay in Germany, Cousin had had 
 time to become familiar with Hegel’s philosophy, 
 which had finally eclipsed all others. He had even 
 been able to profit by the explanations of Hegel 
 himself and of his closest followers. Hegel said on 
 reading Cousin’s lectures: ‘“‘I furnished him the 
 fish, and he has served it with his sauce.’’ The 
 influence of Hegel is chiefly felt in the second part 
 of the course of lectures, which treats of the phi- 
 losophy of history. Indeed, Cousin never con- 
 cealed what he owed to the German philosophers of 
 his time. Heclaims for himself nothing but the 
 conception of an impartial Eclecticism, which, judg- 
 ing previous doctrines to be not false but incom- 
 plete, endeavors to build a true and complete one 
 which shall unite them all in a vast synthesis. 
 
 To consider in Cousin only the metaphysician of 
 the years before 1830 would be wrongly to deprive 
 him of a considerable part of his work. Cousin 
 was also an orator, a professor, an administrator, a 
 historian of philosophy, and in each of these réles 
 he was admirable, or at least interesting. As a 
 professor and orator in 1828 his success was equal 
 to that of Villemain and Guizot, and the fame of 
 his eloquence still remains. As an administrator 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 347 
 
 he was the object of sharp criticism. In the course 
 of defending the teaching of philosophy in French 
 secondary schools against the clergy who wished to 
 suppress it, he formally required of the body of 
 professors he thus protected a politic prudence 
 that was rather incompatible with philosophical 
 liberty. The very obedience he exacted from them 
 changed as soon as he was dead into lasting spite 
 ‘ against his memory. Even his philosophical sin- 
 cerity had appeared open to suspicion, when, in the 
 successive editions of his works, he had been ob- 
 served to weaken his own thought, to strip it of 
 everything original, to pare it down to a vaguely 
 platonized and declamatory kind of spiritualism, 
 and, in short, to do his utmost to make it insig- 
 nificant. Thus, if we were to distinguish two 
 philosophical periods in Cousin’s life (which is 
 unnecessary), the main object of the second would 
 seem to have been to disclaim the first. 
 
 At least his services to the history of philosophy 
 can not be questioned; these were rendered chiefly 
 in his translations of Plato and Proclus, and by his 
 edition of the complete works of Descartes, a task 
 so well done that we are only just beginning to 
 think of needing a new edition. At the same time, 
 Cousin let in a first light in the long and obscure 
 period of the Middle Ages; he had also the good 
 fortune to come across an unpublished pamphlet of 
 Pascal, and he discovered the original text of the 
 Pensées. These historical works, bearing on such 
 various epochs, are all, nevertheless, connected with 
 
348 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 the leading idea of his philosophy; for impartial 
 Eclecticism bears not only on the facts of conscious- 
 ness, but also on the various doctrines which are 
 met with in the history of philosophy. To throw 
 light upon the history of philosophy by means of 
 asystem, and to prove this very system by the 
 whole history of philosophy: such was the pro- 
 gram Cousin had set for himself in his youth. 
 
 Why did he fail to fulfil it, in spite of his 
 luminous intelligence, his happy genius, and his 
 quick power of assimilation? The causes of the 
 failure are many, and we have seen in the course of 
 this study a most important one: the incompati- 
 bility between the method Cousin meant to follow 
 and the doctrines he taught. Then again, he never 
 worked out by himself any part of his philosophy, 
 at least in his earlier and better period. We have 
 nothing but sketches; the author has drawn them 
 with swift, bold strokes, but has not grappled with 
 the difficulties that arise in the details of execution 
 and compel one to make his thought perfectly clear. 
 These sketches themselves, with the exception of 
 some prefaces and short essays, are lectures deliv- 
 ered before "students.s WAS they were = brilliang 
 ingenious, spangled with eloquent passages and 
 striking expressions, one easily understands how 
 they bred enthusiasm in a youthful audience and 
 gave the impression of a forcible doctrine. But the 
 reader who is no longer under the spell of the 
 spoken word is necessarily more difficult to please. 
 And the philosophy of. Cousin, even when it 
 
COUSIN, AND) ECLECTICISM. 349 
 
 seems most abstruse and metaphysical, preserves 
 the qualities, but also the defects, of oratory. He 
 claims to be building up a science, but in fact 
 pleads rather than demonstrates. Like a barris- 
 ter, in the absence of rigorous proofs he is content 
 with probability. He has the dogmatic tone 
 which inspires and even commands confidence in 
 the hearer; but evading objections is not the same 
 as answering them. All this explains why Eclec- 
 ticism, after its brilliant beginning in 1818-1828, 
 could have no fruitful development. Cousin him- 
 self did not care for that: it was sufficient for him 
 that Eclecticism should make shift to live on. 
 
 Among Cousin’s disciples, some clung unreserv- 
 edly to the spiritualism of his later period; others, 
 far less numerous, abandoned it in important 
 points, though remaining faithful to the general 
 spirit of his doctrine. Such were Jouffroy, about 
 1840, and later on, Vacherot. Jouffroy had been 
 one of Cousin’s first pupils. Having a soul eager for 
 truth and thirsting for certitude, he was obliged to 
 confess that the philosophy of his admired master 
 did not give him entire satisfaction. None better 
 than he expressed the doubts and hesitations to 
 which his generation was subject (compare Alfred 
 de Musset’s Confession a’ un Enfant du Siecle) and 
 the imperfect solutions with which it finally had to 
 beveontented.’)In\ ordersto wll the place” of ‘the 
 religious faith which he had lost, he had dreamed 
 of an earnest and self-reliant philosophical faith; 
 
350 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 and when he saw the impossibility of such an 
 attainment his disappointment vented itself in elo- 
 quent and passionate expressions of regret, for 
 which he still lives in the world’s memory. Though 
 he had translated Reid and Dugald Stewart, he 
 refused to admit with them that the ego remains 
 unknowable, and that consciousness can grasp only 
 the phenomena of ourselves. But he has neither 
 the originality nor the subtle psychological analysis 
 of Maine de Biran, and his other works on morals 
 or zsthetics are chiefly an index of a tender, 
 proud, and aristocratic soul, rather than of a vigor- 
 ous philosophical mind. 
 
 Vacherot calls himself a free disciple of Cousin. 
 Free he is, indeed, since instead of putting aside, 
 as Cousin himself did, the metaphysical problems — 
 which Cousin had proposed in his earlier period, it 
 was with the study of these problems that he chiefly 
 dealt. He investigated the ideas of perfection, of 
 the infinite, of the ideal and of the real, to which 
 Cousin had not given sufficiently precise definitions, 
 and in La Métaphysique et la Science he endeavored 
 to show that perfection is incompatible with real 
 existence. We know the real, we form conceptions 
 of the ideal. Renan was therefore right in saying 
 that ‘‘God is the category of the ideal.’’ 
 
 This doctrine, in which the influence of Hegel is 
 visible, was strongly combated by those who might 
 be called orthodox eclectic philosophers, especially 
 by Caro and Janet. Even before these, Ad. 
 Garnier, Jules Simon, Saisset, Bersot, and many 
 
COUSIN, AND ECLECTICISM. 351 
 
 distinguished professors had followed the evolution 
 of their master towards what was called spiritual- 
 ism. They found in it a vantage-ground whereon 
 to defend themselves on one side against the Catho- 
 lic party, and on the other against the materialists 
 and positivists; and they meant to uphold, together 
 with their philosophy, those liberal principles from 
 which they did not separate it, and which were 
 dearer to them than almost everything else. They 
 represented, not ingloriously, the juste milieu inter- 
 pretation of the principles of the French Revolu- 
 tion. While defending the spirit of the eighteenth 
 century against the traditionalistic and clerical reac- 
 tions, at the same time they combated what they 
 called the excess of that spirit. Their philosophical 
 system, as well as their political doctrine, which it 
 reflects, was essentially a compromise. 
 
Oe me bre Geet BN NRA Oe HE 
 
 THE SOCIAL REFORMERS—AUGUSTE COMTE. 
 
 THE first half of the nineteenth century witnessed 
 the appearance in France of a great many thinkers 
 whose efforts were chiefly directed towards political 
 philosophy and the reform of society. In this they 
 showed themselves the immediate heirs of the phi- 
 losophers of the eighteenth century. But this devo 
 tion to social questions is also obviously a reaction 
 from the French Revolution. Such an extraordi- 
 nary upheaval could not but make itself felt in the 
 world of thought, and inevitably gave a common 
 impulse to the minds it had stirred. Some thought 
 of combating the Revolution, others of correcting 
 it, others of completing it; all of them, intention- 
 ally or not, and even in their apparently most in- 
 dependent speculations, took some account of the 
 prodigious historical event which they had wit- 
 nessed. We are often surprised to see some of 
 them present as feasible the most impracticable 
 social metamorphoses; but we must remember that 
 that generation had seen the wreck of the old 
 French monarchy, the almost yearly alterations in 
 the maps of Europe, and the rise and fall of Napo- 
 leon. Thus the limit of the possible in social and 
 
 352 
 
THE SOCIAL REFORMERS. 353 
 
 political matters must have encroached considera- 
 bly upon the impossible in their eyes. 
 
 Among these theorists the earliest, and no doubt 
 also the most original, is Saint-Simon. Born in 1760 
 and dying in 1825, he belongs to both centuries, 
 and exactly represents the transition from one to 
 the other. His mind was formed in the school of 
 D’ Alembert and the ‘‘philosophers;’’ and he in his 
 turn formed, or contributed to form, the opinions 
 of Auguste Comte, Augustin Thierry, Bazard, 
 Enfantin, and the majority of French socialists. 
 Although there is no one more unlike Bayle than 
 Saint-Simon, he may be said to stand on the thresh- 
 old of the nineteenth century, as Bayle did on the 
 threshold of the eighteenth. His was a stirring, or 
 rather, an ever-bubbling mind, surprisingly fertile 
 and no less surprisingly powerless to regulate itself. 
 Impelled by a sort of restlessness to pass constantly 
 from one subject to another, he went back and forth 
 between scientific and philosophical, social and relig- 
 ious problems; he was constantly retracing his steps, 
 strewing his capricious way with new and some- 
 times profound notions, with just observation and 
 even with suggestive principles, from which more 
 practical minds who came after him were able to 
 draw true inferences. Nothing more fragmentary 
 and desultory can be imagined than the pamphlets in 
 which he attempts to elucidate his doctrine, which, 
 however, aims at being synthetical and as viewing 
 things ‘‘as a whole.’’ 
 
 ‘‘T had set myself the task,’’ says Saint-Simon, 
 
354 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 “of throwing light upon the question of social organ- 
 ization.’’ In fact, just as the disruption of the old 
 system of government had been the work of the 
 philosophers of the eighteenth century, the “‘social 
 reorganization’’ was to be the task of those of the 
 nineteenth. The authors of the Excylopedia did 
 a work that needed to be done. They destroyed a 
 system of ideas and institutions which had served 
 their time, and were henceforth only an impedi- 
 ment to advancing civilization. But to destroy is 
 not sufficient: it is not the final destiny of society 
 to inhabit ruins. A critical period must be suc- 
 ceeded by an organic period. The philosophers 
 of the eighteenth century wrote an encyclopedia 
 in order to overthrow the theological and feudal 
 system. It was essential that the philosophers 
 of the nineteenth should, in their turn, write an- 
 other encyclopedia in order to construct the indus- 
 trial and scientific system. ‘‘My purpose,’’ says 
 Saint-Simon, “‘is to impress upon the nineteenth 
 century an organizing character.’’” 
 
 According to De Maistre, one need not go very far 
 to find the principles of social organization. They 
 have been revealed by God Himself, and are taught 
 by the Church. The crime of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury consisted precisely in ignoring these principles, 
 and in having fiercely attacked the Church. Ac- 
 cording to Saint-Simon, on the contrary, the eight- 
 eenth century was right in entirely overthrowing 
 principles bred by superstition, ignorance and _ bar- 
 barism. Like most men of the second half of the 
 
THE SOCIAL REFORMERS. 355 
 
 eighteenth century, he was by nature an unbeliever. 
 He maintained for a long time without the slight- 
 est feeling of embarrassment that ‘‘deism’’ should 
 be left to the people, while philosophers must rise 
 to “‘physicism.’’ Toward the close of his life, how- 
 ever, he began to think of founding a religion of his 
 own; but still religion presented itself to him as ‘‘a 
 political institution tending towards the general 
 organization of mankind,’’ or, more precisely, “‘the 
 body of applications of general science by means of 
 which enlightened men govern the ignorant.’’ 
 Saint-Simon has indeed a faith, but his faith is the 
 same that inspired Condorcet: it is faith in progress. 
 The Golden Age, which a blind tradition has hitherto 
 placed in the past, lies before us. We must forsake 
 the false and disheartening notion that good has 
 preceded evil; we must establish the comforting 
 and inspiriting notion that our labors will increase 
 the welfare of ourchildren. This is an ‘‘essentially 
 idea. This progress depends chiefly 
 upon the advancement of science, about which Saint- 
 Simon gave perhaps some of his most original and 
 helpful views. He indeed pointed out before Au- 
 guste Comte the onward process of the sciences 
 and of philosophy towards a positive form, and 
 
 ? 
 
 religious’ 
 
 showed that progress is dependent on the disap- 
 pearance of metaphysical hypotheses. He dis- 
 tinctly foresaw what scientific psychology and 
 social science would be; but hastened to cast aside 
 purely scientific questions (in which, moreover, he 
 sometimes blundered) and to come to what he 
 
356 | MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 thought the all-important problem of “‘social reor- 
 ganization. All nations tend to one goal, viz.: to 
 pass on from the governmental, feudal, military 
 system to the adminstrative, industrial, pacific 
 system. The moment for such a change has come, 
 and Saint-Simon believes himself destined to play 
 the part assigned by the eighteenth century to the 
 
 rg 
 
 ‘“legislators.’’ 
 
 First of all, there must be in society thus “‘reor- 
 ganized’’ a temporal power and a spiritual power, 
 distinct from each other. This division existed even 
 in the Middle Ages; it kept all European nations 
 united for several centuries under the hegemony of 
 the popes, and is “‘so perfect, that nothing better 
 can be conceived.’’ Now the temporal power is to 
 pass from the hands of the noblemen and military 
 men into those of manufacturers and producers, and 
 the spiritual power is to belong to men of science 
 and to artists; for the new system must be based on 
 principles derived from the nature of things, and 
 independent of passing beliefs and transient opin- 
 ions. The clergy must be the most learned body, 
 or else the most learned body will seize possession 
 of priestly offices. 
 
 The supreme principle of morals is henceforth to 
 be this: ‘‘All men must work.’’ Hence the con- 
 demnation of idleness, and Saint-Simon’s vigorous 
 attacks against the ‘“‘drones’’ that live at the 
 expense of producers, attacks in which the antago- 
 nism between labor and capital, between the richer 
 
THE SOCIAL REFORMERS. SEV 
 
 classes and the proletariat, was already beginning 
 to be felt. 
 
 Lastly, towards the end of his life, Saint-Simon 
 promulgated the idea of a new Christianity. The 
 work of the first apostles had for many years past 
 been misjudged and ignored; Roman Catholics as 
 well as Protestants were now both heretics. ‘* Defini- 
 tive’’ Christianity must take up again the inter- 
 rupted tradition of primitive Christianity; that is to 
 say, it must devote itself solely to a social reorgan- 
 ization intended for the physical and moral improve- 
 ment of the poorer classes. 
 
 It is not our purpose here to study the Saint- 
 Simonian school, notwithstanding the interest excit- 
 ed by its economical and social doctrines. We are 
 likewise obliged to pass by such interesting thinkers 
 as Pierre: Leroux and Proudhon, whose works 
 belong rather to the history of social theories than 
 to that of philosophy. Still we cannot help men- 
 tioning at least another Utopian reformer perhaps as 
 original as St. Simon: Charles Fourier. As early 
 as 1808 he had published his 7héorze des Quatre 
 Mouvements. The censure he passes therein upon 
 ‘*civilization,’’ and upon the philosophers who are 
 the theorists and apologists of it, is unmercifully | 
 clear-sighted. Drawing his inspiration evidently 
 from Rousseau, but being far more precise in his 
 descriptions, he throws a strong light upon the 
 incoherency, the hypocrisy, the waste of strength 
 and wealth, the misery and oppression in the midst 
 of which our modern society is living, and yet not 
 
358 | MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 without a secret feeling of complacency that induces 
 it to deem itself superior in culture and refinement 
 to all the preceding ages. Fourier then boldly 
 proceeds to state the economical and social causes 
 of the disease to which civilized nations are a prey, 
 and in so doing proves the optimism adopted by 
 many philosophers of the eighteenth century wholly 
 untenable. 
 
 But Fourier himself, when he abandons the réle 
 of critic and expounds his own doctrine, paralyzes 
 us by the candor of his optimism. He does not 
 doubt that happiness may be secured for all in the 
 society he dreams of, when men shall live ‘‘harmo- 
 niously’’ together, instead of living ina “‘civilized’’ 
 state; when their passions (which must needs be 
 good, since they are given by God), whose repres-— 
 sion makes them noxious, shall no longer be 
 repressed, but shall find in a properly organized 
 society their free, natural and innocent exercise. 
 
 Such dreams now appear to us almost childish; 
 yet mighty minds in their youth have been carried 
 away by them. How many men of great ability 
 have at first been Saint-Simonians or Fourierists! 
 Filled with enthusiasm for doctrines which prom- 
 ised less social inequality, more justice, more wel- 
 fare and enlightenment for all, they were enrap- 
 tured by a generous feeling of human solidarity. 
 Such were in their youth many distinguished scien- 
 tific men, engineers, manufacturers, and at least 
 two philosophers, Auguste Comte and M. Renou- 
 vier. 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 359 
 
 With Auguste Comte something reappears which 
 had not been seen in France for a long time: 
 an original system of philosophy, borrowing its 
 principles neither from the English nor from the 
 Germans, and endeavoring to give a final solution 
 to the problems of theory and practice. So that, 
 while the doctrines of Saint-Simon and Fourier en- 
 _gendered scarcely anything but sects, or private 
 churches, which, after a short period of fame and 
 popularity, vegetated on without exercising any 
 visible effect upon the world around, the philoso- 
 phy of Comte had a quite different fate. Inde- 
 pendently of the Positivist church, which still has 
 followers in France, in England, and in both 
 Americas, the spirit of the doctrine spread all over 
 the world, and its influence has been so consider- 
 able that the advent of this doctrine may be reck- 
 oned among the most important events of this 
 century. 
 
 This very fact is enough to show the absurdity 
 of the question often raised as to the originality of 
 Auguste Comte; a borrowed thought could never 
 have had such universal and deep influence. He 
 has been reproached with having done hardly any- 
 thing beyond reducing to a system the ideas he 
 received from the philosophers of the eighteenth 
 century, and particularly from Dr. Burdin and from 
 Saint-Simon. But he never denied his indebtedness 
 to his predecessors, except perhaps as regards Saint- 
 Simonswatten! theimirupturentercalls) *@ondorcet 
 “his spiritual father,’’ and openly considers himself 
 
360 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 as the successor—and rectifier—of the eighteenth 
 century. From Dr. Burdin we have only indica- 
 tions, interesting indeed, but merely sketched, of 
 the positive classification of the sciences. And 
 finally, even granting that many ideas were sug- 
 gested to Comte by Saint-Simon, it is sufficient to 
 read both of them in order to see how much was 
 left for the disciple to do, and how far he surpassed 
 his master. Saint-Simon advances by disconnected 
 spurts, and inconsistency does not embarrass him. 
 He seems always completely engrossed by the 
 thought of the moment; if that does not agree with 
 his previous utterances, so much the worse for 
 them; he cares but very little. Comte’s philosophy, 
 on the contrary, is admirably consistent throughout. 
 Being so rich in particular ideas as to have been 
 used as a storehouse by many writers who borrowed 
 from it the essential part of their doctrines, it is so 
 carefully arranged that we are always able to see 
 how those particular ideas are connected with the 
 general principles. In one word, Auguste Comte 
 thinks as a philosopher, and his system is among 
 the best-constructed ones that have ever been put 
 forth. It matters little, then, whether most of the 
 ideas he linked together into this powerful system 
 had been expressed before, scattered here and 
 there; it is he who, by joining them into one sys- 
 tem, gave them most of their virtue and value. 
 According to A. Comte, the modern world is 
 in a state of crisis. The eighteenth century had 
 just achieved a work of dissolution and destruction 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 3601 
 
 which had been begun as early as the end of the 
 Middle Ages. It finally destroyed the principles 
 and beliefs on which the social system of Europe 
 Wasebasea.. But can ethisiustatemlases aN On. 10r 
 human societies have spiritual as well as material 
 conditions of existence. In order that they may 
 live there must be concord among minds, opinions 
 _ must be fixed and generally accepted, and beliefs 
 become common to all., This truth has been made 
 amply apparent by retrograde statesmen such as 
 De Maistre, Lamennais, etc., although their appli- 
 cation of it was essentially false. They wished 
 men to come back to the Roman Catholic faith. 
 Comte thinks their attempt a hopeless one, and 
 that men must look to science and philosophy for 
 salvation and the means of reuniting minds. ** The ob- 
 ject of all my labors,’’ he wrote in 1825, ‘‘has been 
 to re-establish in society something spiritual that is 
 capable of counter-balancing the influence of the 
 ignoble materialism in which we are at present 
 submerged.’’ The lofty ambition of the Positive 
 philosophy is to give to mankind those indispensable 
 moral bonds which religion has ceased to supply. 
 We have already met with thoughts and pro- 
 jects of the same kind in Saint-Simon and in all 
 those who at that time felt that a ‘‘destructive 
 and critical’’ period must be succeeded by a ‘‘con- 
 structive and organizing’ one. But what is orig- 
 inal with Comte is his conception of the re- 
 constructive work. Others go straight to their 
 mark. So eager are they to procure for suffering 
 
362 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 mankind the remedy it needs, that each of them 
 brings a panacea. The Traditionalists preach sub- 
 missiveness to the Church; Saint-Simon proposes 
 Christian socialism and a clergy of scientists; 
 Fourier wishes to set up ‘“‘phalansteries.’’ All 
 these attempts, says Comte, are doomed to certain 
 failure. They are the very symptoms of the evil 
 we have to combat, for they presume to cure 
 the ills of the social body without knowing its 
 structure and functions, just as in former times 
 men undertook to affect nature without knowing 
 physics, and to practice medicine without knowing 
 physiology. The first task, upon which all the 
 rest depends, is not, therefore, to found a religion 
 or to transform the economic system of Europe. 
 We must first of all construct a true social science, 
 and a science of ‘positive politics.’’ ‘‘I am, and will 
 be, simply a theorist,’’ Comte writes; ‘‘I shall 
 look upon all discussions bearing upon constitutions 
 as nonsense pure and simple, until the spiritual 
 reorganization of society is effected, or at least 
 well under way.”’ 
 
 The mental and moral anarchy in which Europe 
 now is, shows itself in ever-recurring revolutionary 
 outbursts, in as surely recurring reactions, and in 
 the see-saw movements of parties equally eager 
 for strife and powerless to establish anything per- 
 manent. But how can we re-establish strong 
 common convictions and concord among minds 
 while harmony is wanting in each individual mind, 
 while social disorder remains a token and conse- 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 363 
 
 quence of the troubled state in which everybody’s 
 feelings and ideas are involved? On the other 
 hand, if we suppose ‘‘mental harmony’’ to be once 
 established in an individual, it will before long be 
 imparted to others, since the same demonstrations 
 must have the same value in their eyes as in his. 
 The problem of ‘‘spiritual reorganization’’ can 
 therefore be set forth in the following terms: ‘‘To 
 find a theory which will establish a conception of 
 nature, of man, and of society, logically harmonious 
 and sufficiently evident to convince all minds.’’ 
 We are here very far from Utopia and the dream 
 of social perfection, for this problem of Comte is 
 one pre-eminently philosophical. 
 
 Now the want of harmony under which men’s 
 minds labor is due essentially to the simultaneous 
 presence within them of three different and even 
 opposite modes of thought which are at strife, and 
 no one of which can as yet completely subdue the 
 other two. Ofcertain objects we judge in a scien- 
 tific and positive way; for instance, we reduce 
 the motion of celestial bodies in the solar system 
 to problems of mechanics. We are thus able to 
 foretell astronomical phenomena with some ac- 
 curacy, and knowing the laws which prevail in 
 these phenomena we no longer think of seeking 
 their cause or end. On other points we think as 
 metaphysicians; for instance, psychological phe- 
 nomena, such as thought, consciousness and mem- 
 ory, we think cannot be explained without 
 supposing an extra-phenomenal reality, a_ self- 
 
364 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 existing principle, which we call the soul. And 
 lastly, when we consider the whole of the universe, 
 or the succession of great historical events, we 
 think we recognize in these the action of a supreme, 
 intelligent and all-powerful cause, tending to an 
 end which in fact escapes us, and we think as 
 theologians. 
 
 The theological mode of thought predominates 
 chiefly in the child. For when contact with the 
 outer world first rouses reflection in man, he begins 
 by supposing everywhere, behind all phenomena, 
 beings similar to himself, who act with a purpose. 
 By degrees, as he notices the perfectly regular recur- 
 rence of certain phenomena, he ceases to postulate 
 an act of volition in order to explain each as it 
 occurs; he next imagines substances, forms, immov- - 
 able and eternal ‘‘ideas,’’ wherewith to account 
 for all that is individual and transient. Lastly, in 
 his mature years, he imagines less; he observes and 
 reasons more; he abstains from seeking after causes 
 and substances, and pursues henceforth only the 
 knowledge of laws. 
 
 But this transition from one mode of thought to 
 another is never methodical or complete; some 
 traees of the first are found in the second, and some 
 of the first two in the third. And above all, should 
 we consider the evolution of the individual mind 
 alone, we should never have discovered this law; 
 here the evolution is too brief, too rapid, while it is 
 veiled and even disfigured by the powerful influence 
 of education, which takes each new generation from 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 365 
 
 the outset to the point reached by the collective 
 generations of the past! But consider the evolution 
 of the whole of mankind and this great law at once 
 appears: human thought passes from the theological 
 stage to the metaphysical, and from the metaphys- 
 ical to the positive. The metaphysical stage is 
 in fact an unstable condition, a transition between 
 the theological stage which is going to pieces and 
 the positive stage which is being prepared. 
 
 There are, then, really but two mental attitudes 
 wherein the human mind finds itself upon a firm 
 and durable basis, and in which it can reduce its 
 conception of the universe toa system. The first 
 consists in seeking out the cause, essence and end of 
 all existing things, in trying to explain phenomena 
 and their laws, in pursuing, in a word, the knowl- 
 edge of the absolute. The second consists in being 
 contented with the knowledge of the relative, which 
 alone is within our reach, and with the determina- 
 tion of the laws which enable us to predict phenom- 
 ena. The former constantly hopes that natural 
 phenomena may suddenly be transformed in favor of 
 man, since to bring about such a result it would be 
 sufficient to conciliate the divine will upon which 
 phenomena depend. The latter knows, according 
 to Bacon’s expression, that man’s power over nature 
 is measured by his knowledge, and that natural 
 phenomena can never be altered except in accord- 
 ance with their laws. 
 
 The history of the sciences shows by a great 
 many examples that in spite of desperate resistance 
 
366 = MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 and often lamentable strifes the first attitude is 
 gradually replaced by the second. Man _ first 
 adopted the simplest anthropomorphic and theclog- 
 ical explanation of the celestial phenomena which at- 
 tracted his attention. He conceived the earth to be 
 the center of the universe, and man himself the final 
 goal of creation; he imagined the stars to be gods,and 
 their regular motion to be the expression of divine 
 wisdom. By degrees, he became aware that he was 
 an inhabitant of a remote district in the universe, 
 and that the orbits of the planets were predeter- 
 mined by necessary laws. And yet it is scarcely 
 more than a century since men of science ceased to 
 require some intervention of divine will in celestial 
 dynamics. Even in our days there are to be found 
 in physics unmistakable traces of the metaphysical 
 spirit, and to a still greater degree in physiology 
 and the moral sciences) But still, )as> time (moves 
 forward, science evidently tends to assume a more 
 and more positive form, to free itself more and more 
 from unverifiable hypotheses, and to restrict itself 
 systematically to the knowledge of the laws which 
 govern phenomena. Will not the harmony among 
 minds which we seek be realized on the day when 
 the victory of the positive spirit is complete, and is 
 not this victory the necessary outcome of a self- 
 accomplished evolution? 
 
 Without doubt the march of progress is of this 
 nature; yet the solution of the problem is not so sim- 
 ple. There are positions from which the positive 
 spirit, as manifested hitherto in science, is powerless 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 367 
 
 to drive out the metaphysical and theological spirit. 
 Theology and metaphysics have not only afforded 
 to man in past times a temporary explanation of 
 certain natural phenomena, but they have also sup- 
 plied and are still supplying him with a general 
 view of the universe, a conception of mankind, of 
 its destiny, of the use it must make of its forces, in 
 short, with a rule of conduct anda discipline. There 
 lies the secret of the tenacity with which men cling 
 to their religious and metaphysical beliefs. They 
 find here an answer to what are to them vital ques- 
 tions; and they will never forsake these points of 
 view, unless a better answer to those questions 
 comes to them from elsewhere. Now the positive 
 spirit has hitherto offered them none. It tends to 
 correct and transform each science considered sepa- 
 rately, but it does not offer a single principle to 
 regulate the mutual relations of the sciences, nor, 
 it may be said with still greater force, does it offer 
 one to regulate the relations between science in 
 general and the other forms of human activity. In 
 a word, the positive spirit has represented hitherto 
 the partial and special point of view, whereas phil- 
 osophic systems and religions represent the synthet- 
 ical and general point of view. Now the latter point 
 of view is no less indispensable to man than the 
 former; so indispensable, indeed, that we cannot 
 think that man will ever abandon it so long as his 
 reflection is directed either upon himself or upon 
 the universe. 
 
 If therefore the present crisis is due to the co- 
 
368 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 existence in men’s souls of the positive spirit and 
 the metaphysical and theological spirit, which ac- 
 cording to A. Comte are mutually exclusive, and 
 yet if the demands of the metaphysical spirit are 
 as well-founded in the general point of view as 
 those of the positive spirit are in the special scien- 
 tific point of view, what will be the issue of this 
 conflict? De Maistre, who is perfectly consistent, 
 wishes man to renounce utterly the positive spirit, 
 and to return to the mental and moral unity of the 
 Middle Ages. A logical but manifestly absurd 
 solution. Human intelligence never takes the 
 backward track; it has achieved too many imper- 
 ishable acquisitions. But if the theological and 
 metaphysical spirit can under no circumstances 
 afford the desired solution, cannot the positive 
 spirit do so under certain conditions? What is 
 wanting in it that it cannot constitute the ‘‘mental 
 harmony’’ that we seek, give a scientific answer to 
 moral and social questions, and prescribe rules for 
 human life and for science itself? Let us now sup- 
 pose the positive method to be applied not only to 
 certain classes of phenomena but to all phenomena 
 in the universe, including social and moral phe- 
 nomena; let us suppose that the positive point of 
 view ceases thus to be partial and special and be- 
 comes universal and general; that the sciences, in 
 short, instead of progressing separately are united 
 and disciplined by a positive philosophy: shall we 
 not thus obtain real mental harmony by means of 
 unity in method and homogeneity in thought? 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 369 
 
 Then the domination of the positive spirit will be 
 fully and entirely established, since it will have 
 actually ‘‘replaced’’ all that the theological and 
 metaphysical spirit formerly afforded to mankind. 
 
 All is then reduced to the supreme question: 
 Whether the positive spirit can, from the special 
 province it now rules, rise to the government of 
 the universal realm; and whether there can be, not 
 only positive natural sciences but positive morals, 
 politics and religion? ‘‘Yes,’’ answers Auguste 
 Comte, “‘all this is possible, if a positive social 
 science be possible.’’ Comte therefore endeavors 
 chiefly to constitute this social science. There 
 lies the clue to the system, there les the solution 
 of that threefold problem, scientific, moral and 
 religious which he proposed to himself. ‘‘The cre- 
 ation of sociology,’’ he says, ‘‘now comes to con- 
 stitute the fundamental unity in the whole system 
 of modern philosophy.”’ 
 
 Why did it not come sooner? To this question 
 sociology itself gives the answer. It shows that 
 the progress of mankind takes place according to 
 necessary laws, and that any social phenomenon, 
 the founding of a new science for instance, is pos- 
 sible only when all the indispensable conditions are 
 in conjunction. Thus, in order that moral and 
 social phenomena might become the object of a 
 positive science and be studied by the same 
 method as the other natural phenomena, that is, by 
 observation and the inductive method, it required 
 
370 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 nothing less than the moral, intellectual and re- 
 ligious state of Europe, and particularly of France, 
 in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It 
 was necessary that the system of ideas and beliefs 
 on which the Middle Ages had thriven should have 
 slowly dissolved, that criticism should have gradu- 
 ally undermined its principles, that, screened by 
 metaphysics, and with the help of the advancement 
 of science, the rudiments of a new system should 
 have been prepared; lastly, it was necessary that 
 the great shock of the French Revolution should 
 have made evident to all eyes the impossibility 
 either of holding to the old principles or of found- 
 ing anything new on the purely critical ideas of 
 ‘“philosophers.’’ At this stage of events, and only 
 then, could sociology become a science. And if, 
 instead of considering the whole evolution of 
 European society, we examine only the evolution 
 of the sciences, the same law will appear evident to 
 us. In any science discoveries can take place only 
 according toa certain order; Kepler comes after 
 Copernicus, and Newton after Kepler. In the 
 series of the sciences, each can become positive 
 only after the preceding ones have attained a cer- 
 tain degree of development and positiveness. 
 
 This idea of the hierarchy of the sciences, under 
 the name of classification of sciences, plays a lead- 
 ing part in the Positive philosophy. It is one of 
 the points in the system which are more generally 
 known and at the same time one of the most im- 
 perfectly known. In this classification Comte 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 371 
 
 deals only with theoretical sciences, and among 
 these with abstract sciences only. He classifies 
 them in accordance with their decreasing generality 
 and the increasing complexity of the phenomena 
 studied in them; and so he reckons six funda- 
 mental sciences, mathematics, astronomy, physics, 
 chemistry, biology, sociology. «This simple and 
 _ clear classification, which upon the whole corres- 
 ponds fairly to the order in which these sciences 
 have developed, has been commonly adopted by 
 scientific men, who have found it convenient. But 
 it has been somewhat sharply criticized by phi- 
 losophers, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, for instance, 
 who endeavored to show that it did not answer the 
 conditions of an exact and complete classification. 
 No doubt Comte would have replied that he had 
 not pretended to give such a classification. Itis a 
 problem which he did not wish to treat completely. 
 The proof of this is that when distinguishing be- - 
 tween abstract and concrete sciences he made no 
 attempt to classify the latter. His classification of 
 the sciences expresses chiefly their order of depend- 
 enoyni from vay positive mpointmorenview.\) i achtof 
 them presupposes the preceding ones and is not 
 presumed by them. Thus geometry has no need 
 of astronomy; but astronomy, on the contrary, 
 could not begin to become a science until after the 
 achievements of Greek geometricians. Physics 
 presupposes mechanics and astronomy; chemistry 
 in its turn presumes physics. Phenomena pertain- 
 ing to living bodies are subjected to the laws of 
 
372 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 mechanics, physics, chemistry, and besides to 
 special biological laws. Along with each new 
 order of phenomena depending on simpler and 
 more general phenomena there appears a new 
 science which supposes the preceding sciences to 
 have been first constituted. 
 
 Social phenomena being the most complex of 
 all, sociology is accordingly the positive science 
 which we must expect to be the last organized. 
 The political illusions still dominant in our days, 
 not only among the lower classes but among well- 
 informed persons and even among statesmen, show 
 sufficiently that men are as yet scarcely accustomed 
 to consider social facts from a positive point of 
 view. Can we wonder at this when positive 
 biology itself is quite recent, dating only from the 
 end of the eighteenth century? And yet, until the 
 latter science had attained a certain degree of de- 
 velopment no positive sociology was possible. 
 
 This is why all constructive attempts at sociol- 
 ogy made by Comte’s predecessors were necessarily 
 imperfect, and are merely monuments to the 
 genius of their authors. Thus Montesquieu 
 clearly saw in advance of his time that social 
 phenomena as well as all others are regulated by 
 laws; but as he lacked biological knowledge he 
 failed in his endeavor to determine these laws, ex- 
 aggerated the importance of climate, which is but 
 a secondary circumstance, and made _ his social 
 science end in a panegyric of the English consti- 
 tution. Condorcet was aware of the fundamental 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 373 
 
 law of progress; but having engaged in the phi- 
 losopher’s war against the theological and feudal 
 system, he condemned the great epoch of the 
 Middle Ages because he did not understand it. 
 If Comte was more fortunate in being able at last 
 to found positive sociology it was because he came 
 aiter Cabanis, Bichat and Gali, who laid the .defi- 
 _ nite foundations of scientific biology. 
 
 But how comes it that in this enumeration of 
 fundamental sciences psychology is passed over in 
 silence? Is not here a gap that imperils the whole 
 system? So at least Stuart Mill thought, and this 
 was one of the chief reasons which prevented him 
 from adhering to Comte’s philosophy. Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer in his vast philosophical synthesis inserted 
 Principles of Psychology between his Principles of 
 Biology and his Principles of Sociology. But it 
 was Comte’s opinion, as also that of Cabanis and 
 Bichat, that pyschological functions are not to be 
 studied apart from the organs which are their 
 necessary conditions, and that there is conse- 
 quently no need to separate psychology from biol- 
 ogy. But this is a mere question of form, and 
 should we infer therefrom that there is no psychol- 
 ogy in Comte, we would be entirely wrong. How 
 could this be lacking in a doctrine the essential 
 principle of which is the historical development of 
 human thought? 
 
 Comte, indeed, does not believe the subjective 
 observation of the phenomena of the soul to bea 
 scientific method of discovering their laws. He 
 
374. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 severely criticizes Cousin’s so-called psychological 
 method. He tries, in order to connect the 
 function with the organ, to assign to each faculty 
 a distinct anatomic region in the brain; he very 
 properly insists that man’s intelligence shall no 
 longer be considered as differing in kind from the 
 instinct of animals; and he commends the study of 
 comparative psychology and mental pathology. 
 When he condemns the psychology of his pred- 
 ecessors he means above all Condillac and his 
 school, whose analyses of “‘the origin of our ideas’’ 
 were at the least as logical as they were psycho- 
 logical. Comte deemed them incomplete, false 
 and dangerous, inasmuch as they tended to repre- 
 sent man as “‘a reasoning and isolated being.’’ To 
 him this was a twofold error; for, in the first place, 
 affectional functions, feelings and passions, are 
 infinitely more energetic in man, and play a far 
 more decisive part in his life than intellectual 
 functions; and, in the second place, the worst way 
 to arrive at an understanding of man is to consider 
 him individually, for there is no distinctively human 
 phenomenon which is not at the same time a social 
 phenomenon. We ought not to interpret humanity 
 by man, but, on the contrary, we ought to inter- 
 pret man by humanity. Therefore the self- 
 analysis of an individual mind, however profound 
 and acute we may suppose it to be, can never 
 reveal the laws of knowledge. It is the develop- 
 ment of mankind which alone permits us to dis- 
 cover the laws which govern the progress of the 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE, 375 
 
 human mind. This it was which enabled Comte 
 to lay down the fundamental law of “‘the three 
 stages;’’ in a word, a positive theory of knowledge 
 is inseparable from sociology. 
 
 Positive philosophy, therefore, studies psycho- 
 logical phenomena as well as other natural phenom- 
 ena; but it refuses to study them otherwise than it 
 _does the others, that is, to separate them from the 
 other classes of facts with which they are connected 
 and upon which they depend. It ignores here, as 
 everywhere else, the consideration of causes and 
 essences, and deals only with laws. It does 
 not wonder that the opposition of metaphysicians 
 is particularly strong and tenacious on questions in 
 which morals and religion are particularly concerned. 
 
 In order to determine what science is, Comte, 
 according to his method, contents himself with 
 opposing the characteristics of positive to those 
 of non-positive knowledge. Science deals not 
 with facts, but with laws. The knowledge of 
 a fact has no scientific value in itself; it is the same 
 as regards the knowledge of any number of facts, 
 which merely deserves the name of erudition. Science 
 begins when we can substitute the prevision of 
 phenomena for the direct observation of them; 
 that is, when we have discovered the constant con- 
 nection which permits us from the presence of a 
 certain fact to infer another determined fact. Those 
 who believe that the accumulation of facts consti- 
 tutes science mistake a stone-quarry for an edifice. 
 
376 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Even very early and when still far from the positive 
 method the human mind cannot be contented with 
 the mere statement of facts. It demands a theory 
 in order to group together those it is acquainted 
 with, and to observe new ones. Just at this point 
 the theological conception of nature is particularly 
 valuable. As it arises spontaneously in the mind, 
 its appearance does not depend upon the observa- 
 tion of phenomena, and yet it permits such obser- 
 vation, which gradually supplants it, first by a 
 metaphysical, then by a positive view of nature. 
 
 The great school for positiveness is the science 
 of mathematics. In this preéminently scientific 
 study the mind learns, to use Descartes’s own words, 
 not to feed upon sham reasons. It becomes trained 
 in the practice of the different forms of reasoning. 
 Mathematics is the very school for logic. There is 
 no other. We learn the art of seeking the truth 
 only through seeking it; so that the education of 
 the man of science should always begin with the 
 study of mathematics. But though necessary, this 
 study is not sufficient; nay, nothing would be so 
 fatal to the advancement of our knowledge as the 
 exclusive domination of the mathematical spirit over 
 all the positive sciences. 
 
 Together with the rise of sciences of the inor- 
 ganic world, astronomy, physics, and chemistry, 
 the experimental method appears. It teaches the 
 legitimate use of hypotheses, makes clear the idea 
 of natural /aws, and, in so doing, deals the most 
 telling blow to the theological conception of nature. 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. SHA 
 
 The experimental method rids man of the error of 
 taking himself to be the center of the world, reveals 
 to him his inability to discover causes, and par- 
 ticularly final causes, and teaches him to gain a 
 definite though limited power through the knowl- 
 edge of laws. ‘‘Let us know, in order to foresee, 
 in order to provide.”’ 
 When we pass on from inanimate nature to the 
 organic world, from physics and chemistry to biol- 
 ogy, the positive method increases proportionately in 
 richness. Instead of mathematical ciphering, which 
 cannot be applied to such unsettled and complex 
 phenomena, instead of experimenting, which is 
 almost impracticable on living beings, the biologist 
 will make use of the comparative method, which 
 has been found to be so extremely fruitful. More- 
 over, while the sciences before named could examine 
 isolated phenomena in pairs and determine the 
 simple relations between antecedent and conse- 
 quent, biological phenomena are so entirely subor- 
 dinate to one another that he who studies them 
 must constantly take into account the action of all 
 upon each and of each upon all. Details here 
 become intelligible only as referred to the whole. 
 And this is truer still of sociology than of biology, 
 since harmony in a human society is still more com- 
 plex and abounding than ina living body, and since 
 we must resort to history in order to understand it. 
 Each of the fundamental sciences, therefore, adds 
 to the positive method something especially its own. 
 The omission of any one of them would baffle any 
 
378 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 attempt to organize the sciences that come after, 
 and consequently the Positive philosophy which 
 appears along with the last of them. Thus in the 
 system of Auguste Comte there is a two-fold course 
 to be pursued by the mind: first, an ascending 
 course, starting from the lowest stage of reality, 
 from the geometrical, the most simple and general 
 of phenomena, and rising progressively to the highest 
 degree, to social phenomena, the most complex 
 and special of all. This summit being reached, a 
 science both positive and universal is then consti- 
 tuted. Thereupon begins a descending course from 
 sociology to the other sciences, in which the mind 
 assigns to each of them from the standpoint of 
 positive philosophy the goal it should pursue, the 
 limit to its researches, and its proper subordination 
 to the whole of human culture, which in turn is 
 subordinate to morals and religion. 
 
 Comte endeavors in this way to secure at once 
 the interconnection and the independence of the 
 fundamental sciences. Nothing is further from his 
 thought than to seek a single supreme law for all 
 phenomena in the universe, as had been done by 
 Saint-Simon, who fancied that he had found this 
 law in Newton’s universal attraction. Comte posi- 
 tively condemns any attempt to seek ‘‘such a unity 
 at once chimerical and injurious.’’ According to 
 him, the different classes of phenomena which are 
 the object of the fundamental sciences cannot be 
 reduced oneto another. They are conditions one 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. BV AS) 
 
 of another, but they are not identical, and as the 
 simpler sciences are always naturally further ad- 
 vanced than the more complex, Comte recommends 
 the latter to defend themselves against the encroach- 
 ments of the former. Thus, physicists should 
 beware of ‘‘the thralldom of algebra.’’ There is in 
 physical phenomena something which is not to be 
 reduced to mechanics. Similarly, when we pass on 
 from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biol- 
 ogy, from biology to sociology, there appears at 
 each step a richer form of reality which we should 
 fail to appreciate if we meant to explain “‘what is 
 superior by what is inferior.’’ The only unity 
 which is necessary and sufficient in science is 
 the unity of method, which secures “‘homogeneity 
 of thought,’’ and this unity has been effected by 
 the organization of sociology. 
 
 The search for a single supreme law for all 
 phenomena springs at bottom from the same instinct 
 as the search for causes, ends, and substances; it is 
 still the metaphysical instinct in search of the abso- 
 lute. But Positive philosophy tends only to the 
 knowledge of what is relative, as the only knowledge 
 accessible to man. True, it seeks to reduce more 
 special to more general laws; but it finds that there 
 are laws which do not yield to this process, It 
 establishes the unity of science only from a socio- 
 logical point of view. Now, in one sense, sociology 
 depends upon all otmer sciences, and again, in 
 another sense, it dominates them all. 
 
380 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Comte divides sociology into social statics and 
 dynamics, according as it studies societies at a 
 given period, or in the regular progression of their 
 successive stages: it is the distinction between rest 
 and movement, between order and progress. But 
 the laws of statics themselves are to be discovered 
 best by observing a society in action; since when a 
 certain category of social phenomena undergoes a 
 change, all the others, by virtue of their interde- 
 pendence, vary simultaneously. Religion, art, 
 morals, civilization, economic conditions, political 
 constitution, scientific knowledge, are all so many 
 aspects of social life, which may be said to be func- 
 tions one of another. : 
 
 The most general law of social statics, at least as 
 regards human societies, was pointed out by Aris- 
 totle; it is the law of the separation of functions 
 and of the combination of efforts. In fact, but for 
 the separation of functions, societies would be mere 
 agglomerations of families, and the division of labor 
 would not exist, and yet this division is the neces- 
 sary condition of a multiplicity of social phenom- 
 ena: )) the #vincrease ‘of: ‘society, ithe “tormationser 
 classes or castes, the divergence of ideas and man- 
 ners, and lastly the institution of a dual govern- 
 ment (spiritual and temporal) which, in Comte’s 
 beautiful definition, represents Jl’esprit ad’ ensemble 
 dans la soctété. 
 
 Comte studies social dynamics in the develop- 
 ment of civilized mankind, and more especially in 
 that of the Caucasian race. Provisionally he omits 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 381 
 
 in his account of human evolution the black and 
 yellow races, merely saying that they will be 
 included in it later on when the more advanced 
 part of mankind has fully reached the positive 
 period. The essential law of social dynamics is 
 progress. The ancients were inevitably ignorant of 
 it. Though more or less dimly perceived by such 
 modern thinkers as Pascal, Fontenelle, Turgot, and 
 above all Condorcet and Kant, it could not find its 
 definitive expression until the French Revolution 
 had enabled men to conceive the ascending course 
 from the Greco-Roman system to the system of the 
 Middle Ages, and from the latter to the positive 
 system. So long as the comparison was limited to 
 the two former terms, an essential element was 
 lacking for the idea of progress. 
 
 Progress does not necessarily mean bettering, or 
 endless improvement. Progress, in sociology as 
 elsewhere, merely expresses a succession of stages 
 reculated by laws. °° Thevpresent, “said ‘Leibniz; 
 mist iulleolsthe past, ‘andwoie withthe future.’ ( 
 The evolution undergone by a living being, all the 
 phases it goes through from its embryo state to its 
 adult form, is an excellent illustration of progress. 
 Progress;. says Comte isthe development. of 
 order.’’ To conceive progress under its most gen- 
 eral aspect, is to conceive order as susceptible of 
 development; and this conception, wonderfully 
 applicable to biological and sociological phenom- 
 ena, also finds employment in mathematics. It is 
 what Comte calls “‘an encyclopzdic law,’’ which 
 
382 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 enables us, without reducing all the laws in the 
 world to one law, to represent them to ourselves as 
 ‘‘ordered and convergent.’ 
 
 We cannot here give even a summary analysis 
 of the vast philosophy of history in which Comte 
 develops his sociological law of progress; but we 
 are already acquainted with its most general princi- 
 ple, which is the ‘‘law of the three stages.’’ Comte 
 shows how mankind must have passed from fetich- 
 ism, which is the earliest form of the theological 
 stage, and is to be met with even in superior ani- 
 mals, to polytheism, and from polytheism to 
 monotheism: how afterwards metaphysics under 
 the increasing impulse of the positive spirit re- 
 duced monotheism to more and more colorless and 
 inconsistent forms of deism, and at last reached 
 the positive period. Arrived at this point, the 
 human mind does not deny the absolute (atheism 
 is but another sort of theology, and a most unten- 
 able one); it merely abstains from seeking it, and 
 is henceforth contented with seeking laws through- 
 out the whole realm of reality. Thus does man- 
 kind pass from an initial homogeneous state, fetich- 
 ism, to a final homogeneous state, positivism; 
 between the two extremes lies the history of relig- 
 ions, Civilizations, and philosophies,—a succession 
 of necessary revolutions, the connection of which 
 constitutes history. 
 
 Humanity, indeed, always seeks to make its 
 conceptions agree with its observations, and this it 
 accomplishes periodically. But, while the system 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 383 
 
 of conceptions at which it stops remains stationary 
 the number of facts and laws observed is constantly 
 increasing, and a moment comes when the equilib- 
 rium is again disturbed. Then the conceptions 
 must once more be adapted to the acquired knowl- 
 edge, and a new phase of equilibrium, as unstable 
 as the preceding ones, is established. This same 
 process had already led humanity out of its 
 primitive theological state; for even then, some 
 rudiments of the positive spirit were mingled with 
 it. The most common phenomena occurred so 
 regularly that man must have had at once a dim per- 
 ception of the laws governing them; for instance, 
 there seems never to have been any god of gravity. 
 From this humble origin, and from necessity that 
 spurred man’s natural sloth, sprang the scientific 
 spirit, which was the main factor in the evolution 
 of the human understanding, and consequently of 
 the whole of civilization. 
 
 It follows from this theory of progress that in all 
 the systems of the past, in every religion, in every 
 kind of metaphysics, the Positive doctrine meets no 
 adversaries, but only precursors. These it does not 
 need to refute; it accepts them as so many necessary 
 links in the chain of the evolution of the human 
 mind. ‘‘By ceasing to be absolute, Positive philos- 
 ophy «ceases. to (be criticalvotmall’ the pasty *\\\) It 
 alone can be just towards all philosophies. A 
 Positive philosopher does not give up his right to 
 judge, but he will not reproach a past epoch with 
 having violated principles which it could not have 
 
384 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 known. In short. without dropping into either 
 fatalism or optimism, Comte does not permit us to 
 expect the past to be otherwise than the evolution 
 of progress permitted it to be. Thus from the 
 historical point of view the Positive philosophy 
 appears true to its relative character, and lays down 
 a principle the consequences of which are far- 
 reaching. History becomes ‘“‘the sacred science’’ 
 of the nineteenth century and the indispensable 
 condition of all positive knowledge in morals. 
 
 This theory of progress, as well as the theory 
 of knowledge, tends, with Comte, to substitute the 
 consideration of mankind for that of the individ- 
 ual. We must no longer study the ‘‘Me’’ but the 
 ““Us.’’? The I'va0 ceavtéy which had been the prin- 
 ciple of philosophical speculation since Socrates is 
 replaced by the precept to civilized mankind: 
 ‘““Know thy history.’’ Thus Comte’s philosophy 
 is indeed a “‘philosophy of humanity;’’ and through 
 this central idea of humanity is effected the transi- 
 tion from the theoretical doctrine to morals, politics 
 and religion. 
 
 Like Saint-Simon, and even more than Saint- 
 Simon, Auguste Comte rejects the notion which 
 the eighteenth century entertained of the Middle 
 Ages. He sees in this period not a long night of 
 barbarism, superstition and misery, but a time of 
 fruitful work, in which the modern world was 
 organized after a pattern superior to that of the 
 ancients. One feature alone would be sufficient to 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 385 
 
 prove the superiority of the Middle Ages over an- 
 tiquity: the existence of a spiritual power, the 
 power of the popes, distinct from and independent 
 of the temporal power of the princes, and capable, 
 if needed, of counterbalancing the latter. 
 
 Comte is never weary of expressing his ad- 
 miration for this ‘‘masterpiece of human wisdom’’ 
 which for centuries preserved the unity of Christian 
 Europe. It is his aspiration that the positive 
 philosophy shall found a new spiritual power, 
 which like the Catholic organization of the Middle 
 Ages will be able to bring all minds together and 
 to subordinate politics to morals. He also praises 
 the moral teaching of the clergy in those centuries. 
 We witness in this body an admirable social con- 
 sciousness. Under a most felicitous and im- 
 pressive form it made the individual feel the 
 necessity of self-sacrifice and the worth of love; it 
 bestowed upon all, humble and great alike, at least 
 a minimum of philosophical instruction, as sum- 
 med up in the catechism. In his later years Comte 
 himself made the /wztation of Christ, together with 
 Dante, his daily reading. 
 
 Unfortunately this moral teaching was fettered 
 by dogma to a system of beliefs which the positive 
 spirit has overthrown. As the ecclesiastical system 
 of morals refuses to part with its beliefs, it is 
 likely to meet with a similar fate, and we see in 
 fact, that on many points the loss of religious 
 beliefs is accompanied by a sort of moral decay 
 which threatens even the institution of family. We 
 
386 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 might be alarmed at this with good reason if the 
 Positive philosophy, after having reorganized 
 beliefs, were not prepared to reorganize morals 
 likewise. 
 
 To begin with, moral phenomena, like all social 
 phenomena, depend upon other series of simpler 
 and more general phenomena in the universe. 
 The behaviour of man is determined in its main 
 features by the conditions of the world he moves 
 in. \-Lhus' the place of the’ earth “in ‘the “solar 
 system, the recurrence of seasons, physical and 
 chemical laws, especially the biological laws which 
 determine the average duration of man’s life, and 
 finally sociological laws, all together constitute a 
 powerful regulator of man’s activity. Though for 
 a long time ignorant of these laws, man was never- 
 theless subject to their action; knowing them now 
 he will not foolishly attempt to elude them, but 
 here as elsewhere he may turn his knowledge to 
 account by making natural laws subservient as far 
 as possible to the object he has in view, and 
 in passing ‘“‘from the natural to the artificial 
 order,’’ which is in this case the moral order. 
 Thus, as Comte says in a beautiful maxim, were 
 we more intelligent it would mean being more 
 moral; for when better acquainted with the grand 
 fact of human solidarity: that man exists only in 
 humanity, we can not help seeing that the only 
 sensible rule of conduct for us is ‘‘to live for 
 others.’’ And conversely, were we more moral, 
 it would mean being more intelligent; for in prac- 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 387 
 
 tising this rule we should experience a vivid and 
 immediate feeling of being united to our fellow- 
 creatures. 
 
 Comte thinks with Cabanis and Gall that the 
 ““philosophers’’ of the eighteenth century misunder- 
 stood the moral nature of man in maintaining that 
 nothing was innate but that it was altogether the 
 product of education. On the contrary, like all 
 animals we have propensities and inclinations with 
 which we are born. Biology studies the relation 
 of these to our organism, and sociology studies 
 their influence upon our behavior, which depends 
 upon them far more than upon reflection. These 
 innate propensities are of two kinds. Some of 
 them are egotistical, and prompt the individual to 
 seek his own preservation, welfare and happiness; 
 others are altruistic and induce him to be mindful 
 of others in his actions, to love his neighbour, in 
 short, to find his happiness in the happiness of 
 others. The moral problem is, then, as follows: To 
 make altruism, which is originally the weaker feel- 
 ing, predominate over egotism, which is naturally 
 the stronger; or, in a word, to make “‘humanity 
 predominate over animalism.’ 
 
 , 
 
 To suppress egotism 
 is not in our power; it is even a dangerous chimera 
 to think this desirable. Morality consists in subor- 
 dinating it. 
 
 And mankind would not succeed even in this 
 were not the constant action of that external regu- 
 lator we have just mentioned at work in the same 
 direction, encouraging a spontaneous kind of moral- 
 
388 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ity, of which reflective morality is but a continua- 
 tion. For instance, family life and social life favor 
 the almost endless increase of altruistic feelings and 
 propensities. These may be developed at the same 
 time in all the members of a social group, and are 
 even increased by imitation and contagion. Selfish 
 sentiments, on the contrary, cannot act without 
 clashing against one another, and social life requires 
 that a bridle be put upon allof them. But it is 
 chiefly by the increase of intelligence and the de- 
 velopment of Positive philosophy that the progress 
 of morality may be secured, so far at least as our 
 imperfect nature permits. For social science, by 
 demonstrating the fundamental law of human 
 solidarity, and by giving to the idea of order its 
 fullest expression, shows at the same time that the 
 claims of egotism are absurd, and that man is des- 
 tinedstom lve 1orvotnerses 
 
 Comte’s ethics is not therefore to be numbered 
 with sentimental systems of ethics. It is rather a 
 translation into positive language of the systems 
 based upon the universal order, such as that of 
 Spinoza or Leibniz. Only Comte separated it from 
 its theological and metaphysical principles. Moral- 
 ity, as well as science, previously considered as 
 absolute, has now become relative. One and the 
 same law has prevailed in the evolution of the 
 human conscience and of the human intellect. 
 
 We live zz Humanity and ¢hrough Humanity, says 
 science. We must live for Humanity, says morality. 
 Thence follow a pedagogy, a statecraft and a 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 389 
 
 religion closely linked together, and based on the 
 same principles. 
 
 Education is to be directed entirely towards 
 securing the harmony of minds. The object is to 
 fill them with strong common convictions, and in 
 this positive science and philosophy alone can suc- 
 ceed. Not that it is incumbent upon everyone, or 
 even possible for everyone, to test the value and 
 certainty of this science and philosophy. And it 
 is sufficient that those who are able to do so should 
 find in them nothing that their reason refuses to 
 accept. Others must trust to the testimony of 
 those who have made this test. How many men 
 are now qualified to criticize and verify the theory 
 of the solar system? Yet everybody accepts it, 
 and this confidence is considered to be reasonable. 
 It will be the same with all philosophy when we 
 haye fully, entered the /positive)) period; andthe 
 unanimity of assent will then produce an intensity 
 of belief we can with difficulty picture to ourselves. 
 
 Comte’s statecraft can hardly be separated from 
 his religion, its first principle being the distinction 
 between the temporal and the spiritual power. The 
 latter is to be the prerogative of a clergy composed 
 of men of science, who are to be at the same time 
 the educators of youth and the priests of that 
 humanity which is the supreme object of Comte’s 
 religion. Humanity, which he also calls the 
 Great @Being.) y1s) deined@ases the tunion; ofall 
 beings, past, present and future, who freely con- 
 tribute to the perfection of the universal order. 
 
 1 
 
390 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Its two essential attributes are solidarity and con- 
 tinuity. The solidarity of human society is the 
 closest and most perfect one offered by nature. It 
 is a wonderful thing to observe how all the func- 
 tions of society are performed with unchanging 
 order, even in times of war and revolution,—all 
 the more wonderful since those who severally con- 
 tribute to it often think only of pursuing their own 
 selfish ends. This happy harmony does not prevent 
 the competition of individuals from remaining 
 essentially free, and does not repress personal 
 efforts. There is no greater error than to compare 
 men to the cells of an organism or to the branches 
 of a polyp. In the society depicted by Comte the 
 individuality of each member of the body is quite 
 compatible with the unity of the body. 
 
 A still more marked characteristic of the ‘‘Great 
 Being’’ is continuity. Thanks to this, human soci- 
 ety, alone among all, has a history; thanks to this, 
 the inheritance of past generations is handed down 
 to the following generations; thanks to this, science, 
 art and civilization are progressing. Comte found 
 a striking way of expressing this continuity. 
 ‘‘Humanity,’’ he says, ‘‘is composed of more dead 
 men than living men.’’ This is no figure of speech; 
 Comte means his statement to be taken literally. 
 Even as Humanity is not an abstraction, but a 
 reality as real as the individuals of whom it is com- 
 posed, so do the dead actually live again in us. 
 
 Comte substitutes for the metaphysical idea of 
 the immortality of the soul the positive idea of 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 391 
 
 +) 
 
 incorporation into the ‘‘Great Being.’’ Men whose 
 behaviour has been deserving do not wholly die; 
 they continue their existence in others by virtue of 
 the continuity of society. Man has, therefore, two 
 kinds of existence. During the first, he partici- 
 pates in social life as an individual. If he under- 
 goes this trial honorably, that is, if he subordinates 
 in himself egotism to altruism, he enters after his 
 death into a second existence, the better part of 
 him is incorporated into the spiritual life of Human- 
 ity. This form of immortality is free even from 
 the laws of space and number. In how many men 
 has not the soul of Jesus or of Plato risen from the 
 dead? One can understand how the soul thus 
 idealized should end only with the ‘‘Great Being.’’ 
 This leads naturally to the commemoration of the 
 dead, that is, to the institution of feasts in which 
 the living representatives of Humanity celebrate 
 the memory of its benefactors who have made it 
 what it now is. 
 
 Thus is established the religion of Humanity, 
 the crown of Comte’s philosophy. He defines 
 religion as ‘‘a state of perfect harmony.’’ Con- 
 sidered in the individual, it is what regulates or 
 fixes in him the relations between feeling, intelli- 
 gence and action. Considered in society, it is what 
 brings men together, or harmonizes their mutual 
 intercourse. The part played by religion has been 
 an exalted one in the history of mankind. It has 
 been both the agent and the essential sign of prog- 
 ress. The great law of social dynamics, the law 
 
392 MODERN. PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of the three stages, marks the process of human 
 understanding by the succession of religious forms, 
 fetichism, polytheism, etc. The part of religion 
 will be no less important in the positive period. 
 The religion of reason does not combat revealed 
 religious, but rather considers itself as their heir-at- 
 law, and looks upon religious history as ‘‘a long 
 minority of Humanity under the guardianship of 
 God.’’ And if henceforth religion has for its ob- 
 ject, instead of an absolute, perfect and eternal 
 Being, an imperfect, conditioned and transient being, 
 it will not be on that account any less fervent or any 
 less beneficent. 
 
 In his Politique Positive, and in his subsequent 
 works, Comte undertook to prescribe in their mi- 
 nutest details the dogmas, worship, and management 
 of the new religion. He took pattern from the 
 Catholic organization, which he looked upon as a 
 masterpiece. This caused Huxley to say that 
 Comte’s system was ‘“‘Catholicism minus Chris- 
 tianity..’ A great many of the disciples who had 
 gathered round the founder of the Positive phi- 
 losophy refused to submit to the High Pontiff of 
 the religion of Humanity. Those dissenters had a 
 right to resume their liberty from the moment when 
 the doctrine of the master ceased to meet with their 
 assent. But they went further. They maintained 
 that it was not they who abandoned Comte, but 
 Comte who abandoned himself; that he was unfaith- 
 ful to his own principles and to the positive spirit, 
 and that in the Polztique Positive he was instituting, 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 393 
 
 in accordance with the subjective method, a second 
 philosophy in contradiction to the first.—It is true 
 that Comte’s last works have a strong sentimental 
 and mystic coloring which is absent in his first works. 
 No doubt also there is something offensive and 
 almost ridiculous in the pedantic precision of the 
 details into which he enters in organizing the religion 
 of Humanity. But the unity of his philosophical 
 thought is unquestionable. He vindicated it vic- 
 toriously against those whom he calls ‘‘incomplete 
 Positivists.’’ ‘‘I have devoted my life,’’ he says, 
 ‘to deriving from the science of the real the neces- 
 sary foundations of sound philosophy in accordance 
 with which it was fitting for me to construct the 
 true religion.’’ And to close the discussion with an 
 unanswerable argument, he reprinted at the end of 
 the Politique Positive his first youthful pamphlets, 
 written nearly forty years previous, in which we 
 find the same leading ideas throughout the doctrine, 
 and see the establishment of a definitive religion to 
 have been its supreme object. 
 
 Therefore, whatever Littré may say to the con- 
 trary, there were not two successive and opposing 
 philosophic systems propounded by Comte. There 
 was only one, which comprises at once his method, 
 his statecraft, and his religion. Yet the division of 
 the school corresponds to a real distinction within 
 the system. In one part of his philosophy Comte 
 represents the general tendencies of his century; in 
 another he expresses more especially the particular 
 aspirations of the generation to which he belonged. 
 
394. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 This part, perhaps the most dear to its author, 
 ‘the thought of his youth realized in his riper 
 years,’’ the creation of a new religion, was, more- 
 over, the one which almost immediately withered. 
 The other remained full of life, and has not yet 
 ceased to bear fruits. 
 
 Comte considers himself as the upholder and 
 corrector of the philosophy of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury in France, and as the successor of Descartes, 
 whose work he completes. The inheritance of the 
 eighteenth century is handed down to him by Con- 
 dorcet, his ‘‘spiritual father’; but he is also deeply 
 influenced by Joseph de Maistre, who points out 
 the negative and destructive character of this phi- 
 losophy. Comte does not seek to reconcile them 
 (which would indeed be impossible), but to discover 
 a higher point of view from which he will take in at 
 a glance what truth there is in both. This point of 
 view he finds on the summit of the positive social 
 science. 
 
 Descartes had considerably advanced the positive 
 spirit; he was really one of the creators of modern 
 philosophy. But he had attempted to group to- 
 gether into a system all the natural sciences after a 
 mathematical method, and the inadequacy of such 
 a mode of procedure appeared more and more 
 obvious as he applied it to more and more com- 
 plex phenomena. Thus in biology he was led to 
 the untenable paradox of animal automata; and 
 when he came to man and society he was suddenly 
 compelled to lay aside the positive method and to 
 
AUGUSTE COMTE. 395 
 
 adopt once more the metaphysical. The fault 
 does not lie with him but with the state of sciences 
 in his time, for chemistry hardly existed then, and 
 physiology was yet unborn. Comte takes up again 
 Descartes’ work, perfects and completes it. On 
 the one hand he abstains from representing the 
 physical universe as a mechanism, but he states at 
 once the interdependence and the independence of 
 the various classes of phenomena. On the other 
 hand he extends the positive method to the study 
 of a// natural phenomena, even the most complex, 
 thus finally securing the victory for the positive 
 spirit. 
 
 Comte is therefore a descendant of the earlier 
 French philosophers. Between the philosophy of 
 Descartes and his own we may observe the links in 
 the chain, the chief of which are forged by Fonte- 
 nelle, Montesquieu, Diderot, D’Alembert, Con- 
 dorcet, Cabanis, and Bichat. Comte understood 
 thoroughly the import of the scientific work accom- 
 plished in the preceding century; he had also a 
 presentiment of the powerful influence which the 
 development of historical science was to exercise 
 upon men’s minds. He perceived clearly that, 
 under the influence of a philosophy which re- 
 nounced the pursuit of the absolute, the aim of all 
 moral, political, social and religious endeavor 
 would be entirely transformed. 
 
 So that, however vehemently the value of 
 Comte’s system may be disputed when it assumes 
 to take the place of either the philosophies or the 
 
396 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 religions of the past, we are compelled to recog- 
 nize almost everywhere in the present century the 
 underlying spirit of his doctrine. And not only 
 the philosophies but the historical and_ scientific 
 work and even the romance and the art of our 
 times are deeply permeated by this spirit. 
 
Ch AEA Keech: 
 
 RENAN AND TAINE 
 
 RENAN possessed, first and foremost, a marvellous 
 gift of style. Heat once took rank among classical 
 writers beside the great masters of French prose. 
 He was also a historian. Whatever may be the 
 judgment of posterity regarding the Origines du 
 Christianisme and the Historre du Peuple a’ Israel, 
 the undertaking was a great one, and marks an 
 epoch in this sort of study in France. But was 
 Renan really a philosopher? In this field do we 
 find in his numerous books anything beyond max- 
 ims, opinions, beautifully expressed, but without 
 any bond of unity and inner coherence? Though 
 he shuns all dialectic display, and is careful never 
 to give demonstrations, is there ever found in his 
 writings a consistent and solid nucleus, a body of 
 principles ensuring the continuity of his thought 
 amidst apparent changes, paradoxes and ironies? 
 Renan himself certainly thought that there was. 
 To this not only his Dzalogues Philosophiques, but 
 his Drames Philosophiques, and above all, L’ Avenir 
 de la Science, testify expressly. The rest of his 
 productions, also, and even his most special works 
 of technical scholarship, as those on linguistics, 
 had evidently in his mind a philosophical bearing. 
 397 
 
398 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 After the example of his master, Burnouf, he be- 
 lieved that the greatest results could often be 
 obtained from the minutest analysis of details. 
 The philosopher in him always stood at the elbow 
 of the philologist. 
 
 Various causes may have rendered him liable to 
 misinterpretation. First, the particular nature of 
 his style; he is fond of delicate shades and tints 
 of meaning, and averse to peremptory and sweeping 
 assertions. He must have seemed often a dilet- 
 tante, who delighted in toying with ideas; and we 
 cannot deny that he was pleased with his own sup- 
 pleness. But this suppleness was not incompatible 
 with a serious mind anda respect for truth. We 
 must so completely respect truth, says Renan, as 
 never to overstate it; and we already overstate truth if 
 we present it without the restrictions, the extenua- 
 tions, the shades, and even the doubts it implies. 
 ‘fA thoroughly complete work ought to leave no 
 need jfor:a) refutation.) 1) Phe sreverse polmenveny 
 thought ought to be pointed out, that the reader 
 may see at one glance the two opposite faces of 
 which every truth is composed; though this twofold 
 way of thinking may occasion some uneasiness in 
 readers who are fond of simplicity. 
 
 Furthermore, it is true that Renan’s philosophy 
 varied, not on the chief points, but in details, and 
 above all, in the tone of expression. Being not 
 only much inclined to take a broad view of the 
 world and of mankind, but also very sensitive to 
 the events he witnessed, Renan felt keenly the 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 399 
 
 shock with which these events reacted on him, as is 
 shown by his works. The revolution of 1848 and 
 the June days, the coup a’état which made Napo- 
 leon the Third an emperor, the disasters of 1870, 
 the final success of the Republican party in 1878, 
 all in their turn exercised a powerful influence upon 
 Renan’s mind, giving it, however, rather a different 
 coloring than a new direction. Finally, last but 
 not least among the reasons which may have caused 
 Renan’s philosophy to be misconceived, it is not of 
 a regular, and so to speak, classical type. It is 
 not fashioned in the usual form. Its problems are 
 not proposed or solved in the customary terms. 
 The reason for this is that Renan composed his 
 philosophy for his own use, under the pressure of 
 needs peculiar to himself, such as most other men 
 of his generation did not feel as he did. That he 
 was able to communicate these needs to them is not 
 the least part of his glory. 
 
 Like Lamennais and Father Gratry, Renan went 
 from the Roman Catholic Church to philosophy. 
 But there is a wide difference between them and him. 
 Lamennais, after having given his whole strength 
 to attacking, with the Traditionalists, the philosophy 
 of the eighteenth century, went on to develop the 
 social principles he discerned in the Gospel, and to 
 work out the conception of a Christian democracy. 
 In his contest with Rome he did not in the least 
 assail the real essence of faith; and he was justified 
 in entitling one of his most vigourous pamphlets 
 Paroles d’un Croyant. Father Gratry thought he 
 
400 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 had found a philosophical proof of what is taught 
 by religious dogmas, or at least by part of them. 
 His@. transcendental method 4, usted, 5 as ale 
 thought, by its analogy with the transcendental 
 method used in mathematics, led him to the much- 
 desired reconciliation of reason and faith. Renan’s 
 case is quite different. Born and bred in the Cath- 
 olic faith, brought up in the thought and hope of 
 becoming a priest, never having conceived any 
 other ambition, and being encouraged therein by 
 his family and by his teachers, he perceived at the 
 age of twenty that his belief was no longer suffi- 
 cient. He had ceased to be a Roman Catholic, 
 and even, in the strictest sense of the word, to be 
 a Christian. He had to break off all his cherished 
 ties and to give up all his fondest hopes. He had 
 to go back into the world and begin life anew. 
 
 In what terms was the philosophical problem to 
 present itself to him? In terms, no doubt, quite 
 different from those which occurred to such men as 
 Maine de Biran, Cousin, or even Auguste Comte. 
 His situation was unique. He wanted a doctrine 
 which would restore to him all that he had lost in 
 losing faith, which would, without having recourse 
 to the supernatural, supply him with an acceptable 
 interpretation of the universe, and at the same time 
 with a certain rule of conduct. Had he examined 
 the whole of the problem—had he begun, as Des- 
 cartes did, by temporarily considering as false all that 
 he had hitherto thought and believed—he would 
 have entered upon an undertaking unsuited to his 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 401 
 
 character and perhaps beyond his power. He 
 adopted a less radical solution. Instead of devel- 
 oping his doubt logically, he set limits to it. Of 
 the whole system of belief that had been taught 
 him, he rejected only what he saw clearly to be 
 incompatible with his reason—that is to say, with 
 science and criticism; he kept all the rest, and out 
 of it constructed a doctrine which remained essen- 
 tially religious. What he could no longer admit 
 was the historical husk of religion, the narrow, one- 
 sided notions, the myth that falls before the blows 
 of criticism, the assumption of a supernatural 
 character in the Christian revelation; whereas he 
 knew that we have here to deal with a phenome- 
 non in all respects similar to that of the appear- 
 ance of Buddhism, Islamism, etc. But in the very 
 essence of religion, the mystery of divinity, and of 
 man’s participation in it, Renan did not cease to 
 believe. 
 
 His philosophy must therefore needs be a secu- 
 larized and rationalized form of his faith. He was 
 sorry for a rupture which grieved his dearest friends, 
 but there was within him neither the anguish of 
 moral upheaval nor an intellectual crisis. ‘‘To all 
 these outward revolutions there corresponded no 
 inward revolution. I have learned several things, 
 but I have changed in nowise as to the general sys- 
 tem of intellectual and moral life. My habitation 
 has become more spacious, but it still stands on the 
 same ground. I look upon my estrangement from 
 orthodoxy as only a change of opinion concerning 
 
402 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 an important historical question, a change which 
 does not prevent me from dwelling on the same 
 foundations as before. I accept and preserve all 
 the practical and speculative traditions of my past, 
 intending subsequently to correct them by the 
 logical results of my thoughts and studies.”’ 
 
 Thus Renan’s philosophy does not stand in 
 opposition to religion, and has no intention of tak- 
 ing its place. Nothing can replace religion. It 
 forms part of the very definition of humanity. 
 Without it man falls to the level of the brute. 
 Had Renan been obliged to choose between posi- 
 tive religion, with its mythical elements, and an 
 abstract system of philosophy, devoid of all reli- 
 gious feeling, he would not have hesitated; he 
 would have chosen the positive religion. But hap- 
 pily this dilemma was not presented. The task of 
 our time, one not impossible of accomplishment, 
 consists precisely in preserving all the essential part 
 of religion in a free and harmonious philosophy. 
 We must, therefore, ‘‘transfer religion into the re- 
 gion of the unassailable, beyond special dogmas and 
 supernatural belief.’’ Sucha philosophy must also 
 take into account all the elements of intellectual 
 and moral life, which Christianity did not do. It 
 totally neglected what is true and beautiful. It 
 looked upon philosophy, poetry and science as so 
 many vanities. Human nature was thus deprived 
 of some of its most essential members. Among 
 intellectual things, which are all alike holy, a dis- 
 tinction was made between the profane and the 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 403 
 
 sacred. A fatal distinction! Whatever comes from 
 the soul is sacred. 
 
 Imagine Malebranche having read Gcethe, 
 Kant, and Hegel, having studied under Burnouf 
 and understood Lamarck’s theories. If, instead of 
 looking down upon the history of the human mind 
 as a futile picture of what others have thought, the 
 proud Oratorian had consented to look at the world 
 and at humanity, how much wider his horizon 
 would have become! from how many prejudices he 
 would have freed himself! He would have beheld 
 the endless meanderings of legend and history and 
 the infinite web of divine creations; and though the 
 sight might have bereft him of his narrow faith, it 
 would have given him instead a sense of true the- 
 ology, which is the science of the world and of 
 humanity, the science of universal development 
 (Werden), which leads, under the aspect of worship, 
 to poetry and art, and above all, to morals. 
 
 Such a nineteenth-century Malebranche Renan 
 tried to be. 
 
 Could Renan have lived all his life long in the 
 same state of mind and soul as his religious teachers, 
 who ‘‘made him acquainted with perfect virtue,’’ 
 he would have counted himself happy, and would 
 have been spared many struggles. But is one free 
 to believe or to reason as one may prefer? Is it 
 our fault if belief in the supernatural gives way 
 before the science of nature, if belief in the sacred 
 narratives gives way before philological science? 
 
404 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 At least, in this inevitable evolution man _ loses 
 nothing which is of vital importance to him. Only 
 that is destroyed which is already falling to decay; 
 everything else is still found in science. Were it 
 not so, science would be, as the Jansenists said, 
 a vanity. 
 
 It is a great error to take its object to be either 
 the amusement of the mind or the increase of man’s 
 material welfare. No doubt these advantages must 
 not be despised. It is true that curiosity is a mark 
 of man’s intellectual nobility, and material progress 
 is, in one sense, the indispensable condition of other 
 and higher forms of progress. But the real value 
 of science lies elsewhere. We require a symbol. 
 Religion gave us one ready-made; science takes it 
 away from us by depriving us of our faith in the 
 supernatural. Science owes us another. It is in 
 duty bound to explain man to himself, in the name 
 of human nature as a whole, which is the only law- 
 ful authority. To live without a general idea of the 
 world is not really to live a man’s life. Science 
 must supply such an idea. If you rob science of 
 that, you take away its real worth and leave it 
 nothing but an insipid residue, fit at the best to be 
 thrown to those who are satisfied with dregs. If 
 the old faith disappears, let science put a critical 
 faith in its place. 
 
 What, then, is this science, for which Renan 
 expresses such a lofty ambition, and which he 
 extols so enthusiastically at five-and-twenty years 
 of age, in L’ Avenir de la Science? Sometimes it 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 405 
 
 means for him the physical and biological sciences 
 which have taught man to find out his true place in 
 the universe and no longer to believe himself the 
 end of creation. But it most often represents the 
 group of those sciences which were more familiar 
 to Renan—that is, historical and _ philological 
 sciences. It was from these that the supernatural 
 received the finishing stroke. It was these that 
 gave wise to exegesis, manapalitets excy esis  tomtne 
 science of comparative religion, which made the old 
 faith impossible. As a natural, though perhaps 
 deceitful consequence, it was in them also that 
 Renan expected to find the principle of his new 
 faith. He was so much struck by what they had 
 been able to effect that he had few doubts as to 
 what they would still be able to accomplish. And 
 does not history, indeed, seem to be the foundation 
 of philosophy in our days? The new philosophy is, 
 in one word, the science of humanity, and the 
 science of a being which is in a state of perpetual 
 evolution (Werden) can be nothing if not its history. 
 
 This was undoubtedly a rather narrow and 
 unstable basis on which to erect the whole edifice 
 of man’s vital beliefs. Without speaking ill of his- 
 torical science, who does not know that it is the 
 most conjectural and unsafe of all? that its conclu- 
 sions are always liable to revision, and vary, in 
 fact, with each new generation of scientific men? 
 And who better than Renan himself knew the weak 
 sides of this science? Not only does he confess 
 that the results of criticism cannot be proved, but 
 
406 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 only perceived, but towards the end of his life he 
 seemed quite to have lost his first illusion, and to 
 have got bravely over the enthusiasm bred in him 
 during his youth by the teaching of Burnouf and 
 the works of German criticism. He almost re- 
 gretted having given up his life to the historical 
 sciences rather than to the natural sciences, which 
 had taken such a hold upon him in the seminary at 
 Issy. He ‘‘sees the inevitable end of them.’’ <A 
 century hence mankind will know all it can know 
 about its past, and then it will be time to stop, for 
 it is characteristic of such studies that as soon as 
 they have reached a state of relative perfection 
 they begin to fall to pieces. 
 
 In spite of these melancholy reflections, it 
 remains true that Renan’s philosophy is founded 
 upon history. Though not demonstrable like 
 mathematical theorems, the results of criticism 
 have yet a quite sufficient value; the tact of a 
 judicious, methodical, conscientious mind is a very 
 sure instrument for the discovery of truth when the 
 discovery is possible. And the inevitable uncer- 
 tainty of history as to details in nowise diminishes 
 the force of the conclusions which may be drawn 
 from comparative philology, exegesis, and the his- 
 tory of languages and of religions. And on the 
 other hand, these sciences have the valuable priv- 
 ilege of making us understand the nature of develop- 
 ment and of progress. They thus introduce us to 
 the only philosophy which can henceforth explain 
 the world, humanity, and God Himself. 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 407 
 
 The idea of progress, which is at the basis of 
 Comte’s philosophy, plays, therefore, a no less 
 important part in Renan’s. But Comte, while 
 applying the idea of progress to every class of phe- 
 nomena, endeavours to use it always in a strictly 
 scientific and positive sense. Renan attributes to 
 it also a metaphysical sense. Progress means to 
 him advancement towards perfection, towards the 
 good and the beautiful, towards being and con- 
 sciousness. ‘‘A sort of inner spring, urging all 
 things towards life, and towards a more and more 
 fully developed life, is the necessary hypothesis.’’ 
 This hypothesis forces itself upon our minds chiefly 
 when we examine the history of mankind. If any 
 result has been acquired from the immense develop- 
 ment of historical knowledge at the end of the 
 eighteenth and during the nineteenth century, it is 
 the conviction that there is a life of mankind as 
 there is a life of the individual man; that history is 
 not a vain series of isolated facts, but a spontaneous 
 tendency towards an ideal goal; that perfection is 
 the centre of gravitation of mankind, as well as of 
 everything that has life. Hegel was the first to set 
 forth this truth with perfect clearness. The philos- 
 ophy of history was founded the moment that this 
 conception of progress was grasped by our reflec- 
 tion. Hitherto progress had come in a spontaneous 
 way; it is to be henceforth the conscious aim of 
 the efforts of the best of mankind. 
 
 There is, then, no reasoning with one who 
 thinks that history is an aimless ebullition, a motion 
 
408 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 without any resultant. ‘To us idealists,’’ one doc- 
 trine only is true, the transcendental doctrine, ac- 
 cording to which the chief end of mankind is to 
 constitute a superior kind of consciousness, or, as 
 people once used to say, to glorify God. This 
 universe has an ideal aim, and is subservient to a 
 divine end. This aim of the world is to make rea- 
 son reign. To organize reason is the duty of man- 
 kind. ‘‘We are pretty nearly agreed,’’ he says in 
 the Dialogues Philosophiques, ‘‘that the aim of the 
 world is the production of a reflective and more 
 and more perfect consciousness. We know of no 
 higher form of this reflective consciousness than 
 And more briefly, in the Avenir de la 
 Science, ‘‘Our creed is the reasonableness of prog- 
 
 y 
 
 D9. 
 
 humanity. 
 ress." 
 
 This symbol, which is rather Hegelian than posi- 
 tivist, permits Renan to preserve in his science the 
 objects of religion and metaphysics, only some- 
 what transformed; it is sufficient for him to substi- 
 tute the standpoint of development for that of a 
 changeless eternity. ‘‘God! Providence! soul! 
 Good old words, rather heavy, but expressive and 
 respectable.’’ What is God to humanity if not the 
 transcendental summary of its supra-sensible needs, 
 the category of the ideal? As soon as we believe 
 in liberty and in mind, we believe in God. To love 
 God, to know God, is to love what is beautiful and 
 good, and to know what istrue. A religious man is 
 one who knows how to find in everything its divine 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 409 
 
 ‘part, not one who professes belief in some dry and 
 unintelligible formula about divinity. In this view 
 the old questionings as to the essence and attributes 
 of God become useless. Let us cast aside, in 
 thinking of the divine life, every notion relating to 
 our transient life. Is this absolute being free and 
 conscious? Questions of this sort may be answered 
 equally well with yes or no. They imply an incor- 
 rigible anthropomorphic illusion. In like manner, 
 we may say both that God is and that God will be. 
 Only that can develop which exists already. But, 
 at the same time, the universal task of all that exists 
 is to make God perfect—that is, to realize the great 
 and final resultant which is to close the circle of 
 thingsaby..adisupremenunity aan ann tN Cason, 
 after having organized man, will organize God. 
 The immensity of time is here the chief factor. 
 Furthermore, let us beware lest these formule 
 should lead us to an abstract idealism, and lest 
 metaphysical speculation, instead of bringing us 
 nearer to God, should only remove us farther from 
 Him. God, as Kant clearly saw, is the product of 
 moral consciousness, not of science or metaphysics. 
 It is not reason, but feeling, that determines the idea 
 of God. This is why poetry and religion on this 
 point outweigh philosophy. The creed of progress 
 implies only faith in the triumph of mind, virtue, 
 and beauty. Let religions, therefore, continue to 
 speak of God, and let us take heed lest in simplifying 
 them we destroy them. Let us not proclaim our- 
 selves superior to them. Their creeds are but a lit- 
 
410 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tle more mythical than ours, and they have 
 immense advantages to which we shall never attain. 
 The theology of the wise in our days might be 
 summed up in the two following propositions, which 
 leave the religious idea entirely undetermined: First, 
 religion will be eternal among mankind; second, all 
 religious creeds are assailable and perishable. 
 Miracles disappear together with supernatural- 
 ism, and for the same reasons. Providence, as 
 understood by the vulgar, is a sort of thaumaturgy. 
 Renan thinks that the true Providence is not sepa- 
 rate from the constant order of things. He liked to 
 quote this saying of Malebranche’s, ‘‘God does not 
 yi Ouch struthiasethe 
 religious instinct had perceived in the idea of Provi- 
 dence is found again in a purer form in the idea of 
 progress. But science no longer ascribes to the 
 
 act through special volitions. 
 
 Divine Person our petty modes of action and our 
 paltry calculations. In nature, as in history, the 
 ends attained seem to have been reached only by 
 means of an extraordinary prodigality of efforts and 
 attempts. There isanimmense loss of germs. But 
 forces spent in vain serve at least as wasted forces, 
 if there must be such. We cannot apply to prog- 
 ress our human idea of finality. All that we can 
 say is, that in the long run good triumphs over evil, 
 and truth over error. The proof is that the world 
 lives on and even moves forward. 
 
 Neither can we preserve the idea of the immor- 
 tality of the soul such as it has been handed down 
 to us by religious tradition. We could not do so 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. At 
 
 even if we chose, if we were sincere with our- 
 selves. And if we no longer have this belief, how 
 can we dare to demand it of others? God forbid, 
 says Kenan, that I should say that belief in immor- 
 tality is not, in one sense, necessary and sacred. 
 But I maintain that when a sceptic who does not 
 believe in it preaches this comforting dogma to the 
 poor in order to keep them quiet, this must be 
 called swindling. It is paying with bills we know 
 to be counterfeit; it is tempting the simple-minded 
 man by an empty bubble away from the pursuit of 
 reality. The old idea of immortality is a remnant 
 of the conceptions of the primitive world. It ranks 
 with the anthropomorphic representation of God. 
 It supposes man to be composed of two substances, 
 and would be greatly at a loss to explain how mem- 
 ory, consciousness and individuality in the one 
 Suiviventhewmwedcstruction, ofMiinomother midlet )us 
 frankly renounce this kind of spiritualism, which in 
 its simplicity does not perceive how closely it bor- 
 ders upon materialism. 
 
 Let it be sufficient, in order to give satisfaction 
 to the instinct in our hearts, to admit that all that 
 has been sacrificed to progress will be found again 
 on the farthest verge of infinity, in a sort of immor- 
 tality which moral science will some day discover, 
 and which will be to the fanciful immortality of the 
 past what the palace of Versailles is to a child’s 
 toy-house. Belief in immortality implies nothing 
 else than man’s invincible confidence in the future. 
 “Individuals live on after death in the collective 
 
412 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 work of progress. No action dies.’’ Later on, in 
 the latter part of his life, Renan seems to have con- 
 ceded somewhat more to individuality in the con- 
 tinuation of existence. Whoever has had a hand 
 in the divine work will feel the divine work that has 
 been accomplished, and will see his own share in it. 
 We shall live again in the world we have contributed 
 to make. Human life, upon its moral side, traces 
 a small furrow, as with the point of a pair of com- 
 passes, on the bosom of the infinite. This arc of a 
 circle drawn in God is as eternal as God Himself. It 
 is in God’s remembrance that all men are immortal. 
 
 This philosophy, or science, as Renan chose to 
 call it, is undoubtedly religious, but it is surely not 
 Christian. It is even in a sense anti-Christian. It 
 renews what Malebranche termed the source of 
 every heathen impiety; it denies creation and 
 deifies nature. Jesus, says Renan, will always be 
 my God. But Jesus is no longer the Redeemer of 
 man from original sin. Man’s nature has no need 
 of being redeemed, for it is not corrupted, but has 
 its part in the divine work of progress. 
 
 Thence come the fluctuations, rather apparent 
 than real, in Renan’s moral doctrine, which did not 
 vary in its fundamental views. Now he protests 
 that the morals taught by the Gospel will always 
 be his, that Christian education has made him what 
 he is, that he will be eternally grateful to it, and 
 that it will prevent him from ever falling into low, 
 frivolous habits. Again, he speaks to us most 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 413 
 
 admirably of his master Marcus Aurelius, glorifies 
 his fortitude and his melancholy optimism. Still 
 again, he wonders whether virtue may not be delu- 
 sion, and runs the risk of scandalising Christian 
 souls by declaring that beauty is quite as good as 
 virtue. But all these sayings may be reconciled 
 without supposing in Renan either a surprising 
 instability of doctrine or a desire to astonish his 
 readers. His conception of morals is, at the same 
 time, natural, like that of Epicurus; rational, like 
 that of Marcus Aurelius, and divine, like that of the 
 Gospel. The comprehensive principles of his philos- 
 ophy admitted of such a synthesis. 
 
 Yet he differs from Christian morals on an 
 important point. Nature is divine. Man, who is 
 one of nature’s masterpieces, is not born actually 
 good, but with the possibility of becoming so. All 
 the evil in humanity proceeds from want of culture. 
 Renan here agrees with the philosophers of the 
 eighteenth century and their perfect confidence in 
 human nature. ‘“‘I, who havea cultivated mind, 
 find no evil in myself, and in all things turn spon- 
 taneously to what seems to me most beautiful. 
 Were all men’s minds as cultivated as my own, all 
 men, like myself, would be in the happy case of 
 finding it impossible to do wrong. An educated 
 man has but to follow the delightful bent of his 
 inner impulse. He might adopt the motto of the 
 Abbey of Théléme, ‘Do thou as thou choosest,’ for 
 he cannot choose any but beautiful things. A vir- 
 tuous man is an artist.’ 
 
414 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Shall we call this pride, or perhaps irony? Tobe 
 sure, the author of Caliban did not shut his eyes to 
 the fierce and base instincts that survived in the soul 
 of the ‘‘improved gorilla.’’ Heknew how much time 
 and how many efforts it has taken to accomplish the 
 fragile work of civilisation. But the definition of 
 humanity must be found in the ideal to which it 
 dimly tends, and which some time it is to reach. 
 Christianity was mistaken in making a virtue of 
 humility. The foundation of our morality is the 
 excellence, the perfect autonomy of human nature. 
 We must not, therefore, define goodness as obedi- 
 ence to the will of a superior being. Nor must we 
 impose upon man ascetic observances; to affect 
 abstinence proves that we highly value the things 
 of which we deprive ourselves. Plato mortified his 
 body less than Dominique Loricat did, and no 
 doubt he was more of a spiritualist. 
 
 Likewise, the imperative character of duty 
 should not be too much insisted upon. We obey 
 it, but we see the weakness of the arguments 
 upon which it rests. We obey it, because we have 
 faith in God, because we believe in progress, in 
 good, and in the final victory of what is best, and 
 this without any hope of personal reward. The 
 same privilege of human nature which enables us to 
 be religious—that is, to understand the divine 
 work—also enables us to be moral—that is, to have 
 a share in that work. ‘‘There is in man a faculty 
 or a need, a capacity, in short, which is satisfied in 
 our days by morals, and which has always been 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 415 
 
 satisfied, and always will be, by something of the 
 kind. I understand that the word morals may in 
 future times become inadequate, and may be 
 replaced by another. For my particular use I pre- 
 fer to substitute for it the word esthetics. Let us 
 remember that whatever is of the soul is sacred. 
 Greece, which carried the beautiful to its utmost 
 perfection, is as much entitled to the gratitude of 
 men as Judza, which taught them divine justice.’’ 
 
 We cannot here enter, even summarily, into the 
 details of Renan’s political and social ideas; to sum- 
 marise them would be simply equivalent to distort- 
 ing them. They were among his favourite themes 
 for reflexion; their wealth, their variety, and even 
 their apparent incongruities, are indeed often some- 
 what puzzling. In order to account for this, we 
 must remember the interest Renan took in contem- 
 poraneous events, and his tendency to make the 
 whole of his ideas harmonise with them, though 
 without changing those ideas in essential particu- 
 lars. Moreover, the general optimism of his philos- 
 ophy did not make him less clear-sighted, and could 
 not prevent him from being aware alike of the folly 
 of revolutionists and of the selfish absurdity of 
 conservatives. Lastly, he himself confesses that 
 his opinion on very important points became modi- 
 fied with time. In ZL’ Avenir de la Science, when 
 full of juvenile enthusiasm, and no doubt under the 
 influence of socialist doctrines, he believed that 
 science would finally enfranchise all mankind; he 
 hoped to see all men rising to the new religion and 
 
416 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 participating in full consciousness ‘‘in the organisa- 
 tion,-of. mankind and’ of ‘God. Latervon; in the 
 Drames, and chiefly in the Dialogues philosophiques, 
 he understands how chimerical such a hope is; he 
 considers it probable that the ignorant mass will 
 always need to be ruled over by an intelligent aris- 
 tocracy. He even conceives the idea of a few men 
 holding in their hands, by means of their science, 
 the fate of the globe, and reigning over mankind by 
 the terror they inspire. But such a dream, even to 
 Renan himself, was nothing but a sort of nightmare. 
 
 At the end of his life, as he looked back upon 
 his juvenile works, he persuaded himself that upon 
 the whole he had been right, and he remained faith- 
 ful to his leading ideas. ““Progress,’’ he says, 
 ‘“save a few disappointments, has been accom- 
 plished in the direction | imagined. Like Hegel, I 
 made the mistake of attributing too positively to 
 mankind a central part in the universe. The devel- 
 opment of humanity may possibly be of no more 
 consequence than the moss or lichens growing over 
 a damp surface. But still, in our eyes, the history 
 of mankind preserves its supremacy, since mankind 
 alone, for all we know, constitutes the conscious- 
 ness of the universe. And even though life should 
 disappear from our small planet before mankind 
 has attained to the full consciousness which is its 
 supreme aim, the attempt baffied here would suc- 
 ceed elsewhere, and the effort toward the realisation 
 of God would not be lost. But for this supreme 
 hope, life would be absurd, and this wretched com- 
 
 é 
 
RENAN AND TAINE, ALT 
 
 edy would not be worth playing. Did I not 
 believe that mankind was summoned to a divine 
 end, I should become an Epicurean, if I could, and 
 if not, I should commit suicide. But virtue will be 
 vindicated in the end.’’ 
 
 Renan’s philosophy is therefore really a kind of 
 faith. Is it a philosophy as well? This is the 
 question which we proposed in the beginning, and 
 which the reader can now answer. Renan’s doc- 
 trine certainly does not fulfil the idea once enter- 
 tained of a philosophical system. Renan himself 
 never thought of constructing one. With respect 
 to metaphysics considered as a science, his attitude 
 was that of a positivist. Every truth, he says, has 
 its starting point in scientific experiment. It issues 
 directly or indirectly from a laboratory or a library, 
 for whatever we learn we learn by studying nature 
 or history. ‘‘Philosophy is not a separate science; 
 it is one side of every science. In the great optic 
 pencil of human knowledge it is the central region 
 where the rays meet in one and the same light.”’ 
 No doubt there is room for a logic or a criticism of 
 the human mind, such as Kant attempted, but 
 there is no room for vain and shallow metaphysical 
 speculation. 
 
 But while abandoning its ancient dogmatic 
 claims, philosophy is enriched, on the other hand, 
 with the ideas of humanity and progress. The idea 
 of humanity is the great boundary line between old 
 and new philosophies. Carefully examine why the 
 
418 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 old systems can no longer satisfy you, and you will 
 see that it is because this idea is absent from them. 
 In it there is a whole new system of philosophy. 
 The moment that mankind is considered as a con- 
 sciousness in process of formation and develop- 
 ment, there is a psychology of mankind as well as 
 one of the individual. There is, therefore, a science 
 of the human mind, which is not only the analysis 
 of the machinery of individual understanding, but 
 the very history of the human soul 
 
 This philosophy was prepared by the eighteenth 
 century in France, which clearly conceived the 
 import of history. But in history itself it misap- 
 prehended the part of spontaneousness and exag- 
 gerated that of reflexion, so that it thoroughly 
 understood nothing but itself. It did not see that 
 primitive epochs were the creative epochs; it tried 
 to explain everything with words of superficial clear- 
 
 99 66 
 
 ness— ‘credulity, superstition,’’ ‘‘fanaticism’’— 
 and above all, it attacked religion in its essence, 
 without seeing that it is as eternal as the human 
 soul. The result was a dry, analytical, negative 
 rationalism, satisfactory neither to the imagination 
 nor to the heart, nor even to reason. A. Comte 
 understood the import of history and the idea of 
 progress. But he did not realise the deep variety 
 of mankind. He was unacquainted with the East 
 and India; he studied only the Western world, and 
 even in this overlooked the details of history. 
 Thence comes the arbitrary, artificial and already 
 decrepit character of his building. Only historical 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 419 
 
 and philological sciences can do as much for the 
 knowledge of humanity as the positive sciences 
 have done for the knowledge of nature. And 
 among those historical and philological sciences the 
 science of religions is that which throws most light 
 upon the past of mankind and the direction of 
 progress. Thus, in writing the Orvigines du Chris- 
 tianisme, Renan thought he was writing the most 
 necessary and philosophical book of the age. 
 
 It is time that reason should cease to criticise 
 religions as being works raised against it by a for- 
 eign and rival power, and that it should at last 
 recognise itself in all products of mankind.  Reli- 
 gions are popular poems: systems of metaphysics 
 are learned poems: the subject treated is fundamen- 
 tally the same. No doubt, we may contrast reli- 
 gion and philosophy as we contrast two systems, 
 but not without recognising that they have the 
 same origin and rest onthe same ground. The old 
 controversy seemed to admit that religions have a 
 different origin, and by this very admission it was 
 led to abuse them. By growing bolder we shall 
 become more respectful. 
 
 This attitude was a new one in France. With 
 respect to religion people hitherto had scarcely 
 known any middle ground between enmity and sub- 
 missiveness. Renan took a position from which he 
 did justice both to religion and to reason. He 
 made the ‘‘philosophers’’ understand that religion, 
 far from being the bane and disgrace of mankind, is, 
 on the contrary, its very honour and life; to the sup- 
 
420 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 porters of revealed religion he explained that noth- 
 ing can prevail against truth when once it is known, 
 and that supernaturalism must disappear when 
 science has shown it to be false. But, he says, 
 let us not mistake for irreligion a refusal to adhere to 
 this or that belief which comes to us assuming to 
 have been revealed. The man who takes a serious 
 view of life, and employs his activity in the pursuit 
 of a generous end, is the religious man. The friv- 
 olous and superficial man, who has no high morality, 
 is the infidel. 
 
 Renan thus opposes religion to religions, as 
 Rousseau had done, as Victor Hugo was just then 
 doing. But he asserts, not without reason, that his 
 criticism has done more for the preservation of reli- 
 gion than any apology. Religion, as he under- 
 stands it, is very remote from what the philosophers 
 call natural religion, a sort of paltry theology, with- 
 out poetry and without effect upon mankind. True 
 religion he takes to be only a way of viewing life as 
 a whole, seeing under all things the ideal and 
 divine meaning, and sanctifying the whole of life by 
 purity of soul and loftiness of heart. 
 
 Renan remained a priest, in the main, as he said 
 himself. He was a priest of a religion devoid of 
 the supernatural element and tending to the realisa- 
 tion of good. It was the strictness of the Roman 
 Catholic dogma which compelled Renan to aban- 
 don the Church. One easily sees how in a Protes- 
 tant country he might not have been obliged to 
 stand apart from the communion of worshippers, 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 421 
 
 and might even have exercised spiritual ministry, 
 as eiierder: and) Schleiermachermdids There are 
 striking points of resemblance between him and the 
 latter. Both addressed an incredulous and frivolous 
 society, in which they tried to awaken the respect 
 for religion and the sense of what is divine. 
 Renan’s success on this point exceeded even his 
 hopes, and it might astonish the supporters of 
 revealed religion to tell them, what is nevertheless 
 true, that he brought back to them more souls than 
 he led away. At least he showed by his own 
 example that a man could think with the greatest 
 freedom, be an evolutionist, a Hegelian, make a 
 scientific study of the history of religions, and yet 
 remain deeply religious. In him was best effected 
 the harmonious blending of the rationalistic criticism 
 of the eighteenth century and of the historical and 
 religious tendencies of the nineteenth. 
 
 Had not ‘“‘parallels’’ long been out of fashion, a 
 parallel between Renan and Taine would inevitably 
 occur to an historian of philosophy, as well as to an 
 historian of literature, for seldom have two more 
 different tintellectual, ‘tempers been) found!’ No 
 doubt they have some features in common: a taste 
 for history, a respect for facts, a feeling of distrust 
 towards professional philosophers, and traces of the 
 evolutionary tendencies of their time. But besides 
 the fact that the one is perfectly suppie and the 
 other perfectly rigid, they do not set themselves 
 the same problems, nor do they apply to them the 
 
422 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 same method. Renan reached philosophy through 
 religion and religious exegesis, Taine through 
 ideology and philosophical criticism. Renan came 
 from St. Sulpice, and Taine from the Ecole Nor- 
 male. 
 
 Taine’s first master, the one whose influence 
 upon him was most deep and lasting, was Condil- 
 lac. Taine was astonished that people in France 
 could have forgotten Condillac’s method, ‘‘one of 
 the masterpieces of the human mind,’’ and adopted 
 Eclecticism. He brings against Cousin and_ his 
 disciples the charge that they lacked precision, 
 proved but little, were chiefly orators, and were 
 more concerned with producing an effect than with 
 discovering truth. We ought, he thinks, to turn 
 back to Condillac, whose mind was of unparalleled 
 lucidity and precision. To nearly all the great 
 questions he gave answers which the reviving theo- 
 logical prejudice and the importation of German 
 metaphysics discredited in France in the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century. But people will yet 
 come back to him. Taine sets the example. The 
 process which he calls analysis, and which is the 
 very soul of his method; the principle of his psy- 
 chology, that whatever is in the understanding may 
 be reduced to sensation,:and that sensations are 
 ‘““the very substance of human intelligence’’; lastly, 
 the psychological and logical theory of symbols and 
 reasoning—all these things Taine owed to Condil- 
 lac. In this sense he may be considered as a suc- 
 cessor of the Ideologists. 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 423 
 
 Yet he does not confine himself to the continua- 
 tion of their doctrine. Between them and him 
 came Auguste Comte, who gave Taine the idea of 
 a philosophy infinitely more comprehensive and 
 closely linked to the advancement of science and 
 history. Taine reproaches the Ideologists for hav- 
 ing been scarcely anything but logicians. They 
 lacked the sense of concrete reality, and they lacked 
 a taste for it as well. They excelled in the theory 
 of method, but not in its application. They called 
 themselves followers of Bacon, and thought they 
 were; but though their starting point was different 
 from that of the Cartesians, they trod the same 
 path, and like them, after making a slight appeal 
 to experience, they abandoned it. They studied 
 man without noticing the differences which exist 
 between men. 
 
 Now, Taine, on the contrary, was, like Renan, 
 fully aware of the diversity of: races and civili- 
 sations. Man is not to him an abstract entity. 
 Taine would have us think of him with his individ- 
 ual features and physical characteristics, his size, 
 the colour of his eyes and hair, his garments, his 
 moral peculiarities, his beliefs, his customary ges- 
 tures—in short, with all that constitutes his visible 
 and invisible being. To apply Condillac’s analysis 
 to men thus conceived was one of Taine’s favourite 
 modes of procedure. 
 
 Next to Condillac, Spinoza and Hegel were his 
 masters. He went deeply into their doctrines, 
 which produced such a strong impression upon him 
 
424 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 that he thought he would never again feel such 
 another. This sensationalist who thinks man’s 
 intelligence to be composed of sensations and sym- 
 bols, this positivist and empiricist who limits science 
 to facts and their laws, this phenomenalist who 
 defines the ego as a collection of sensations, is also 
 a metaphysician who does not shrink from transcen- 
 dental problems. Now he inclines towards an 
 almost purely Spinozian conception of nature, look- 
 ing upon the physical and moral nature of man as 
 two aspects of one and the same essential reality, 
 which is developed according to a law of absolute 
 necessity; and again he conceives of the evolution 
 of being rather as Hegel does. If he abstained 
 almost wholly from metaphysics, it was owing to 
 the scruples he had as a man of science; meta- 
 physics must not be mixed up with the positive 
 investigations of the psychologist and the historian. 
 But he does not at all consider metaphysical specu- 
 lation wrong or fruitless in itself. He leaves the 
 questions open. He even has a glimpse, though 
 but vaguely, of the possibility of a kind of meta- 
 physics founded on experience, which by a 
 methodical advance should attain to the supreme 
 law, the primitive formula from which the whole of 
 reality might be deduced. 
 
 And lastly, beneath the sensationalist and the 
 metaphysician there lay hidden in Taine the soul of 
 a true Stoic, who chose Marcus Aurelius as_ his 
 model in life, and who possessed the same noble 
 and deep conception of the world, the same disillu- 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 425 
 
 sionised serenity, and the same lofty disinterested- 
 ness. 
 
 If we disregard this inward life, which Taine 
 concealed with jealous care, can we at least see how 
 he joined together the two apparently so contra- 
 dictory conceptions of the universe, the empirical 
 and the metaphysical, in which he took equal 
 interest? From what point of view did he reconcile 
 in his own mind Spinoza and Hume, Hegel and 
 Condillac? The reconciliation is brought about by 
 means of abstraction. This “‘beautiful faculty, the 
 source of language, the only real distinction which, 
 according to its degree, separates men from brutes 
 and great men from common ones,’’ is the power 
 of isolating elements from given facts and of con- 
 sidering them apart. 
 
 Abstraction constitutes a transition between the 
 world as it is revealed to our senses and the world 
 as it is understood by our intelligence. There are 
 two great aspects of nature, “‘two kingdoms,’’ that 
 of complex facts, and that of simple elements. 
 The former is the result and the latter the cause. 
 The former is contained in the latter, and deduced 
 from it aS a consequence is deduced from its 
 premise. Both are of equal value; they are one 
 and the same reality viewed in two different lights. 
 This magnificent moving world, this tumultuous 
 chaos of intricate events, this unceasing life, infi- 
 nitely varied and many-sided, are reducible to a few 
 elements and to the relations between them. To 
 pass on from one of the aspects to the other, from 
 
426 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 complexity to simplicity, from facts to laws, from 
 experiments to formule, is the work of abstraction. 
 “English philosophy ends in considering nature as an 
 assemblage of facts; German philosophy looks upon 
 it chiefly as a system of laws. If there is a place 
 midway between the two nations, it belongs to us 
 Frenchmen. We amplified the English ideas in the 
 eighteenth century: we can in the nineteenth give 
 precision to the German ideas. What we have to 
 do is to temper, amend and complete the two spir- 
 its one by another, to fuse them into one, to 
 express them in a style that shall be intelligible to 
 everybody, and thus to make of them the universal 
 spirit.’ ’ 
 
 Such, then, is the position assumed by Taine, 
 intermediate between English Empiricism and Ger- 
 man metaphysics. If he seemed to incline rather 
 towards Empiricism, it was because he found him- 
 self confronted by Eclecticism. This doctrine pos- 
 tulated rational principles independent of experi- 
 ence, and Taine had first to combat what he 
 deemed a feeble imitation of Cartesianism or of 
 German metaphysics. But when in presence of 
 such Empiricism as that of Stuart Mill, for instance, 
 Taine, on the contrary, defends the principle of 
 causality and gives to it an absolute value. He 
 shows that a collection of facts is not science, and he 
 maintains the possibility of rising to a general con- 
 ception of the universe. Abstraction permits him 
 thus to stand as an arbiter. Only the philosopher 
 must make a methodical use of it, and instead of try- 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 427 
 
 ing to construct the world @ frzorz, as the German 
 metaphysicians have been rash enough to do, he 
 must draw the elements of his building from reality 
 itself. On this condition ‘‘the moral as well as the 
 physical universe may be held in the palm of our 
 hand,’’ and an abstract formula may represent the 
 immense variety of things as easily as an equation 
 represents a curve. 
 
 In perfect conformity with these principles, Taine 
 had not only a passion for minute details, for char- 
 acteristic and special facts, the search for which 
 delighted him in Stendhal and in the Goncourts, 
 but also a taste for general and abstract formule, 
 going so far as to say that a man, a nation, a civili- 
 sation, are ‘‘walking theorems. 
 cessive steps of abstraction from the most minute 
 facts to the most comprehensive laws, is the very 
 object of science, and the method to be employed 
 in moral sciences does not essentially differ on that 
 score from that of the physical sciences. 
 
 Whether the facts are physical or moral is of no 
 consequence; they always have causes. There are 
 causes for courage or ambition, as well as for diges- 
 tion or respiration. Every species of human pro- 
 duction—literature, music, painting, philosophy, 
 science, industry, etc.—is directly caused by a moral 
 disposition or a combination of moral dispositions. 
 The cause being given, the production appears; 
 take the cause away and it disappears. The link 
 between them is the same as that between a phys- 
 
 »? 
 
 To rise by suc- 
 
428 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ical phenomenon and its antecedent conditions, 
 between the dew and the cooling of the surround- 
 ing air, between expansion and heat. 
 
 To the consideration of ‘‘causes,’” borrowed 
 from physics, we must add that of ‘‘dependencies’’ 
 and ‘‘conditions,’’ derived from biology. If we 
 study a man, a nation, a race, a century, we shall 
 find that the thousand details to be observed in 
 them may be classified under certain headings, cer- 
 tain general qualities which may be expressed in 
 seven or eight formule. We shall furthermore 
 notice that these formule are all interdependent, 
 and that the qualities vary, as if mathematical 
 functions one of another. And finally, we shall 
 reach the fundamental property which Taine, with 
 Condillac, calls the ‘‘ primitive fact,’’ the generating 
 cause, from which all others can be deduced. 
 ‘*Between a bower at Versailles, one of Male- 
 branche’s philosophical and theological arguments, a 
 precept of versification by Boileau, a mortgage law 
 of Colbert, an antechamber compliment at Marly, 
 and one of Bossuet’s sentences on the sovereignty 
 of God, the distance seems infinite. The facts are 
 so dissimilar that at first sight we deem them iso- 
 ‘lated and separate. Yet the facts are connected 
 with one another by the definitions of the groups 
 within which they are comprised. Each of them 
 is an action of that tdeal and general man around 
 whom all the contrivances and peculiarities of the 
 time are grouped.’’ With this ‘‘ideal and general 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 429 
 
 ’ 
 
 man’’ abstraction reaches its final term; all the 
 causes are united into one supreme formula. 
 
 These causes are made up of ‘‘dependencies’ 
 and ‘‘conditions,’’ and were they better known to 
 us, history would be like everything else, only a 
 problem of mechanics. The only difference is that 
 the quantity and direction of moral forces cannot 
 be measured in a mathematical way. But we can 
 at least determine in every historical development 
 the three primordial causes, which are race, environ- 
 ment, and time. Does not Taine here, in this idea 
 of social solidarity and continuity, return to what 
 Auguste Comte termed the objective conditions of 
 the development of societies? 
 
 The History of English Literature is the most 
 celebrated production due to this method, which, 
 according to Taine, is applicable to all moral sci- 
 ences. After a period of very great favor, this 
 process has been severely criticised and finally aban- 
 doned. Without here examining whether this fate 
 was deserved or not, we must confess that the 
 method lacks precision. The very lavishness of 
 Taine’s ‘‘illustrations’’ isa proof of this. Moral 
 sciences, and particularly history, he compares suc- 
 cessively to mechanics, mineralogy, physics, chem- 
 istry, zodlogy, anatomy, and natural history in 
 general. In spite of all these comparisons, or 
 rather because of them, the reader is left puzzled. 
 Taine did not see that it was necessary for him to 
 choose for the method of moral and social sciences 
 
 y 
 
430 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 between the geometrical and mechanical con- 
 ception, based on the relations between conse- 
 quences and principles, and the biological concep- 
 tion, based on the harmonic relation of the different 
 parts with one another and with the whole. So, in 
 spite of the powerful streams of light sent forth 
 by his style, there are interfering rays which make 
 spots of shadow and cast obscurity upon his theory. 
 
 Taine’s strictly philosophical work comprises La 
 Philosophie de l Art and Del’ Intelligence. For La 
 Philosophie de l Art Taine assumes an intermediate 
 position between realism and idealism, in accord- 
 ance with his general attitude between empiricism 
 and rationalism. He isa realist in principle, since 
 he defines art as the imitation of nature; but he is 
 also an idealist when he adds that the object of this 
 imitation is to express the essence of things by means 
 of their ‘‘essential characteristic.’’ This essen- 
 tial characteristic is a quality from which all others, 
 or at least many others, are derived according to 
 fixed connection. This characteristic being deter- 
 mined, we must be able to deduce from it all the 
 others, as from the jawbone of a fossil Cuvier 
 deduced all the organs of the carnivorous animal. 
 
 The production of a work of art is, moreover, 
 determined by a mass of conditions which are 
 summed up in race, environment, andtime. Taine 
 has been charged with exaggerating the importance 
 of these conditions, and not taking sufficiently into 
 account the individuality of the artist. It never- 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 431 
 
 theless remains a fact that in his theoretical and 
 historical considerations upon art he presented 
 many ingenious and instructive views. He showed 
 admirably by numerous examples how any art was 
 at a given moment the living expression of a whole 
 civilisation, and how each was to be understood 
 only by means of the other. 
 
 When Taine’s book, De 1’ Intelligence, appeared, 
 the psychology taught and generally accepted in 
 France was that of Cousin, Garnier, and Jouffroy. 
 It was based upon observation by consciousness and 
 reflexion, and was mainly devoted, as it seemed, to 
 the defence of a spiritualistic metaphysics. Taine 
 deemed this doctrine vague and incapable of prog- 
 ress, and wanted to substitute for it. a scientific 
 psychology. If psychology is a science, he says, 
 its object is to discover unknown facts, inaccessible 
 to direct observation. In order to make these 
 discoveries, it must, like other sciences, find a 
 substitute for the observing instrument and modify 
 the object observed. It will therefore have recourse 
 to experiment whenever that is possible—to phys- 
 iology, to the organs of the senses, to mental 
 pathology, to the study of phenomena connected 
 with hypnotism and double personality, to the 
 observation of children and animals, etc. Taine’s 
 work, Del Intelligence, gives a good idea of the state 
 of science with regard to psychological questions at 
 the time when it was written. If it has grown out 
 of date, it is in the same way as treatises on physics 
 or physiology, owing to the very progress of sci- 
 
432 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 ence. Cerebral anatomy and physiology have been 
 completely renewed during the last forty years. 
 Even the analysis of sensations, which Taine set 
 forth in such a masterly way, no longer corresponds 
 to the present state of our knowledge. 
 
 Besides this strictly psychological part, De [ntel- 
 ligence also contains a theory of knowledge and an 
 attempt to frame a metaphysical theory of the soul. 
 The theory of knowledge, as might be expected, is 
 chiefly a study of abstraction. It is by abstraction 
 that we are enabled to infer from particular facts a 
 general idea, and from several general ideas another 
 more general still, and so on, step by step, always 
 progressing according to natural order, by a con- 
 tinuous analysis, with expressive notations, after 
 the example of mathematics, which passes on from 
 finger-reckoning to figure-reckoning, and thence to 
 letter-reckoning. Truth resides in things, and in 
 order to discover it we need only “‘resolve things 
 into their elements, note these elements with pre- 
 cise symbols, collect these symbols into exact for- 
 mulz, reduce these formule one to another, and go 
 on by means of equations till the final equation is 
 reached, which is the desired truth.’’ Taine’s con- 
 ception of science is perhaps that of Bacon; his 
 method certainly is that of Condillac. But Taine 
 claims to rise by this method to a Spinozian or 
 Hegelian view of the universe, which neither Bacon 
 nor Condillac would have accepted. 
 
 Finally, his general conception of the activity of 
 the soul is Associationism. Had he not been 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 433 
 
 familiar with the works of Spencer, Bain, Stuart 
 Mill, and all the English Associationist school, the 
 method of Condillac and of the Ideologists would 
 nevertheless have led him to this theory. Our con- 
 scious sensations, remembrances, desires, etc., are, 
 according to Taine, composed of unconscious ele- 
 ments. The object of psychological analysis is 
 precisely to isolate these elements. It is a sort of 
 mental chemistry, even more advanced than chem- 
 istry properly so called. For the latter has to deal 
 with a great many elements, called simple sub- 
 stances, which it has not yet been able to decompose, 
 whereas psychological analysis has discovered the 
 one simple element of which all the diversity of 
 psychological phenomena is composed. This com- 
 mon element, which, perpetually repeated, consti- 
 tutes all our ideas, is sensation. We are thus in 
 possession of the ‘‘first fact,’’ and from it we are 
 able to deduce the whole ‘‘mechanism”’ of intelli- 
 gence and of psychical life in general. Psychology 
 in our days finds it difficult to believe that a state 
 of the soul is composed of simpler elements, asa 
 crystal is composed of molecules, and Association- 
 ism has lost many of its partisans. 
 
 To conclude, there seem always to have been in 
 Taine not one but two co-existing philosophies, to 
 both of which he clung all his life with equal tena- 
 city. One isa philosophy of sensation. With it 
 are connected his criticism of the Cartesian spirit, 
 his professed taste for the varied forms, sounds, 
 
434 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 colours, peculiarities, and singularities of beings; 
 the character of his style, and his kinship with 
 Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola, and in general 
 with the art of his time. The other sees in the 
 universe a system of laws, and limits the infinite 
 diversity of reality within a small number of for- 
 mule, more and more comprehensive till we reach a 
 supreme formula, which comprises all others, and 
 consequently, the whole of reality; on this side 
 Taine sympathised with Spinoza and Hegel. No 
 doubt abstraction helped him to pass from one 
 system to the other. But does he not put too 
 much confidence in the virtue of symbols and for- 
 mula, and does he not demand of this process more 
 than it can give, when he finds in it a reconciliation 
 between the empirical and the rationalistic concep- 
 tion of the world? Stuart Mill, on the one hand, 
 and Kant, on the other, are not so easily to be 
 brought together by this newer form of Condillac’s 
 method. And thus there remains in Taine’s doc- 
 trine an ineradicable taint of duality, the influence 
 of which is felt throughout his works. Though an 
 admirable writer, there is always in his representa- 
 tion of reality something geometrical and abstract. 
 He constructs the Ancien Régime, he constructs the 
 Jacobin, he constructs Napoleon; and these con- 
 structions, in strict conformity with his method, are 
 extremely brilliant, but more or less artificial. The 
 formula meant to express, in an abstract way, the 
 characteristic common to a collection of facts often 
 proves unequal to the harmonious unity of life. 
 
RENAN AND TAINE. 435 
 
 However, the defects of Taine’s method and the 
 weak points in his philosophy did not become 
 apparent at once. His contemporaries were chiefly 
 struck by the beauty, the power, the originality of 
 the works which it inspired. His influence upon 
 minds has been perhaps equal to that of Renan, 
 and still makes itself strongly felt even in his very 
 adversaries. 
 
GTAP ATT Pay, 
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT IN FRENCH 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 RENAN and Taine addressed the general public. 
 While their books have been admired and widely 
 read, and have served as vehicles for ideas which 
 were destined to become popular, a number of 
 works of a more specially philosophical nature, and 
 therefore appealing to a far less numerous class of 
 readers, have appeared in France, bearing witness 
 to the speculative activity of the country. 
 
 At the first glance that we cast upon the latter 
 half of the nineteenth century we are struck with 
 the extreme variety, or, more accurately speaking, 
 with the isolation and apparently fortuitous distri- 
 bution of theories. There is no powerful and 
 dominant school sufficiently representative of the 
 spirit of the time to rally the great majority of 
 thinking minds, as had been done by Cartesianism, 
 by the philosophy of the Encyclopzdists, and even 
 by Eclecticism about the year 1830. Each philos- 
 opher, jealous of his independence, follows his own 
 course. Many, out of dislike for quackery and 
 oratorical philosophy, withdraw into a sort of dis- 
 dainful privacy, which has its advantages as well as 
 its drawbacks. It is certainly to be regretted that 
 
 436 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 437 
 
 philosophical speculation should seem to confine 
 itself within an ‘‘ivory tower,’’ abstaining from 
 intimate intercourse with contemporary life; it thus 
 runs the risk of assuming a formal, narrow, scho- 
 lastic character, and of bestowing much energy and 
 skill upon problems of purely factitious interest. 
 History shows that this danger is far from imaginary. 
 On the other hand, it is no less dangerous for philos- 
 ophy to seek avowedly the immediate favour of the 
 public. The reason for this is evident. The philos- 
 ophers of whom we are speaking have at least 
 escaped the latter peril. Remote from the crowd 
 and unknown to it, unknown for some time even to 
 all but specialists in their own line, there was 
 nothing to disturb the elaboration of their doc- 
 trines. 
 
 It is also a noteworthy fact that they nearly all 
 began by writing on the history of philosophy. In 
 the eighteenth century, Kant remarked that, being 
 entirely absorbed in his own system, he had no time 
 to familiarise himself with those of others. In the 
 second half of the nineteenth century, on the con- 
 trary, nearly every philosopher thinks himself 
 bound, before producing a new system, to be thor- 
 oughly acquainted with the previous ones. The 
 history of philosophy had, indeed, just been revived 
 in France by Cousin, and besides, there was a 
 general increase of the feeling of historical solidar- 
 ity. Wasit not natural, therefore, that philosophy, 
 as well as the other moral sciences, should feel the 
 effect of it? 
 
438 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Thus it happens that though there is not found 
 in this period any theory which has given rise toa 
 wide and powerful philosophical current, it remains 
 possible to locate the various doctrines, either in 
 the general course of some great preéxisting current, 
 or at the junction of several. 
 
 Apart from Eclecticism and Positivism, it seems 
 that we may distinguish four main currents: 
 
 First, a Kantian current, derived in part from 
 Kant’s theoretic philosophy, and in part from his 
 moral philosophy; 
 
 Second,') a’ metaphysical | current, ‘la’ reaction 
 against Positivism and against critical and relativist 
 doctrines in general, proceeding from the great 
 modern metaphysical systems, and more particularly 
 from Leibniz and Schelling; 
 
 Third, an evolutionist current, clearly following 
 Lamarck, Darwin, and Mr. Herbert Spencer; 
 
 Fourth and last, a current which may be termed 
 Separatist, and which being more or less directly 
 derived from Comte, is disposed to abandon the old 
 conception of philosophy, and to organize scientific 
 and positive psychology, ethics, and sociology. 
 
 This, without counting a great many secondary 
 currents and undercurrents which we should be 
 obliged to characterise, were not this sketch neces- 
 sarily a very summary one. 
 
 Eclecticism is still the philosophy officially 
 taught in France. This prerogative, which assures 
 it a positive influence upon the intellectual devel- 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 439 
 
 opment of the nation, is harmful to it in other 
 respects. Being subject to considerations of a 
 political rather than a philosophical nature, it has 
 not been possible for the system either to develop 
 or to transform itself. ‘“‘Eclecticism no longer 
 investigates, it merely teaches,’’ said one of its 
 adversaries (M. Renouvier). Fortunately, intellec- 
 tual originality never renounces its rights. Aside 
 from M. Vacherot, who did not hesitate to part 
 from the school in order to try to found a new spir- 
 itualistic system, there are M. Bouillier, who has 
 written a conscientious history of the Cartesian 
 philosophy, Bersot, the author of ingenious moral 
 essays, and Caro, who produced brilliant critical 
 studies. Frank published a philosophical diction- 
 ary to which all the best men of the school contrib- 
 uted; M. Lévéque has applied the principles of 
 Eclecticism to zsthetics. 
 
 Paul Janet has employed his clear and sound 
 judgment in the consideration of the most various 
 subjects. Not only did he teach the doctrine of 
 Eclecticism in his JWorale, and his Causes Finales, 
 but he has discussed contemporaneous questions in 
 many works, such as Le Cerveau et la Pensée, La 
 Crise Contemporaine, and has made important 
 contributions to the history of philosophy, such as 
 L’ Histoire des Idées et des Théorwes FPolstiques, 
 L’ Histoire de U Ecole St. Simonienne, and a biog- 
 raphy of his master, V. Cousin, in which he has 
 established the truth on several important points. 
 M. Janet has been a rare example of perfect fidelity 
 
440 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 to the doctrine he had adopted in his youth, united 
 with a broad sympathy for all attempts to establish 
 new theories. His respect for philosophical liberty, 
 which he does not separate from other kinds of 
 liberty, permits him to be at once extremely dog- 
 matic and yet sincerely impartial towards his adver- 
 saries, the fiercest of whom have always been will- 
 ing in the end to do him justice. 
 
 ‘‘Eclectic spiritualism’’ had none the less to 
 contend against an opposition growing in strength 
 and number, which was more hostile to its method 
 even \thaniyto) -itswconclisions-WiesVia ono niin 
 reproached it with having neither a clear and con- 
 sistent method, nor sincerity, nor precision; with 
 borrowing its dogmas “‘from theological traditions 
 which have now become pure conventionalities,’’ 
 and with being afraid of logic. Other equally 
 severe attacks have been repeatedly directed against 
 it. Especially after the death of Cousin, Eclecti- 
 cism constantly lost ground. Indeed, more than 
 one philosopher whose metaphysical convictions 
 were not really very different from those of Eclecti- 
 cism, honestly felt compelled to combat it in order 
 to establish his own views. 
 
 On the other hand, whilst the spirit of Positivism 
 was constantly gaining new influence and spreading 
 by a thousand channels through the mass of the 
 nation, the adherents of the system properly so 
 called did not increase in numbers. The peculiar 
 style and the extravagant pretensions of Auguste 
 Comte’s later works had done great injustice to the 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. AAI 
 
 very essence of La Philosophie Positive, with the 
 original text of which few people were acquainted. 
 The schism in the school and the quarrels which 
 ensued had also produced an unfortunate impres- 
 sion. Littré, the best known standard-bearer of 
 the doctrine, aithough a dissenting disciple, was a 
 scientist rather than a philosopher, and if he made 
 clear Comte’s copious and prolix thought, we must 
 confess it was at the cost of its richness and depth. 
 Orthodox Positivists, under the guidance of M. 
 Pierre Laffitte, kept close within their church. The 
 time had come for the revival of metaphysical 
 speculation. 
 
 This revival, which had already given tokens of 
 its approach before the middle of the century, 
 assumed various shapes according to the predomi- 
 nance in it of the spirit of dogmatic metaphysics, 
 or of the influence of the Kantian criticism. The 
 philosophy of M. Ravaisson belongs to the first 
 class, and is derived in various proportions from 
 Aristotle, Leibniz, and Schelling. According to 
 M. Ravaisson, all philosophical systems may be 
 reduced to three types, which are so many points 
 of view from which the truth is more or less thor- 
 oughly perceived. On the lowest stage are the 
 empiric philosophies. They are blind to all that is 
 not revealed to the senses. These systems are not 
 false in their affirmations; but what they deny is 
 infinitely more real than what they take to be the 
 only reality. Above these, on an intermediate 
 
442 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 stage, rank the philosophies of the understanding, 
 such as Stoicism and Kantism. They recognise, 
 indeed, that the mind has its proper activity, but 
 they believe it incapable of rising above certain 
 insurmountable barriers, such as time, space, caus- 
 ality, and there they stop. Lastly, on the summit, 
 are the systems of metaphysics which have under- 
 stood that sentient and even discursive knowledge 
 would not be possible did there not exist an intui- 
 tion of the reason, in which real being, the abso- 
 lute, reveals itself without any intermedium, and by 
 which reason is united to the absolute as to the per- 
 fect principle of all existence, of all knowledge, of 
 all beauty; and ‘of, all. forces. To) this) systemeare 
 added a philosophy of nature which shows the 
 eternal ascent of imperfect beings towards the all- 
 perfect being who is both their cause and their end, 
 and a philosophy of history which sees in religion 
 and art revelations parallel to that of reason. 
 
 The philosophy of Secrétan, contemporary with 
 that of M. Ravaisson, is also allied to Schelling’s 
 second system, but more closely. It has moral and 
 religious tendencies. M. Secrétan’s main effort 
 was to reconcile and even to identify with the dog- 
 mas of his Christian belief the metaphysical conclu- 
 sions which result from his speculation. He wasa 
 Protestant and accordingly enjoyed the liberty 
 necessary to treat such questions. He speaks asa 
 theologian no less than asa philosopher when he 
 touches upon the formidable problems of the origin 
 of the world, of the divine personality, and of the 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 443 
 
 explanation of evil. His supreme principle is the 
 idea of God's absolute liberty, which great meta- 
 physicians, such as Descartes, had already affirmed 
 before him. From it he infers the possibility of 
 contingency in the world and of liberty in man. 
 
 In the latter part of his life Secrétan had lost 
 much of his interest in such a lofty and abstruse 
 science of metaphysics. Not that he had ceased to 
 believe it true; but he thought it less necessary. 
 Duty, being manifested to the conscience as a cate- 
 gorical imperative, now seemed to him a sufficient 
 revelation of the Absolute. Therefore, laying aside 
 these speculative difficulties which are calculated to 
 make even the most powerful minds dizzy, he 
 directed his efforts to moral and social questions. 
 He felt how serious are the problems set before all 
 Europe by socialism, and sought the solution of 
 these, not as an economist, but as a philosopher 
 and a Christian. Yet it was chiefly his Pzlosophie 
 de la Liberté which exercised upon French thought 
 a slow but deep and lasting influence. This influ- 
 ence is found more or less distinctly permeating the 
 numerous philosophies of liberty which have 
 appeared in the second half of the present century, 
 and is particularly visible in M. Fouillée’s teachings. 
 
 If Kant’s philosophy met with little response in 
 France in the first half of this century, it was not 
 because it was unknown; on the contrary, even in 
 the earlier years of the century we find it mentioned 
 and criticised. But no one had stopped to investi- 
 
444 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 gate it thoroughly, either because many thought 
 with Schelling and Hegel that it suffered from being 
 over-subjective; or more probably because, as most 
 eclectic philosophers said, its idealism seemed to 
 end in a sort of scepticism. As Kant denies to 
 human reason the capacity to solve metaphysical 
 problems dogmatically, to demonstrate the existence 
 of God and the immortality of the soul, he is in 
 their eyes a sceptic. All the arguments against 
 sceptics in general hold good against him, and there 
 is no need of paying any further attention to him. 
 So it happened that the first men who began after- 
 wards to study the text of Kant felt as though 
 they were making a discovery. Instead of a nega- 
 tive and sceptical system, they found one of the 
 most powerful efforts ever made by the human 
 mind to measure the scope of its own faculties and 
 to reconcile the demands of science with those of 
 morality. The effect of this discovery was not 
 long delayed; it gave a new impulse to philosophical 
 studies in France, and several original systems 
 appeared, all drawing inspiration from Kant’s ideas. 
 
 These were chiefly idealistic systems, as had 
 been the case in Germany also. M. Lachelier, for 
 instance, in seeking for the fundamental principles 
 of induction, came to the conclusion that a science 
 of nature would be an impossibility if the laws of 
 thought were not at the same time, as Kant main- 
 tained, the constitutive laws of nature. But for 
 all that, M. Lachelier does not adopt the theory of 
 space, time, and categories enunciated by Kant in 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 445 
 
 the Critique of Pure Reason, which concedes to our 
 science only a relative value, and denies to man the 
 knowledge of things as they are in themselves. 
 M. Lachelier, on the contrary, believes that there is 
 a method—i. e., reflexion—by which our thought 
 may contemplate and possess itself in its very 
 essence, and that having reached this point, it has 
 attained to absolute being and has nothing to seek 
 beyond itself. This was a singularly refined form 
 of idealism, which goes beyond Kant and connects 
 with Leibniz; sensible knowledge being conceived, 
 after the fashion of Leibniz; as an obscure form of 
 intellection. The concepts of space and time, 
 instead of being imposed upon human knowledge, 
 as in Kant’s system, without our knowing how or 
 why, are deduced from the very essence of thought 
 by an effort of reflexion. Thus a purely idealistic 
 doctrine is propounded, according to which ‘‘ideas 
 are given before sensations and laws before facts.”' 
 After beingrexpounded’ in *Ttectures: given at: the 
 Ecole Normale, and summed up in a vigourous and 
 concise little book, this form of idealism had to 
 struggle against the diffuse influence of Positivism, 
 and against the increased favour bestowed upon 
 English Empiricism. It aroused and maintained a 
 taste for metaphysical speculation. Itself a product 
 of Kant’s critical philosophy, it occasioned in its 
 turn the production of new doctrines, which owed 
 to it at least their initiative. 
 
 Such is the doctrine of M. Boutroux, who, in 
 his remarkably profound book, La Contingence des 
 
446 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Lots de la Nature, asked whether the laws of 
 nature were absolutely necessary, or whether they 
 might not admit of some sort of contingency afford- 
 ing scope for the free activity of rational beings. 
 He proved that an absolutely rigourous necessity is 
 inconceivable to our minds; then from a scientific 
 point of view he pointed out further that even the 
 laws of science do not imply the absolute necessi- 
 tarianism which has been claimed forthem. As 
 we consider more complex and richer orders of 
 reality, after the world of inanimate nature the 
 world of life, after the world of life the world of 
 thought and morality, the degree of contingency 
 permitted by the laws of phenomena also becomes 
 more apparent, and liberty at last asserts its pres- 
 ence in man’s consciousness. That which is 
 subject to measurement and calculation, which 
 presents an aspect of perfect regularity, uniform- 
 ity, and necessity, is but the surface of things. 
 At bottom Leibniz’s principle of the indiscern- 
 ible is true; there never are two entirely iden- 
 tical beings or phenomena; no general formula 
 is adequate to the ever-changing spontaneity 
 of reality. But M. Boutroux, who has a thorough 
 knowledge of the great systems of the past, and 
 has thoroughly investigated their evolution, pre- 
 serves a critical attitude towards metaphysical 
 principles instead of merely drawing these infer- 
 ences from them. He is alive to the postulates 
 and results of positive sciences, and respectful to 
 experience, even while examining and interpreting 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 447 
 
 it. He is determined to sacrifice no portion of 
 reality, and to give their due share to facts as well 
 as to ideas, to science as well as to morals. 
 
 From Kant again, and in a smaller degree from 
 Hume and from A. Comte, is derived the philos- 
 ophy of M. Renouvier. His Essazs de Critique 
 Générale mark an era in the history of French 
 philosophy of the nineteenth century. ~ Like A. 
 Comte and several other vigourous thinkers of the 
 time, M. Renouvier had received his training in 
 the study of mathematical sciences at the Ecole 
 Polytechnique. These sciences, and also his con- 
 victions concerning social problems, induced M. 
 Renouvier to study the philosophical questions on 
 which all others depend. He could not be satisfied 
 with the doctrines which were popular in his youth. 
 We have heard how he condemned Eclecticism with 
 the utmost severity. He reproaches Positivism 
 with its empiric dogmatism which will not take the 
 trouble even to justify itself, with its presumption 
 in attempting to ‘‘organise science and religion,”’ 
 and to solve in a negative way the question of 
 ‘‘possibilities which ought to be the prerogative of 
 free belief.’’ But he accepts this Positivist princi- 
 ple—viz., that our knowledge pertains only to phe- 
 nomena and the laws of phenomena—a principle, 
 moreover, in accordance with the results of the 
 philosophy of Hume and Kant. 
 
 M. Renouvier gave to his doctrine the name of 
 Critzcisme. It manifests its Kantian origin, both 
 
448 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 in basing the solution of philosophical problems on 
 a previous criticism of the human understanding, 
 and in its way of stating the moral problem. But 
 M. Renouvier radically modifies Kant’s theory of 
 knowledge. True, he also states that time and 
 space are not realities in themselves, and that our 
 thought operates by means of categories (of which 
 M. Renouvier furthermore draws up a new list.) 
 True, he thence infers, again following Kant, that 
 we know nothing but phenomena, and that in 
 every cognition the part of the mind which knows 
 is inseparable from that of the object which is 
 known. But beyond phenomena, Kant admitted 
 a world of ‘‘noumena”’ (Dinge an sich) inaccessible 
 to our knowledge, and yet the foundation of the 
 reality of phenomena. In these “‘noumena’’ M. 
 Renouvier sees but a last remnant of the ‘‘sub- 
 of the old metaphysics so aptly criticised 
 by Hume and which Kant retained only at the 
 cost of self-contradiction. In accord on this point 
 with nearly all the neo-Kantians, M. Renouvier 
 rejects these ‘‘noumena’’ which Kant himself ad- 
 mitted to be absolutely unknowable. He holds that 
 there is no reality but that given in consciousness. 
 
 For a while M. Renouvier inclined towards 
 Hegelianism, and thought that, though to our finite 
 understanding two contradictory propositions ex- 
 clude each other, from an absolute point of view 
 they may be reconciled, or even support each other. 
 But he soon assumed the contrary position and 
 afterwards made it a rule to consider as false what- 
 
 bed 
 
 stances 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 449 
 
 ever he found incompatible with the supreme log- 
 ical law of our thought, called the principle of con- 
 tradiction; and he constructed the whole of his 
 philosophy in accordance with the rigourous appli- 
 cation of this rule. 
 
 For instance, he owed to it the solution of Kant’s 
 antinomies; or, rather, he showed that, had Kant 
 observed this rule, he would not have formulated 
 his antinomies. For one ought not to ask whether 
 space is finite or infinite, whether the world had a 
 beginning or not. To say that space is infinite, or 
 that the world had no beginning, is equivalent to 
 admitting that an infinite number is possible and 
 even real. Now, according to M. Renouvier, the 
 realisation of an infinite number is an absurdity, a 
 contradiction in terms; therefore such a number 
 does not exist, and therefore we must admit that 
 space is not infinite, that the world had a beginning, 
 that the ascending series of causes has a first term, 
 and consequently that contingency and liberty both 
 have a place in the world of phenomena. Add to 
 this the exclusion of the idea of substance, —which, 
 if once tolerated in a system, leads inevitably to 
 unity of substance, that is, to pantheism and fatal- 
 ism,—and you have the elements of a system at 
 once idealistic and phenomenalistic, which under- 
 takes to establish, as conclusions of critical study, 
 man’s liberty and personality, an order in nature 
 compatible with contingency, and the existence of 
 an author (M. Renouvier for a long time said, of 
 several authors) of the universe. 
 
450 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Does Critictsme then, after a long and toilsome 
 circuit, simply come back to the theses of the old 
 dogmatic metaphysics? It would be unfair to say 
 so, though the differences are not so great as one 
 would at first imagine. But the road foilowed by 
 Criticisme is a new one, and M. Renouvier flattered 
 himself with occupying a position that the old met- 
 aphysics had never reached. For want of having 
 made a criticism of the human mind, for want of 
 having acknowledged that we know phenomena only, 
 for want of having understood that certitude is but 
 a form of belief and that liberty is implied in every 
 affirmation, these ‘‘substantialistic’’ doctrines were 
 inevitably condemned by the internal logic of their 
 own principles to deny, in spite of themselves, 
 man’s liberty and the distinction between God and 
 the world. Phenomenalistic Cvztzctsme alone can 
 be logical in affirming these things and in affirming 
 them freely. 
 
 With M. Renouvier, even more decidedly than 
 with Kant, the supreme interest is that of action, 
 and therefore the centre of gravity of philosophy 
 lies in morals. In man’s conscience is to be found 
 the only really fixed. point, the only belief unas- 
 sailed by doubt, the revelation of the absolute, on 
 which, for us, all the rest depends, and which itself 
 depends on nothing else. The ethics of duty is 
 admirably emphasised in M. Renouvier’s works. 
 It is the ever-present inspiration and the very soul 
 and centre of his doctrine. It is this which has 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 451 
 
 chiefly contributed to give it a firm hold on many 
 of our contemporaries. 
 
 Social ethics is treated much more fully in M. 
 Renouvier than in Kant, as might be expected 
 from a former admirer of St. Simon and Fourier. 
 But while rightly recognising the fact of social inter- 
 dependency and its consequences, he vigourously 
 opposes the Positivist theory of progress, and ina 
 general way, all philosophy of history which tends 
 to fatalism. He regards the complete subordina- 
 tion of the individual to society as a baleful thing. 
 His only hope for the future is from the free and 
 deliberate efforts of the individual. His social ideal 
 is above all one of justice. 
 
 After combating for a long time with passionate 
 earnestness the philosophy officially taught in 
 France, Crzticisme at last made its way into that 
 very official teaching. In more than one case it 
 triumphed now over Eclecticism, which was decid- 
 edly out of favour, and again over even the dog- 
 matic idealistic systems. Many university profes- 
 sors in our days adhere to the philosophy of M. 
 Renouvier and of his faithful disciples, MM. Pillon 
 and Dauriac. The summons had been given more 
 than fifteen years ago by M. Brochard in his work 
 entitled’ De Erreur.  Criticisme is clearly the 
 form of neo-Kantism which has been best accli- 
 mated in this country. Whatever may be the 
 future of the system, it has at least manifested 
 vigourous life, and effectually contributed to restore 
 the unprejudiced study of philosophy in France. 
 
452 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Opposed in many respects to M. Renouvier’s 
 philosophy, there arose another system, the suc- 
 cess of which was no less considerable—the system 
 ofwM>. Fouillée; ans extremely Mprolitep writer, 
 endowed with inventive imagination and wonderful 
 dialectical resources, his style as easy as that of M. 
 Renouvier is laborious. M. Fouillée has already 
 presented to the public a long series of works, some 
 historical, some dogmatic, and others critical and 
 controversial, in which his doctrines have gradually 
 taken shape. His first purpose seemed to be to 
 substitute for Eclecticism a philosophical synthesis 
 at once very comprehensive and very consistent. 
 Being remarkably well informed on the history of 
 systems and quick at discovering how the consti- 
 tutive principles of the chief ones among these may 
 adapt themselves to one another, or cover or sup- 
 plement one another, he sought a higher point of 
 view, whence he might survey all the systems he 
 meant to reconcile. He had studied profoundly 
 the modern philosophies of liberty, but he was no 
 less indebted to the great systems of antiquity, and 
 particularly to the philosophy of Plato, which had 
 been the subject of his first work. One may believe 
 that he found a model for his own system in this 
 broad theory of ideas, into which Plato could intro- 
 duce all the essential parts of the chief Greek philos- 
 ophies previous to his own without impairing its 
 harmonious unity. 
 
 M. Fouillée acknowledges the advance made by 
 the Kantian criticism over the former systems of 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 453 
 
 metaphysics; but he does not hesitate to criticise 
 the philosophy of Kant himself, and refuses to 
 accept either his ethics or his theory of knowledge. 
 The leading idea of his own system is the hypoth- 
 esis of the zdées-forces. On it he founded his 
 psychology, his ethics, his general theory of nature 
 and society, and lastly a doctrine of metaphysics 
 based on experience. 
 
 An idea, according to him, is not a mere repre- 
 sentation—that is, a sort of mental reproduction of 
 a real or supposed object outside itself; an idea is 
 at the same time a force working for its own real- 
 isation. For instance, liberty is not a reality given 
 objectively, of which we have an idea because we 
 perceive it; but, on the contrary, it is because we 
 have an idea of our own liberty, because we believe 
 in it, because we adapt our conduct to this belief, 
 that we are actually free, and that our freedom is 
 effectual in the world of phenomena. Our ideas 
 and feelings are conditions of real internal change, 
 and consequently factors in mental evolution, not 
 mere signs of an evolution wrought independently of 
 them by exclusively physical causes. Furthermore, 
 every internal change, being inseparable from an 
 external change or motion, produces effects upon 
 the external world, so that ideas, having acted 
 inwardly, at the same time find outward expression 
 with all thesresultine: Aconsequences. +7, Thus: the 
 internal and the external efficacy of mental states 
 are inseparable, because of the fundamental unity 
 between the physical and the mental. 
 
454 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 The idea is, therefore, inseparable from action— 
 that is to say, from motion. ‘‘It is a form, not 
 only of thought, but of volition; or rather, it is no 
 longer a form, but an act, conscious of its own 
 direction, quality, and intensity.’’ This indissolu- 
 ble union between thought and action is the all-im- 
 portant psychological law summed up in the term 
 zaée-force. Not that ideas intervene physically so 
 as to interfere with the universal mechanism. This 
 would represent the zdée-force as an object endowed 
 with a certain amount of persistent energy. Noth- 
 ing is further from M. Fouillée’s thought. He does 
 not conceive ideas as being apart from one another 
 and endowed each with its individual power. Every 
 state of consciousness is the resultant of a prodi- 
 gious number of actions and reactions between us 
 and the exterior world, while its correlative is the 
 sum of our cerebrations at any given moment. 
 
 From this conception M. Fouillée easily derives 
 a criticism of the theories put forward by spiritual- 
 ism and materialism on the relation between the 
 soul and the body, then a criticism of the notions 
 of soul and body themselves, and finally the elements 
 of a general theory of the universe, in which the 
 world of motions being conceived as inseparable 
 from the world of ideas, there is established a real 
 monism, the monism of zdées-forces, superior both 
 to materialism and to idealism. It is easy to 
 understand how the same principle is applicable to 
 the philosophy of history and of law, and to the 
 solution of sociological questions, which were 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. A455 
 
 always of special interest to M. Fouillée. In all 
 these matters he can stand above the empiricist and 
 rationalistic systems which indefinitely oppose each 
 other without either of them ever gaining a decisive 
 victory; he shows everywhere, to use Leibniz’s 
 expression, that they are right in their affirmations 
 and wrong in their negations. His doctrine, in 
 short, deals fairly with them in criticising them 
 all, and yet remains different from each of them 
 even at the moment when he identifies it with some 
 aspect of hisowntheory. This broad spirit of con- 
 ciliation did not sap M. Fouillée’s vigour, and we 
 need only read his Critique des Systemes de Morale 
 Contemporains to feel sure that the weak point of a 
 system cannot easily escape him. 
 
 M. Fouillée’s philosophy is certainly one of those 
 which best represent the collective aspirations and 
 intellectual needs of the present time. It contains 
 nearly every element of modern thought; the crit- 
 ical spirit which recognises no barriers and claims a 
 right, despite the school of Cretzczsme, to test the 
 very idea of duty; a tendency to adopt the histor- 
 ical and evolutionary point of view; respect for 
 positive science; ataste for social problems; an 
 effort to construct a positive psychology, and to 
 found a science of metaphysics that shall sincerely 
 take into account the modern theories of knowledge. 
 The greatness and inherent interest of such an 
 effort is evident to all eyes; time will show whether 
 a reconciliation between opposite systems is not 
 often achieved by M. Fouillée at the expense of the 
 
4560 © MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 integrity of the system which effects the reconcilia- 
 tion, and whether the framework of his philosophy, 
 the conception of the zaées-forces, is strong enough 
 to support the weight of such a comprehensive doc- 
 trine. 
 
 We must not separate M. Fouillée from his 
 nephew Guyau, whose genius, prematurely lost to 
 philosophy, he celebrated in touching terms. 
 Guyau, who died at thirty-three, left works suff- 
 ciently complete to demonstrate clearly the origi- 
 nality of his mind. It was not his ambition to 
 attempt a conception of the whole universe; he 
 feared that a metaphysical system, of whatever 
 sort, would always be lacking in stability. His 
 efforts were especially directed towards the moral, 
 zsthetic, social, and religious problems which con- 
 front man’s conscience in our times, the old solu- 
 tions of which are seldom satisfactory to any con- 
 science which is honest with itself. Guyau thought 
 that a new solution might be sought in sociology. 
 ‘‘Guyau’s leading idea,’’ said M. Fouillée, ‘‘is that 
 of /zfe as the principle common to art, ethics, and 
 religion. According to him—and this is the gener- 
 ative conception of his whole system—life, rightly 
 understood, involves in its very intensity a principle 
 of natural expansion, fruitfulness, and generosity. 
 From this he concluded that normal life naturally 
 reconciles in itself the individual and the social 
 point of view.’’ By showing this social aspect of 
 individual life, we might establish at the same time 
 both art and morals on a basis which should hence- 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. AS. 
 
 forth be solid. And Guyau hopes for the creation, 
 in the twentieth century, of a social science based 
 on a scientific psychology, the first rudiments of 
 which we behold in our own time. The influence 
 of A. Comte is obvious here; it also appears else- 
 where in Guyau’s thought, for instance, in his con- 
 ception of the immortality of the soul. His works 
 nevertheless bear a strongly marked individual char- 
 acter, due both to his passionate earnestness of 
 thought and to the charm of his style. 
 
 Few doctrines in the period we are considering 
 contain as many keen, deep, and original views as 
 the works of Cournot. Yet his fame has not 
 extended beyond a very limited circle. There was, 
 indeed, nothing in his style capable of attracting 
 the general public; yet more than one of those who 
 attract the attention of the public have read Cour- 
 not and availed themselves of their reading. A 
 prudent, methodical mind, well trained in the prac- 
 tice of the sciences, averse to all hasty generalisa- 
 tion, Cournot tried to determine what we may know 
 of the foundations of our knowledge. Most philos- 
 ophers have sought the solution of the problem 
 in the analysis of our faculty of knowledge. Cour- 
 not followed another method. He carefully inves- 
 tigated each of the sciences which the human 
 intellect has built up in order to gain a better 
 knowledge of the universe and to exercise upon it 
 practical influence; he analysed the principles on 
 which these sciences depended for the establishment 
 
458 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of their laws, and sought to discover whether it 
 were possible by bringing together the principles 
 and methods of the different sciences to obtain a 
 group of fundamental ideas. This group will then 
 constitute his philosophy. 
 
 Three ideas are of paramount importance in 
 this doctrine, which shuns all @ przorz deductions 
 and constitutes a system only in so far as experi- 
 ence warrants: these are the ideas of order, chance, 
 and probability. Order exists in the universe. It 
 is the regular recurrence of the series of phenomena 
 that makes it possible for us to acquire a knowledge 
 of their laws, and the faculty of putting the uni- 
 versal order into an intelligible form is what is called 
 in us reason. But this order is not such that we 
 can deduce the laws of phenomena by means of an 
 abstract action of the mind. Induction is necessary 
 to arrive at these laws, and induction does not con- 
 vey absolute certitude, but only probability, which 
 may be practically equivalent to certitude, but 
 leaves room theoretically for contrary chances. 
 For chance is not a word invented to conceal our 
 ignorance, as has been claimed by philosophers; it 
 is a positive factor in the sum total of reality; it 
 comprises all that results from the concurrence of 
 independent series of causes. Its part in history 
 is undeniable; it is no less so in the evolution of 
 our universe, which may be considered as a sort 
 of history. But whatever be the actual part played 
 by chance, it is a fact that the various series of phe- 
 nomena occur in a regular way, and that order 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 459 
 
 exists. The conclusion we are to derive from this 
 must not be more absolute than the principle itself; 
 this order comprises possible irregularities and 
 exceptions; outside the domain of mathematics, we 
 must always make a principle of reserving a place 
 for what may appear without our being able to 
 foresee it. Therefore no science of real phenomena 
 can claim absolute certitude, moral sciences less 
 than any other, and philosophy still less than ethics. 
 Philosophy is merely an attempt to connect what has 
 been taught us by the study of different classes of 
 phenomena, and to conceive order as universal. The 
 controversies of philosophers show sufficiently that 
 several conceptions of this kind are equally possible. 
 Philosophy proceeds naturally from man’s reflexion 
 upon science; but it is not itself a science. 
 
 This doctrine, clearly akin to Positivism and 
 Criticisme, is nevertheless separate and distinct from 
 them, and even emphasizes some of their defects. 
 It warns us against the too often rash affirmations 
 and conjectures in which our reason indulges. But 
 can a philosophy exist that dares not assert itself as 
 a philosophy? May it not be to its extreme cau- 
 tiousness that Cournot’s doctrine owes the relative 
 obscurity in which, despite its rare value, it has 
 remained? A philosophical doctrine can be but a 
 great hypothesis; this may be a weakness, but it is 
 also the main reason for its existence. 
 
 We are thus brought to the large category of 
 thinkers who believed that such a hypothesis was 
 
460 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 henceforth impossible, and who gave up all attempts 
 to seek for a total and absolute explanation of the 
 universe. Therefore, they abandon the pursuit of 
 essences, causes, and ends. They are still philos- 
 ophers, but have renounced the name of metaphy- 
 sician. This positivistic tendency is found in the 
 most various domains. 
 
 We must first mention men of science, such as 
 the physiologist, Claude Bernard, and the chemist 
 M. Berthelot, who, while enriching science with 
 valuable discoveries, have also reflected upon the 
 nature and scope of science itself. Independently 
 of his interesting observations on the experimental 
 method in general, Claude Bernard has endeavoured 
 to determine exactly the object of physiological 
 science, and his conclusions agree most strikingly 
 with what Auguste Comte has said on biological 
 philosophy. On the one hand, Claude Bernard 
 disencumbers physiology from the last remnants of 
 metaphysics which were still clinging to it. Sci- 
 ence, here as elsewhere, seeks only to know phe- 
 nomena and theirlaws. It has nothing to do with 
 a so-called ‘‘vital principle’’ to ‘‘explain’’ those 
 phenomena, which, considered singly, are never 
 other than physical and chemical phenomena, 
 which are identical in living and lifeless bodies. 
 But, on the other hand, Claude Bernard does not 
 mean to ‘‘reduce’’ physiology to physics and chem- 
 istry. He is fully aware that this would be equiva- 
 lent, as August Comte said, to explaining the 
 superior by the inferior. He shows that life has 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 461 
 
 something specific and irreducible to a physical and 
 chemical mechanism. He emphasises the part 
 
 be) 
 
 played by the ‘“‘dominating idea,’’ which seems to 
 preside over the evolution of the living being, and 
 the necessity that the biologist who wishes to 
 understand one phenomenon should connect it with 
 all the others that take place at the same time, 
 and even with those which shaped the past life of 
 the’ creature. | “In (short; Claude “Bernard’s” chief 
 object is to establish the positive character of 
 physiology and its connexion with the other and 
 older positive sciences, yet without infringing upon 
 its separate, original and irreducible character. 
 
 M. Berthelot, being equally versed in chemistry 
 and in the history of its beginnings, arrived also at 
 general views not very different from those of the 
 Positive philosophy. He thinks that the progress 
 of science will gradually make a theological and 
 metaphysical attitude untenable. As_ minds 
 become familiar with the knowledge of natural 
 laws, they become incapable of harbouring superstt- 
 tions and arbitrary hypotheses. In this M. 
 Berthelot shares the convictions and hopes of the 
 philosophers and scientific men of the eighteenth 
 century. He shows that great changes have 
 already been wrought by the influence of the posi- 
 tive sciences; and yet nearly all of these sciences 
 are just beginning their career, and their influence 
 has only begun to triumph over violent and des- 
 perate opposition. What, then, may we not expect 
 from the future, when these sciences shall hold 
 
462 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 undisputed sway, and shall have made discoveries 
 beyond all our present dreams, which will probably 
 transform both the conditions of social life and the 
 traditional rules of morality? For the moral sci- 
 ences are destined to become positive, after all 
 others, it is true, but no less surely. 
 
 This last stage seems to have been attained by 
 psychology in our days. M. Ribot, casting aside 
 the semi-literary and semi-metaphysical psychology 
 of the Eclectic school, initiated the study of scientific 
 psychology in France. He is not a Positivist, inas- 
 much as he does not, like Comte, regard metaphys- 
 ical investigations as useless and even injurious; he 
 has written an excellent little book on Schopen- 
 hauer, and wishes to leave all questions open. But 
 his conception of psychology is in perfect con- 
 formity with the positivist spirit. He defines it as 
 a science of facts, the sole object of which is the 
 search for the laws concerning these facts. The 
 psychologist needs not choose between materialism 
 and spiritualism, or decide whether it is the soul 
 that acts upon the body or the body upon the soul: 
 this is the business of the metaphysician. 
 
 The psychologist knows the facts from inward 
 observation, and studies them according to the 
 objective method. He does not regard psychical 
 facts as constituting by themselves an order of 
 realities independent of all others; on the contrary, 
 though careful not to say that facts of consciousness 
 are but a phase of physiological facts (an unverifi- 
 able and metaphysical assertion which oversteps the 
 
« 
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 463 
 
 limits of his science), he studies, nevertheless, the 
 facts of consciousness as far as possible, only for the 
 purpose of seeking for and establishing their associ- 
 ation with the physical facts of the nervous system. 
 Adding example to precept, M. Ribot has published 
 a number of books in which the keenest psychologic 
 faculty is combined with a strictly scientific method. 
 In each of his works he endeavours to reduce some 
 special laws to one general psychological law which 
 shall furnish the reason for a great many facts. 
 He holds that psychologic science leads to theories 
 which are at least provisionally satisfactory, with- 
 out being absolutely demonstrated, similar in this 
 respect to the great hypotheses of physics. Fol- 
 lowing M. Ribot came a whole school of young 
 psychologists who abstain from even such theories, 
 and who apply all their energies to laboratory 
 investigations of a very special and often minute 
 nature. There remains nothing in common between 
 psychology understood in this way and what the 
 Eclecticists or Scotchmen called by that name. 
 Sociology is far from having assumed such a 
 decidedly positive form. It still retains more than 
 one of the features which according to Comte mark 
 a science yet in the metaphysical stage. Works on 
 sociology are still chiefly devoted to defending the 
 legitimacy, the object, or the method of this science. 
 Those who treat of it rarely take up the science at 
 the point where their predecessors had left it; each 
 of them contributes his own definition of social 
 facts, upsets the edifice raised by the others, and 
 
464 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 goes about building anew one. There is nothing 
 surprising in this state of sociology. Social phe- 
 nomena being the most complex of all, sociology 
 must necessarily be the last science to reach the 
 positive stage. Still, among the very numerous 
 attempts made to organise it, some will certainly 
 be made use of by the science of the future. Such 
 are the works of MM. Espinas, Durkheim, and 
 Tarde, vto "cite ‘onlya few) names,» > \iriicninas 
 comes first in order of date, with a fine study on 
 Les Soctétés Animales. M. Durkheim, in his Dzvz- 
 ston au Travail Social and in his Régles de la 
 Méthode Soctologique, endeavoured to treat the facts 
 of moral life after the method used in the positive 
 sciences—that is, not only to observe them care- 
 fully, to describe and classify them, but to find out 
 in what way they are capable of becoming objects of 
 scientific study, and to this end, to discover in 
 them some objective element which will admit of 
 exact determination, or if possible, of measurement. 
 If the definition of the ‘‘sociological fact’’ were 
 sufficiently exact, the greatest difficulty would be 
 overcome, and social science could then progress 
 rapidly. Like other positive sciences, it would 
 give man ‘‘foresight and power.’’ 
 
 M. Tarde feels much less strongly than M. 
 Durkheim the need of making sociological investi- 
 gations rigourously scientific. He studies social 
 phenomena now as a psychologist, now as a his- 
 torian, and again as a philosopher, the comparative 
 method, broadly and freely applied, being his 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 465 
 
 favourite procedure. He has given us profound and 
 thorough criticism of Italian theories of criminality, 
 particularly those of Lombroso, and his own Phz/oso- 
 phe Pénale contains many views which are original, 
 comprehensive, and often suggestive. The same 
 thing may be said of his Lozs de l’ Imitation and 
 most of his other works. Amid the sometimes 
 crowded and rather desultory abundance of his 
 ideas, there are found a number of more systematic, 
 esthetic and even metaphysical convictions, which 
 now and then make themselves manifest, and give 
 unity to the work. 
 
 We are very far from having given even a sum- 
 mary idea of the active contemporary philosophical 
 movement in France. How many interesting works 
 we are obliged to pass over in silence! Let us at 
 least mention, in psychology, under its various 
 forms: Fr. Paulhan (L’ Activité Mentale, Les Phé- 
 nomenes Affectifs, etc.), Egger (La Parole Inté- 
 rieure),Pierre Janet (L’ Automatisme Psychologique), 
 Féré (Sensation et Mouvement), Binet (La Psychologie 
 du Ratsonnement, L’ Année Psychologique), H. Berg- 
 son (Essat sur les Données Immédiates de la Con- 
 science, Maticre et Mémoire); in metaphysics, MM. 
 Evellin (De 2 /nfinz) and Rauh (Le Fondement Méta- 
 physique de la Morale); in logic, MM. Liard (Des 
 Définitions Géométriques et des Définitions Empt- 
 riques, etc.), Brochard (De l’Erreur, Les Sceptiques 
 Grecs), Naville (La Logique de l Hypothese); in 
 moral and religious philosophy, MM. Marion (La 
 
466 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 Solidarité Morale), Ollé-Laprune (La Certztude 
 Morale, Le Prix de la Vze, etc.), and Sabatier 
 (Essai @ une Philosophie de la Religion); in sociology, 
 MM. de Roberty (La Soctologie, Auguste Comte et 
 Herbert Spencer, etc.), De Greef (Les Lots Soctolo- 
 gigues, Le Transformisme Social, etc.), Lacombe 
 (Les Lots de lf Histoire), Henry Michel (L’ldée de 
 l’ Etat); in the philosophy of the sciences, MM. 
 Delboeuf (Le Sommezl et les Réves, La Matwere 
 Brute et la Matiere Vivante), Hannequin (Essaz sur 
 l! Hypothése des Atomes), Couturat (De LInfini 
 Mathématique); in esthetics, MM. Sully-Prud- 
 homme (De l’Expresston dans les Beaux-Arts), and 
 Séailles (Essaz sur le Génie dans Art); in the his- 
 tory of philosophy, MM. Adam (La Philosophie en 
 France au XIX* Siecle), Tannery (Pour 1 Histotre 
 de la Science Hellene), Lyon (L’ldéalisme en Angle- 
 terre, La Philosophie de Hobbes), Delbos (Le Probleme 
 Moral dans la Philosophie de Spinoza), Denis (f7/ts- 
 torre des Idées et des Théortes Morales dans 
 f’Antiquité), and so many others whom we regret 
 not having the space to mention. 
 
 The very number of all those we should have 
 cited will be our excuse. True, this philosophical 
 activity, of which the Bzbliothéque de Philosophie 
 contemporaine gives so many tokens, seems at the 
 same time to be quite desultory and fragmentary. 
 But perhaps we overrate the diversity of the philo- 
 sophical tendencies of the present time. Perhaps 
 we are labouring under an optical illusion inevitable 
 to those who try to take a general view of contem- 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT. 467 
 
 porary events. Probably many an important point 
 of resemblance between doctrines escapes us, 
 because the very spirit of our time, with which we 
 are all imbued, is expressed in these resemblances, 
 while, on the other hand, we take too much notice 
 of secondary differences. The historian in the 
 next century will discern the due proportions, and 
 portray more easily than we can do the leading 
 features of such a complex evolution. 
 
CHAPDERYAVI 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 IF we cast a general glance upon the three centuries 
 that have elapsed between the birth of Descartes 
 and the present day, two great features are at once 
 perceptible. French philosophy during that period 
 offers characteristics peculiar to itself, and yet it is 
 inseparable from the general evolution of European 
 philosophy; for is it not closely linked with the 
 development of science, and is not this development 
 the common work of civilised nations? The inter- 
 change of philosophical ideas has been scarcely less 
 active than that of scientific discoveries. Especially 
 has this been the case between France, England, 
 and) Germany. Indeed; more than once eachaor 
 the three countries welcomed from abroad ideas 
 which had originated at home but a short time 
 before without having attracted much attention. If 
 we were to imagine a sort of international clearing- 
 house for philosophical accounts, we should some- 
 times see the same doctrine passed in the course of 
 one generation from the debit side to the credit 
 side of one and the same nation. 
 
 What really belongs to each nation in this com- 
 mon evolution? It is seldom the very substance of 
 a philosophical doctrine, but rather the stamp of its 
 
 468 
 
CONCLUSION. 469 
 
 peculiar genius, the form and expression given to 
 the doctrine, the expansive force which the thinkers 
 and writers communicate to it. In this sense there 
 is a French philosophy. In the historical sequence 
 of French philosophers continuity is the result of 
 the persistency of a certain number of common fea- 
 tures, expressive of the very genius of the nation. 
 Even as in the seventeenth century, the prestige of 
 antiquity and the ascendancy of the literatures of 
 Spain and ltaly rather nurtured than stunted the 
 admirable blossom of French literature, so Bacon 
 and Locke in the eighteenth century, and Kant and 
 Hegel in the nineteenth, furnished to French philos- 
 ophy a rich supply of material which the French 
 mind transformed and by assimilating made its own. 
 
 English philosophers, in general, have occupied 
 very diverse social positions, and their minds have 
 been trained in most various studies. Bacon was 
 a statesman, Locke a physician, Berkeley a bishop; 
 in the present century many have been physiolo- 
 gists, others have taken a part in public affairs. 
 We cannot, however, draw from this any indication 
 respecting the character of English philosophy. 
 In Germany, a certain number of philosophers, and 
 among the greatest, began by studying divinity, 
 and this fact was not without its consequences. In 
 France it was mathematics that was first studied by 
 many a great philosopher—for instance, in the 
 seventeenth century Descartes, the inventor of 
 analytical geometry; Pascal, a geometrician anda 
 physicist; Malebranche, a member of the Academy 
 
A470 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 of Sciences; inthe eighteenth, Fontenelle, D’Alem- 
 bert, and Condorcet; in the nineteenth, August 
 Comte, Renouvier, and Cournot, to quote but a few 
 names. Even among those who are not geome- 
 tricians, many were deeply interested in mathemat- 
 ics. Voltaire became the herald of Newton in 
 France, and Condillac wrote the Langue des Cal- 
 culs. It is not likely this could have been a mere 
 coincidence, protracted as it was for so long and in 
 such a definite way. It seems allowable to infer, 
 not that French philosophy was based on mathe- 
 matics, but that there has been in France a close 
 affinity between the mathematical and the philo- 
 sophical spirit. 
 
 Thus, as perfect clearness is an essential feature 
 of mathematics, French philosophy was also fond 
 of clearness. The ‘“‘philosophy of clear ideas’’ 
 which, upon the whole, predominated in France 
 under different forms till the end of the eighteenth 
 century, proceeded from Descartes. This philos- 
 ophy took it for granted that among the various 
 ways of representing reality, there is one which is 
 adequate and is recognisable on account of its clear- 
 ness and its sufficient ‘‘evidence.’’ In this perfectly 
 intelligible representation we have truth at its 
 source, and though henceforth experience is still 
 useful for the confirmation of our conclusions, it is 
 no longer necessary for the acquisition of scientific 
 knowledge. When in possession of the principles, 
 we can deduce the consequences, as is done in 
 mathematics. Thus Descartes undertook to con- 
 
CONCLUSION. 471 
 
 struct the physical universe, if only he were given 
 extension and the laws of motion; thus Condillac 
 undertook to construct the phenomena and faculties 
 of the soul, if only he were given sensation; and 
 thus also did Rousseau construct society, and 
 Auguste Comte the positive religion. 
 
 Now, to discover principles, as well as to build 
 upon those principles, method is necessary. Thence, 
 the great importance attached to method by 
 nearly all French philosophers. Is it not to method 
 that mathematics owes its certainty and fruitfulness? 
 The value of science depends upon the strictness of 
 its method. Almost every one of the French 
 philosophers in his turn composed his Dzscours de 
 la Méthode, and ascribed to his method the credit 
 of the advance he believed had been achieved 
 beyond his predecessors. With Descartes method 
 is science itself. With Condillac everything 
 depends upon the judicious use of that analysis 
 which is capable of discovering the process of 
 nature. Lastly, with A. Comte, positive philos- 
 ophy is achieved by the application of one and the 
 same method to every branch of knowledge. In 
 short, when the method is found, the philosophy is 
 alreadyubuilt. bie rest wiseanmactter of executron 
 which may be more or less complicated and difficult, 
 but is not the essential part. In striking contrast 
 with the ways of German thought, which is wont to 
 construct a body of doctrine first and afterwards 
 abstract a method, ‘isi that’ of) the) French, ‘who 
 shape their doctrines in accordance with their 
 
472 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 methods. Here, again, the prevailing need of 
 clearness and intelligibleness is manifest in the 
 latter; only when the process of reflexion is deter- 
 mined beforehand, and sure to reach its mark, does 
 reflexion upon reality appear to them profitable and 
 even possible. 
 
 Such a philosophy, the constant ambition of 
 which is deduction, may comprise among its devo- 
 tees many men who are empiricists in method, but 
 few who are empiricists by temperament. Compare 
 in this respect Locke and Condillac—the one vigilant 
 in following up all the devious ways along which 
 the observation of facts leads him, the other con- 
 cerned above all else to find the ‘‘primitive fact’’ 
 from which may be inferred all others. But such 
 a philosophy, on the other hand, will scarcely admit 
 of the instantaneous divination of the absolute, the 
 mystical intuition which is superior to reason and 
 which dispenses with logical demonstration. There 
 certainly are French mystics, and very notable 
 ones, but most of them belong to the history of 
 theology rather than to that of philosophy. Those 
 who are philosophers, as St. Martin, Ballanche, and 
 Quinet, have little of the philosophic spirit, and 
 their influence was limited in France, for the precise 
 reason that their outpourings and visions puzzled 
 those minds whom no philosophy that lacks a 
 methodical, rigourous, and lucid form can long 
 allure. 
 
 For the same reasons there have been but few 
 very original metaphysicians among French philoso- 
 
CONCLUSION. A73 
 
 phers. They have excelled rather in the philosophy 
 of the sciences and in moral philosophy; also in the 
 study of the feelings and passions, in the analysis of 
 intellectual functions and of the mechanism of polit- 
 ical society, and in the systematisation and classifi- 
 cation of the sciences. To classify beings or 
 phenomena, to discover their natural bonds and 
 relations, to rise from particular laws to laws as 
 general as possible, was the work to which the 
 majority spontaneously devoted themselves. 
 
 By virtue of their undeniable principles and 
 rigourous demonstrations, mathematical truths are 
 accessible to all rational minds. French philoso- 
 phers, who flatter themselves that they employ a no 
 less rigorous method and attain to the same degree 
 of certainty, claim for their doctrines a universal 
 validity similar to that of mathematics. Thence 
 the attitude peculiar to them. Being persuaded 
 that the truth they have discovered is obvious to 
 every mind that follows a suitable method, they do 
 not write for a limited circle of philosophers and 
 men of science; they pursue, notably in the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries, a sort of intellectual 
 proselytism. Their fancied audience is the whole 
 of mankind, whom they endeavour to convince, and 
 to whom they appeal as judges of the truth of their 
 philosophy. 
 
 In consequence, they attempt to eliminate from 
 their philosophy its purely national form, which 
 they think would make the exposition deficient in 
 clearness and obscure the universal character of the 
 
474 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 doctrine. In moral and social sciences they study 
 “society 5: and ) if, they ideal «witha 
 given society, it is always with the intention of 
 separating what is special to one place and one 
 epoch from what is true in all places and epochs. 
 This is a feature common to nearly all French phi- 
 losophers, to Montesquieu himself, as well as to 
 Auguste Comte. Then, just as they imagine their 
 doctrine extending over the whole upper stratum of 
 the globe, they also seek to go lower down, to 
 penetrate to the mass of the people, being con- 
 vinced that every rational man, whatever be his 
 social condition, can and must appreciate the truth. 
 French philosophers, as a rule, are desirous of mak- 
 ing themselves accessible to all. Descartes set the 
 example by writing his Descours de la Méthode in 
 French. The philosophers of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury desired, above all else, to be understood by 
 every one in France and all over Europe. In the 
 nineteenth century many thinkers, entirely occu- 
 pied with social questions, attempted to come into 
 direct contact with the people. Auguste Comte 
 carried on for eighteen years a free public course in 
 popular astronomy so as to help in the intellectual 
 emancipation of workingmen, and it was upon them 
 that he counted chiefly for the success of the Posi- 
 tive philosophy. 
 
 This also explains the fact that French philos- 
 ophers have nearly always taken care to show that 
 their doctrines were in perfect accord with common 
 sense—that is to say, with reason freed from tradi- 
 
 é¢ %? 
 
 mat and 
 
CONCLUSION. 475 
 
 tional prepossessions and prejudices—that even their 
 method was no extraordinary contrivance, but a 
 mere application of the rules of common-sense. 
 Condillac expressly says that ‘‘nature always begins 
 aright,’’ and all the men of his time repeated this 
 aiter vhimi wiAccordingtomComte ms theniositive 
 method is a “‘systematic extension of popular rea- 
 Son, 
 
 A philosophy which thus addressed the whole 
 of mankind could hardly ignore what alone can 
 excite the pinteresh) and jAaxmithemattentionnof, the 
 immense majority of men—that is, the practical 
 affairs of life and action. And indeed, this philos- 
 ophy manifestly showed a tendency to make the 
 practical the goal of its speculation, though with- 
 out subordinating its freedom of investigation 
 exclusively to the idea of immediate utility. Here 
 again mathematics provided a sort of model; 
 applied mathematics has proven all the more use- 
 ful because pure mathematics has pursued theoret- 
 ical truth in a more disinterested way. Condorcet, 
 and Comte after him, observed that the first geom- 
 etricians and astronomers who made it possible to 
 determine longitude were not aware that their dis- 
 coveries would some day serve to preserve the life 
 of seamen. According to Descartes, ethics, medi- 
 cine, and mechanics, which are sciences directly 
 profitable to man, cannot bear all their fruits until 
 the theoretical sciences upon which they are based 
 have been fully mastered. 
 
 Thus French philosophers generally believe in 
 
476 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE, 
 
 the power of man over nature. Whether they be 
 necessitarians or not (and it is among them that we 
 meet with the greatest number of advocates of free 
 will), they are hardly willing to deny that in 
 natural, and above all, in social evolution, man’s 
 own volition is a factor which must be taken into 
 account. Descartes expected from science more 
 than we dare hope for now; he thought it would 
 some day prolong the term of life indefinitely. 
 Everybody knows what faith the ‘‘philosophers’’ of 
 the eighteenth century had in the power of educa- 
 tion and legislation. And at least in the first half 
 of the nineteenth century, French thinkers were 
 not over-timid in their political and social concep- 
 tions. They wished to find in society, as well as in 
 nature, a clear and logical order, justifiable in the 
 eyes of reason; and not finding it there, they tried 
 to establish it. Even the knowledge of history was 
 not always sufficient to warn French philosophers 
 against @ priort social constructions. The desire 
 for justice being in that case added to the desire for 
 order produced in them an almost irresistible incli- 
 nation to construct an ideal society, and though 
 their doctrines were often chimerical, they were 
 also, on the other hand, often humane, generous, 
 and suggestive. 
 
 To sum up ina word all these characteristics, 
 which, after all, were connected together, there has 
 been in French philosophy for three centuries a 
 singular persistency of the Cartesian spirit; whether 
 
CONCLUSION. A477 
 
 the stamp of the first great modern philosopher was 
 indelible, or whether—which is more likely—Des- 
 cartes expressed in his doctrine the essential fea- 
 tures of the French genius, which caused his influ- 
 ence to codperate with the tendency of the national 
 temperament. This spirit, which had become 
 predominant by the end of the seventeenth century, 
 was transmitted in the eighteenth through Fonte- 
 nelle and Montesquieu, prevailed among the ‘‘ philos- 
 ophers,’’ and even in Condillac, and spent itself 
 in the French Revolution, to be revived in the 
 nineteenth century, modified, but still recognisable, 
 in Auguste Comte. This spirit was wonderfully 
 adaptable to the task of criticism incumbent upon 
 modern philosophy when once out of the Middle 
 Ages and past the Renaissance and the Reforma- 
 tion. The main object was to definitely separate 
 scientific or philosophical speculation from theology, 
 and to overthrow the entire body of institutions 
 based on a historical tradition which was often 
 indefensible, in order to establish in their place 
 a just system. To this work French philosophy 
 was peculiarly adapted by reason of its rational, 
 universal, and humane character, and of its insistence 
 upon logical clearness. 
 
 Historians, for instance, were fully aware of this. 
 Though the “‘philosophers’’ of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury are not very original, and though they repre- 
 sent, or think they represent, an empiricism of Eng- 
 lish origin, nevertheless they are acknowledged to 
 be true representatives of the French spirit, and to 
 
478 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 have employed in moral and social questions a 
 method similar to that of Descartes. Their talent 
 as writers, their enthusiasm and their zeal for mak- 
 ing proselytes, rendered them formidable adversa- 
 ries of the old system, which they attacked from 
 every point of view. Through them ideas of 
 sereturn: to natures’ fof) yustice, \humanttiymand, 
 equality spread triumphantly all over Europe. 
 These ideas were prevalent during the second half 
 of the eighteenth century, meeting with scarcely any 
 opposition. At the end of the century a reaction 
 set in against this philosophy almost everywhere, 
 coincident with the reaction against the French spirit 
 in general in literature and in art, as well as in phi- 
 losophy. As early as the beginning of the French 
 Revolution the signs of this reaction appeared. 
 New doctrines revealed what was abstract and 
 superficial in the French philosophy of the eight- 
 eenth century. They showed that the “‘humanity’’ 
 for which this philosophy constructed a society, a 
 political constitution, and an educational system, 
 was nothing but an imaginary body of men as they 
 might have been just after the deluge, having no 
 past, no history, no tradition, no ties to bind them 
 to any country—nothing, in fact, pertaining to an 
 actual and living people. The new doctrines 
 opposed to cosmopolitanism a distinctively national 
 sentiment. They treated history with respect, tra- 
 ditions with consideration, and restored so far as 
 possible what the eighteenth century had destroyed. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact that at the very time 
 
CONCLUSION. 479 
 
 when this reaction was triumphing in France, 
 French philosophy drew its chief inspiration from 
 foreign sources——Scotch and German. With 
 Auguste Comte it resumed a national, and at the 
 same time a Cartesian, direction; yet even Comte 
 felt the influence of the traditionalist current. To 
 this influence is due his partiality for Joseph de 
 Maistre, his enthusiastic admiration for the Catholic 
 organisation of the Middle Ages, and his contempt 
 for many of the eighteenth century ‘‘ philosophers, ’’ 
 who, in his opinion, merely completed a task already 
 more than half accomplished, the result of it purely 
 destructive. Since that time French philosophy, 
 in its various forms, has been controlled in part by 
 the spirit of the eighteenth century, persisting in its 
 critical tendency, and in part by the reconstruc- 
 tive movement, which, according to the historian 
 Ranke, is characteristic of our own century. This 
 divided attitude may be one of the causes of its 
 weakened influence over the mass of minds. 
 
 Yet, whatever be the political future of civilised 
 nations, significant symptoms already show that 
 ‘‘national philosophies’’ are on the decline. While 
 the French genius, as well as the English and the 
 German genius, has played its special part in the 
 evolution of modern European philosophy, it seems 
 that this part is soon to be reduced to that of merely 
 an important factor in a common development. 
 Already positive science (to which philosophy is so 
 closely allied) knows no frontiers; it is purely inter- 
 national. It is the same with sociology, with scien- 
 
 x9 
 
480 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 tific psychology, which is cultivated at the same time 
 and by similar methods, in Germany, the United 
 States, England, and France; the same is also true 
 of logic and the theory of knowledge. We are 
 progressing towards a state of things in which 
 there shall no longer be any French, English, Ger- 
 man, or American philosophy, but only one philos- 
 ophy common to civilised mankind. Thus it was 
 inthe Middle jAgess-s Since” then, windeediminder 
 the influence of many causes, particularly of the 
 organisation of the great European nations, philos- 
 ophy, like literature and art, has assumed a 
 national character, and each great nation has had 
 its own original thinkers, as it had its writers and 
 artists. But the day seems at hand when this 
 national character will again be lessened and when 
 philosophy will no longer bear geographical labels. 
 
 What will be the part of France in the common 
 philosophical work of the future? An answer to 
 this question would necessarily be daring, since so 
 much depends upon a factor that cannot be antici- 
 pated, the appearance of one of those men of genius 
 who carry the human mind astep forward. At any 
 rate, the country which gave birth to such men as 
 Descartes, Malebranche, Montesquieu, Diderot, and 
 Auguste Comte may hope to supply still more 
 leaders to the sacred legion of mankind. But it is 
 perhaps less bold to inquire what direction the evo- 
 lution of philosophy is likely to take. It really 
 seems as if the old forms of metaphysics—I do not 
 mean metaphysics itself—were tending gradually to 
 
CONCLUSION. A8I 
 
 disappear, in spite of the efforts and talent bestowed 
 upon their renovation. Their apparatus for demon- 
 stration is outgrown, for criticism in the last two cen- 
 turies has shown what its faults were, and made it 
 ineffective. But from this very criticism there 
 may issue a theory of knowledge, scientifically 
 established, and from this theory of knowledge, 
 perhaps, a new science of metaphysics. 
 
 History teaches us that philosophical revolutions 
 are accomplished only by degrees, and that crises 
 which seem most violent to contemporaries may 
 afterwards assume the aspect of slow transitions. 
 Our time is no doubt a stage of the great transition 
 by which the mind of man is passing on from the 
 state in which religious dogma dominated his 
 thought, to another state, to be realised in the 
 future, which may also be religious, but in which 
 dogma will no longer prevail. In this long strug- 
 gle for enfranchisement, which is not accomplished 
 consistently or continuously, but which implies 
 spasmodic advances, fluctuations, and _ recoils, 
 there have been several periods of stagnation. 
 Repeated and serious attempts at reaction have 
 been made in the nineteenth century; but we are 
 justified in believing that these are mere incidents, 
 the historical causes of them recognisable, affecting 
 only temporarily the general progress of human 
 development. Though this development takes 
 place in obedience to laws, the transition from one 
 stage to another is inevitably accompanied by a pro- 
 found moral and social transformation. This trans- 
 
482 MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE. 
 
 formation can be achieved only with jars, painful 
 friction, and even violent lacerations, and those 
 who oppose it no doubt fulfil as important an office 
 as those who labour to effect it. The incidents of 
 this strife are reflected in the conflict of doctrines 
 which characterises our time, and of this the present 
 state of philosophy in France presents a faithful 
 picture. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MODERN FRENCH 
 PH BOSO@ Ure: 
 
 DESCAKLES, 
 (1596-1650.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Opera. Latin edition of his works. Amsterdam. 1650 ff. 
 _ Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Cousin. Paris. 1824-26. 11 vol. 
 in 8vo. 
 
 Oeuvres Philosophiques. Ed. Garnier. Paris. 1834. 4 vol. 
 in 8 vo. 
 
 Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Ch. Adam et Tannery. Paris. In 
 4to. (The first volume appeared in 1896, the second in 
 1808.) 
 
 Oeuvres Choisies. Ed. Jules Simon. 1 vol. Paris: Charpen- 
 tier. 
 
 Oeuvres Chotsies. Ed. Jules Simon. 1 vol. Paris: Garnier. 
 
 The Method, Meditations, and Selections from the Principles. 
 Translated into English by J. Veitch. 11th ed. Edin- 
 burgh & London. 1897. 
 
 Meditations. Translated into English by Lowndes. Lon- 
 don. 1878. 
 
 Latracts from Descartes’'s Writings: Rules for the Direction 
 of the Mind, the Meditations (in part); the World, Pas- 
 sions Of the woul, cic, PBY Tin Awa orrey.) (New. ork, 
 1892. 
 
 German Translations: (1) The Method, (2) the Principia, 
 (3) the Passions of the Soul, (4) the Meditations. Heidel- 
 berg: Georg Weiss. 1 or 4 vols. 
 
 Discourse on Method: Authorised Reprint of Veitch’s Trans- 
 lation. Chicago. The Open Court Publishing Company. 
 1899. 
 
 * The present bibliography has been prepared by the UE Ge for the conven- 
 ience of students. It is not designed to be exhaustive. Only the best editions of 
 the collected works of each philosopher are indicated, and the best, cheapest and 
 most accessible single-volume editions, or epitomes, of their most representative 
 productions. In each case, a number of volumes for reference and for collateral 
 study, mostly in the French language, have been added. 
 
 483 
 
4384 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 fF. Boutllier. Histoire de la Philosophie Cartésienne. 2 vol. 
 Paris. 1868. 
 Liard. Descartes. Paris: Alcan. 1881. 
 Foutllée. Descartes. Paris: Hachette. 1893. 
 Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale. Descartes number. 
 
 1806. 
 Mahagy. Descartes. Edinburgh & Philadelphia. 1881. 
 Wallace. Art. ‘ Descartes’’ in Encyclopedia Britannica. 
 
 Schaarschmidt, C. Descartes and Spinoza. Bonn. 1850. 
 Natorp, P. Descartes’ Erkenntnistheorie. Marburg. 1882. 
 
 MALEBRANCHE. 
 (1638-1715.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 
 Oenures” (Panis. (0712, 
 Oeuvres. Ed. Jules Simon. 4 vol. Paris. 1871. 
 De la Recherche de la Vérité. 2 vol. Paris: Charpentier. 
 
 (English translation by Taylor, 1712.) 
 Méditations Chrétiennes. vol. Paris: Charpentier. 
 Entretiens Métaphysiques. ivol. Paris: Charpentier. 
 Traité de Morale. Ed. H. Joly. Paris. 1882. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Abbé Blampignon. ¥tude sur Malebranche, suivie d’une 
 Correspondance inédite. Paris. 1863. 
 L. Ollé-Laprune. La Philosophie de Malebranche. 2 vol. 
 Parisswiitore. 
 
 PASCAL. 
 (1623-1662.) 
 EDITIONS: | 
 
 Les Provinctales. 1656-57. 
 
 Pensées. (1) Edition de Port Royal, 1670; (2) Ed. de Con- 
 dorcet, 1776; (3) Ed. de Bossut, 1779; (4) Ed. de Faugeére 
 (the first edition conforming to the manuscript), 1844; (5) 
 Ed. de Havet, 1851; (6) Ed. de Astié, Paris et Lausanne, 
 1857; (7) Ed. de Rocher, Tours: Mame, 1873; (8) Ed. de 
 Molinier, Lemerre, 1877; (9) Ed. de Brunschvicg, Paris, 
 1897. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 485 
 
 Thoughts. ‘English translation by C. Kegan Paul. London. 
 1885. 
 
 Provincial Letters. English translation. London. 1889. 
 
 Pensées. 1 vol. Paris: Garnier. 
 
 Lrowineiales. “1.Vole» Faris? Garnier. 
 
 Lettres, Opuscules et Mémotres de Madame Périer et de Jac- 
 gueline, Soeurs de Pascal, et de Marguerite Périer, sa 
 Niéce. Publiés par M. Faugére. Paris. 1845. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 
 Sainte-Beuve. Port-Royal. Paris. 1878. 
 
 A. Vinet. Ftudes sur Pascal. Paris. 1848. 
 
 J. Bertrand. Pascal. Paris. 1890. 
 
 V. Cousin. Jacqueline Pascal. 
 
 Droz. Etude sur le Scepticisme de Pascal. Paris. 1886. 
 Tulloch. Pascal. Edinburgh & London. 1878. 
 
 BAYLE., 
 (1647-1706.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Dictionnaire Historique & Critique. Rotterdam. 1697. 2 
 vol. in folio. 3@me éd., 1820. 4 vol. in folio. 
 Oeuvres Diverses. La Haye. 1738. 4 vol. in folio. 
 Chowx de la Correspondance inédite de P. Bayle. Publié par 
 E.Gigas. Copenhague et Paris. 1850. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Ludwig Feuerbach. P. Bayle. Leipzig. 1844. 
 A, Deschamps. La Genése du Scepticisme érudit chez Bayle. 
 Lieges 1370; 
 
 FONTENELLE, 
 (1657-1757.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Completes. (1) Paris, 1758, 11 vol.; (2) Paris, 1790, 
 8 vol.; (3) Paris, 1825, 5 vol. 
 Eloges. 1 vol. Paris: Garnier. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Sainte-Beuve. Causeries du Lundi. Vol. III. 
 
486 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 MONTESQUIEU. 
 (1689-1755.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 
 Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Richer. Paris. 1758. 
 Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Laboulaye. Paris. 1875-79. 7 vol. 
 LEsprit des Lots. 1 vol. Paris: Garnier. 
 Lettres Persanes. vol. Paris: Garnier. 
 Constdérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur & de la Deé- 
 
 cadence des Romains. 1vol. Paris: Garnier. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 A, Sorel. Montesquieu. Paris. 1887. 
 
 VOLTAIRE. 
 (1694-1778.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Completes. YEd. Beuchot. Paris. 1828. 70 vol. 
 Oeuvres Complétés. Ed. Avenel. Paris. 1867. 8 vol., in 
 4to. 
 Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Moland. Paris. 1877. 50 vol. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 
 Condorcet.. Vie de: Voltaire.’ |Genéve.” 1787." Paris;)1820) 
 
 Longchamp & Wagniére. Mémoires sur Voltaire & ses 
 Ouvrages. 2vol. 1825. 
 
 Bersot. La philosophie de Voltaire. Paris. 1848. 
 
 Du Bots Reymond. Voltaire in seiner Beziehung zur Natur- 
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 G. Maugras. Voltaire et J.J. Rousseau. Paris. 1886. 
 
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 Siécle. Paris. 1867-76. 
 
 John Morley. Voltaire. London & New York. 1872. 
 
 LA METTRIE. 
 
 (1709-1751.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Philosophigues. London & Berlin. 1751. 2 vol. 
 
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BIBLIOGRAPHY. 487 
 
 Ll’ Homme-Machine. German Translation by Ritter: Der 
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 FOR REFERENCE: 
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 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 
 (1712-1778.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Completes. Ed, Dupeyrou. 1782. 35 vol. 
 Ocuvres Completes. F.d. Musset-Pathay. Paris. 1833. 8 
 vol. 
 Oeuvres & Correspondances Inédttes. Ed. Streckeisen-Moul- 
 (Olig UMATISg clools 
 Oeuvres Choisies. 1 vol. Paris: Garnier. 
 Pages Choisies. Ed. Rocheblave. 1 vol. Paris: Colin. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Madame de Staél, Lettres sur le Caractére & les Ouvrages 
 de J. J. Rousseau. 1788. 
 Chuqguet. J. J. Rousseau. Paris. 1893. 
 John Morley. Rousseau. London & New York. 
 Thomas Davidson. Rousseau and Education According to 
 Nature. New York. 1899. 
 
 D’ALEMBERT. 
 (1717-1783.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 
 Mélanges de Littérature, ad Histoire et de Philosophie. Paris. 
 1752.7, 5° vols. 
 
 Oeuvres Philosophiques, Historigues & Littératres. (1) Ed. 
 Bastien. Paris. 1805. (18 vol. (2) Ed. Bossange. Paris. 
 16215, VO: 
 
 Opuscules Mathématigues. Paris. 1761-80. 8 vol. 
 
 Oeuvres Chotstes. Paris. 1852. 
 
 Oeuvres & Correspondances Inédites. ¥.d. Ch. Henry. Paris, 
 1887. 
 
 Discours Préliminaire a l Encyclopédie. Ed. Picavet. 1 
 vol. Paris: Colin. 
 
488 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Condorcet. Eloge. Paris. 1784. 
 J. Bertrand. D’Alembert. Paris. 1880. 
 A, De Morgan. In the English Cyclopedia, Art. “Alem- 
 bert, Jean-Le-Rond D’.” Vol. V. 
 
 DIDEROT. 
 (1713-1784.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Ocuvres Completes. Ed. Assézat et Tourneux. Paris. 1875- 
 79. 20 vol. 
 
 Pages Chotstes. Ed. Pellissier. 1 vol. Paris: Colin. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Ed. Scherer. Diderot. Paris. 1880. 
 L. Ducros. \Diderot. Paris. 1804. 
 J. Reinach. Diderot. Paris. 1894. 
 K. Rosenkranz. Diderot’s Leben und Werke. Leipzig. 1866. 
 2 vol. 
 J. Morley. Diderot. London & New York. 1886. 
 
 D’HOLBACH. 
 (1723-1789.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Le Christianisme Dévotlé. Paris. 1756. 
 Systeme dela Nature. 1770. 2 vol. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: : 
 Fr. A, Lange. Geschichte des Materialismus. Leipzig. 
 
 1806. 
 Avezac-Lavinne. Diderot et la Société du Baron d’Holbach. 
 1875. 
 J. Morley. Diderot. 1878. 
 HELVE-CIUS: 
 (1715-1771.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 
 Oeuvres Completes. (1) 5 vol. London. 1781. (2) Io vol. 
 Paris. 1796. An edition was also published in 1818. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Cousin. Oeuvres. Vol. II. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 489 
 
 CONDILLAC, 
 (1715-1780.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Completes. (1) Paris. 1798. 23 vol. (2) Paris. 
 1803. 32 vol. 
 
 Traité des Sensations. Premiere Partie. Ed.  Picavet. 
 Paris. 1885. German translation by Johnson. Heidel- 
 berg: Georg Weiss. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Réthoré. Condillac. Paris. 1864. 
 Dewaule. Condillac et la Psychologie anglaise contempo- 
 Taine.) F arises loge: 
 Laromiguiére. WLecons de Philosophie: Paradoxes de Con- 
 dillac. 
 Taine. Les Philosophes Frangais du X1Xe Siécle. Paris. 
 
 CONDORCET. 
 (1743-1794.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Completes. Paris. 1847. 12 vol. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Dr. Robinet. Condorcet. Paris. 
 John Morley. Critical Miscellanies. 
 Comte. Cours de Philosophie Positive. Vol. IV. 
 Arago. Biographie de Condorcet. 
 
 DESTUTT DE TRACY. 
 (1754-1836.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Eléments @’Tdéologie. Paris.’ 1801. 
 Commentaire sur l Esprit des Lots de Montesquieu. Paris, 
 1817. (English translation by Thomas Jefferson.) 
 Oeuvres Completes. Paris. 1824. 4 vol. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Picavet. Les Idéologues. Paris. 1891. 
 
490 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 CABANIS. 
 (1757-1808.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 
 Les Rapports du Physique & du Moral del Homme. Paris. 
 1805. 2 vol. 
 Oeuvres Completes. “Ed. Thurot. Paris. 1825. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Picavet. Les Idéologues. Paris. 1891. 
 
 JOSE RHMD be MAIS Dinis; 
 (1754-1821.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Completes. Lyon. 1884-87. 14 vol. 
 Les Sotrées de St. Pétersbourg. Paris: Garnier. 2 vol. 
 Du Pape. Paris: Charpentier. ; 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Fr. Paulhan, J. De Maistre et sa Philosophie. Paris. 1893. 
 Cogordan. J. De Maistre. Paris. 
 
 DE BONALD. 
 (1754-1840.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Complétes. Paris. 1857-75. 12 vol. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Damiron. Philosophie en France au X1X® Siécle. 
 De Bonald. Notice sur M.le Vicomte De Bonald. 1841. 
 
 MAINE DE BIRAN. 
 (1766-1824.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Ocuvres Posthumes. Ed. Cousin. Paris. 1841. 3 vol. 
 Pensées. ¥ed. Naville. Paris. 1857. 
 Oeuvres Inédites, Fd. Naville. Paris. 1859. 3 vol. 
 Science & Psychologie. Ed. Bertrand. Paris. 1887. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 491 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Merten. ¥tude Critique sur Maine de Biran. 1865. 
 Gérard. Maine de Biran. Essai sur sa Philosophie. Paris. 
 1876. 
 L Marillier. Maine de Biran. Paris. 1893. 
 
 COUSEN: 
 (1792-1867.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Completes. Paris. 1846-47. 22 vol. 
 Du Vrai, du Beau & du Bien, Paris. 1872. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Pierre Leroux. Réfutation de l’Eclectisme. Paris. 1839. 
 Paul Janet. Victor Cousin et son Oeuvre. Paris. 1885. 
 Jules Simon. Victor Cousin. Paris. 1887. 
 Dictionnatre des Sciences Philosophiques. 2nd edition. Art. 
 “ Cousin.” 
 
 JOUFFROY. 
 (1796-1842.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Cours de Droit Naturel, Paris. 1834. 2 vol. 
 Meélanges Philosophiques. Paris. 1833. 
 Cours ad’ Esthétique. Ed. Damiron. Paris. 1843, 
 Nouveaux Mélanges Philosophiques. Paris. 1842. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 L. Ollé-Laprune, Th. Jouffroy. Paris. 1899. 
 
 SAINT-SIMON. 
 (1760-1825 .) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Oeuvres Chotstes. Fd. Lemonnier. Bruxelles. 1859-1861. 
 3 vol. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Paul Janet. Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme. Paris. 1879. 
 G. Wetll. Saint-Simon et son Oeuvre. Paris. 1804. 
 
492 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 CHARLES FOURIER, 
 (1772-1837.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Théorie des Quatre Mouvements. Lyon. 1808. 2 vol. 
 Le nouveau Monde Industriel, Paris. 1830. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Pellarin. Y¥ourier, sa Vie et sa Théorie. Paris. 1872. 
 
 A: COMTE. 
 (1798-1857.) 
 EDITIONS: : 
 Cours de Philosophie Positive. Paris. 1894. 6 vol. 
 Discours sur ’ Esprit Positif. Paris. 1898. 
 Systéme de Politigue Posttive. Paris. 1851-4. 4 vol. 
 
 The Positive Philosophy of A. Comte Freely Translated and 
 
 Condensed. By Miss H. Martineau. London. 1853. 2 
 vol. | 
 Rigolage (Rig, Jules.) Cours de Philosophie Positive. Epit- 
 ome. Paris. 1896. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 
 Robinet. Notice sur 1’ Oeuvre et la Vied’ A. Comte. Paris. 
 
 1860. 
 Littré. A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive. Paris. 1877. 
 Gruber. A. Comte der Begriinder des Positivismus. Frei- 
 
 Duron a1sso: 
 
 De Roberty. A.Comte et Herbert Spencer. Paris. 1894. 
 Wantig. A.Comte und seine Bedeutung fiir die Entwick- 
 
 lung der Socialwissenschaften. Leipzig. 1894. 
 J. S. Mill, Comte & Positivism. London. 1865. 
 £. Caird, The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte. 
 
 Glasgow. 1885. 
 
 J. Watson. Comte, Mill, and Spencer. An Outline of Phi- 
 
 losophy. 2nd edition. New York. 1899. 
 
 TAINE. 
 (1828-1893.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Les Philosophes Frangats du XIX° Siécle. Paris. 1895. 
 Philosophie del Art. Paris. 1881. 2 vol. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 493 
 
 Dellntelligence, Paris, 1895. 2 vol. 
 
 Flistotre de la Littérature Anglaise. Paris. 5 vol. 
 
 Les Origines de la France Contemporaine. Paris. 1876-93. 
 5 vol. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 Awde d/l arvceria, Vlainew Parise 1504. 
 G. Monod. Renan, Taine, Michelet. Paris. 1894. 
 
 RENAN. 
 (1823-1892.) 
 EDITIONS: 
 Averroés & [Averroisme. Paris. 1859. 
 Questions Contemporaines. Paris. 1868. 
 Essats de Morale & de Critique. Paris. 1867. 
 Dialogues & Fragments Philosophiques. Paris. 1895. (Eng- 
 lish translation. 1883.) 
 L’ Avenir dela Science. Paris. 1890. 
 Les Origines du Christianisme. Paris. 1863-83. 7 vol. 
 Etudes a Histoire Religieuse. Paris. 
 Vie de Jésus. Paris. 1863. (English translation by Wilbour.) 
 Pages Chotstes. 1 vol. Paris: Colin. 
 
 FOR REFERENCE: 
 
 Séatlles. E. Renan. Paris. 1894. 
 
 Allier. a Philosophie d’Ernest Renan. Paris. 1895. 
 G. Monod. Renan, Taine, Michelet Paris. 1894. 
 
 GENERAL REFERENCE WORKS ON THE HISTORY 
 OF FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IN THE XVIII 
 AN DYXTXY GEN EURIES: 
 
 1, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Damiron. Mémoires pour servir 4 |’Histoire de la Philos- 
 ophie en’ France au XVIII* Siécle.. Paris. 1858-64. 3 
 vol. 
 
 Brunel, Les Philosophes et Académie Francaise au 
 XVIIIe Siécle. Paris. 1884. 
 
 Lerminier. De VInfluencede la Philosophie du XVIIIe 
 Siécle sur la Législation et la Sociabilité du XIX*. Paris. 
 
 1833. 
 
AQ4 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Lanfrey. VEglise et Les Philosophes au XVIII° Si&cle. 
 Paris. 1857. 
 
 Frank. La Philosophie Mystique en France au XVIII° 
 Siccie, Parisetsoo. 
 
 Ferraz. Histoire de la Philosophie pendant la Révolution 
 Francaise. Paris. 1890. 
 
 Faguet. Dix-huitiéme Siécle. Paris. 
 
 Brunetiére. Histoire & Littérature. Paris. 
 
 Brunetiére. Questions de Critique. Paris. 
 
 Brunetidre. Nouvelles Questions de Critique. Paris. 
 
 11. NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Damiron. Essai sur Histoire de la Philosophie en France 
 AUP NUNC SICClEe Paris maLoz4dy 
 
 L. Reybaud. Etudes sur les Réformateurs ou Socialistes 
 Modernes. Paris. 1864. 2 vol. 
 
 L. Von Stein. Geschichte der socialen Bewegung in Frank- 
 reich. 1842-48, 2 vol. 
 
 H. Taine. Les Philosophes Francais du X1X¢ Siécle. Paris. 
 
 1895. 
 
 F. Ravaisson. Wa Philosophie en France au XIX° Siécle. 
 Paris. 1889. 
 
 P. Janet. Les Origines du Socialisme Contemporain. Paris. 
 1883. 
 
 Ferraz. Etudes sur la Philosophie en France au XIX° 
 Siécle. Paris. 1882-89. 3 vol. 
 
 E. Faguet. Dix-neuviéme Siécle. Paris. 1887. 
 
 E. Faguet. Politiques et Moralistes du XIX Siécle. Paris. 
 1881. 
 
 H. Michel. Lidée de l’Etat. Paris. 1896. 
 
 Ch. Adam. La Philosophie en France. Premiére Moitié 
 du XIX° Siécle. Paris. 1894. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Aesthetics, contemporary, list of 
 writers in, 466. 
 
 ‘Affective life,’’ Biran’s theory of, 
 324. 
 
 Agnosticism, 102. 
 
 Aguesseau, D’, 161. 
 
 Alembert, D’, 139, 211-219, 222. 239, 
 353, 395, 469. 
 
 Ampétre, 322. 
 
 Apperception, pure, Cousin’s notion 
 of, 337. 
 
 Aristotle, 67, 89, 152. 
 
 Arnauld and Nicole, rog. 
 
 Associationists, 433. 
 
 Augustine, 44, 95. 
 
 Avenir de la Science, L’, 397, 404, 408, 
 
 415. 
 
 Bach, J.S., 54. 
 
 Bacon, 4, 68, 81, 82, 179, 212, 214, 281, 
 285, 315, 316, 423, 432, 469. 
 
 Bain, 433. 
 
 Ballanche, 320, 472. 
 
 Bayle, 106, 107-125; a precursor of 
 Rationalism, 125; 172, 175, 185, 198, 
 353- 
 
 Bazard, 353. 
 
 Berkeley, 76, 469. 
 
 Bernard, Claude, 460 
 
 Bernouilli, 222, 288. 
 
 Bersot, 350, 439. 
 
 Berthelot, 460, 46r. 
 
 Bibliotheque de Philosophie Contem- 
 poraine, 466. 
 
 Bichat 325, 372, 395. 
 
 Biran, Maine de, 305, 311, 321-330, 
 350, 400. 
 
 Boerhaave, 209. 
 
 Boileau’s Arrét burlesque, 39. 
 Bonald, De, 312-313, 320, 342. 
 Bonnet, Charles, 322. 
 Bossuet, 51, 105, 106, 109, 201, 307. 
 Bouillier, 439. 
 
 Boutroux, 445. 
 
 Boyle, 41. 
 
 Bradley, 288. 
 
 Brochard, 451. 
 
 Buddhist metaphysics, 325. 
 Buffon, 139, 240, 276, 277, 288. 
 Burdin, Dr., 359. 
 
 Burnouf, 398, 406. 
 
 Cabanis, 303, 306-311, 322, 324, 325, 
 330, 373, 387, 395. 
 
 Candide, 118, 185, 202. 
 
 Caro, 350, 439. 
 
 Cartesianism, 38-44, 433. 
 
 Catherine II , 219. 
 
 Causes Premtéres, 
 SUT, 310. 
 
 Chinese religion, 188. 
 
 Christianity, Pascal’s argument for, 
 102; Voltaire’s hostility toward, 
 192; Renan’s relation to, 412. 
 
 Christian, Rousseau’s ideal of a, 253. 
 
 Ctuzl Government, On, (Locke), 143. 
 
 Clark, 184. 
 
 Classification of the Sciences, ac- 
 cording to Comte, 370. 
 
 Cogito, ergo sum, 15. 
 
 Collins, 171. 
 
 Comte, 31, 138, 145, 214, 268, 311, 312, 
 320, 355, 359-396; his three modes 
 of thought, 363-370; 400, 407, 418, 
 423, 438, 447, 460, 470, 471, 474, 477, 
 479, 480. 
 
 Lettre 2 Fauriel 
 
496 
 
 Condillac, 33, 139, 207, 217, 221, 228, 
 234, 239, 240, 245, 271-287, 289, 304, 
 308, 309, 315, 322, 323, 326, 330, 333, 
 374, 422, 432, 434, 470, 471, 472, 475, 
 477. 
 
 Condorcet, 70, 207, 288-302, 303, 318, 
 355, 359, 372, 381, 394, 395, 475- 
 
 Confession d’un Enfant du Sidcle, 349. 
 
 Confucius, 188. 
 
 Conseils a un Journaliste, 201. 
 
 Considérations sur les Causes de la 
 Grandeur et de la Décadence des 
 Romains, 166. 
 
 Copernicus, 370. 
 
 Corpuscular philosophy, 127. 
 
 Cosmopolitanism, Voltaire on 200. 
 
 Cournot, 457-459, 470. 
 
 Cousin, 321, 323, 325, 330-351, 374, 400, 
 422, 431. 
 
 Criticism, 447, 450, 459. 
 
 Critique des Systémes de Morale Con- 
 temporaines, 455. 
 
 Critique of Pure Reason, 35, 85, 93. 
 
 Dante, 385. 
 
 Darwin, 319, 438. 
 
 Dauriac, 451. 
 
 Deist, Voltaire a, 184, 
 
 Delacroix, 341. 
 
 Democritus, compared with Descar- 
 eS 7- 
 
 Descartes, 1-37; his attitude toward 
 his predecessors, 1-6; emphasizes 
 ethics, 7; discovers analytical ge- 
 ometry, 10; his rule of evidence 
 11; excepts religion and politics 
 from the sphere of philosophy, 
 13; opinion of the experimental 
 method, 29; close of his life, 32; 
 influence of his philosophy, 33; in- 
 cidental references, 45, 46, 51, §2, 
 53, 50, 57, 65, 66, 68, 69, 76, 81, 82, 83, 
 85, 86, 88, 89, 98, 105, 107, 109, 126, 
 129, 134, 146, 169, 172, 178, 179, 190, 
 209, 218, 273, 327, 329, 347, 376, 394 
 
 400, 443, 469, 470, 474, 475, 476, 478, 
 480. 
 
 Dialogues Concerning Natural Relz- 
 Lion, 184, 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Dialogues Philosophiques, 397, 408, 416. 
 
 Dictionary, Bayle’s, 124. 
 
 Dictionnatre philosophique, 200. 
 
 Diderot, 139, 171, 208, 219-227, 229, 
 234, 240, 245, 248, 276, 319, 395, 480. 
 
 Discours dela Méthode, 10, 38, 172. 
 
 Discours Préliminatre, 211. 
 
 Discours sur l’ Histoire Universélle, 
 106. 
 
 Dogmas, Voltaires attack upon, 189, 
 
 Dominique Loricat, 414. 
 
 Drames Philosophiques, 397. 
 
 Durkheim, 464. 
 
 Eclecticism, 330-351, 438, 440. 
 
 Education, viewed by Rousseau, 245, 
 265; aim of, according to Comte, 
 389. 
 
 Ego, the, Maine de Biran’s theory of, 
 326. 
 
 Eighteenth century in philosophy 
 contrasted with the seventeenth, 
 107; De Maistre's judgment on, 314, 
 philosophical schools in, 332. 
 
 Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton, 
 178. 
 
 Eloges, 289. 
 
 Emile, 230. 
 
 Empiricism, 426, 445. 
 
 ‘¢Encased germs,”’ theory of, 52. 
 
 Encyclopedia, 139, 208. 
 
 Encyclopezdists, 171, 196, 207-235, 271. 
 289, 311, 345. 
 
 Enfantin, 353. 
 
 England, Montesquieu’s admiration 
 for, 161; Woltaire’s fondness for, 
 172. 
 
 Entretien avec la Maréchale de * * *, 
 225. 
 
 Entretiens sur la métaphysique, 75. 
 
 Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes 
 128. 
 
 Entretien, sur Epictete et Montaigne, 
 94. 
 
 Epicurus, 40, 413. 
 
 Epictetus, 89, 90, 91, 93. 
 
 Espinas, 464. 
 
 Esprit, Del’, 227. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Esprit des Lots, L', 139, 141, 142, 145, 
 147, I5I, 154, 160, 163, 165, 166. 
 
 Essai sur les Maeurs, 201, 204. 
 
 Essai sur l’ Origine des Connaissances 
 huntaines, 272. 
 
 Essats de Critique Général, 447, 
 
 Essay on the Understanding, 174, 214. 
 
 Ethics, Diderot’s, 225; Rousseau’s 
 255; Comte’s, 385-389, Renan’s, 413. 
 
 Euler, 222, 288. 
 
 Evil, the problem of, viewed by Vol- 
 taire, 185; by Rousseau, 238; by 
 Condorcet, 295. 
 
 Faith and reason, their relation ac- 
 cording to Bayle, 112 ff. 
 
 Femmes Savantes, Les, 38. 
 
 Fénelon, 56, 105, 109. 
 
 Fichte, 21, 341. 
 
 Flaubert, 434. 
 
 Fontenelle, 106, 125-138, 172, 180, 182, 
 193 381, 469, 477. 
 
 Fouillée, 443, 452-457. 
 
 Fourier, 357, 362. 
 
 Frank, 439. 
 
 Franklin, 288. 
 
 Frederick the Great, 196, 219, 234, 298. 
 
 Free will, Cousin’s view of, 345. 
 
 Galileo, 1, 40. 
 
 Gall, 373, 387. 
 
 Garnier, Ad., 350, 431. 
 
 Gassendi, 40, 107, 
 
 God, Descartes’s demonstration of, 
 16; Malebranche’s notion of, 54- 
 63; D’Holbach’s criticism of, 232; 
 Voltaire’s argument for a, 179; 
 Rousseau’s view of, 249; Condil- 
 lac’s proof of, 286; De Bonald’s 
 idea of, 312; Cousin’s notion of, 
 342; Comte’s notion of, 389; Re- 
 nan’s idea of, 408. 
 
 Goethe, 201, 227, 246. 
 
 Goncourt, 427, 434. 
 
 Government, nature of according to 
 Montesquieu, 151, 
 
 Gratry, Father, 399. 
 
 Grotius, 143. 
 
 Guizot, 346. 
 
 Guyau, 456. 
 
 497 
 
 Haller, 288. 
 
 Harrington, 143. 
 
 Harvey, 1. 
 
 Hegel, 1, 339, 343, 346, 350, 407, 416, 
 
 423, 434, 444, 448, 469. 
 Helmholtz, 218. 
 
 Helvetius, 199, 227-231, 239, 318. 
 
 Herder, 201, 421. 
 
 fistotre des Oracles, 131. 
 
 Histotre du Peuple d’ Israel, 397. 
 
 Histotre Naturelle de [ Ame, 209. 
 
 History, as treated by Fontenelle, 
 133. 
 
 History of English Literature, 429. 
 
 History of philosophy, list of con- 
 temporary writers in, 466. 
 
 History, Universal, Voltaire’s no- 
 tion of, 200. 
 
 Hobbes, 4, 143, 150, 151. 
 
 Holbach, D’, 231-234, 246. 
 
 Hométie sur l’ Athéisme, 185. 
 
 Hlomme-Machine, 209. 
 
 Hugo, V., 341, 420. 
 
 Humanity, Comte’s idea of, 389-392. 
 
 Hume, 21, 33, 67, 76, 184, 217, 425, 447, 
 448. 
 
 Huxley, 392. 
 
 Ideas, Malebranche’s notion of, 48, 
 53. 
 
 Idées forces, 453. 
 
 Ideologists, the, 303-311, 322, 332, 422, 
 433. 
 
 Imitation of Christ, The, 385. 
 
 Immortality, Comte’s notion of, 391. 
 Renan’s view of, 410. 
 
 Instinct, Condillac’s doctrine of, 278, 
 
 Intelligence, De £', 430. 
 
 International law, Montesquieu on, 
 164. 
 
 Inward Light, the, in Rousseau, 246, 
 
 Jacobi, 344. 
 
 Janet, Paul, 439. 
 
 Janet, Pierre, 324, 350. 
 
 Jansenists, 39, 95, 212. 
 
 Jesuits, 32, 40, 212. 
 
 Jesus a theist, according to Voltaire, 
 19I, 391. 
 
498 
 
 Jouffroy, 349, 431. 
 Jussieu, 288. 
 
 Kant, 4, 21, 35, 51, 67, 72, 76, 85, 92, 93, 
 99, 164, 169, 183, 201, 218, 256, 325, 
 327, 328, 332, 336, 337, 344, 381, 409, 
 417, 434, 437, 438, 441, 443, 445, 447- 
 453, 469. 
 
 Kepler, 370. 
 
 Lachelier, 444. 
 
 Laffitte, 441. 
 
 Lagrange, 222. 
 
 Lamarck, 438. 
 
 Lamartine, 341. 
 
 Lamennais, 320, 342, 361, 399. 
 
 La Mettrie, 207, 209-211. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 134. 
 
 Lange, F. A., 28. 
 
 Language, Condillac’s doctrine of, 
 279. 
 
 Langue des Calculs, 272. 
 
 La Rochefoucauld, 228. 
 
 Laromiguiére, 330, 
 
 Leewenhoek, 52. 
 
 Leibniz, 4, 27, 36, 51, 52, 53, 62, 67, 75, 
 96, 99, 107, 116, 118, 129, 185, 190, 322, 
 324, 326, 388, 438, 441, 445, 446. 
 
 Lettres Anglaises, 172, 179. 
 
 Lettres Persanes, 139, 141, 147, 150, 157, 
 163, 164, 166. 
 
 Lettre sur les Aveugles, 211. 
 
 Leroux, Pierre, 357. 
 
 Lévéque, 439. 
 
 ‘‘ Libertines,’’ 171. 
 
 Littré, 393, 441. 
 
 Locke, 21, 33, 36, 143, 160, 172, 175, 190, 
 205, 209, 214, 217, 221, 226, 230, 248, 
 272, 286, 287, 291, 315, 332, 469, 472. 
 
 Logic, contemporary, list of writers 
 in, 465. 
 
 Logiqgue, La (of De Tracy), 305. 
 
 Lombroso, 465. 
 
 Louis XIV., 157. 
 
 Maistre, Joseph de, 309, 312, 313-320, 
 340, 342, 354, 361, 394, 479. 
 
 Malebranche, 21, 36, 44-76; summary 
 of his work, 75; 80, 95, 107, 123, 172, 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 238, 815, 321, 327, 403, 410, 412, 469, 
 480. 
 
 Mandeville, 200. 
 
 Manicheans, 116, 118. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 413, 424. 
 
 Maupertuis, 178. 
 
 Méditations chrétiennes, 61. 
 
 Mémoire sur tl’ Habitude, 322. 
 
 Metaphysics, Voltaire’s, 178. 
 
 Metaphysics, contemporary, list of 
 writers in, 465. 
 
 Métaphysique et la Sctence, La, 350. 
 
 Micromégas, 175. 
 
 Middle Ages, Voltaire’s view of the, 
 203; 293, 347, 373, 381; Comte on, 384, 
 
 Mill, J. S., 217, 373, 426, 433, 434. 
 
 Miracles, Renan’s view of, 410, 
 
 Montaigne, 6, 31, 75, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 
 gg, IOI, 147. 
 
 Montesquieu, 139-168; his circum- 
 stances, 140; his travels, 142; his 
 great thought, 144; 229, 313, 372, 395; 
 474, 477, 480. 
 
 Morality, the basis of, according to 
 Voltaire, 199. 
 
 Moral philosophy, contemporary, 
 list of writers in, 465. 
 More, 143. 
 
 Musset, A. de, 349. 
 Myths, Cults, and Religions, 134. 
 
 Nature, the state of, according to 
 Rousseau, 240. 
 
 Naville, 321. 
 
 Neveu de Rameau, Le, 225. 
 
 Newton, 33, 41, 128, 172, 175, 178, 780, 
 232, 370, 378, 470. 
 
 Nicole, 238. 
 
 Nouveaux Essais ad’ Anthropologie, 
 330. 
 
 Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 
 Tir. 
 
 Occasional causes, Malebranche’s 
 doctrine of, 64. 
 
 Oratorians, 39, 44. 
 
 Orders, Malebranche’s theory of, 54. 
 
 Origines du Christianisme, 397, 419. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Paroles dun Croyant, 399. 
 
 Pascal, 42, 77-106; as natural philos- 
 opher, 81; as moral philosopher, 
 89; 109, 136, 192, 278, 347, 381, 469. 
 
 Passions de l’ Ante, 22, 32. 
 
 Penal judicature, 161. 
 
 Pensées, Pascal’s, 77, 79, 86, 94, 100, 
 103, 347. 
 
 Philosophe Ignorant, 17%. 
 
 Philosophie de l’ Art, La, 430, 431. 
 
 Philosophy, contemporary, 438. 
 
 Pillon, 451. 
 
 Plato, 23, 45, 53, 58, 152, 169, 173, 218, 
 325, 335, 339, 347, 391, 414, 452. 
 
 Plotinus, 339. 
 
 Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon 
 250, 
 
 Politique Postttve, 392. 
 
 Positivism, 224, 359-396, 459. 
 
 Princesse de Babylone, La, 202. 
 
 Proclus, 347. 
 
 Progress, the central idea of Con- 
 dorcet’s doctrine, 293. 
 
 Proudhon, 357. 
 
 Psychology, contemporary, list of 
 writers in, 465. 
 
 Pufendorf, 143. 
 
 Pyrrhonism, 97, 99, 100, 124. 
 
 Quesnay, 234. 
 Questions sur l' Encyclopédie, 203. 
 
 Quinet, 472. 
 
 Ranke, 479. 
 
 Rapports du Physique et du Moral 
 306, 325. 
 
 Ravaisson, 441. 
 
 Raynol, Abbé, 207. 
 
 Reason, Cousin’s definition of, 335. 
 
 Recherche de la Vérité, La, 45, 74. 
 
 Reid, 332, 336, 350. 
 
 Religion, Natural, expounded by Vol- 
 taire, 186; by Rousseau, 254. 
 
 Renaissance, I, 3, 
 
 Renan, 350, 397-421; review of his 
 philosophy, 417-421. 
 
 Renouvier, 358, 439, 447-452, 470. 
 
 Réve de D' Alembert, Le, 248. 
 
 Revolution, French, 305, 319, 331, 351, 
 
 352. 
 
 499 
 
 Ribot, 462-463. 
 
 Richelieu, Montesquieu’s hatred of, 
 157. 
 
 Romanticism, 340. 
 
 Rousseau, 139, 155, 164, 199, 205, 226, 
 230, 234, 236-270, 271, 277, 281, 289, 
 357; 420, 471. 
 
 Royer-Collard, 323, 331. 
 
 St. Martin, 472. 
 
 Saint-Simon, 353-357, 360, 362, 378, 
 384. 
 
 Saisset, 350. 
 
 Scheffer, Ary, 341. 
 
 Schelling, 337, 339, 341, 346, 438, 441, 
 442, 444. 
 
 Schlegel, A. W., 341. 
 
 Schleiermacher, 421. 
 
 Scholasticism, 4, 42, 45. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 325, 462. 
 
 Science, DeMaistre’s attitude toward, 
 316; Comte’s notion of, 375-378; 
 Renan’s notion of, 404. 
 
 Sciences, philosophy of the, list of 
 contemporary writers in, 466. 
 
 Scotch school, 344. 
 
 Secrétan, 442. 
 
 Sensations, Condillac’s doctrine of 
 the, 274. 
 
 Sensations, Traité des, 276. 
 
 Senses, Malebranche’s view of, 46. 
 
 Sévigné, Madame de, 38. 
 
 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 187, 221. 
 
 Sidney, 143. 
 
 Simon, Jules, 350. 
 
 Smith, Algernon, 160, 
 
 Social Reformers, 352-359. 
 
 Society, Rousseau’s view of, 261. 
 
 Socinians, 187. 
 
 Sociology, Comte’s theory of, 380- 
 382; contemporary, 463, list of 
 writers in, 466. | 
 
 Soul, Descartes’s definition of, 24; our 
 knowledge of, in Malebranche’s 
 doctrine, 68; Voltaire on the, 177; 
 Condillac on the, 286. 
 
 Sourds Muets, Sur les, 221. 
 
 Sparta, viewed by Rousseau, 265. 
 
500 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 333, 371, 373, 433 
 438. 
 
 Spinoza, 36, 51, 60, 76, 105, 169, 179, 
 388, 423, 432, 434. 
 
 Stendhal, 311, 427. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 350. 
 
 Stoicism, 31, 74, 89. 
 
 Supplément au Voyage de Bougain- 
 ville, 225. 
 
 Swammerdam, 52. 
 
 Systéme dela Nature, Le, 231. 
 
 Tableau des Progrés de l' Esprit Hu- 
 main, Esguisse ad’un, 290. 
 
 Tacitus, 160. 
 
 Taine, 161, 311, 421-435. 
 
 Tarde, 464. 
 
 Theism, discussed by Voltaire, 187. 
 
 Théléme, Abbey of, 413. 
 
 Théodicée, 116. 
 
 Theology and philosophy, their rela- 
 tion according to Bayle, 112. 
 
 Théorie des Quatre Mouvements, 357. 
 
 Thierry, A., 353. 
 
 Three Stages, Law of the, Comte’s 
 382. 
 
 Toleration, religious, Montesquieu’s 
 argument for, 163. 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Torricelli, r. 
 
 Touch, Condillac’s view of the sense 
 of, 274. 
 
 Tracy, Destutt de, 303-306. 
 
 Traditionalists, the, 311-320, 342, 362. 
 
 Traité de Dynamique, 211. 
 
 Traité de Métaphysique, 171. 
 
 Tratté du Monde, 30. 
 
 Tratté du Vide, 81. 
 
 Troglodytes, the, 150. 
 
 Turgot, 234, 289, 381. 
 
 Vacherot, 349, 350, 439. 
 Vigny, De, 341. 
 Villemain, 346. 
 “‘Vision in God,” 
 doctrine of, 48, 58. 
 Voltaire, 105, 112, 129, 139, 140, I4I, 
 147, 158, 169-206, 207, 212, 218, 226, 
 232, 234, 250, 256, 271, 289, 208, 315, 
 479. 
 Vortices, theory of, 30. 
 
 Malebranche's 
 
 Wolf, 4. 
 
 Zadig,, 202. 
 Zola; 434 
 
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