LIBRA^RY Theological Seminary PRINCETON, N. J. BL 51 ,84413 1863 V Saisset -1863 Emile Edmond, 181 Ess 3y on religious ^^ 1 ^ u„ MODERN PANTHEISM. Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/essayonreligious02sais ESSAY RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY BY M. EMILE SAISSET, Professor of the History of Philosophy in the Faculty of Letters of Paris. WITH MARGINAL ANALYSIS, NOTES, CRITICAL ESSAY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL APPENDIX, VOLUME IL EDINBURGH: T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET. LONDON : HAMILTON, ADAMS, & CO. DUBIJN: JOHN ROBERTSON & CO.; AND HODGES &: SMITH. 1863. Edinburgh : Tiirnlull l5* Spears, Printers, 21 George Street. CONTENTS. Seventh Treatise — Pantheism of Heg-e! PAGE I |^art 331,— ^eDitations, First Meditation, 41 Second Meditation, 46 Third Meditation, 77 Fourth Meditation, 83 Fifth Meditation, 123 Sixth Meditation, 145 Seventh Meditation, 162 Eighth Meditation, 171 Ninth Meditation, 182 Essay: by the Translat or, 193 '^ppznnix. I. Natural and Revealed Religion, II. Christlanity and Platonism, III. Philosothy and Religion, Index, .... 231 242 267 269 ^ebentl) Creatine- The Pantheism of Hegel, It is impossible to doubt that Kant's idea of God phiioso- is quite inconsistent with his system. But I can- p^^'^ s^"^" not at once conclude that Kantism is false. For Kant, if I take this system by itself, after eliminating g^f^^Jj'^^ every heterogeneous ingredient from it, it appears Hegel. "' to form a sufficiently united whole, and that whole is possibly the truth. The last doubt which I wish to settle is con- nected with the question of the definite conclusion of the Kantian system. I hear it said that Kantism leads to the Idealism of Fichte, and that this Idealism itself conducted Fichte to a Subjective Pantheism, from which arose the Absolute Pan- theism of Schelling and Hegel. What is the definite meaning of the formula, ^^^^^l^" Idealism, subjective Pantheism, absolute Pan-tise. theism ? What is the strange genealogy which jj subje^- deduces Fichte from Kant, Schelling from Fichte, tive Pan- and Hegel from Schelling ? I wish to understand n^ Abso- all this. I wish especially to find a key to the ^"^^. p^"" txiGism system of Hegel, since I am assured that it con- and espe- tains the final conclusions of German philosophy, ^^^i^^jj^p, I. One point which is clear to me is, that theism! II. A 2 SEVENTH TREATISE. f. Idealism phllosopliical movement excited by Kant could Two^sys-''' ^^^ s^^^P ^^^^^ ^^^^- ■'• ^^^^ clearly, indeed, recog- tems in niscd the fact, that the Critique of the Pure Reason^ and the Critique of the Practical Reason do not form one homogeneous philosophy, but, in some sort, two distinct and even contrary philosophies, Avhich no artifice of logic or of analysis can solder together. I do not insist upon the additional fact, that Kant has written a third criticism, the Critique of the Judgment^ which, fastened on to the two others by ingenious combinations, enriches them undoubtedly, but also complicates to excess the whole system. Fichtecon- But I couseut to euclose myself within the even^he^ Hmits of the Critique of the Pure Reason^ and to first of the forget all the rest. Has the system, thus simpli- ian systems fied, pcrfcct rigour and perfect unity ? Such is —that con- |-]-^g questiou which Fichte put to himself It led the C/7/,>,.- him to substitute a new doctrine for that of his of the Pure niaster, which at first he merely proposed to make Reason— \^ i ; r r wanting in morc pcrtect. Accordmg to r ichte, the system comL!""^ developed in the Critique of the Pure Reason is tency. esscutially wanting in that logical severity which, in his estimation, is the characteristic of true science. The system The first assertiou of Kant is, that nothing can Lrts with b^ produced in thought, except as the sequence an enor- of cxperieucc and of the phenomena which strike Soi^"' our senses. But these phenomena, which the with a mind meets with and does not produce, pre-sup- '^^^ ' '''^' pose a foreign principle. Thus we have, at the very outset, an enormous concession,, which ruins by anticipation the whole system of Critical Philo- THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 3 sophy. What ! Science has the subject — the human mind — for its impassable barrier ; and yet there exists another thing : and the first condition of science is to postulate an object which science does not know, which it cannot attain, and which is the only origin of all ! Science, then, starts with a hypothesis, and with a hypothesis contra- dictory in its very nature. It leaves its principle outside of itself, or rather it has no principle — it does not exist. The end which Fichte proposes to himself in Fichte's his Theory of Science is to give to science a true, fa\™o?' that is to say, an absolute principle, reposing only '^J^"2!vt" upon itself, and leaving a basis to all the rest. ~ Here, the idealism of Kant is accepted in all its rigour. There is no longer any arbitrarily sup- posed objective element, even as a simple pheno- menon. All is severely deduced from the sub- ject, the sole term of knowledge admitted by idealism. Fichte's problem is just this: to bring out philosophy whole and entire from the Ego ; and this bold reasoner proposes to give his deduc- tion a more than mathematical exactitude. Al- gebra rests upon the law of identity, which is thus expressed: A = A. Fichte maintains that this law implies another, the only one which a philosopher is entitled to admit without proof, and also the only one which he requires: Me = Me. When you say A = A, you intend to affirm This prin- nothing upon the existence of A. You only ^^p^^^^'^^^J^j^ affirm that if A is A, A can be nothing else th^nln form and A. The proposition A = A, is therefore, says'^'"'''- Fichte, absolute only in its for?n^ and not in its matter or contents. I know not if A exists prac- 4 SEVENTH TREATISE. tically and materially or not; but it matters not. I am formally certain that given A, A cannot differ from A, and that there is a necessary rela- tion between these two terms. It is by the analysis of this relation that Fichte undertakes to prove the existence of the Ego. In the propo- sition A = A, he argues, the first A is not con- sidered under the same point of view as the second. The first A, as we have seen, is laid down conditionally, the second absolutely. What reduces these two terms to unity, puts them in a certain relation, judges, affirms, and constitutes this relation ? Evidently the Ego. Take away the Ego^ and you take away the relation, the two terms, the proposition A = A. Above it, then, there is a higher and more immediate truth. The principle of identity is only absolute mform; the principle Me = Me is absolute both in form and matter; it alone is truly absolute. Fichte'> I need not follow Fichte in the course of his £^. and deduction, the most subtle and artificial which can be conceived. It is enough for me to know that he pushed to the utmost the strange idea of deducing a vast system of philosophy from this one principle, the Ego. Upon this needle's point he pretends to rest the entire edifice of human be- liefs. Nature and God are but developments of the Ego. The Ego alone is the principle, ex- plaining, laying down, creating all; explaining, laying down, creating itself. I know not whether I should wonder more at the excess of extrava- gance to which the human mind may be carried, or at the amazing richness of its resources. By Kant it was condemned to be ignorant of the THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 5 universe and of God, locked up in the prison of the Ego. Let him alone. This one reserved point will give him back all the rest. From the furthest limits of scepticism he will even pass to the most absolute dogmatism. But a little while ago he doubted of everything. Now he vaunts, not merely that he knows Nature, but that he creates her. Nay, he vaunts that he creates God. Such are the very expressions, at once absurd and logical, of Fichte. Yes ! Fichte draws nature and God from the Ego. The Ego implies the Non-Ego. It limits itself. It is only itself by opposing to itself another which is not itself. It poses itself only by opposing its contrary. It is itself the link of this opposition, the synthesis of this antinomy. In fact, if the Ego only exists for itself by limit- ing itself, the faculty of self-limitation which it possesses, implies that, in itself, it is infmite and illimitable. Beyond the divisible and relative EgOy opposed to the Non-Ego, there is, therefore, an absolute Ego, comprising nature and man. This Absolute Ego is God. Here, then, is thought in Reiathe possession of its three essential objects; here are |^' [^^^^j^_ man, nature, and God, in their necessary rela- tithesis oi tion, members of one identical thought, with^^^^^^"^' three terms, at once separated and reconciled; ^0/''^^^?° here is a philosophy worthy of the name; a"^ "^ ' rigorous, demonstrated, homogeneous science, start- ing from one great principle to follow out and to exhaust all its consequences. Such in its general principle is the metaphysics of Fichte. His morality is a logical, though per- haps unforeseen, consequence of this. It is 6 SEVENTH TREATISE. Morality fouiided upoii the Ego^ whose eminent character- drawn ig|-|(3 jg liberty. To preserve one's own liberty. Ego. whose one's Ego^ is duty; to respect the Ego^ the liberty character- q£ Qthers, is another not less sacred duty which iii)eity. becomes the foundation of right. Hence the noble stoicism of Fichte, and that passion for liberty, which were in such perfect hannony with the masculine strength of his character and the generous part which he played in the political affairs of Germany. But the But the importance of the system of Fichte metaphy- jQgg not He here. I find his greatness and ori- tion of'his ginality in the extraordinary metaphysics so justly mofTm^'^ and boldly called by himself Subjective Absolute portant as Idealism. It has this singular feature, that in JJj^^PJ"^]"^^ pushing the scepticism of Kant to its extremest matism of cousequeuces, it prepares the way for the dogma- anS^Helei. ^^^^ ^f Schelliug and of Hegel. Not only does it prepare the way for, but even begins and con- tains this dogmatism. Fichte openly aspires to absolute science. He explains all things — man, nature, and God. He leads German philosophy, if I may venture to say so, from the subjective to the objective by the subjective itself. From absolute scepticism he flings it into an enormous dogmatism. Setting out from a teaching so timid that it scarcely ventures to affirm one actual being, it is the prelude of that ambitious philoso- phy which embraces in its enormous frameworks the history of man and that of nature, and pre- tends to an unmeasured, unreserved, and univer- sal explanation of all things. ir. Subject- II. Schelling began his philosophical career by theirm"'and ^cceptiug the system of Fichte, as Fichte had at Schelling. first adopted that of Kant. His first writing, THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 7 composed at the age of twenty, has this signifi- scheiiing cant title: Of the Ego as the Principle of Philoso-'^^"^' ^'^^"^ phy. But he was not long in perceiving the absolute impossibility of retaining philosophy within the narrow boundaries where she could not breathe. Human thought, gone astray upon the track of Fichte, had lost nature : the question was to win her back. Nature exists in presence of the Ego. This is a The pro- simple fact, but a fact which science should explain. ^^^"V^.^ But the example of Fichte has proved that every scheUing: attempt to deduce nature from the Ego, the object ^'ijjj'^^^"^ from the subject, is radically impotent. One thought, no would succeed no better in deducing the subject Jy°I^j|jJ from the object, the Ego from nature, thought being, and from being. Thus there is no being without re^.c^Wn"^^ ° thought, no thought without being, and no means thought r ^ 1 • -L ° r • -L • 1 • • into being. or resoivmg thought mto bemg or bemg mto or being thought. ScheUing put the exact problem of^"^° philosophy to himself in these .terms. *' I can explain to myself, without much difficulty, common the solution to which he was led. According to ['j^l,"^ ^/^ f him, thought and being, the subject and the object, and object cannot be at. once indivisible and inseparable, s'^bj'e"/.''^^^^ unless there be one principle common to both, atject. Schei- once subjective and objective, intelligent and Intel- ^^^l^^ ^°^"' ligible, the only source of thought and being. This principle, this absolute subject-object, as ScheUing calls it, is the leading idea of his philosophy. Ahriost in the same way, Spinoza was led to his Analog)- unity of substance. His master, Descartes, had J^j^^^'j^^^Jj^ , laid down a fundamental duality, at the beginning in which of science. He had recognised extended '^'^^^^^andSpTn^za in face of thinking being. How was their co-exis- were led to 8 SEVENTH TREATISE. their con- tciice, Still iTiore, their union, to be explained? elusions. Malebranche, a precursor of Kants idealism, had denied that bodies can be known. Berkeley, anticipating Fichte, had tried to explain exten- sion as a creation of thought. Spinoza, feeling beforehand the uselessness of these attempts, loudly declared that the co-existence of thought and extension was only possible by an infinite substance, at once extended and thinking, at once nature and humanity. The ana- ^he analogy is marked, but I must take care logy not to exaggerate it. The movement of German SchXng philosophy has a character peculiar to itself, and and Spinoza an Originality, which, however limited, is real as pressed °too far as it goes. Schelling is not merely the ^^'■- plagiarist of Spinoza. Yet he had read and admired Spinoza from his youth, while the fierce controversy, which divided Mendelsohn and Jacobi, and in which all the thinkers in Germany took part, was a few years earlier than the first writings of Schelling, and struck him so strongly, that in his first essay he openly expressed a hope of "one day realising a system, which should be the pen- dant of the Ethica of Spinoza." It was just what actually happened. T. (a.) In the universe of Spinoza there are anT df ffJr- two worlds, at once united and opposed, the world ences q^ thought or of souls, and the world of extension between ^ ' Schelling or of bodies. These worlds interpenetrate one s"?noza ai^other. Every soul has a body, every body has I. Ana- a soul. Thought has its own laws, so has nature ; logies. 1^^^ these laws strictly correspond. One of the Spinoza, main theorems of Spinoza is this ; '^ The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 9 connection of things." ^ What is the secret of this identity? This — that thought and extension, souls and bodies, are but two sides of one and the same extension. Nature is God in extension and motion ; the soul is God in thought. God being one, the laws of his development are one. Thus all existences interpenetrate one another ; all is united and identified. (,3.) Schelling also set out from this duality, (^.) schei- thought or the subject, things or the object, or^^^o- again, nature and humanity. Nature has laws ; but a law is something essentially intellectual, it is an idea. Nature, therefore, is penetrated through and through with intelligence. On the other side, humanity also has its laws ; it is free, no doubt, but it is not given up to chance. Absolute laws govern its development. There is a kindred, then, between humanity and nature. From whence does their distinction come ? Because nature obeys its laws without consciousness, while humanity is conscious of its laws. In other words, there is being in thought, the ideal in the real, and there is also thought in being and the real in the ideal. The difference is that thought predominates in one direction and being in another ; but, at bottom, thought and being are inseparable. There is, therefore, a common principle, which developes itself, sometimes with, and sometimes without self- consciousness. This is the God of Schelling. 2. So far, the Dutch philosopher and the Ger- ,. Differ - man philosopher are at one. Here comes the^"<^*=*- point at which they diverge. (a.) In the universe of Spinoza, there is ^"^(a.) with abyss between thought aud extension. Thought spinoza, 1 Ethica, Part H., prop. 7. 10 SEVENTH TREATISE. an eternal and cxtensIon in this system, indeed, are always relation of represented as God, but there is no kind of union between bctweeu these two portions of his being. The anTbe^n ^^^^ ^^ ideas flows ou oue side, the tide of bodies on the other. God embraces them, it is true, but the contrary waves are never united in this infinite ocean. (3 ) With i'^-) ^^ '^^ quite otherwise in the system of Sciieiiing, ScheUing. The total of beings forms one con- Ind"being tiuuous auS homogcucous whole, in which each form a form of existeuce leads to a higher form. Nature is geiTeous not destitute of intelligence, as with Spinoza. An whole. infinite current of thought circulates throuo-h every portion, only this thought does not at once arrive at the plenitude of its being. It is, at first, thought so deaf and so obscure that it absolutely escapes from itself. By degrees, it becomes clearer and falls back upon itself; first it feels itself, then it distinguishes itself, then it arrives at self-reflec- tion, self-possession, and perfect self-knowledge. "Nature," says Schelling, "sleeps in the plant, dreams in the animal, wakens in man." This marvellous development is what the Germans call the progress or processus of being (prozess) and if we are to believe them, the idea of the processus is the peculiar conquest of Schelling, and his great claim to distinction. This, however, is to forget that Leibnitz, and Aristotle, two thousand years before Leibnitz, had conceived nature as a series of homogeneous forms, rising from gradation to gradation to an ever-increasing perfection. But this is comparatively unimportant, as Schelling evidently copied neither Leibnitz nor Spinoza, nor any one else. It was the movement of his THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. ii own thought, it was the current of the Kantian philosophy, which led him on to the philosophy of identity. In point of fact the system of Schelling — in Scheiiing's one sense an extreme reaction against the doctrine part^!"a of Fichte — is, in another sense, a continuation of it. reaction Does not Fichte also admit the absolute identity of pfrti"y^a things '^. Did he not resolve the opposition of the cpntinua- Ego and the Non-Ego into a superior principle ? Fichte.' Only this superior principle was always understood to be the Ego^ and hence the idealistic and subjec- tive character of the whole system. This ideality, admitted by Fichte, Schelling generalises and trans- forms. It is with him no longer locked up in the narrow prison of the Ego — it is the foundation of all things. It may be said that Schelling has taken the frames of his philosophy from the hands of Fichte ; but in enlarging them he has given them infinite amplitude. He has caused exiled nature to enter into the system of Fichte, and scattered reality over it in handfuls. 3. The evolution of German philosophy could ni. Abso- not stop short with Schelling. The system ofthelsm^Tnd Schelling, indeed, contained a principle, but it did H^g^^- not furnish any means of giving it scientific de-ScheUing velopment. Schelling had conceived the sum total ^^^)^^ ^^^ of things as the progressive series of the varied the identi- forms of one identical principle. But how are we dpCof to grasp this principle.'' how are w^e to find the law whose of its development? how are w^e to demonstrate it .''forms all This Schelling never did. thl^^ro'" Why does this principle develope itself.'' whygressive does it become alternately gravitation, light, acti- ^'^"^^• vity, consciousness ? Are we to question experi- 12 SEVENTH TREATISE, Hhinteiiec- encc ? Expenciice only collects, but cannot ex- a" vain "'""' plain, facts. Shall we say that the subject-object attempt, developcs itself by its very nature? It will be asked, in return, what its nature is? and this Schel- ling in no way determines. The occult quality of an unknown principle must be admitted here. How many mysteries and hypotheses ! and what end do they all serve ? Take away experience, and there is no apparent mode of constructing science regularly, or even of sketching its faintest outlines. Under the pressure of this diiSculty, Schelling imagined his intellectual intuition^ a trans- cendental faculty which attains the absolute with an immediate grasp, without passing through the laborious steps of analysis and reflection. But Schelling was never able to throw any light upon the equivocal nature of this alleged intuition. Is it a natural gift, or an abnormal privilege of the human mind? We know not. What can be obscurer, more arbitrary, or more incompatible with the conditions of science ? German philosophy must take a step further, or abandon its principle. Hegel's Hegel took this last step. Hegel sought for, logic. ^j^d believed that he found, a method of construct- ing and demonstrating absolute science. That method he calls logic. Hi5 prin- It is no easy matter to understand the logic of "fdentit^^^ ^^^^^' ^^ ^ ^^ ^^^ comprehend his meaning, it is of contra- characterised by two great novelties which are dictones." closely couuected. First, he pushes further than Schelling had ever done, and to its very utmost limit, the principle of the absolute identity of thought and being ; then, as a consequence of this very excess, he introduces a law which is the re- THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 13 rived from Kant'j versal of all received ideas — namely, that con- tradictions are identical, that being is identical with nothing, the finite with the infinite, and life with death. However strange these novelties may appear, The" iden- I think that I can perceive their root in the ^^^v °^ <=°" doctrine of Kant. Suppose that Kant could tories" de- have risen from his grave in 1820, on seeing"! what philosophy had become in the hand ofarTdnJ Hegel, there can be no doubt that he would "^'^' have exclaimed, like Malebranche when he read Spinoza, that it was a fearful chimera. And yet, upon closer inspection, those two strange and perilous principles — the identity of contra- dictories and the identity of thought and being — are already in the system of Kant. Has not Kant, in the dialectical portion of his work, set the example of opposing ideas to one another, and of proving that contradictory propositions are equally true ? Is not Hegel's logic, in this point of view, the development of the antinomies ? What is still more evident, and still more im-The portant is, that Kant prepared the way for the^^s^^j absolute identification of thought and being. '< identity The history of this principle, of which Ger-''^^^°'!^^^, J J • I- I, 1, 1 and being many is so proud, and m which she makes similarly her principal reputation to consist, is an infi- fjl^J^'^^^j^^ nitely curious study. We see it born from Kant, Kantian developed in Fichte, transformed in Schelling, andthShwsof finally grown to its fullest maturity in the system phenomena of Hegel. According to Kant, what we call laws forms^of of nature are really the forms of our intelligence o"'' ^"teiH- T 1 1 1 ri-ii pgence ap- applied by us to phenomena. 1 he great error or pHed to philosophers is to detach these laws from their true^^'^'"- lan the 14 SEVENTH TREATISE. Traced principle, which is the human mind or subject, to thorough" transport them into things, to objectify them. ^'f'lv ^"'^ ^^^^ loved to make the idea of his philosophical to Hegef. reform sensible, by comparihg it to that which his countryman, Copernicus, had introduced in astro- nomy. The vulgar believe that the stars turn round the earth, which does not accord with the exact observation of facts. Reverse the hypothesis. Make the earth revolve round the sun. All con- tradiction vanishes. Everything is explained and cleared up. Just so; we are accustomed to sub- ordinate thought to being, while, in truth, accord- ing to Kant, being is subordinated to thought. From this conception to that of Fichte there is but a step. If things are only what thought m.akes them, it is thought which constitutes and creates things. The Ego^ in thinking and laying down itself, creates itself. This is the absolute identity of thought and being, explicitly professed by Fichte, and boldly, but logically deduced from the fundamental idea of Kant, only that this absolute identity has the peculiar impress of Fichte's sys- tem, I mean to say, that it is purely psycholo- gical and subjective. With Fichte, being, like thought, is ever the Ego or a development of it. Fichte could give no other meaning to the iden- tity of thought and being, but upon condition of going beyond his system. Schelling took up, and radically transformed the system of Fichte. In his eyes, the Ego and the Non-Ego have an equal reality ; nature and humanity subsist face to face. They find their union in a principle at once ideal and real, subjective and objective, which consti- tutes and contains them. THE PANTHEISM OE HEGEL. 15 The identity of thought and being, of subject and object, conceived as real and objective, is the common principle of the philosophy of Schelling, and that of Hegel, aftd we have seen that both one and the other are closely linked with previous doctrines. Let us now glance at the difference of the two systems. Schelling identifies thought and being only in their first principle, which is God ; but below God, thought and being are dis- tinguished without separation. There is more being in nature, more thought in man. If it be so, thought and being are two different things, and the principle of identity is at fault. Logically, if thought and being are one and the same essence, thought should not only be. found wherever being is, but it should be met with in the same propor- tion. Why is this equilibrium broken, and how is it possible that it should be broken? Why is God more in humanity than in nature ? The question is, no doubt, a rash one, but it is one which he, who is bold enough to maintain that absolute science is possible for man, is imperatively called upon to answer. But this question Schelling does not, and cannot, solve. He is thus convicted of inconsistency. He proclaimed the principle of the identity of thought and being. He cleared it from the relative and subjective character, which disfigured it in Fichte and in Kant, but he did not dare to develope it rigorously. And thus his philosophy only propped itself up by hypotheses, or by disguised loans which he made from experi- ence. Hegel makes it his special glory that he was bolder and more consistent than his predecessor. l6 SEVENTH TREATISE. The uiti- He professes to draw from the principle of iden- iTa^ri?J?o'f^^ty ^^'^^^^ neither Schelling, nor any other philo- truiy abso- sopher had been able to make it yield — a science tky/ ^^' of the development of things. Hegelian Thought and being are one. But why two principles. ^yQj-js to express One thing ? Let us not say Thought thought and being ; let us say, the idea. The =tdea'"^ /W^^, here is Hegel's God ; the development of the idea=God. idea, here is reality ; the knowledge of this devel- menf of' opmeut, here is science. The science of the idea idea = is called lone, and thus metaphysics and loeic are reality. r J J ^ Knowledge coutounded. of develop- Thanks to this truly absolute identity, science scienci becomes possible. It is reduced to determining Science of ^j-^g necessarv relations of ideas. In the theory of idea=logic. ^ i n- r ^ • Science ochellmg, we were rorced, sometimes to rest upon thus be- experience to describe the movement of beine comes pos- .a /i-ii-i rr ^ i- sibie m nature (which did not aiiord a real science), kn'cS'wiJdge sometimes to give scope to the imagination, and of the laws to preseut hypothesis disguised under the sound- of the idea, j^^ name of intellectual intuition. This arose from the fact that the essence of the first principle re- mained undetermined, and that an arbitrary dis- tinction was admitted between the objects of thought and thought itself. But now that we know that this first principle is the idea, and that nature and humanity are nothing but the develop- ment of the idea, the law of the idea once known, science is found. The laws of ^ ^^k Hegel how the law^s of the idea can be the idea de- determined. He answers this question by his thTiaJoT logic, which is the scientific determination of the the idea- j^ws of the idea. They are all deduced from one tradict(^°" fundamental law, the law of the identity of con- THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 17 tradictories. According to Hegel, all thought, all being, every idea encloses a contradiction. This contradiction not only exists in things, but consti- tutes them. Life is essentially the synthesis and union of two elements, which together are mutually • exclusive, and require one another. At first sight Hegel owns that this doctrine is repugnant to common sense, and appears favour- able to scepticism. The Pyrrhonists triumph in the opposition of ideas ; but this opposition is not at all embarrassing to the true philosopher, who sees in it the condition, and the very movement of life. Common sense, far from rejecting the principle of the identity of contradictories, is perpetually w^itnessing to it,^ Does it not maintain firmly, from age to age, the difference and identity of the soul and the body, the co-existence and op- which is position of God's foreknowledge and man's free J^^JJ^^^^^^^^ will.'' To abandon one of these truths for the mon sense. other, under the vain allegation that they are ^^J^ ^{^^^^J^^^ contradictor)^, would be to fail in common sense. Theology-. Examine common sense in its highest form, reli- gion. Does not the religious soul adore a God at once Personal and infinite, a God at once im- moveable and living, visible and invisible I The sceptic believes that he triumphs in opposing these ' Hegel's law of the identity of contradictories has been anticipated by Heraclitus. "When extravagant wits and pretenders to wisdom shall assert things evidently repugnant to sense or reason ; that snow and coal have the like appearance (as did Anaxagoras) : that all motion is im- possible (as Zeno) : that contraaidory propositions may be consistent {as Hera- clitus''''^. Barrow, Sermon viii. " The Being of God proved from uni- versal consent," in "The Christian Faith, explained and vindicated." Hpa/cXetros to dvri^ovv crvfxcpepov /cat c/c tQv diatpepovTUv KaWiaTTju ap/xoviav Kal irdvTa /car' ^piv ybeadai.. — Arist. Ethic. Nic, lib. viii. i.] II. B t8 seventh treatise. attributes to each other: it is because his reasoning has extinguished his reason. While he is torment- ing himself by turning from one of these contraries to the other, an elevation of the heart to God unites them. Has not the Christian religion, the most reasonable of all religions, been teaching men for the last eighteen hundred years, that God made the world out of nothing, that God was made man '^. Are there not there just as many contra- dictions as there are propositions, but contradic- tions full of reason, life, and truth ? In science. The scicuces preseut us with a thousand ex- amples of the identity of contradictories. In phy- sics, do we not admit without difficulty that light supposes darkness .^ Imagine a light without a shadow. Objects equally illuminated can no longer be distinguished, and this uniform day is precisely equivalent to night. Thus light implies its contradictory, obscurity. Not only does it suppose, but it bears darkness within itself and engenders it: and on the other hand, while pro- ducing it, it realises itself. The product is effective light, colour.^ From these quaint but simple examples we may form a general idea of the system of Hegel. Three mo- Every idea encloses three elements, or to use the Tve'^ Idea o^^hodox Hegelian language, three moments. It may be considered in itself, in its opposition to the contrary idea which it implies, or finally, in the unioyi which conciliates them. The first moment is that of the idea in itself ; > [" Erit igitur lumen quasi coloris color." — Jul. C. ScJig, Di Subtil, Exerc. Ixxi.] THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL, 19 the second, that of the idea out of itself; the First «*- third, that of the idea in itsef and/i/r itsef. The ^^'^^==idea idea first exists simply and immediately; then it Second ;«.- is divided and opposed to itself; then, finally, it '"^'"'^7.''^''^ reduces its two members to unity. 1 ne moment Third mo- di unity is that of life, of concrete, individual ^'J^^=!j^^^^^^^ reality. He who only considers the idea in its/or iudf. earlier moments knows nothing but abstractions, and this is the common weakness of the vulgar, and of those philosophers who follow the logic of the schools. The vulgar holds to that first view of things which makes us know them in a state of mixture and confusion. This is the perception of the senses. The understanding is applied to this gross matter, divides and decomposes it. Here oppositions come out conspicuously. All things appear contrary. Life and death, motion and repose, soul and body, fact and right, society and nature, philosophy and religion. Minds which fasten upon these oppositions cannot fail to fall into scepticism; an absurd extreme, as far re- moved from common sense as it is from true phi- losophy. But to stop short at scepticism is to know very imperfectly the nature of things and the power of thought. The understanding is above the senses.^ but reason is above the under- standing. What the understanding separates, the reason unites. Things which seemed incom- patible appear united. Confusion is succeeded by order, war by peace, doubt by faith, the anguish of the soul and the hesitations of reason- ing by the serenity of an afiSrmation, which is sure of itself, and the fulness of a perfect comprehen- sion. Life and death are but the two moments of 20 SEVENTH TREATISE. existence; fact and right, the two aspects of one ne- cessity; society, an advance made upon nature; philosophy, a finished development of religion. I can see how Hegel may have been led to the principle of his logic and of all his philosophy, the identity of contradictories. His constant me- Method of thod is to find in every idea a contrary idea, and f^egei. j-Q ^j^i|-g them in a third idea; to oppose thesis coJdi'ngtT^^^ antithesis, and reunite them in a synthesis; him. to consider the idea successively in itself^ outside of itself and for itself We thus arrive at a new idea, which is nothing but the first idea, vivified by the very opposition which it has met, become concrete and living, instead of dead and abstract. The same idea thus transformed, meets with a new contradiction, a new opposition, to come out victorious from it, and so on, ad infinitum^ from the simplest idea which contains the germ of all the rest, to the most compound, which ex- presses its fullest development. The chain of these oppositions is science. It consists in bring- ing out the universal identity. Setting out from a primitive idea at the lowest degree of thought, it finds this at the summit, and all the intermediate ideas are nothing, but the same idea unfolding itself infinitely. Tripaitite This general view enables me to take my bear- HleeHan^^ ings in the midst of that vast edifice of accumu- phiiosophy. lated abstractions, where the thought of Hegel plays with unparalleled subtlety and fertility. Nothing remains external to this system, and I am not unwilling to allow that there is in it an immense effort to embrace and explain all things. The work of Hegel comprises three parts: THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 21 logic ^ properly, so called; the philosophy of nature; Logic, phi- and the philosophy of mind. The first and last ;r72^,7phi_ principle of things, which Hegel calls the idea, lo^ophy of should first be contemplated in itself, in the depths of its yet unmanifested essence, in those necessary and primitive laws which constitute it, and which at a later period are reflected in all its works. The science of the idea in itself is pure logic, the key-stone of the whole system. The idea — ^by a necessary sequence of its na- ^^^'^r*^^ «/ the idea ■pure ture, such as logic has described and explained it — itself^ developes itself; or, to use a better expression, ^''■^''• splits itself and lavs bare the element of contra- ^/^i^^^e of • ■ tiiG scrips diction which was enfolded within it. It was of necessary God in Himself; it becomes nature; eternal andT?"'5"^' r 11 1 • r *"^^ immutable, it falls under the conditions of time =phiiosophy and change. The philosophy of nature developes "-^"''^"''^' for us the series of necessary movements which carry the idea across all the degrees of the scale of sensible beings. The laws of mechanics, chemistry, and physiology resolve themselves into a series of oppositions. But the final principle, which presides over this development, decides that the contradiction necessarily assumed at the outset should be necessarily destroyed in the sequel. The idea, which in nature was ignorant of and denied itself, returns upon itself and becomes mind. The science of the return of the idea to Science of itself is the philosophy of mind. Religions, arts, ^f^^hf -je" systems, social institutions, are but different upon itself phases of that evolution which is regulated by an ^^^^^"■^ '-^ eternal and inflexible geometry. The history of humanity reflects that of God. It is a living logic. It is God who realises Himself; who, 22 SEVENTH TREATISE. setting out from Himself, returns to Himself, thus closing the infinite and eternal circle. I resume these three great divisions. Logic, in the system of Hegel, occupies the position which in ordinary systems is assumed by Theo- dicea. It is the science of God, considered in Himself before creation (at least, if the words God and creation have any meaning here). Strange Theodicea truly ! where, in place of the sublime attributes of eternal justice, infinite good- ness, pure and unmingled beauty, I find a dry enumeration of abstract ideas — being, nothing, quality, quantity, measure, identity, difference. These ideas form a chain whose first link is the idea of being; all the others presuppose it, while it presupposes none of them. But the idea of being or being — for Hegel here iden- tifies these two things, as he always does — is identical with nothing. What is being con- sidered in itself? It is absolutely undetermined being, neither finite nor infinite, neither mind nor matter — that which has neither quantity, quality, nor relation. All this may be affirmed of nothing. To think upon nothing is to abstract from all the fonns of existence, which is conse- quently the same thing as to think upon being in itself. On the other side, Hegel does not deny that being and nothing, the existent and the non- existent, are two contradictory terms. They are at once contradictory and identical. Contradiction in identity is the supreme law of thought and things. Thus, from the idea of being, the primitive matter of things, comes out the idea of nothing. But being and nothing do not remain as they are. THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL, 23 Being at once excludes and call for nothing. This double movement excites a third idea, which Hegel calls becoming, and which reconciles the other two. Becoming is the idea of development, by which a being becomes that which it was not before. This idea implies simultaneously that of being and that of nothing ; it is their synthesis. We are now free from the confused abstraction, where all is lost and mingled. We set foot upon the solid ground of reality. We have to do with determined being, with quality. Athwart this endless deduction, which I shall The make no attempt to follow out in detail, the lead- J^f^olomy ing idea of Hegel's system is maintained with sin- carried out gular firmness. In all cases, the idea traverses J^S!" ""^^ three necessary moments. It is first the con- fused identity of contraries, then it divides itself to go back finally to its primitive identity, illuminated and quickened. This is the dominant law of all spheres of thought, not only physics, astronomy, and the natural sciences, but also psychology, morals, jurisprudence, the history of civilisation, of religions, and of philosophies. There are three faculties in the human mind : i^ppHed to sensation, which gives ideas confusedly; the un-\^'^]''^''' derstanding, which disentangles and opposes ; the reason, which unites them. Man is first for himself a confused unity of a soul and a body. This unity is split by reflection. The soul opposes the body, but it perceives that the body is still itself, and then it refers it back to itself as a necessary moment of its existence. Inman, allatfirst is mingled — instinct, will^ reason. The man already exists in the child without doubt, 24 SEFEJSITH TREATISE. but in an abstract and undetermined way. He is in h'wuelf^ not for himself. The age of reflection comes. An opposition emerges between instinct and reason, nature and will. Hence evil, but hence also good. Good supposes evil ; for he who does good without struggle, solely by the impulse of an excellent nature, is not truly good. Here, ac- cording to Hegel, is a brilliant verification of the principle of his logic. We cannot conceive good without at the same time conceiving evil. Good, in one sense, therefore, implies evil, and yet ex- cludes it. This is the contradiction to be solved. Hegel believes that he attains the solution by demonstrating that at botton instinct and reason are identical. Instinct is reason which is igno- rant of itself. After being opposed to itself in the struggle between the will and nature, it recognises their identity, and henceforth all be- comes order in the pacified souL Instinct under- stands that to obey reason is to be faithful to oneself. Reason understands that it is not des- tined to extinguish or violently suppress instinct, but to guide it; and the intelligent and volun- tary harmony of instinct and reason is virtue, the source of happiness. People imagine that virtue and happiness are two different things, but that is a narrow philosophy of the understanding. Reason identifies what the heart of the honest man never separates, well-doing and well-being, P^^j^g^ jg_ virtuous action and felicity. veiopments Everywhere, on the surface, are contradiction ciVie^of "he ^^^ difference ; everywhere, at bottom, are har- identity of mouy aud identity. What, apparently, can be more toris! ^^' opposed than philosophy and religion ? What THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 25 more different than various religious worships? What more contrary than philosophical systems ? Yet, in reality, all these religious institutions, whose variety confounds and whose opposition astonishes us, are but members of one body and moments of one idea. The idea which is developed in the harmonious course of religions, is the same which, under clearer forms, displays its ever-diverse, yet ever-identical, nature in the regular movement of philosophic systems. The laws of logic, every- where present, because they are the foundation of all, determine and preside, with sovereign power, over this twofold evolution. Applied to There are three great religions — the Oriental J^^^'^^.^?^''^'^'''' religion, the Greek religion, and the Christian religion, which correspond to the three necessary view of " moments of the logical idea. The Oriental re-^hristi- ligion is the idea of God in its first moment, ^' comprising all the rest in their confused unity. Man adores God, but without knowing Him and without knowing himself. The universe, man, and God, form as yet but an indistinct whole, nature. The Greek religion is the idea of God at the moment of diremption and contradiction. God is divided, so to speak, ramified into a thousand branches, opposed to man and to Himself. The in- finite is lost and dissolved in the finite. The Christian religion, in its very essence, is the reli- gion of reconciliation. The daughter of the East and of Greece, Christianity reproduces and iden- tifies them. God, who was ignorant of Himself in the obscure symbols of India, who, in a certain sense, wandered out of Himself in the prodigious variety of contrary divinities in Greece and Rome, 26 SEVENTH TREATISE. came back to Himself, and took clear conscious- ness and perfect possession of Himself in Chris- tianity. Thus Christianity is the sole, complete, true, self-evident religion; it is God knowing Him- self, and affirming Himself to be God. What are called the mysteries of the Christian religion are the absolute laws of things, obscure to the senses, to the understanding absurd and contradictory, to the reason clear and harmonious. Is not the first of these mysteries that of the Holy Trinity ? But the Holy Trinity is the very prin- ciple of logic under the form of a symbol. The Father is the idea in itself; the Son is the idea out of itself., in its visible manifestation ; the Spirit is the idea in itself and for itself arrived at the ultimate term of its movement, recog- nising itself as identical in all the degrees which it has traversed. In the bosom of the Father are found the three moments of the idea, but as yet in a purely ideal form; being or power, the object of thought ; the word, or intelli- gence, or again, thought engendered by being; finally, love, which proceeds from and unites the two. This purely ideal trinity is realised by creation, the kingdom of the Son ; but, to fasten creation to its principle, the finite must know itself infinite, man must know himself God — this is the kingdom of the Spirit. To philosophy it pre-eminently belongs to realise the kingdom of the Spirit upon earth. Philosophy, in fact, it is which, by linking the symbols of Christianity to the laws of thought, explains and demonstrates that which religion could only assert — the intimate union of God and man. The first form of this THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 27 union is found in the Christian community of the Church in its cradle ; the second has been the organised Church ; the last will be the State, to which all religious creeds are invited to ally them- selves one day under the law of reason and of liberty. I m.ust frankly confess that my first sentiment, Weakness as I leave these strange speculations of modern °|^!^^''"'^;' Germany, is one of astonishment that, in the^ io^^Pv country of Leibnitz, they should have been able to enthrall men's minds so long. Unless I am much deceived, German philosophy. The belief for the last half century, has been under the [^^^^^ ^^^"^^^'^ dominion, and, as it were, under the spell of an is attainable illusion, that of believing that absolute science is f-' ^^^ •1 1 r 1 1 • • numan possible for the human mind. Absolute science — mind the by which term I mean to denote the universal and Zo^7 adequate explanation of all things — is the chimera of German which German philosophy has been pursuing since p^'^^'^p 5'- the time of Fichte, and each of the systems to which it has by turns given birth is merely an effort to seize the elusive phantom. It is said that this unmeasured confidence in This pure theory arises from the speculative genius of ^euff^dL? the Germanic race. This explanation is true, as not arise far as it goes ; but insufiicient. For this land of ^o^^[he enthusiasm has produced such great critics as speculative Wolf, Heyne, and Paulus. This chimerical race fh" oer*^* has given birth to Kant. "^^"-5 I should rather be apt to believe that it is the rather a very excess of doubt, in the doctrine of Kant, J^^^^^°" which has produced, in that of Hegel, the oppo- excessive site extreme of dogmatic pride. In philosophy, q''/^^^^/^'"' account must be made of two essential elements. 28 SEVENTH TREATISE, On one side, there is the human mind, with its nature, its limits, its weaknesses of every kind. On the other, there is the sum of things, their essence, and their relations. To reduce the human mind to the sole knowledge of its own constitution, in forgetfulness of the nature of things, is to deny science. To conceive science as independent of the nature of the human mind, its constitution, laws, and limits, is to deny it again; for it is to make it impossible and contradictory. Kant's German philosophy aifords the spectacle of extreme these two oDDOsite extremes. Kant begins by scepticism . . ^ r ^ • • i -i i and Hegel's recognismg the ract that m science philosophers extreme \i2iYQ not (riveu sufficicut Weight to the human mind, dogmatism. o ^ ^ o _ ' to the subject. This is a profound as well as solid view, from whence an incomparable analysis of reason has arisen. But soon, dragged on by his own principle, this wise thinker forgets his wisdom so far as to debar the human mind from all access to the reality of things. Hegel flung himself into the opposite extreme. The author of the Critique of the Pure Reason scarcely ventured to affirm the existence of external objects ; the author of the Logic professes to know them thoroughly, and to demonstrate their origin, essence, and laws. The father of German philosophy pared down Theo- dicea to a suspicion of the possibility of God. To the last inheritor of that philosophy, the Divine nature has no mysteries. The number and order of His attributes are discovered with the same clearness as the properties of geome- trical curves. Kant imprisoned reason in the circle of experience. Hegel refuses all scientific authority to experience ; all must be demonstrated THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 29 in philosophy, that is to say, deduced from pure ideas. For the master, the highest conceptions of the human mind had a merely relative and sub- jective value ; if we believe the disciple, nothing relative and subjective has any place in the frame- works of science. Thus, of the two necessary terms of all know- common ledge — the human mind and things — Kant sup-P?^"^^" presses the second, Schelling and Hegel narrow the Scheiii'ng. first, Fichte marks the transition from one extreme ^^^ Hegei, to the other. In fact Fichte, even while exaggerat- belief in ing Kantism, pursues the chimera of absolute [^'^^^^p''^^'" science ; but it is in the Ego that he flatters himself absolute with the hope of finding it. Like Kant he sup- '"^"*'^- presses things, but he preserves their ideas, and prepares the future transformation, which is about to construct things themselves out of these ideas. Thus Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (and one might add to these eminent names those of all the philosophers of modern Germany) have this com- mon point through all their differences, viz., that they believe that absolute science is possible, that they search after, and attempt to construct it. Hence their common method^ which is as chime- Their rical as the object which it pursues. Its dis-^^j^^^ tinctive feature is the suppression of experience .^ or the sup- at least its complete subordination to the data oi^J^^^^l pure reason. Germany has the most complete contempt for observation. To attend to facts is, in its estimation, to fall into empiricism, the lowest stage of intellectual degradation. Science is essentially the explanation of things. But experi- ence explains nothing. Science in explaining de- monstrates. Experience can demonstrate nothing. 30 SEVENTH TREATISE, It is enclosed in necessary limits. It knows what happens at a given time or place. But science must have universal and durable results. Experi- ence is the work of a finite mind, and consequently always relative and subjective. Science is, by its very essence, absolute and objective. Absolute Evidently, if philosophy pursues absolute science in- scieuce, the philosophic method is the a priori volves an / i i i a priori method, founded upon pure ideas, following the methcxi. order of things, explaining and deducing every- thing, despising experience, recognising no limit and no condition. By such a science such a method is absolutely required. These two chimeras are made for one another ! The most If I am not much mistaken, the secret of all Shdstic German speculation is here. The double illusion principles which I have just pointed out appears to have for UngVnd ^t^ necessary consequences — (i.) The principle Hegel of the identity of thought and being, the common th^ideaT fouudatiou of the system of Hegel and Schelling. of such a (^2.) The still more dangerous principle of the and such a identity of contradictories, of which the Hegelian science. jogic is a perpetual application. (3.) The eminently Pantheistic idea of the processus of things, which makes of the human mind the ultimate term, in which the successive developments of existence are at last concentrated and reflected. Absolute For the construction, indeed, of absolute biuveln science, it is not enough that the order of ideas ideitsand should express the order of things. The ideas qui"?d for must embrace, penetrate, and constitute the things, aosoiute Xhe ideas must be the things. Suppose that Know e ge. ^.j^j^^^ ^^^ Separated, or only distinct from ideas, a doubt is possible as to the perfect conformity of THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 31 the ideas to the things. The essence of things is surmised, perceived through a medium ; it is not grasped and thoroughly mastered. Absolute science is overthrown, if there is not a perfect identity between ideas and things. Absolute science must start from a first idea, Absolute and deduce all others from it. What can this'"^"'^^ idea be ? The vaguest and most comprehensive from the of all, the idea of undetermined being. But how j'^^^ °^."^ •' - •11 determine are we to pass from undetermmed to real bemg, being. from the abstract to the concrete, from the nega- tion of existence to life ? There is a contradiction there. Well ! Instead of concealing it, let us boldly accept it. Contradiction then will be at the very origin From O^^^ thence will of things. Let this primitive contradiction foUow the become the fundamental law of thought andofX^^'' being. Let it be found again and again in all "identity nature. Let it be the hidden force by which dicdo^nJ/' ideas come out, one from the other, from the and its poorest to the richest — so that definitively ^^"^1^" J" nothing is the principle, God the term, and '-nothing nothing becomes God. God"'" But how can the human mind know and de- scribe this vast and marvellous evolution ^. On one condition only — that the human mind be the superior degree in which everything ends, the final circle which envelopes and penetrates ail the and to rest — on condition that the human mind is all, i;]^"^^"''' that Man is God. Man divinized — such is the last word of German philosophy. Schelling says that God is the absolute subject- o/"ht1'^ object. Hegel says that He is the idea, infinite tems of mind. But we must understand each other f^j'^H^^ei. 32 SEVENTH TREATISE. clearly. The subject-object, considered prior to its development, is but an abstraction, an empty identity. I say as much of the infinite mind, of the idea in itself. Hegel himself declares that the idea in itself is identical with nothing. If this be God, it is necessary to explain it frankly. But it is not so. The God of German philoso- phy is not at the commencement, but at the end of things. This God is the human mind; or rather, God is at once at the origin, at the end, and in the middle; which is just tantamount to saying that there is no God distinct from things. How far In default of more solid merit, have these dortrines Strange doctrines that of novelty ? Here again is original? Que of the illusious of German philosophy. German Nothing cau be more artless than these pre- troriVin-^ tensions to originality on the part of our neigh- aiity. hours bcyond the Rhine. In the Hegelian school especially they have been carried to the furthest point. Hegel, in his Lessons on the History of Hegel's Philosophy, only recognises two great epochs — o7ph1b-''^^ ttie Greek epoch and the Germanic epoch. But sophy. it is a matter of course that German philosophy is comprised between Kant and Hegel. This is to erase, with one stroke of the pen, from the annals of human thought, scholasticism and French philosophy, such names, for instance, as those of Abelard and Descartes. We can understand that Germany should treat French philosophers with this haughty contempt. But is it not the extreme of ingratitude thus to humiliate Leib- The great- . ^ ° est ideas of UltZ . ^h-l^'^^h ^^^^ is the more revolting, inasmuch as these arJnororl- proud coutemuers of the philosophy of the seven- ginal. THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 33 teenth century have not disdained to borrow They come from it its most original views. partly from The following great ideas, which constitute all the force and riches of Schelling, come from Leib- nitz: — (1.) The principle of the universal homogeneity of substances. (2.) The law of continuity^ according to which all beings are interlinked and placed on the scale. (3.) The inner dynamism^ which all through nature makes itself felt, under the apparent mechanism of its phenomena. (4.) The profound analogy between the laws of the universe and the laws of humanity. Has not another Cartesian, Spinoza, a large Partly from part to claim in the speculations of Germany ? I ^p*"*'^^- have formed a positive conclusion, that the prin- ciple of the identity of thought and being, is the very fundamental doctrine of Spinozism. Hegel accuses the Jew of Amsterdam of having mistaken the occidental principle, the modem principle of personality — of having made of God necessity, or absolute existence, without recognizing in Him the subject, the person. But is it becoming in Hegel to raise against Spinozism such an accusa- tion, however well-founded in other respects ? Has he respected in God or in man the personality w^hich he invokes — he^ who from the summit of being to its lowest gradation, has seen nothing but the rigorous geometry of the idea.^^ While distinguishing himself from Spinoza, Hegel never- theless recognizes a great precursor to German philosophy. Who, in the name of wonder ^. Not 34 SEVENTH TREATISE. Spinoza. Perhaps Descartes. No ; it is a Ger- man of the sixteenth century, the chimerical author of the Daivn of Mornings the philosophical cobbler of Gcerlitz, Jacob Boehme ! Kofthe I ^^^ Hegd himself speak: "We shall see," originality says he in a Celebrated discourse, "that amongst phiSsoph" those nations of Europe where the sciences are cultivated with zeal and authority, philosophy has been left nothing but the name, the idea of it has perished, it only exists in the German nation. We have received from nature the mission of being the preservers of this sacred fire, as to the Eumol- pidse of Athens was confided the preservation of the mysteries of Eleusis, and to the inhabitants of Samothracia that of a higher and purer worship ; as in still older times, the universal spirit had given to the Jewish nation the consciousness that he would come forth renewed from her." What astonishes me most in the artless vanity of these words, is that the history of philosophy, which has been cultivated so deeply and patiently by the compatriots of Hegel, and by Hegel him- self, has not in the slightest degree altered the serenity of their speculative pride. Without going back to the early times of Greek philosophy ; I find about the time of the decline of Greek and Roman civilization, a philosophical movement, full of striking analogies with that which has agitated Germany for sixty years, I speak of the Alexan- drian philosophy. It also had been preceded by a radical scepticism, that of Q^nesidemus, of Agrippa, and of Sextus ; it also flung itself into the contrary extreme, to embrace the phantom of absolute science. Like Hegel, Plotimus disdains experi- THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL. 35 ence ; like him, he pretends to seize the absolute order of things, and not only to seize it, but to de- duce it, and to demonstrate it; both admit a dialec- tic movement in being which is reflected in science, and which identifies reason and being in the idea. At Alexandria as at Berlin, the mysteries of the ^'^^^^''''" divine essence are clearly discerned, they are ana- philosophy lysed into three elements, at once distinct and inse- o/the gS- parable, a primitive trinity which is found at the "^^^^ ^^ bottom of every thing, and of every thought. ^/LeTbnitz This trinity becomes to these two schools a sort ^^^ ^Pj"'^- p • 1 1 • 1 -IT! za. as above or magic wand, which removes every veil, lights up indicated. every obscurity, and effaces every difference. Phi- losophical systems are brought together, religious symbols are confounded, everything is interpene- trated and united. At the summit of this trinity, beyond all the determinations of thought and being, reigns the absolute unity, the identity of existence with nothing, the abyss where human thought, after having run round the necessary circle of its revolutions, comes to seek repose in the annihilation of consciousness and personality. Thus, in both cases, there is the same principle, the search after absolute science : the same method, purely rational speculation : the same results, the identity of contradictories, and man made one with God. This, then, is the beginning and the end of German philosophy ; it begins with scepticism, it ends with Pantheism. And these are the two springs where the rising generations are to drink and be satisfied. Kant pours them out scepticism, Hegel pantheism, and these two currents of ideas meet in the doctrine of an impersonal God. 3^ SEVENTH TREATISE. Thus in vain have Descartes and Malebranche, Newton and Leibnitz, exhausted their genius, to The scepti- organise into a system the universal belief of the Kam°^d h^^*^^ ^^^^- ^^^ Personal God, the God of the Panthe- common seuse, the God of spiritual philosophy, eeTconf ire "^^^^ give way, and in His stead scepticism and tointro- Pantheism leagued together must introduce the doctdne of Undetermined substance of being. Once for all I an imper- pause, and ask myself seriously : Must I come to this at last ? Is this result the answer to my long historical researches ? I have read enough, I have talked enough, the age of maturity comes, I will shut my books, I will fold myself within myself, and consult henceforth my reason alone. sonal God, 1 [The question of the consistency of Hegelianism with Christianity has been anxiously discussed. There appear to be three parties in the Hegelian school. The droit is occupied by such men as Bauer who, hold- ing the Hegelian doctrine of God in man, receive the Gospel history. The milieu has for its exponents those who, like Rosencrantz, only deny deny the supernatural events of the Saviour's life. The gauche is repre- sented by Strauss, who, with the anti-historial spirit of all thorough Pantheists, evaporates the whole life of Christ into the " meteoric regions of idealism," and who agrees with Hegel himself that " the Christian idea of God's oneness with mankind as a sensible history is abolished, and degraded into a distant, dreamy vision." (Hegel ei V Hcgelianesme, par M. Edmond Scherer, cf. Michelet, Geschichte der Systeme der Philosophic^ TI., pp. 638-659. Mill on the Mythical Interpre- tation of the Gospels.) The Hegelian trichotomy, applied to the Gospel history by Strauss, nms thus. The moment of confusion has a spontaneous expression in the evangelists. The moment of contradiction is supplied by the nega- tions of history and of science. The moment of identity is found in the combination of faith and science in the school of Hegel ! Christ has disappeared as person and fact ; He abides as idea, and the union of God and man is realised in humanity. I need scarcely observe that Neander, Tholuck, and Ol'hausen, have overthrown this unhistorical scheme; an admirable critici.'-m of Strauss is to be found in Dr. Mill on the Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels. There are just two points to which I would allude in this note, (i.) The most original portion of Strauss, his " ideological Christology," is really in the New Testament, in such texts as, " crucified with Christ," '• risen with Him," appearing with Him in glory." The points of difference are, that the " ideological Christology" THE PANTHEISM OF HEGEL, 37 of the New Testament only applies to regenerate humanity ; and, still more, that that ideology is based upon distinctly historical grounds by those who first preached it, and who, having a really ideological version of the Resurrection before their eyes, pronounced it to be a '• babbling," and a "gangrene." (2.) The character of Christ is a knot which the Hegelian Christology can never cut. Either Christ created the Church, or, the Church created Christ ; but the Church could not have created Christ, therefore, Christ created the Church. The ablest exponents of Hegelianism consider his system equally in- consistent with man's immortality. Mankind, with Hegel, is mathe- matically immortal, because new generations supply the place of those which perish ; like a spring which at any moment we term analogously the same with that which has existed in the same place, because other waters pour in with pauseless rapidity ; or, like a tree, which h fgura- tively styled perennial, while the apparently permanent green with which it is invested is made up of successive generations of leaves. But in the immortality which Scripture reveals, each leaf upon the tree, and each drop in the river is immortal and imperishable. — Cf. August : Be Chit: Dei, XXIT., I. (See also VI.)] pan 3i% ESSAY ON RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. MEDITATIONS. jfir0t jHeMtation* Is there a God? I REFLECT within myself and say, "Whence comes why do i it that I must always think of God ? I exist, I J^^J^ °^ live ; existence and life are dear to me. I find around me a thousand objects which please and interest What need I more to fill my soul? and why do I seek something beyond? Why? Be- cause I feel but too well that I am imperfect, and set in the midst of imperfection. When I consider my being, I see it pass away like a rapid stream. My ideas, my sensations, my desires, all change every hour ; and, in the same way around me, there is no being that is not passing from motion to repose, from progress to decay, from Hfe to death. Amid these vicissitudes, like a wave borne on by other waves, I roll in the immense torrent that bears all things to the unknown shore. This change — this perpetual change, is the universal law — is my condition. And the more I reflect, the more I see that this i am led to condition belongs to the very nature of things, cha'nge^and Within me, and without of me, being is ever impertec- changing, because it is limited. I find myself con- fined in a comer of space and time. In vain I strain And all nature. 42 FIRST MEDITATION, all the springs of my frail corporeal machine; I can only lay hold of the few objects that are within my reach. I think, but among the numberless truths Man, that I perceive I can but seize some, and these only on condition of concentrating my thoughts in a nar- row circle, beyond which I see dimly, or not at all. I love, but my power of loving, which turns with a sud- den impulse towards all which contains some evident or secret perfection, can only cling to frail, perish- able, changeable objects, not one of which fulfils the promises it made. Everywhere there is a limit. I change its place, but I cannot destroy it : still I feel it, still it weighs me down. There is in me an indefinite power of development, which aspires to unfold itself in a thousand different ways, and which, meeting everywhere with obstructions, now strains violently against them, now falls back upon itself, weak and weary, discouraged. And the reason of this continual change within and around me is this : we all, inhabitants of this world, great and small, thinking atoms, blades of grass, grains of sand, are, in our different degrees, and under forms infinitely various, imperfect beings, striving after perfection, but only reaching it in an imperfect manner. Why am I? But why am I imperfect? why do I bear such My reason r • i i • of existence 3- lorm, m such a manner, at such a time, or m is not in such a placc ? Why do I exist at all ? I know "^^^ ' not, and this proves invincibly that the reason of my own existence is not within myself, that my being is not a first being, but a borrowed and relative existence. Now, whenever I contemplate my being thus, as radically imperfect and incapable of self-exist- ence, there arises in my soul the idea of the perfect IS THERE A GOD ? 43 Being. I conceive Him perfect in all the infinite idea of the powers of His being. Whilst I am endeavouring, "^l^^^^ across the waves of time, to gather the broken fragments of my life, and to develope imperfectly some one of my powers, He, concentred in an im- mutable present, enjoys the absolute plenitude of His existence in its eternal expansion. I find every- where limits, either in the beings who surround me and press upon me, or in the form and degree of my own powers. He is the being without limits, the only being of His kind, the being to whom nothing is wanting. All the powers of life are concentred in Him, those that I know as well as those infinitely more numerous, of which I have no idea. In imperfect beings, limited and unequal, they are subject to strife, to negation, to discord. In Him all is infinite, positive, fall, equal, alone, harmonious. This plenitude, this harmony, this unity of all the powers of being, is the supreme good, is the absolute beautiful, is the Being of be- ings, is God. This idea of the perfect being charms me. How vast, how sublime it is ! but is it not too far from me ? On the contrary, it is as near as possible. Plunged in the whirl of passing things, I may, for an instant, be seduced by their charms. I may, falling in love with myself, be sometimes dazzled and intoxicated with a feeling of my own strength, but it is because I only look at the surface of things. As soon as I return to myself, as soon as I examine the depths of my nature, I am terrified at the weakness, the incon- sistency, the incurable fragility of my being, and I feel that it would vanish away if it were not sup- ported by the true Being. There is no efibrt of the mind in this, no circuitous thought, no reason- 44 FIRST MEDITATION. ing process ; there is a sudden, spontaneous, irre- sistible impulse of my imperfect soul, turning to its eternal principle, feeling itself live and exist in Him. When I come to reflect and to reason on these two objects of my thought — the imperfect being The exist- that I am and the perfect Being by whom I exist God, like — ^ see that it would be madness to suppress one our own, qj- other of these two terms. I find them at the conclusion end of all my analyses, at the beginning of all my "ism^^^^°' r^^sonings. They compose, in their indissoluble union, the permanent foundation of my consciousness, ma^^ob- Can I think on duration which passes away, ^"h^^ah 3.1 ways preceded and always followed by another imperfect duration, without conceiving eternity? Can I and perfect represent to myself a certain space, surrounding a smaller space, and surrounded by a larger, without Thought of ..^.' -30 T 1 u- duration coucciviug immensity i^ Can i contemplate a being leads to finite, changeable, in process of development, without space' to conceiving the Being who is infinite, immutable, per- iTfiliT''^^' ^^^^ ''* "These two ideas call one to the other, and infinite, are linked by a necessary connection. But am I not the dupe of a fortuitous reciprocal relation, which is, perhaps, only in words? Nay, how should it be in the words if it were not in the ideas, and how in the ideas if it were not in the things? Besides, is not this connection most simple ? Before the imperfect being there must be the Perfect Being ; before that which only exists in a temporary, local, and relative manner, there must be that which exists fully and absolutely. This is simple, clear, evident ; it is a natural axiom ; it is the first of axioms ; it is the supreme law of my reason. Shall I endeavour to destroy, by an artifice of reflection, what nature has so deeply engraven in my consciousness ? I have tried it more than once IS THERE A G0D1 45 without ever being able to succeed. Supposing The idea of that there is no perfect being, how should I^^^J"/^^e^^ have the idea of one? Could I have created it? destroyed But with what elements and after what model? ^7 j^^^^^' I might accumulate ages and spaces, I should never make immensity or eternity. In vain should I heap size upon size, in vain should I choose among exist- ences all their powers, all their features of beauty or perfection : these accumulated masses, these beau- ties, these powers, ever increased, purified and com- bined by the most powerful imagination, would never give me the infinite, the absolute, the per- fect. Moreover, what are ideas in general ? They are forms of thought; and what is thought in gene- ral? What is its essence ? It is to represent that which is. How, then, should it represent that which is not? Finally, if I were to analyse the idea of an imperfect being, I find that the imper- fect being is one who has not within itself the reason of its own existence, and supposes, conse- quently, something beyond itself. If, then, I were to conceive the imperfect being as exhausting all existence, I should conceive it at the same time as contingent supposing, and not supposing something beyond ^^^ !"^p|=.''" itself, which is a palpable contradiction. necessary I could bring forward many more reasons and ^efnr'^^^'^^ show that 1 cannot deny the perfect being without being liable to a re duct io ad absurdwn. But that is useless. I am in a region above reflection and reasoning — in the region of primary ideas and evi- dent principles. I lay down, then, as a principle, as a truth self-evident and anterior to all other truth, that my contingent and imperfect being, and every other analogous being, has its reason in the necessary and perfect being. ^econti iaetiitation. Is God accessible to Reason ? Proof that I KNOW that before this universe of which I form Bdrf'^ex-^ a part, and which is a moving collection of fragile ists by and imperfect beings, there is the perfect being Himself. ^i^Q ^jQj^g g^-g^g ^^ Himself. This is the first ray of light that breaks upon my night ; and I scarcely perceive it, when it seems to vanish, and leaves me involved in darker shadows. For what is the signification of these words ; God exists by Himself.? I find a profound mystery in the very evidence they afford. I cannot doubt that the Perfect Being necessarily contains in Himself the principle of His own existence. Otherwise God would not be God, the perfect being. For not existing by Himself, He would exist by some anterior principles. He would only have a commu- nicated, perishable, dependent existence. And this extraneous principle, whence He must draw His being, would be the true God, unless, in its turn, it depended upon some other principle, and so on, infinitely ; and thus there would be no first prin- ciple, no God. Therefore, it is certain that the Negative perfect being must exist by Himself. Being" b^y ^es, it is cvideut enough, but that does not Himself, make it more easy to understand, for what is the IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 47 meaning of self-existence ? If a negative notion were sufficient, I should say, To be self-existent is to have no need of a beginning. I understand this well enough, for I have only to look at my- self, or at any other being whatsoever in the uni- verse, to know what it is, to need a beginning. I know negatively what it is, to be self-existent, ^°^^ 9^."^ but when I want to form a positive notion of the self? self-existent being, I feel myself face to face with an insoluble enigma. Were I to say that God creates Himself, it would be using mere words, for if I accept this explanation seriously, it signi- fies that God is both the cause and effect of Him- self, He was then before He made Himself, He was then before existing : two contradictions — so we are reduced to say that God has no need of a Creator, that He is uncreated. I fall back upon a notion purely negative and indirect. Were I to say that God is perfect, and that js God's His perfection is the reason of His existence, even perfection this thought which had appeared to me solid, and of^Htr°" profound, is an illusion. No one has yet suc-^^i"?^ ceeded, perfection being given, in deducing exist- ence from it. Who shall attempt it where so many have failed ? If the perfection of God is the reason of His existence, we must say, to speak rigorously, that God is perfect before existing, which is a contradiction. Reason being so consti- tuted that she submits every conception to the conception of existence, that she can conceive nothing anterior to existence, we must here invoke some human faculty superior to reason, some unheard of esctatic intuition. But perhaps I am wantonly making difficulties 48 SECOND MEDITATION. Shall we for myself. God is being itself. Is it not quite must exht? pl^iri that being must exist ? No, it is not quite We are met plain ; for liow many times at the end of all my swer, Why reflectious on the origin of things have I met not nothing? ^\[\^ this problem. Why is there anything rather than nothing ? I mean rigorously nothing, neither imperfect being nor perfect being, neither finite being, nor infinite being, neither God, nor universe, neither man, nor space, nor time, nor movement, nor number, in fact, absolutely no- thing. Our ignor- \ sj^^ll be told that this supposition is contra- God. dictory, and that trying to conceive absolute nothing, I myself destroy the conception, for I at least exist who conceive the nothing. It is true, I cannot evidently draw out the hypothesis of nothing, as an hypothesis actually realised ; but that does not prevent me from conceiving nothing as possible, having abstracted myself as well as everything else. What matters it that I have no positive idea of self-existence .f* If I could conceive it, I should know how and why it exists, and I need not ask, Why is there anything? This question shows me the depths of my own incurable ignorance ; it shows me my absolute in- capacity of attaining God in His essence. I know that God is : I know not why He is. His essence escapes me. I can say what it is not ; I cannot say what it is. God incon- It is uot cuough to say that God is incompre- w7ii as 7n- hensible. God in His essence, God as self-existent, frehen- is absolutely inconceivable to any other being but Himself. When we say that all in God is infinite, and, consequently, infinitely disproportioned to sibL IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 49 man, and consequently incomprehensible, we speak the truth. When we say that there is in God an infinity of perfections, an infinity incomprehensible to a finite being, we speak truth again ; but we speak the whole truth when we say that the essence of God is wholly inaccessible to us ; and it is quite conceivable to say that the essence of God is incommunicable; God alone is God. We must be God to understand what God is in Him- self, and why He exists ; where is the root of His perfections, and what mysterious tie unites them. Then it avails me nothing to have found God, since this knowledge only shows me the infinite depth of the abyss of ignorance, where my thought Yet no need is lost. But let not my soul therefore despair, or scepti- Let me examine closer. We cannot know the"^"^- essence of God, but it does not follow that we can know nothing about Him. We cannot know in God'is His essence because it is incommunicable, but evidently all in God is not incommunicable, for we exist, we think, we love, we act. And thought, and life, and activity, and love, are everywhere diffused around us. God has not then remained within Himself, enwrapped in the mystery of His essence : God has manifested Himself, God has communicated Himself. Why, how, we know not, but the fact is certain, the universe is there. There is then something incommunicable in God, namely the essence of His being. There is also something communicable, namely the powers of His being, thought, love, joy, and life. We know besides that God is perfect. With- out understanding, without even conceiving the first foundation of His essence, we know that all that communi- cable. 50 SECOND MEDITATION. is in Him, is there under the form of perfection, that is to say, under the form of immensity, of eternity, of absokite plenitude, and of entire completeness. Why, then, should we not know God according to the measure of our needs and earthly condition ? Without indiscreet haste, or timid mistrust, instead of groaning over the weakness of our nature, let us walk by its light, and to strengthen our steps let us make use of what we know best in the world, our own thought. Our We think, doubtless weakly, sometimes well, thought sometimes ill, always much worse than we wish, to^ Perfect^ but as a matter of fact we think. Among all Thought, beings, we have the privilege of exerting that superior power of thought which is called reason, and which has truth for its object. We know very clearly what constitutes truth. No doubt we do not always attain to it, but we know always that it consists in the agreement of thought and being.^ Without being, there is no thought, without thought the being escapes from itself, it is as if it had not been. Thought reflecting being, being laying hold of itself by thought, this is truth. Now, why is thought imperfect ? Be- cause it is limited, either in its object, or in itself. Being escapes it, and often in its effort to seize it lets it escape. Because it pursues with too much ardour, it is always trying to embrace a larger quantity of being, and to lay hold of a higher degree of purity, and it never attains its object. Thought is an incomplete power, which attains ' ["Veritas est affectus orationis conveniens menti, et aflectus mentis conveniens rei , . . falsitas erit in notlonibus, quje ?unt in anima, prop- terea quod cse rebus adxquatce non sunt."' — J. C, Scaliger, De Subtil., Excrcit. II.] IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 51 action only by effort, aided by time, across a thou- sand intermediaries, a thousand obstacles, a thou- sand mistakes. And even when it attains some particular truth, it cannot stop there. It perceives immediately another distant truth which attracts it, so that having taken breath, it dashes forward again, always restless, desirous, greedy of truth, never satisfied. This aspiration ever disappointed, teaches us to conceive the ideal of the perfect thought, I mean thought in a state of absolute completion, embracing all being, embracing it with a sure hold, and with a single glance, without effort, without intermediary, without succession, without limit, without weakness, without the least imper- fection. O, we cry, what a sublime ideal were this ! With what ineffable joy should we follow such a possession of truth I and we say well, for living truth, truth laying hold on itself, and enjoy- ing itself, perfect joy in the full possession of truth, is God. But what if all this is but a delusion, a chimera what if of my reason, which gives reality to that which ^^^j^^^^^^^ it desires. What if, making a God in my own image, composed of all that is best in myself, I have invented a God who has no existence but for me alone ? I said just now, and I thought I demonstrated, that between God and man there is a difference which is absolute, and not relative; a difference of nature, and not of degree. It is true the finite has no proportion with the Finite and infinite; but let us weigh this well — between thejjjj^^^^j^t. intellects that we possess and the complete intel- lect, there is the infinite. Our thought, and every imperfect thought, is a power in the way 52 SECOND MEDITATION. of development; this is its essence and its neces- sary law. Divine thought is a thought fully de- veloped, which by its essence is anterior to all de- velopment. Finite thought implies effort, infinite thought excludes it. Finite thought is displayed under the form of time, infinite thought subsists and is maintained under the form of eternity. It knows none of the conditions of an imperfect in- telligence, nothing of limit, or time, or space, or succession, consequently nothing of memory, or reasoning, or induction, or any of those human intermediaries between an infinite truth and a finite thought; nothing of those laborious opera- tions which are the torment and confusion of our reason. It is but the pure essence of thought, thought adequate to being, intuition having con- sciousness of itself, thought taking hold of being, and taking hold of itself. On one side an indefi- nite virtuality, tending towards action without being able to reach it, on the other the absolute infinite act, excluding all virtuality, all effort, all measure, all degree, all interval between itself and its end. The difference is not of degree, but of nature and essence; it is the difference between time and eternity, between the finite and the infi- nite, the relative and the absolute. God has in- Also, since God is the universal Being, the and'^on*^*^ Being to whom nothing is wanting, He must pos- sciousness. sess intelligence. There could not be less in the Perfect Being than in the imperfect, in the cause than in the elfect. God could not be the source of being and yet not be the source of that intelli- gence without which being would be as though it were not. And if God be intelligent He must rS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 53 perform acts of intelligence. He must have in- tuition and consciousness of Himself. For in reality to imagine a thought without intuition, and without consciousness, would be to keep the name while taking away the thing; unless I should venture to say that there is nothing in common between divine thought and human thought. And then these words, God thinks, would have no sense to man. The consciousness of thought would be an imperfection, sleep would be better than waking, and God, as said one of the ancients, would be like a man asleep. Where would be His dignity ? " No," cries another sage, "no, by Jupiter! they wiU not persuade me that thought, a soul, motion, and life, do not belong to the Absolute Being; that this Being neither lives nor thinks, that he remains motionless, im- mutable, a stranger to the august and holy powers of intelligence." And the sages were right. God is not an ab- God is not solutely incommunicable being;, having no rela- ?^^°^"^^^y • 1 1 1-1 1 r XT- incommu- tion with that which proceeds n-om Him. Itnicabie. there be in His essence a mystery which baffles me, there is also in it a dazzling light which shines to the eye of my reason, and charms it.^ He is reason itself, eternal reason; not the dark 1 [It has been said that " not our logical mensurative faculty, but our imaginative one, is king over us," and that " a symbol is ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God- like." — Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. The opposite aspects of the infinite God are thus revealed to us under apparently contradictor)- symbols in the Bible: "The Lord said that He would dwell in the thick dark- ness;" yet '-He dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto." — I Kings viii. 12; i Tim. vi, 16. What is the conclusion of philosophy, as indicated above, but the translation into modern lan- guage of God's "dwelling in thick darkness," yet ''in light imap- proachable."] 54 SECOND MEDITATION. germ of thought, but thought complete ; not ab- stract truth, but truth substantial and active, which diffuses itself and communicates itself infi- nitely. Rejoice, my soul, thou hast found God, the living God, the true God. OBJECTIONS OF A PYRRHONIST. I was resting joyfully in the idea of eternal truth, the divine harmony of being with thought, the complete type of the perfect life. I said to myself, Here is a certain victory; here is a first step made on firm land. I may advance in safety, and I congratulated myself on having set aside books, systems, the disputes of the schools, and permitted my mind to give itself free scope, and to taste at will the pure luxur}^ of free thought. But it is all in vain. Books follow me; they fling themselves in my path, and force me to stop in spite of myself. Sometimes Kant impedes my way, sometimes Spinoza. And when I succeed in putting to flight the illustrious dead, their liv- ing disciples rush to the assault. I cannot take one step out of my retreat without meeting with scepticism or pantheism, in the person of some one of my friends. To-day it is a sceptic with whom I have to do. Scepticism His opinious are in general quite in accordance with ~^j'P^r those of Sir William Hamilton, the great Scotch the Hamii- critic. Like him he has passed the Rhine, and been initiated in the German philosophy, whose darkest labyrinths have no secrets for him. It is espe- cially the doctrine of Kant that has seduced and toman form IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? ^^ fascinated him, so that in the recent attempts of Schelling and Hegel he sees only an added proof of the impotence and the incorrigible pride of reason. ^'I confess God as well as you, says he, but I believe in Him in another manner. God is not to me an object of science, but an object of faith; Revelation I speak of that natural faith vvhich has been re- °( *'^f '"^" fused to no man, and which has a more extensive which, circle than reason. The visible world, the finite, j^o"^^^^'^""' , . . , belongs to or, m more precise terms, ' the conditioned m faith, not space and time,' is the domain where reason and^^^^"*^"' science display themselves; that which is beyond it escapes them. I agree, that 'the very con- sciousness that we have of our impotence to con- ceive anything beyond the finite and the relative, inspires us by an astonishing revelation with faith in the existence of something unconditioned, be- yond the sphere of comprehensible reality.'-^ But do not triumph in this confession, for this uncon- ditioned, this absolute, although real and certain, is not the less outside of science. Science is composed essentially of positive and determined notions, and the absolute is to the human mind only a negative idea absolutely undeterminable. ^' See what happens when you dare to determine the nature of God. Your God is, you say, the Being of beings; that first principle which philo- The abso- sophers in France call the perfect Being, and in^"^^* Germany the Absolute. Pray what is the abso- lute ? As long as you confine yourself to nega- tive determinations you are all right. You say the absolute is the infinite, the eternal, the immu- 1 Sir W. Hamilton's Discusstom on Philosophy and Literature. See espe- cially Appendix I. ; Conditions of the Thinkable. 56 SECOND MEDITATION, table, the one, the simple. That means that God has no precise limits ; that He is neither in space nor time ; that He is incapable of motion, of variety, of difference, which are all void and negative notions. To speak thus is not only to say nothing about God, but it is to acknowledge, without knowing it, that He is inaccessible to man. Man, in fact, by his nature, is subject in all his acts to the laws of space and time. This is why his reason cannot exercise itself on any object without imposing on it this double con- dition. To say that the absolute is without rela- tion to space and time, is to say that He is with- out relation to human reason ; that He will always be to it an algebraic X, the X of an in- soluble equation. Sceptical You feel this yourself, and you try to come to to^TsitiTe positive determinations. God, you say, is intelli- determina- geuce, consciousuess, reasou, truth ; and, if we GoT *^ You ^^^ yo^ go on, you will tell us presently that He are pro- is love aud joy, active power and liberty, wisdom, Ind^mao-ni Justice, foresight, holiness, anything you please, fying your But do you uot perceive that you are the dupe mlnity!' of '^ pl^y of the imagination, which is thus making to itself an idol of human elements .f* Thought, love, joy, and liberty, are but modes and relations of your particular being; that is to say, the acci- dental and changeable forms of a little being wan- dering in a corner of the earth, in the midst of infinite space. Can you call that atom, more or less amplified, God? And what an extreme of pride to see only man in the universe ^. Is not God the God of all beings ? why confine Him and cut Him down to the proportions of IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 57 man ? Why not say He is matter when you aver He is spirit ? By what right do you give Him thought, and deny Him motion ? And then in the narrow circle where you want to contain Him, why choose that which suits yOurself ; why accept this, and refuse that, while all modes of life are one and inseparable ? God possesses joy ac- cording to you; He must then suffer sadness. You attribute to Him thought and consciousness ; He must then think as man thinks. He must recollect, reason, and conclude; He sees and hears. He must have eyes and hands. You are ashamed of this idol, which is your own creation, and you try to make it a little less material. You take away first the senses, then memory, then reason- ing, till, by refining and retrenching, you have nothing leift but an empty abstract thought, a thought which does not think, a nothing. "The strength of your reasoning is this princi- Proof that pie, that all that is in the effect must be in the .^^'^ ^^'°" cause. But this principle is false; for otherwise cessibie to we must transport into God not only finite forms ^^°"&^^- of existence, but also duration, succession, and extent, without which these forms vanish. "You would attach yourselves to the idea of Divine thought, no doubt, because you think this safer ground than any other. Well, let us try it. Assuredly if there is a truth that contempo- rary philosophy has put in a strong light, it is that all truth supposes the distinction of the sub- ject and the object. There must be a subject who thinks, there must be an object who is thought; there must be a relation between the 58 SECOND MEDITATION. two terms. Nothing is plainer. Well, do you know what follows rigorously from this admis- sion ? This — ^that the Absolute is absolutely in- accessible to man; further, inaccessible to Himself. In a word, the Absolute is a contradiction to the laws of thought. How, in fact, should the Ab- solute admit of thought, since He is absolutely one, and thought implies a division and a differ- ence ? Besides, thought is only real when it seizes itself. It supposes, then, consciousness, the Ego. From the "If God thiuks, God has consciousness, God Tou^h''^ says I. Now to say I, is to distinguish oneself from something else; it is to place an extraneous object before oneself. The I, consciousness, can only belong to a particular finite being, limited by other beings. This is the meaning of the celebrated formula, ' The Ego supposes the Non- Ego.' Then to suppose an Absolute being who says I, is evidently to deny His being abso- lute; it is to deny Him while you assert Him. We must believe, then, one of two things : either that God thinks without consciousness of His thought — that is to say, that He thinks without the necessary conditions of thought; or thinking really that He has consciousness, that He says I ; and then He is no longer God. Can the " The Absolutc, then, considered in itself, is not, bethought and cannot be, intelligence and thought; it can- by man?^ not think itself; can it be thought by man ? No. ectatk^' For to think the absolute, is to tiike the absolute intuition. fQj. ti^g object of tliought; therefore to distinguish oneself from it, to set oneself outside of it. But according to its definition, the Absolute is that which embraces everything, and outside of which IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 59 nothing can exist, or be conceived. Schelling understood perfectly the contradiction which exists between the Absolute and the laws of thought; and he admits, in God, a thought absolutely unde- termined, a thought which is mingled with His being, and which he calls the absolute indiffer- ence of these two terms. Such a thought is equivalent to the annihilation of thought. But better still — Schelling goes on to ask, how man can think the Absolute. He knows and acknow- ledges that the Absolute cannot enter into human consciousness, the Absolute being one, and con- sciousness implying opposition between the sub- ject and the object. So what does he do.^ he imagines a human intuition of the absolute, which is accomplished outside of consciousness, and which he calls contemplation or intellectual intuition. It is, says he, a flash of lightning, a sudden rap- ture. Ask him not to describe it; it avoids ^analysis, for it avoids reflection and even conscious- ness. In this mysterious act every distinction vanishes between the subject and the object of thought. It is not God on one side and the soul on the other. God and the soul are identified. We are in thorough mysticism. "But we do not escape from the discussion by taking refuge in mysticism and ecstasy. For if we place ecstasy outside of reason and knowledge, we confess ourselves conquered, and if we accept the discussion we are reduced to say that there is a thought which is in contradiction with the essence of thought. Nor if we admit this thought are we any better off*, for since it is outside con- sciousness, it is outside memory. ' We come 6o SECOND MEDITATION. out of intellectual intuition,' says Schelling, ' as out of a state of death ; we come out of it by reflection.' This is impossible, — we cannot re- flect on that which does not come within the range of our consciousness ; we cannot recollect that which we have not perceived and felt. Supposing the act of intuition to be complete, having no pos- sible relation with our consciousness, it would remain entirely extraneous to us. Dilemma. " Tliis, then, is the state of the question, If you confine yourself to excluding from God all the forms of finite existence, all positive determination, you confess that God is indeterminable, and that the science of God is a void and negative science. If you try to determine positively the nature of God, either you have a god made in the imiage of finite being, a false god, an idol, or else you give to God contradictory attributes ; as, for instance, thought without the necessary conditions of thought. Then adding to thought, love, joy, and liberty, but love without need, joy without sad- ness, liberty without effort, you think you advance in the knowledge of God, and that you make His nature to consist of an harmonious union of all perfections, while all the time you are making of Him a monstrous assemblage of all contradictions. History " In point of abstract reasoning, this is what logic must be says^ In point of fact, there is but one way of consulted. < . ,^ . '. iii' solvmg the question, that is to consult the history of systems, and the history of religions. What, in fact, is any doctrine, philosophical or religious, but a manner of conceiving the origin of beings, that is to say, of determining the Absolute ? One philosopher conceives the Absolute as substance, IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 6i another as cause, another as unity ; and all are persuaded that they possess an Absolute perfectly pure, unfettered by any condition or relation — the true Absolute. Now substance is not the Absolute, for it implies modes. Cause is not the Absolute, for it is relative to its eiFects. Intelligence is not the Absolute, for it is only realised by consciousness, difference, and opposition. Unity even, is not the Absolute, for it necessarily engenders variety ; and if it does not engender it, it expresses nothing, and itself vanishes in absolute indetermination. There is no middle way; there must be either a determinate, conditional, relative God, or an un- determined God, who may be reduced to these three syllables the Ab-so-lute — and then follov/s the logic of Hegel, which identifies this Absolute with nothing. One of his own disciples, Oken, has given the real formula of this God-nothing of Hegel, namely Zero.^ "This is the mere play of scholastic acuteness, "Reii- but let us consider now the beliefs of human g?"''"'^^-^ tnis school. science. There is at least one incontestable fact, "so many which is, that all men savage and educated, have f^^'j^J"/ ^ the Abso- lute." ' [Mr. Mansel, several years ago, gave a summary of these opinions with equal learning, acuteness, and wit, — "The land that produced one Kant with a K, And many Cants with a C. Where Hegel taught to his profit and fame, That something and nothing were one and the same ; Where, rear'd by Oken's plastic hands, The ' Eternal Nothing of Nature ' stands ; And Theology sits on her throne of pride, As 'Arithmetic personified ;' Where Feuerbach shows how Religion began From the deified feelings and wants of man, And the Deity ovv'n'd by the mind reflective Is Human Consciousness made objective." — Phrontistakn — Scenes from an unfinished Drama, pp. 13-14. J 62 SECOND MEDITATION. alike felt a need of thinking of God, of making to themselves some image of Him, of introducing the Divinity into their homes and their consciousness. Thence all religions — thenceFetichism, Polytheism, Manicheism, Monotheism, which are so many dif- ferent forms under which man strives to imagine the Absolute. An endeavour touching and sublime, but ever impotent, ever infinitely beneath its object. This is why religions die, after having lived, and are continually renewed with time, places, races, nations, and the great movements of civilisation. Consider the last and the most philo- sophical of human religions, Christianity. You will find in it, amidst the purest symbols, the proof of the vanity of all symbols. When the God of holy writ describes Himself, He lets fall from His lips only that grand ironical sentence, ' I am that I am.' The New Testament, it is true, is given to complete the Old. God becomes incai-nate in man, but how is this incarnation taught to the Christian ^ Is it offered to his reason to under- stand, or to his faith to adore ? The Word made flesh is, we are told, a mystery, the great mystery. It is, in fact, the expressive mystery, for God made man, is the Eternal fallen into time, the Absolute become relative, the Infinite finite. This is the common foundation of all religions, and the eternal despair of all philosophy. All religion is the development of a symbol, and it is of the nature of a symbol to represent under a form that which is independent of all form, as it is of the nature of a system to define that which is in- dependent of all definition. This does not mean, in the least, that philosophy and religion are with- IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 63 out object, and without truth, or that we must be sceptical, or impious, or atheistical ; for philosophy and religion are in the first place legitimate, inas- much as they have their roots in the superior elements of human nature, and in the second place, they are efforts of ever increasing strength and happiness to reach to purer symbols, and formulas that are larger and more exact. Philosophy and religion bear witness to the origin and the Divine destiny of man. They bear him beyond the borders of the real, and transport him into the boundless realms of the ideal. They are true in their essence. But they cannot be worth more than man himself, and man is subject to change, the supreme law of all that is imperfect and finite. Man must not set himself in the place of God ; to God belongs absolute truth, to man the immortal search after truth." Such are the arguments which I hear every day. This scep- from men in whom a scepticism more or less ^icism is confessed is united with the most brilliant intel- reaction. lectual gifts, further enhanced by a noble inde- pendence of character. I hear them, I admire and I contradict them. My profound conviction is, that this negative philosophy is a disease of our times, a bitter fruit of our philosophical disputes, a perhaps natural enough, but certainly most exor- bitant reaction against the daring of speculative pride. In a word, I see in this scepticism, which is most frequently concealed, a little truth mingled with a great deal of error. It is easy to single out the little truth that it contains — namely, the very simple fact, that the 64 SECOND MEDITATION. True part, scieiice of things divine, as much and more than lol^hlT" ^^y other science, has its shadows and its mys- mystenes.i terics. I begin, then, by confessing that not only the Absolute is incomprehensible, and also the Infinite; but even that, considering Him in His essence, in what He is of Himself, He is in- conceivable to man. We know that He is. We know neither why nor how He is. Untrue This comes from the weakness of the human Go'd's^IxL intellect, which is the real meaning of that prin- tence can- ciple of the incomprehensibility of God that we demon- ^^e and abuse so much. In fact, ours is a com- strated. muuicated being ; the being in God is of another nature. He exists of Himself. God is then dif- ferent from us. The Being is His sublimest name, and yet He has no name; for there is beyond His attributes something which establishes them, and constitutes them, and this something is inaccessible and ineifable. For this reason the existence of God, notwithstanding the genius of Saint Anselm, and the accumulated efforts of Descartes and Leibnitz, has never been rigorously proved a priori. God alone knows why God exists, and demonstrates eternally to Himself His ' [It is often assumed that there is something in the very conception of a mystery as such, which at once baffles evidence, and precludes examination. Unquestionably there are propositions which either con- vey no ideas (e.g. those in an unknown tongue), or which are palpably self-contradictory. It is important to bear in mind (and it is a prin- ciple which cuts very deep in our controversy on the two opposite sides of Romanism and Socinianism, that a mystery., far from involving contradictions, or presenting no tangible truth, is an idea \\\\o'^q. general outlines are traced with sufficient distinctness, while the particulars are concealed. Thus mysteries^ in general, are possible, but the truth of a par- ticular my slery must be decided by its evidence, l^eibnitz says, '■' Fossi- bilitatem mysteriorum contra insultus infidelium et harreticorum a contra- dictionibus vindico ; haud quidem veritatem, quae revelatione sola stabiliri potest. "J * IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 6$ own existence, because He knows the how of it. God alone sees in the idea of God, or as Leib- nitz would say, in the simple possibility of God, the reason of the existence of God. It is not thus that men know the Divinity. They only know it as the reason of their own existence and of that of the universe. Nothing more. What inference may be drawn from this .? That Tme con- we must bow down before the eternal mystery .? I fusions ^ willingly do so. That we must take down the pre- incapacity tensions of Pantheism, that proud and foolish ?^ '^''"'^^''" 1 •! 1 1-1 1 1 ^^Z God. philosophy which pretends to penetrate to the Divine essence, to set out with the adequate defi- nition of God, and to deduce from it the complete system and the universal evolution of beings ^. I Not that assent to this also. But when, from the incon- J^^ti'^n^^of ceivability of the essence of God, it is concluded God, and that we know nothing at all about God ; when ^^^^J^ ^""'" instead of comprising in precise limits the science theology, of things divine, that science is set aside altogether; I can go no further, and I enter my protest in the name of common sense. ^' The heavens declare the glory of God," this is the voice of common sense, and science in the depths of its analysis finds this principle, that the imperfect being has its reason in the perfect Being, and consequently that there must be in the perfect Being something that may be communicated to the imperfect being, and be to it a natural revelation of its principle. To say that God has never manifested Himself, God mani- is to say that He is by His nature absolutely in- ''^^^ " communicable. Now, if God were incommuni- cable, not only in His essence but in all that He is, God would then be the only possible being. 66 SECOND MEDITATION, Not only the sceptics, but even the idealists and the mystics, those who deny life altogether, would God is ab- |3g nght in that case. Life is everywhere ; I feel teiiigence. it iu mysclf, I See it in the universe ; and of all the forms under which it appears, the clearest, the most certain, and the purest, is intelligence. Intelligence is displayed in the whole universe. • It is manifested among inferior beings by the laws which direct them unknown to themselves. It begins to work in the plants like a dim glimmer of life. It has the sentiment of itself in the beast. In man, finally, it knows itself, it possesses itself; it shines, and is resplendent. But even in man it acknowledges itself subject to the law of development and change, to ignorance, to error, to endeavour ; and is consequently incapable of existing or subsisting by itself. There is then, above nature and man, a first principle of intelli- gence, and this principle must be intelligent, other- wise there would be less in the cause than in the eirect, which would be inadmissible. All that is positive and real in the effect can only come from its cause. Properly, there belong to the effect only limits and relations. Now there is nothing more real, more positive, or more clear than in- telligence. God is therefore absolute intelligence, perfect thought, truth in itself. God is As a general thesis, as truly God is incompre- ?n Hif ^^ hensible in His essence, so truly He is accessible in manifesta- His manifestations. I ascend to Him from the tliTugh in- bosom of my own imperfection ; and knowing that incompre- ^U that is real and positive in the imperfect being in^His^ has its reason in the Perfect Being, it is enough essence, f^y ^^ to couceive aright the communicable IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 67 powers of the Divine nature, to conceive them in all their plenitude under the forms of immensity and eternity. But, I am told, this is just what cannot be objections: done. You forget that the human mind can V ^"^J^J, , . o , . . , . that God s conceive nothmg that is not in space and time ; attributes therefore, to say that the attributes of God must ^'"^ ^''. ^^ / •/ . conceived be conceived under the form of immensity and eter- under these nity, is to say that they are in fact inconceivable, [o'^^dmi'^j. I acknowledge that space and time are the forms that they of imperfect existence, this is why reason can only cdvaMe"' conceive it under this double condition ; but I say that reason has other objects, that while imposing on all the beings in the universe, the laws of time and space, she acknowledges herself independent of them. The proper objects of reason may be characterised as universality, eternity, and infinity, so that to submit reason and its objects to the laws of space and time is to deny reason and truth. Can we not conceive mathematical truths, and moral truths, as eternal and universal? Do we not know that before there were men injustice was an evil, and justice a good, as before there were circles the radii of a circle were equal ? You will say that I, who think these things, think them in time, that if geometry be eternal, the geometrician is not so. True, but the privilege of this geometrician of a day, is to conceive dis- tinctly eternity from the bosom of time ; is to place himself beyond the finite by the contempla- tion of universal truths ; is to perceive above the universe, beyond time and space, the divine type of the Eternal Geometrician. 68 SECOND MEDITATION. 2. objec- 2. If it be said that we cannot understand an c'a^nnot^un- ^^^ive intelligence which is not subject to the con- derstand an ditious of time, I deny it. Thought in man, no in action"^^ doubt, is previsiou, is recollection, is to reason, to which is reflect, to abstract, to pay tribute to time in every tionedby' way. But these are only discursive operations, time. tj^at; is to Say, meaus of assisting the weakness of our intuition. The essential of reason is intuition sui conscia. To see, and to be aware that we see, is the type of knowledge, is the divine model of which human thought is a feeble image. Thought in itself is then independent. Not only it has nothing in it repugnant to the nature of God, but it expresses, with a singular precision and clear- ness, the incomparable perfection, and the radiant beauty of that nature. 3. Objec- 3. At this rate, I am asked, if human reason if°we have ^^^ transport into God all that there is real and a right to positive in imperfect beings, why choose this and SdaUthat^'^J^ct that? Why not transport into God exten- is real and siou and duratiou, time and space, which are also bdng^we surely something .? I reply, that time and space have no are not real things, but ideal things ; and as to dura- p^k^and tion and extension, I do not dispute that they are choose. founded in reality, but they must not be confounded with the effective properties of beings. They have only an accidental and relative value, the proof of which is, that they cannot be thought as absolute. When you conceive time as absolute you must cut off its succession and so destroy it. On the contrary, when you conceive thought as absolute, you only take away its limits ; you con- ceive it as a perfect intuition, that is to say, in all the purity of its essence. 5 GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 6^ This brings us to the end of the matter. There First and is a timid scepticism which, proclaiming God as dpie^o"' indeterminable, fears to carry out its opinion, and thorough- dares not acknowledge either its first principle orSm.^'^"^" its final consequence. Leaving these uncertain spirits, let us inquire of more daring reasoners whence they set out, and where they mean to end.? This is their first principle, that thought never goes beyond the relative, and the necessary consequence is that the Absolute is absurd and contradictory. Hear Hamilton and his disciples, they will tell you that the law of thought and being is determi- nation, and, consequently, negation and relation. A thing only exists on one condition, which is to be so and so, and to be conceived in such and such a relation with him who thinks. Thence it follows that every thinkable obiect must contain some neea- ^-J^^^}^ , r ■ -I 1 1 • • 11 Hamilton s tion, tor, HI order to be this, it cannot be that — some proof that difference, for in order to have such a property, it f^f/^^^n must differ from that which has quite another pro- thinkable. perty — and some relation, for, in order that I may think of an object, it must be present and within my reach. This being established, the Absolute, by its very definition, is unthinkable and impos- sible ; in fact, the Absolute is that which eludes all negation, all difference, and all relation. If I do not mistake, the whole system of these Falsehood ' ^ . . ofthe reasonings rests on an error common to scepticism principle and Pantheism, which formerly misled, and still ''^"^"'! deceives, many a superior mind. This error con- natio ne- sists in imagining that every determination is aS^^'°^®^' negation. 0?nnis determinatio negatio est^ says Hamilton after Spinoza. Nothing can be falser 70 SECOND MEDITATION. or more arbitrary than this principle. It arises from the confusion of two things essentially differ- ent, namely, the limits of a being, and its deter- Arising minate and constitutive characteristics. I am an co^nTusion intelligent being, and my intelligence is limited ; of the limits these are two facts equally certain. The possession with its' "^ of intelligence is the constitutive characteristic of constitutive niy beine:, which disting-uishes me from the brute characte- ►— • ristics. being. The limitation imposed on my intellect, which can only see a small number of truths at a time, is my limit, and this is what distinguishes me from the Absolute Being, from the Perfect In- telligence which sees all truths at a single glance. That which constitutes my imperfection is not, certainly, my being intelligent ; therein, on th(. contrary, lies the strength, the richness, and the dignity of my being. What constitutes my weak- ness and my nothingness is, that this intelligence is enclosed in a narrow circle. Thus, inasmuch as I am intelligent, I participate in being and perfec- tion ; inasmuch as I am only intelligent within cer- tain limits, I am inperfect. So that It follows from this very simple analysis that \s'^A\cI\\y determination and negation, far from being identi- different cal, differ from each other as much as being and motion, nothing. According as a being has more or less determinations, qualities, and specific characteris- tics, it occupies a rank more or less elevated in the scale of existence. Thus, in proportion as you suppress qualities and determinations, you sink from the animal to the vegetable, from the vegetable to brute matter. On the other hand, exactly in pro- portion as the nature of beings is complicated, in proportion as their bodies are enriched with new IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 71 fiinctions and organs, as their intellectual and moral faculties begin to be displayed, as more delicate senses are added to their grosser senses, to sensa- tion, memory, to memory, imagination, then the superior faculties, reasoning, and reason, and will, you rise nearer and nearer to man, the most compli- cated being, the most determined and the most perfect in creation. If man were to lose his intelligence, I ask you, would he thereby win perfection ? Apparently not, and yet he would have one determination less. Do you find that the progress of human life, from infancy to virility, consists in the ever-increasing in- determination of its faculties ? Quite the contrary. Perfection in man is the increase and development of faculties, the passing from power to act. Which is then the least real being? the being, so to speak, which is least a being .? The most indetermined being ; and, consequently, which is the most real being, the most perfect being, the being who is most a being ? The most determinate being. In this sense, God is the only being absolutely deter- mined. For there must be something indeter- mined in all finite beings, since they have always imperfect powers, which tend toward their devel- opment after an indefinite manner. God alone the complete Being, the Being in whom all powders are actualised, escapes by His own perfection from all progress, and development, and indetermination. It would be a pure illusion to imagine that different determinations could, by any chance, limit or contra- dict each other. Could intelligence prevent liberty ? or the love of the beautiful extinguish the love of the good, or truth, or beauty, or happiness be any hindrance, the one to the other? Is it not evident. 72 SECOND MEDITATION, on the contrary, that these are things perfectly analogous and harmonious, which, far from exclud- ing, require each other, which always go together in the best beings of the universe, and when they are conceived in their eternal harmony and pleni- tude, constitute the living unity of God ? Now, let us hear our sceptics. They say the Absolute excludes all limits, and, consequently, all But does determination. I reply, the Absolute has no limits, not determi-'^^ is true, that is to say, that His beins: and the nation imTpiy , . •/ ' 11 r n i reiationi powers that are m rlim are all mil, complete, m- finite, and eternal ; but far from these determina- tions limiting His being, they characterise and con- stitute it. Does not every determination, say they, imply relation ? By no means. If you call determina- tion that which in imperfect beings belong to their original limitation, such as their duration, their material figure, their distance, I agree that these determinations are relative, and that an absolute duration, an absolute extension, an absolute dis- tance are contradictory ideas ; but if you come to intrinsic characters, to the constitutive qualities of beings, such as thought and activity, there is no- thing here w^hich implies a limit or a boundary — nothing, consequently, which is repugnant to the nature of the Absolute. Thought What, says Hamilton, is not the Absolute one, !iot?con- ^^^ ^^^s ^^^ thought imply diversity? Does it tradiction. not suppose the difference between the subject which thinks and the object thought.'^ not to men- tion several other conditions. I reply, you con- found the real unity of God with the abstract IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 73 unity of your imaginary Absolute. Doubtless, thought — living thought, real thought — implies the difference of subject and object. In this man- ner there is diversity in the divine thought ; but this variety does not exclude unity, for in God the subject and the object are identical. A perfect being who thinks himself is not one in the sense of the unity of abstraction. He lives, he revolves upon himself; he has in him a sort of spiritual motion. But as this consciousness that the Perfect Being possesses this contemplation that He enjoys, supposes no separation between the subject and the object, no disproportion, no interval, no effort, no succession, there is nothing in it opposed to the most rigorous unity. Hamilton proceeds : You agree that the essen- uto think tial condition of thought is the distinction of thej'/^o'^if subject and the object. The subject lays itself_this down on one side as the one who thinks, and it is ""t™^ opposed to the object which is thought. It follows that the Absolute escapes the grasp of the human mind for the human mind thinking the Absolute, as the subject places itself outside of it, and as the object places it in opposition to itself. Thus it destroys the Absolute. I grant that when a man thinks about God he makes himself distinct from Him, but to make oneself distinct from Him is not to be separated from Him. I think God as differ- ent from myself ; that is not to think Him as finite, as limited by me, or relative to me. I think God as other than myself, but as the reason of my be- ing. I distinguish myself from Him, but, at the same time, I link myself to Him. You tell me that Schelling has admitted the to im" 74 SECOND MEDITATION. Pantheistic absurdity of such an intuition, that he has con- mirfed " fesscd that the notion of the Absolute, under the absolute condition of consciousness, is a contradiction, and tradiction that the Only method of knowing the Absolute is fundam^n ^^ ^^ oueself absorbed into it. I give you up taUaws of the intellectual intuition of Schelling and the Abso- thought— j^|.g q£ ^Yie Pantheists, which is an undetermined not the , ' determined Absolute. I admit that such an Absolute is in GoV'^^"^ contradiction with the fundamental law of thought and being, that it is unthinkable to the human mind and to itself. But then, this is but a vain abstraction, not the determined God, not the living God, who is intelligence, truth, and the eternal consciousness of thought. Reductioad You triumph when you see M. Schelling corn- Hamilton, pelled, in order to justify his idea of the absolute, to invoke some strange ecstatic intuition, and to fall into a wild mysticism. But you are hastening yourself to an extremity quite as dangerous, quite as far from common sense. For after having proved that the Absolute, such as you understand Him, is indeterminable, you conclude that he is absolutely unintelligible. What does this conclu- sion signify .f^ In plain words it signifies that the notion of God is absurd. You began by telling us that the human mind must believe in something unconditioned and Absolute, that the existence of God is consequently certain, that common sense has a reason for being religious, that all religions have their foundation in truth, and now you tell us that human thought can only think the relative, that the relative only can exist and be thought, and that all determination of the Absolute is contradic- tory. Then, not only all the philosophical systems IS GOD ACCESSIBLE TO REASON? 75 that have tried to explain God have stopped below their ideal, but the ideal itself is a wild chimera. Not only every religious symbol is incomplete and insufficient, but every religious symbol is an ex- travagance. We may no longer say that human kind makes to itself symbols of God more or less pure; the very idea of a religious symbol is a contradiction ; consequently, all religion is false and chimerical. Besides, how are we to estimate the value of these different symbols ? There must be a criterion. You say that the symbols of one religion are infinitely richer that those of another — nobler, more expressive, more poetical. Poetical, that is just the word ; you make religion an affair of the imagination. But the judge of poetry has his eye fixed on the ideal of the beautiful ; you, on the contrary — critics without a criterion — have no fixed rule to measure the beautiful any more than the good ; and you are obliged to say at last that truth in matters of religion, as in matters of art, and in every order of thought, is not made for man. Then what means that divine origin, that superior des- tiny, which you attribute to it ? The words divine and heavenly have no sense from your lips. They only call up an illusion, and, if you are right, the best service one could do to humanity would be to cure it of this illusion once for all. What is emptier than an investigation which knows that it is object- less ? what more fragile than a love without hope ^ There is, you say, an exquisite pleasure in the search, and, besides, we need not trouble ourselves, men will be always sufficiently curious to persist in it. Yes, as long as they are believ- ing, as long as they are persuaded that truth and 76 SECOND MEDITATION. goodness are not illusions. As soon as you shall have persuaded them of this, they will sink into incuriousness and torpor. Whatever you may say, this refined delight in a useless search can only be attained by a small number of chosen spirits, intoxicated with a superabundant ardour which conceals from them the real consequences of absolute scepticism — I mean indifference. History is there to warn us. It is two thousand years since Heraclitus said with graceful melancholy, " We cannot bathe twice in the same stream; everything becomes, nothing remains." Soon after came Pyrrho, who com- pleted thus the formula of Heraclitus: -'There is nothing that is more false than true, more beau- tiful than ugly, more good than bad." All is re- lative. No ; all is not relative ; all is not given up to change. There is one truth which remains, and that living truth is God. Can there be anything but God? I HAVE set myself free from a harassing difficulty. I have placed my belief in God beyond the shadow of a doubt. My God is not an unde- termined something, which thought cannot seize, an empty form without contents, substance with- out quality, thought without consciousness and without ideas, being without existence, a phan- tom which only appears to man's bewildered gaze to drag him into a vain pursuit, or to lead him to an unfathomable abyss. The God of my consciousness is the Being who is truly perfect, finished in all the powers of His being, determinate, real, living. His life, as far as I can comprehend it, is the life of intelligence, the fall possession of truth, the perfect thought apprehending the per- fect being, and apprehending itself without inter- vention, without effort, with one simple, single, eternal, equal act. And must this thought be solitary, and, so to speak, egotistic, absorbed in itself, solely occupied with itself? That were strange. And yet how can we explain that the Divine thought can come out of itself to con- ceive anything beyond itself? 78 THIRD MEDITATION. How can Anything, I say, anything but God. For God lute'^orb ^^ ^^^^ perfect and infinite being, and beyond the all? perfect being who possesses all the powers of being, nothing is possible, nothing can be con- ceived. I cannot elude this difficulty. It met me at the moment when scepticism told me that to think about the Absolute was to make myself distinct from Him, and consequently to deny Him as absolute; for how can the Absolute being be anything but the whole of being, and where is there room for anything besides Himself? Here is the great mystery. From the idea of perfect being it is impossible to deduce the possibility of the imperfect being. It seems indeed strange to be told that God being given, all other beings follow as a matter of course. This is to place oneself at the antipodes of truth, to conceive God as insufficient to Him- self, as a dark hidden germ which needs to be developed. But the real difficulty is this. God is a perfect being eternally complete. How can there be anything else than God ? I can conceive that a finite thinking being should imagine something beyond himself; that is to say, finite beings like himself. Or again, I can conceive that such a being, seeing himself incom- plete, should imagine an extension, or possible increase of his being. But that the infinite and perfect Being, who lives in Himself with a per- fect life, should think of anything but Himself, is what I cannot conceive. There are mysteries everywhere. I hardly know that God exists, and I find myself face to face with the mystery of CAN THERE BE JNTTHING BUT GOD? 79 His inaccessible essence. I have just satisfied myself, not without labour and trouble, that God is a perfect idea, which embraces all that is and all that can be; and when I seek to understand how God can conceive other beings than Himself, I feel my sight grow dim. Shall I then stop short ? And because my Experience reason, in its efforts to conceive the origin and J^iJ'gj''^"" order of things, has m.et with an insurmountable weU as pure obstacle, must I despair, and weakly forego the^^^^^"' search.^ No; pure reason is not my whole rea- son; I can still call experience to miy aid ; for I am not a celestial being disengaged from earthly ties, and formed to contemplate face to face the Di- vine essence ; I am an intelligence joined to senses, and surely it were not too much to make use of all the collected powers of my nature in order to throw some light on this darkest of all problems. I feel myself live, and think. I see around me millions of beings who display their activity in space and duration. The earth and the skies, motion and life, my equals and myself, are not vain shadows. Therefore there is not a doubt that the imperfect being exists, and if it has being, I conclude that before being it was a pos- sibility. When I say before being, I do not mean to decide whether it began to exist. That is of little consequence. From the moment that such and such a being is granted as imperfect, it follows that the possibility of that being is logi- cally anterior to its reality. For being imperfect, consequently not having in itself the reason of its existence, it cannot exist without an anterior 8o CAN THERE BE ANTTHING BUT GOD ? condition. Even if going backward through all time, I could not find its beginning, its existence would not the less depend upon a condition which is beyond it, and which governs it, and that con- dition is independent of duration, it is eternal. It is quite evident that the perfect being is the only one that can elude this law. He has in Himself the reason of His own being, therefore it does not depend on an anterior condition, but the contingent being can only exist by finding without itself the reason of its existence ; and this is what I call its possibility. For, granted the existence of a contingent and imperfect being ; in order to exist it must have a possibility, it must have beyond and without it a reason for its existence, and that reason must be independent of time. Then since this imperfect being actually exists, whether or not it ever began to exist is of little consequence, for there must have been an eternal possibility of its existence. Now where is the origin of this eternal possi- bility of imperfect beings — this eternal reason for their existence ? Clearly in God — since God, we know, is the reason of existence in all that exists. And since God is intelligent, knowing Himself perfectly, and all that is in Him, how should He not know this eternal possibility of beings t Hence I conclude, not by a direct and immediate intuition of my reason, but in an indirect manner, and with the assistance of all my means of knowledge com- bined, that there is in the divine intelligence be- yond the eternal consciousness of the perfect be- ing, the idea of the eternal possibility of the im- CAN THERE BE ANTTHING BUT GOD ?8i perfect being, an idea which embraces all possible existences. Now by what connection this eternal possi- bility of the imperfect being is united to the exis- tence of the perfect being, is a secret hidden from every human eye — a mystery buried in the furthest depths of the Divine essence. God alone knows why God exists. God alone knows why any- thing but God is eternally possible. The reason of the being of God, and the reason of the eternal possibility of the imperfect being, are two enigmas linked one to the other, alike impenetrable. But this hinders me not from knowing three things certainly' — that the Perfect Being exists, and con- tains within Himself the reason of His existence; that imperfect beings are possible; and that the reason of this possibility forms an integral part of the Divine thought. Thus, then, my thought has cast a bridge between God and the world. Still I hesitate as I set my foot upon it, and fear to trust it ; for, is it not a flagrant contradiction to suppose that God, the perfect being, should think within Himself of anything but Himself? If this were but a difficulty I would pass on, but a con- tradiction arrests me. Let me examine it again. This is the point ofrheimper- the question. It seems that the imperfect being Jj^f^^^J^^" can only be conceived in two modes as distinct pres^jon of from the perfect being — as a limit or as a pro- J-^^^^"^^— '^'^' longation. But these two suppositions are equally not a limit absurd ; for the infinite and perfect Being cannot, °[ion° °"^' as infinite, be limited, as perfect, be prolonged or expanded. Still I think I perceive a way to solve the difficulty. Certainly the imperfect being can- 82 THIRD MEDITATION. not limit or prolong the perfect Being, but it can express Him — manifest Him by His image. Nor is this idea a phantom which arouses and deceives my imagination; it is rather a gleam which en- lightens my reason, and dissipates my doubts. The more 1 reflect the more I think I perceive clearly that the perfect Being thinking Himself, thinks also the imperfect being, not as a prolongation, not as a limit, but as a possible expression of His existence. And why should not the eternal Being be eternally capable of expression ? Why, outside eternity, should there not be time which is its image ? Why, outside immensity, shall there not be extent to express its grandeur ? Why, outside the perfect thought, the eternal reason, the shad- owless light that burns eternally — why should there not be imperfect intelligences to reflect some of its rays .? I may then, with all safety, cross the bridge that I have constructed between God and the universe. God alone exists eternally, but the universe is eternally possible. God conceives it eternally, conceiving Himself. He conceives it as a possible expression of His infinite perfection. This is the sum of the whole matter. I do not understand why God exists, nor how the possi- bility of imperfect being is connected with the ex- istence of the perfect Being, but I am certain that it contains no contradiction, and that is enough, if not to satisfy my insatiable curiosity on divine things, at least to settle the doubts in my mind, and to give a little light and repose to its restless ardour. fount) ^eMtation^ God the Creator, I THOUGHT I saw a ray of light amid the obscurity of the problem of creation. Let me turn towards that light, which is still weak and uncertain; I shall see it perhaps grow larger and become more steady. I know now, without the shadow of a doubt, that God thinks the universe eternally, as a pos- sible manifestation of the communicable powers of His existence ; can I suppose that God would remain indifferent, or powerless, in presence of this image of Himself.? An indifferent God, a powerless God, would be strange hypotheses ; but before discussing them a priori^ there is one fact that resolves the question. The universe exists. God has not remained powerless or indifferent be- fore the image of the universe eternally impressed on His intelligence. He resolved to realise it — He had power to effect it ; and He made use of that power, because He was not indifferent, be- cause He saw that the universe was good, because He is good Himself, and because He loves all that is like Him. But let me not go too fast in these uncertain and perilous paths. I represent to myself a God :ion k God? 84 FOURTH MEDITATIOISI. Am I au- ^}^Q wills, a God who resolves, a God who loves ; thorised in . . , . ., , r t> • speaking of but IS iiot this to attribute to the perfect iSemg will, re- ^Q imperfect modes of my own being ? God has and love in first appeared to me as a father, who desires to produce a living image of Himself, to see a wit- ness of His fecundity grow and increase. But is not this image, which seems to me august and touching, infinitely beneath the ineffable perfection of the absolute Being ? Is it not a pious supersti- tion of my heart, or rather an illusion of my pride, and a degradation of the Divine essence ? When we look at things with the cool eye of reason, can love be conceived in the perfect Being ? The per- fect Being is sufficient of Himself, and love is an aspiration towards an object foreign to ourselves — an effort to ennoble and complete our being, by uniting it to another being, equal or superior. Love is then the sign of an imperfect nature, and cannot be conceived in a complete and infinite being. I perceive the difficulty, but it presents itself in vain; a secret instinct within me protests, and tells me that love as well as intelligence is some- thing divine. I can see but dimly, yet I feel with an irresistible force, that there must be in love, along with its terrestrial and human part, a celes- tial and divine part; and I seek now, as before, to divide its pure essence from its separable accidents. The love of From the moment that I feel my existence, I feel that I love ; I love to live — I love to think — I love to love. All my powers please and delight me, and I am happy to employ them; but every where I meet with obstacles : I feel that I must en- dure and struggle. My whole life is made up of this. A feeling of power which makes me happy, and a God GOD THE CREATOR. 85 feeling of impotence which weighs me dowm and torments me — a need of evolving my faculties, and a weary effort to overcome the obstacles that I meet — such is my own actual condition. And this is an epitome of the drama of the universe, where there are everywhere powers which limit each other and strive together, which have here the joy of triumph, there the weakness and the torments of impotence and defeat. It is a universal law that every being loves to be, and seeks to maintain and develope its being ; but if the love of being is inherent in being, is it possible to conceive that the perfect Being could be indifferent to be or not to be.^* God is, He thinks Himself, He knows Himself to be perfect, how should He not love to be and to think .? Whence comes the law that unites ever)^where love and being, if it does not reside in the very first prin- ciple of all love and of all being .? And is there anything in love and joy repugnant to this Divine essence ? He knows Himself, He possesses Him- self, He loves Himself, He enjoys His thought and His perfection : from thence springs a felicity which is sublime, incomparable, the complete type of all felicity. Love in the imperfect being is accompanied by imptrfec- desire, by the need of developing and completing J^'°" °^ its being — so its joy is mingled with sadness, its We. hope with fear, its possession with dissatisfaction. Its power of loving can never be fully satisfied, obstacles are constantly rising, and when there are none the beloved object fails to yield what^'"'^"^^"''^- it sought, and it wanders from object to object, always seeking, and after a hundred vanished 86 FOURTH MEDIIATION. illusions, always hoping for the peace and the satisfaction which always eludes its grasp. In the perfect Being on the contrary there is one sole love which finds eternally its object, and possesses it without effort, a love accompanied by an eternal joy. Nor is there in these ideas of love and joy and possession anything involuntarily profane, or which my reason should mistrust, for reason tells me that the essence of love is divine, that the first principle of love is in God, and my heart supporting my reason tells me that there is nothing purer or more divine than joy in the pos- session of the perfect life. And now new lights appear, and I see a little clearer into the mysterious depths of the origin of things. If God is love, if God loves His being, if He loves thought, love, joy, felicity, how should He remain indifferent, before those beings, infinite in number, whose idea made a part of the con- sciousness that He had of Himself, of those beings which, each according to its nature, according to the form and degree of its power, reflects and expresses in different manners the perfections of the Creator.'' And if God loves these beings before they exist, because loving Himself He loves all that resembles Him, if God loves these beings, why should he refuse them reality '^. for this God must be impotent, the most absurd of all suppositions, belied both by the idea of the all- perfect Being, and by the existence of the universe, that undeniable witness of the fecundity of God. Thus, little by little, a kind of idea of the creation forms itself in my mind — a very imperfect idea of mingled light and shade, where I must be con- GOD THE CREATOR, 87 tent to let dark mysteries lie beside shining truths, aiming only at putting away contradictions, and overstepping the limits of invincible ignorance. Thus, then, the world, eternally thought as a possible manifestation of the Perfect Being, is in some sort the ideal and divine matter of creation. The agent is the absolute power of God, and love is the motive which inspired Him, and the reason which determined Him to come forth out of Him- self. Therefore this universe is a work of power, of intelligence, and of love. Intelligence has eter- nally conceived its germ, love has brooded upon it, power has given it expansion. OBJECTIONS OF A PANTHEIST. As long as I keep it to myself the idea that I The state have formed of the creative act is perfectly satis- ^^ "^'"^ factory. I congratulate myself on having regained pTmhasts. by an effort of reflection the gift and the happi- ness of faith. But as soon as I permit my thoughts to venture forth and plunge again into the troubled atmosphere, where one breathes only doubt, con- tradiction, and sarcasm, in spite of myself I fall anew into uncertainty. I see one of my friends long enslaved by the doctrines of Plotinus, Spinoza, ^ Personal and Hegel, smiling at the very name of God the conceived Creator. bynK)dern "It is rather late," says he, " to go back to the philosophy old Theodicea. He must be a bold man who ~7t'^^"^'^^ 01 beins^an expects to succeed where Leibnitz has failed, old super- We have done with all that: you must leave in the^^4\?e"d up. 88 FOURTH MEDITATION. abysses of the past, the personal God, the God who creates by chance or through benevolence, the solitary and capricious artist who wakens up now and then from his sleep, and takes pleasure in his work. These are pious creeds, I grant, touching symbols, but to speak the truth, pure superstitions. Now, when we come to supersti- tions, the simplest are the best, and you by your refinements, only despoil popular superstitions of their fascination and their poetry, by trying in vain to clothe them in the severe forms of science. I'he uni- " Look at what has been passing in the world for verse is ^.vjo ceutuHes. Scieuce has destroyed for ever the distinction between God and the universe. God is the universe united to its eternal first principle, the universe is the living God, the infinite evolu- tion of divine life. This is what science tells us, all the rest is imagination and sentiment." Pantheistic " Let US discuss the matter seriously. I propose dilemma, ^o you this alternative ; — your God is conceived as either creating the universe out of Himself, and this hypothesis is big with a thousand contradic- tions ; or your God creates the universe in Himself, and therefore the universe is Himself, is His life, and so far you agree with us. Or to view it in another light — If you conceive God as living in Himself, and wholly sufficient to Himself, you are driven to admit that the work of creation is an accident, or a thoughtless caprice ; or, if you acknowledge that such a manner of conceiving things is puerile and absurd, you must unite the creation again to the Creator, you must confess that God conceives and loves the world eternally, therefore the creation is eternal, there- GOD THE CREATOR. 89 fore it is part of God, being His necessary mani- festation ; and here again you agree with us. You must take your choice, for between the God of superstition and the God of science there is no medium. ''We need not argue formally to prove that creation your idea of a personal God, coming out of the^^^lj^^ sphere of His being to manifest Himself beyond finite, it, creating for any reason a world that He need ^ Transit- not have created, is an anti-scientific idea; for if ive action.' there is anything evident in the world it is that a being who acts out of Himself is a finite being, for if He were really infinite there would be nothing real or possible beyond Him. Action ex- ercised out of oneself, or, as the schools say, trans- itive action, is the effect of a cause that oversteps the boundaries of its own being to act upon an exterior term, as a sculptor hews a block of marble. You would not make of your God an artist fashion- ing chaotic matter at His will. You are too much of a philosopher not to leave chaos to mythology. But take care. The Nous of Anaxagoras lend- ing regular motion to the inert mass of similar parts ; the Demiurgos of Plato setting on the bosom of matter the luminous impression of the ideas of the good and the beautiful; even the profounder and more scientific doctrine of Aris- totle, I mean that of an eternal world which moves by virtue of its secret aspirations toward a solitary happy God, who attracts all beings and knows them not; — all these things are as much behind the age as the theogony of Hesiod. "But you will say, God has no need of matter 90 FOURTH MEDITATION, to form the world ; that ideal matter, which is only the world conceived eternally in His thought, is sufficient. Granted; but you only put off the difficulty, you do not destroy it. You set it aside for a while to fall on you again with all its weight. God, you say, thinks the world eter- nally; but what is the world.? Is it anything beside God.f* This is just the difficulty; your fatal stumbling-block. It is no more possible for God to think than to do anything out of Himself, for out of Himself there is nothing. Theistic " You must in honesty acknowledge that your Id^aii^^-d^^" personal God is a determined separate being, more The indi- po^erful and more intelligent than man, but of the viduaiised Same species; in fact, an idealised man. He has infinite """^ consciousness; He says I; and these things attest a separate existence, which is distinct from that which it is not, which is concentrated in itself, and possesses its own individuality. Your God is an individual. He is some one, or some thing. He is not the Being, the infinite, universal, abso- lute Being, He who is. He in whom we all have being, life, and motion. You make to your- self a superb idol which inhabits the heights of heaven, but by that very idea you limit Him to a place. In vain you load Him with brilliant gifts and magnificent attributes. He is but a poor child's toy beside the Infinite Being who has no place but immensity, no duration but eternity; who, far from being contained, contains in Him- self space and time, who is comparable to nothing, resembles nothing, is distinct from nothing; for He holds and envelopes all. This is God ; the GOD THE CREATOR. 91 God of manly reason, and of free enlarged science." ''■ We are willing to say that He is a Creator, a God im- cause: not a transitive, but an absolute and imma- "'^"^"^' . 1 11'1'TT" ^c ^ transi- nent cause. He creates the world withm Himselr, tive cause. and thenceforth there is no separation of the Crea- tor and the creature; for the creature is still the Creator considered in His eternal and necessary action. Take away the world there only remains an abstraction, the being in itself, the potential being. But as it is, the potential passes into actual being, the universal Being becomes successively all particular beings, which are only the momenta of His life, the inexhaustible forms of His essence. Nothing is separated, all beings are the acts of one and the same principle, and compose one and the same harmonious tissue which is Divine life." ''But how will you pass from your idea of acodrnfi- personal God to that of the universe ? Will you^iteand be satisfied with the infantine thought that God bethought Himself one day that He would create the world ? But if God is complete without the world, if He lives in Himself a perfect happy life, needing nothing beyond Himself, why should He go out of Himself ? You will have to acknow- ledge that the creative act in God is something fortuitous and miraculous. If you do not say that God is indifferent to the creation, that the being or non-being of creatures is identical to Him, that creation adds nothing to His happiness or to His perfection; if you do not say this, if, pressed by the laws of science, you try to join effect to cause by some intelligible •relation, you 92 FOURTH MEDITATION. must say that God creates from love or from duty. Now, without noticing what is palpably human in these images, cannot you see that if God loves He cannot be without what He loves ; if to create is better than not to create, God cannot but obey His wisdom which shows Him the best, His holiness which forbids the wrong ? And thus the world is necessary to God either as an object of love or duty, and thus God without the world is an incomplete God, a God to whom something essential is wanting, a power without effect, a cause without activity, a wisdom without object, a love without effusion; and thus the world is as necessary to God as God is to the world. Without God no world, without the world no God. God and the world are mutually complementary, and realize each other. Let us hear no more of a personal God, living in Himself, distinct from the universe. Instead of this phantom let us recognize the true God, the God who is neither a thing nor a person, but the impersonal and universal principle of every person and every thing, the God who inhabits not the heavens, but whom the earth and the heavens inhabit — the Immense, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Absolute, the Being of beings." Who are they that speak thus ^ not only one or two Hegelians of my acquaintance; to-day it is one of my friends, to-morrow another; for these opin- ions are too common. Issuing from the German Prevalence schools, they have made their way to France, vLws!"^ England, Italy, through all Europe. I find them alike in serious books and frivolous ones, with learned men and critics, with poets and romancers, even in after-dinner talk. Rejected under this GOD THE CREATOR. 93 or that particular form, they still make their way, as a general tendency, seeking to substitute a vague religiosity for the little dogmatic faith that still exists. Of this flood of Pantheistic ideas I can only say, that it is as impossible for me to deny their existence, as to share in their attraction. I grant to my friends the Spinozists and Hegelians, that they excel in bringing out the difficulty of a God distinct from the world. I will go further ; I will acknowledge that Pantheism is a seductive conception, and, as it were, an eternal temptation to the metaphysical mind. In fact, it satisfies that need of finding unity which is felt by specu- lative reason. It charms our reason to find a first principle, from which all things are deduced as a necessary consequence. But the search of truth is no intellectual play, no mere satisfaction in the regular movement of ideas, but an earnest seeking for the truth with all the powers of our being. The more I think over the problem of creation Pantheism and the Pantheistic idea, the more I am satisfied seductive to SD6CU * that the difficulties about the creation only arise ktive from the diversity and defectiveness of our means '"^^°"' of knowledge, while the Pantheistic idea contains j^^ ^.^,^^. . in itself such absolute contradictions that no logical dilemma. mind could hold it. The/cr/ of Pantheists, the grand argument on which they build their thesis of immanence, so popular beyond the Rhine, is reduced to this : To be the cause of the universe, God must be the transitive or immanent cause of it. There is no middle course, for to say that God does not form the universe out of Himself is to say 94 FOURTH MEDITATION. that He forms it within Himself. Now, God does not form the universe out of Himself, for out of God, out of the Absolute and Infinite, nothing can exist, or be conceived to exist : the very words out of God are a contradiction. God then forms the world within Himself; He produces it of His own substance; He animates it with His own life; in a word. He is its cause, eternally and necessarily acting — a cause not separated from its effect — but realizing itself by its effects, the immanent cause : Deus o?nnium rerum causa immanens non vero transiens. Pantheism This is their decisive, victorious, triumphant mor^phk ' reasoning. Yet, I tell those who are satisfied also. with it that they are the dupes of a strange illu- sion. What do they do? They consider the things of this world, the things of time and space, and amongst the different modes of action that they find, they choose out one and want to impose it on the Creator of the universe. As if absolute activity could be subject to the conditions of finite activity — as if the relations of finite things, one with the other, could be compared to the relation of the finite with the infinite. Strange to say, these Pantheists who accuse their adversaries of humanizing God, fall themselves into anthropo- morphism, and the philosophers of the absolute are caught in the very act of superstition. Transitive To prove this, it is sufficient to show how the cause— spectacle of the imperfection of relative causes must have J^. i • i r i i i j matter. raises US to the idea of the absolute and creative cause. Chained by our senses to this material world, reason at first only grasps causes in their grossest and most common action — the action of a GOD THE CREATOR. 95 power on an external object. The river flows; it bears away my load with it. The branch of a tree crosses my path ; I break it or turn it aside. I can do more. Here is a piece of clay ; I mould it and give it the form that I choose. All human industry is in this. James Watt, with some coal and some water, produces a new and inexhaustible source of motion. Michael Angelo draws his Moses from a block of granite ; here is the transitive cause. But a cause of this kind, however powerful it be, can only act with the help of matter foreign to itself. Without marble and without chisel where were Michael Angelo? But there are causes whose energy has something more intimate and more profound. They are productive without coming immanent out of themselves. A grain of corn germinates ; *^^"=^' an oak spreads out its roots ; a flower unfolds. This is a beautiful sight, yet these are but a gross and material development. I can conceive evolu- tions of a much higher order ; the thought of genius geraiinates and expands in a superior intel- lect : Newton conceives the system of the world. Here is the immanent cause ; and unquestion- ably this spiritual fecundity of an intellect that seems to owe all to itself is the sublimest type of activity that man and the universe can produce. Does it follow that we have exhausted all pos- Both im- sible fonns of activity, and that we must attribute needTng'^'' one of these to the Infinite Being.'' Evidently not. materiaLs Immanent activity, producing its work within itselr, exhaust is certainly superior to transitive activity, and I^^^uses. admit that to conceive God as a power reduced to impress movement on independent and eternal corpuscles, is to go back to the days of Anaxagoras; 96 FOURTH MEDITATION. also, to represent God as a skilful architect, as a great artist embellishing matter by the imprint of His ideas, is a symbol infinitely defective. But even the forms of immanent activity, though of a higher order, are imperfect forms which cannot be transported into the absolute, eternal Being. A grain of corn is a marvel — granted ; but it needs light, and air, and water. It developes itself — true ; but in virtue of a power which is not its own, and on condition of finding around it conditions favourable to its development. Newton himself is subject to a thousand external conditions ; he must have the world to contemplate, and an instru- ment to make his calculations with. Imagine even a pure spirit, an angel, speculating on abstract ideas, his ideas must come from a higher source; without them he can do nothing. To assimi- Immanent activity, then, such as we find it in ^^n^..^^'^ ^^ the universe, is not independent of external condi- manent tious. Let US look at the thing closer. There is ^^^^^^jj^ ^° nothing more opposed to the idea of perfection Him. than the idea of a being who developes himself, a germ that struggles for expansion. This is where the Pantheists deceive themselves ; they cannot see that to assimilate God to the immanent acti- vities of the universe is to make of Him a be- ing who developes himself, consequently an im- perfect being, — is to fall infinitely below God. To act within oneself or without oneself are forms of finite activity. The language here is singularly expressive. Without — within ; these words sup- pose finite beings, limited in space and time, much more in the radical conditions of their existence. But God is the Infinite, Eternal, Perfect, Complete GOD THE CREATOR. 97 Being. Nothing finite is then properly without or within God ; the imperfect being and the Per- fect Being cannot bear any relation of this kind to each other. God is the complete Being ; the world is being in the way of development ; God is in eternity, the world is in time. Can one conceive that time is without or within eternity ? it w^ere a manifest absurdity. Such a century is outside such another century, precedes or continues it ; such a day contains within itself a certain number of hours, which compose its total duration; but time is not a sequel to eternity ; the moments of time do not make up eternity. Time is, then, neither within nor without eternity, and yet there is a reason for its existence. In the same way, the imperfect being, the being imperfect who developes himself, is properly neither without p^J.^^ '^^^' nor within the perfect being eternally developed, neither He does not continue him, nor is his eternal de- nor'^-wkh- velopment, and yet he has his reason for his exist- ^^t" per- ence — a most mysterious and incomparable, but, at the same time, certain and demonstrable relation. Here the Pantheists meet me. Explain this illustration relation, they say; "you call it mysterious that a^nd"spa?e! you may not be driven to confess that it is unin- telligible and contradictory." I deny the contra- diction — the unintelligibility is another question. Where, I ask, is the contradiction '^. It consists, according to you, in setting down God as a Per- fect Being, embracing all the powers of existence, and admitting that there can be anything beside God. I reply that there would be a contradiction if the imperfect being was set down as a prolonga- tion of the Perfect Being. But this is not the 98 FOURTH MEDITATION. case ; time is not a prolongation of eternity, nor space of immensity. The finite thought which developes itself is not a prolongation of the infinite thought eternally developed. This will help us, if not to understand, at least to perceive, the relation of these two terms, for I can clearly conceive that time manifests and ex- presses eternity. Plato has said that time is the mobile image of eternity, and this profound thought, passing from philosophy to poetry, has become accessible to common sense. And this is not to be wondered at; for if nothing is more sublime, no- thing at the same time is more familiar, than this opposition, and this harmony of time and eternity. It is the opposition and the harmony of heaven and earth — of things human and things divine. Every one perceives that time is a different thing from eternity, and that time is not, and cannot be, a prolongation of infinite eternity, nor a develop- ment of motionless eternity. And yet time exists outside of eternity. Time has the reason of its being in eternity, and eternity has its image in time. In the same manner, extension, with its infinite variety of forms and movements, expresses the immensity of the motionless and invisible Creator. In general, the life of nature and that of man — I mean the endeavour of being to feel, to think, to enjoy, to rise incessantly towards a larger and purer form of existence — expresses and manifests the divine life — I mean the full pos- session of being in the bosom of thought, of love, of joy, and of felicity. ''You are the dupe of a metaphor," say the Pantheists ; you substitute for the unintelligible GOD THE CREATOR. 99 word creation the words expression and manifesta- tion, which seem to you clearer, but they are only clear as applied to man. Man expresses his thought — he speaks ; he speaks to make himself under- stood. Speech, then, supposes two persons at least conversing, and between them a material means of expression. I reply that there is, be- sides material and sensible speech, an internal speech, of which we find some trace in our thoughts. It is this spiritual language that I imagine in God. Eternally He sees time and space and the universe. He sees in time the expression of His eternity; in space, the expression of His immen- sity ; in the universe, the expression of all the communicable forms of His Infinite Being, and He takes pleasure in this image, and He realises it by an act of love, enlightened by wisdom and wrought out by almighty power. He realises it ; how, pray ? I humbly confess that I do not know, and, to speak the truth, I have no difficulty in confess- ing my ignorance on the how of creation, when I think that so many other, so much nearer to me, hows — the how of the union of soul and body, the how of the communication of the simplest motion, leave me in invincible ignorance. Here, then, is a fresh mystery, a new blank to fill up in the human science of things divine; to the mystery of the inaccessible essence of God, to the mystery of the eternal possibility of imperfect being, is added the mystery of the how of creation. Three mysteries bound the one to the other, three ^ph-^^ mysteries as impenetrable the one as the other : mysteries, three mysteries, I say, but not one contradiction. loo FOURTH MEDITATION. After this honest discussion on the capital point of the question, I shall not stop long at a secon- dary difficulty. "Is your creator God," ask the Pantheists, '' a creator by accident, or by nature, by caprice, or by necessity?" You reject a fortui- tous and accidental creation ; you deny that free- dom of indifference which makes of the divine will, the capricious arbiter of good and evil, of beauty and deformity, and which is forced to deify chance under the name of divine liberty. That is well enough, but then the creative act has its reason in the nature of God ; it is as necessary as God Himself; one cannot conceive activity with- out the creative act, nor the creative act without its effect, the creature. Creative activity — the creative act, creation — these form an indivisible whole, and you must come to the conclusion that there is no real distinction between God and the universe, between the infinite and the finite — the universe being only God considered in his life, as God is only the universe considered in its unity. Theuni- My reply shall be very simple: If even the verse IS the universe were the natural and necessary manifes- manifeita- . r r^ ^ ^ ii - -r i - tion, not tation or God, that would not signity that it was ^ment7f°^' "^^^ dcvelopmeut. Superficial eyes will only see a God. shade between the two words, but the difference of the two conceptions is immeasurable. On one side, a perfect, complete, personal God who is sufficient to Himself, who does but express His perfection by creating the world, but who without the world would be equally perfect. On the other side, a God who is altogether in power, and nothing in act ; a germ which develop es itself, and which is only realised by development ; a God who, minus GOD THE CREATOR, loi the world, is reduced to a pure potentiality and an abstract possibility. This is the first capital distinction between the true God and the chimera of the Pantheist. More than that, when I say that the creative act is a natural and necessary expression of the divine life, I do not speak of a blind necessity, of an absolute necessity, of that Pantheistic necessity which insists that the primi- tive germ of things must develope itself without will or knowledge to be realised in nature and humanity ; I speak of a suitable moral necessity, a necessity based upon wisdom and love, the holy necessity of an Infallible Impeccable Being, who cannot do wrong, and who moreover does neces- sarily all that He does. And now, he were no philosopher who should deny that there must be a difficulty in understand- ing how, in the bosom of the creative act, there exists love without want, and liberty without the moral possibility of doing otherwise. But this granted, I turn again upon the Pantheists, and tell them that I am about to show in their system not only difficulties, confusion, and defects, but impossibilities, absurdities, and contradictions. I shall state in the first place plainly, the lead- True view ing idea of Pantheism. Pantheism has been ^j^^^^^^JJ" ^^ sometimes understood as the absorption of thedistin- infinite into the finite, at other times, on the con- ^^l^ ^^^e- trary, as the absorption of the finite into the in- ism and finite ; both these ideas are false. The absorption y'^"^''""' of the infinite into the finite, of God into nature, is an attempt to deny the infinite, to reduce every- thing to the universe, it is Atheism. The absorp- tion of the finite into the infinite is an effi^rt to 102 FOURTH MEDITATION, deny the finite, to reduce everything to God ; it is Mysticism. Pantheism is a more profound sys- tem, it is an attempt to keep at an equal distance from mysticism and atheism. That this attempt should be in vain, that Pan- theism should necessarily fall into one of these alternatives is, in my mind, its condition, its neces- sary law, and its condemnation. But if Pantheism ends there, it does not begin there. It begins by wanting to bring God and nature, the finite and the Infinite, to the unity of one single, identical existence. According to Pantheism, nature without God is but an effect without a cause, a mode without substance, a shadow without reality; and God with- out nature is but a cause without effect, a sub- stance without mode, a power without life ; from the bosom of motionless eternity, of infinite im- mensity, of the almighty cause, of the being with- out limits, there break unceasingly an infinite variety of contingent and imperfect beings, which succeed either in time, which are in juxtaposition in space, ever coming from God, ever aspiring to return to Him. God and nature are not two beings, but the single being under a double aspect. Here unity multiplied, there multiplicity which unites itself again to unity. On the one side is the natura naturans^ on the other, the natura naturata. The true being is not in the finite or the infinite, he is their eternal, necessary, and Various indivisible co-existence. formula of 'Y\{\^ is Pantheism. You may vary the formulas Pantheism, , . ^ . i i -^ r "^ i -r- with an ad infinitum^ as you take them 1-rom the Last, or iXntky."^ from Greece, or from modern Europe. You may GOD THE CREATOR. 103 say with one philosopher, that nature is an overflow of the absolute unity ; with another, that God is the eternal coincidence of contraries ; with a third, that nature is a collection of modes of which God is the substance; or, again, that the finite and the infinite, and contradictories, in general, are identical ; but under every variety of formula, through all the changes and progres- sions of Pantheism, analysis finds one single con- ception always the same, and that conception is, the necessary and eternal co-existence of the finite and the infinite. History teaches us what is the necessary Pantheism development and the inevitable result of this idea ; '" ^'^^^'i'- and she only declares, in strong characters, the laws of the human mind, and the real nature of things. History shows that everywhere, and at all times, in the East, and in Greece, at Athens, as at Alexandria, in the modern world, and in the ancient. Pantheism has always been led either to deny the proper reality and individuality of finite beings, and to concentre all life and existence in God, which is the mysticism of the Oriental reli- gions, and of Plotinus and Jacob Boehme ; or to give their individuality to the world and to man, and to reduce God to an abstraction, which is the atheism of Epicurus, of Hobbes, and of their contemporaneous disciples. There is nothing in this which does not find its reason in the consti- tution of the human mind. In fact, a metaphysical system only exists on one condition, that is, to give a reason for the nature of beings, for their most essential conditions, for their most intimate relations. You have hardly done anything when 104 FOURTH MEDITATION, you have set down, in a general way, God, nature, and humanity. You must determine all these conceptions. You must say what God is, whether or not He has attributes, what is His manner of being. You must explain yourself on finite things, on the precise degree of their existence. It is useless to view^ with complacency the logical arrangement of notions, you must pay your tax to experience, you must give a reason for the realities of this world. Not only the visible uni- verse strikes our senses, but the human conscious- ness, always present, makes its imperious language heard. The mind has its laws, the heart has its needs ; the soul has its inspirations, its impulses, its mysterious presentiments. Every system of philosophy must collect these facts, and make allow^ance for them. Radical Here Pantheism meets with insurmountable vice of difficulties. It recognises the existence of the 'finite and the infinite, and so far it is in harmony with the laws of the human mind and the aspira- tions of universal consciousness. But the human race is not satisfied with asserting nature and God; it believes in a nature which is not peopled with phantoms but with effective things, with living powers ; it believes in a God w^ho is not an ab- straction or a sign in algebra, but a living, active, productive God. Such is the faith of the human race, and, w^hether it will or no. Pantheism must account for it. All its most celebrated partisans have tried to do so. But if Pantheism is obliged to come into contact with real life, it is not less imperiously obliged to remain faithful to the con- ditions of its essence. Now, the essence of Pan- GOD THE CREATOR. 105 theism is the reduction of the Unite and the infinite, of nature and God, into one absolute unity. Ac- cording to us the difficulty is insoluble, or rather the contradiction is radical. On the one hand, the human mind and universal consciousness demand a real God and a real nature ; on the other, Pan- theism requires the reduction of all beings to unity. If God is not to be merely abstract and indetermi- nate, He must have attributes, and these attributes must have motion and life ; but then these modes, these attributes, these determinations of God, be- ing only God himself, nature is absorbed in Him; there is no longer any nature, there is nothing but the life of God. On the other side, if nature is to have its proper reality, and it be admitted that the beings of this world have a certain consistency and a certain individuality, what becomes, then, of the reality of God? God is henceforth only a name, a sign. He disappears — he vanishes. In one word, Pantheism is condemned to this alter- native, to diminish and impoverish the divine exist- ence in order to give reality to the universe, or to annihilate the existence of visible things in order to concentrate all actual existence in God. I insist on this fundamental point, and, to show Fundamen- it in a stronger light, I shall choose narrower ground ^^^^^^^' and concentrate the difficulty on a precise problem. Among the attributes which the human race recog- Reality of nises in God, there is none more striking or more august than intelligence; among the beings which people this universe, there is no existence more certain or better known than that of intellectual beings. There is then an infinite intelligence, and there are imperfect limited intelligences which io6 FOURTH MEDITATION. conceive and adore in God the plenitude and the perfection of intellect. Pantheism is obliged to recognise these two sorts of intellect, and at first it does not seek to deny them. But it is not enough to recognise them, we must conceive their co-existence and determine their relation. The problem is difficult and formidable to any system, but Pantheism finds in it a special difficulty. In fact, while laying down as real the infinite intelli- gence and the variety of finite minds, it must bring these two species of intellect to an absolute unity. Some Pan- This is the shoal on which the Pantheistic sys- schemes ^^"^^ make shipwreck; so far they have gone on absorb all vigorously iu a straight and simple path, but fnteUi-^^' stumbling at this difficulty, they divide and di- gences into verge in two contrary directions. A philosopher theabso- Penetrated with a profound sentiment of the lute inteiii- Diviuity, with that perfect and finished thought Which knows no bound, in Whom are concentrated all the rays of absolute truth. Who embraces with a single and eternal glance the plenitude of being, the real and the possible, the past and the future : such a philosopher will never be satisfied to make an undetermined thought of the Divine intelli- gence — a thought void of ideas, without conscious- ness; in a word, the abstraction of thought in- stead of real living thought. He will admit then a rich and fertile intelligence, full of life, contain- ing in itself all the forms of thought. But then, what will he make of our finite intellects ? Are they to be outside of the absolute intelligence ? Are their ideas to be distinct from His ideas, their life from His life? Thus we deny at once the fundamental principle of pantheism — the law gence. GOD THE CREATOR. 107 of absolute unity ; and we must either renounce all logic and desert our principles, or else submit to this consequence — that what we call a finite intelligence is but a part of infinite Intelligence, a fugitive moment of His eternal life, that our feeble intellects lose all distinct reality, all individual consistence, and are resolved into pure modes into particular ideas of the absolute intelligence. But there are minds which cannot renounce the Q^^ier^ consciousness of their own reality. There are make finite robust idiosyncracies, determined not to sacrifice ^"f^i^^f^'^'i themselves, not to be absorbed into the bosom of real ones. an extraneous existence. Spirits of this kind, strongly attached to the data of consciousness, undertake to reconcile them with their fundamental principle, which is the absolute unity of beings. There is only one way to do that, that is to refuse all distinct life to the Infinite intelligence, to reduce Him to a pure thought, to an indetermi- nate thought — to the bond of all thought, and of all finite intelligences. Then, in the place of a sole intelligence, who alone lives, who alone thinks, who alone is real, you have an infinite variety of distinct and determinate intelligences, joined by a general character and a common sign. In the first case God alone is real, and creatures are but the series of His actions ; in the second, creatures only have reality, and God is the sign that unites them. Such is the inevitable law imposed upon Panthe- ism by logic, and by the nature of things. It sees before it two realities, which no reasonable mind can deny, and it undertakes to reduce them to the absolute unity of a single existence. And it finds To8 FOURTH MEDITATION. itself reduced, if it wants a real and living God, to absorb in Him all creatures, and so to fall into mys- ticism; or if it wants a real and effective universe, to make of God a pure abstraction, a mere name, and so to be in danger of Atheism. Of two This terrible alternative weighs upon the Pan- t^nd^des theism of the present day, as it weighed upon ofPanthe- Malebrauclie and Spinoza, and before them on towards the schools of Athens and Alexandria. Which ^rlvaur ^^^^ ^^'^^^ ^^^ Pantheists take ? There is in a cer- tain number of the schools of our time, chiefly among the disciples of Schelling, some tendency towards mysticism, but it is quite evident that the strength and the danger are not on that side. These germs are abortions, and they must perish in an age like ours, when the sentiment of things celestial is weakened, when the love of life, the ardour of enjoyment, the exaggerated notions of the power of man, form a torrent which carries away the firmest characters and the noblest intel- lects. What follows .f" That the mystic Pan- theism of Baader and Goerres, which sacrifices man to God, has vanished, and that the opposite tendency of Pantheism universally prevails. The Hegelian school has decided resolutely to sacrifice the Divine personality, and to know no other God but that which it calls the impersonal God. God is nothing more to the Pantheists of our day than the abstraction of being. He only arrives at consciousness after having passed through all the degrees of life, and it is man who is at last the really perfect being. There is in the idea of being a necessary dialectic, which urges it to deve- lope itself, and from progress to progress, from GOD THE CREATOR. 109 evolution to evolution, the idea becomes man. Then only God has consciousness of Himself. In other terms, God instead of being the first prin- ciple and the Creator, is but the last consequence. We must examine more closely this concep- The Abso- tion, which is given us as the last effort of a new "^^" science, of some unheard of dialectic, armed with its theses and its antitheses, and which, setting out from the abstraction of being, fancies that it arrives at the complete being, by passing through all possible forms of existence. The common aim of French and German Hegelians, when they set out from the principle which they call the Absolute, and which in their system plays the part of God, is to take their stand on the highest idea of rea- son. I ask what they mean by the Absolute. The difference of definitions and formulae is of very little consequence here, for they all agree in ac- knowledging that this Absolute, taken in itself, is not a living and determinate principle. As soon as it is determined, as soon as it lives, it is no longer the pure absolute, it is no longer itself, it becomes another, it becomes nature and humanity. Now, so far from such an Absolute beine^ thej^"^^'!^ 1 . T • • 1 r • . . . 9 , highest highest prmciple or reason, m my opmion it is de- principle of nying reason altogether to give it this rank and '"*^''^^^"* character ; for properly speaking it is confounding reason, intuitive reason, with those secondary faculties of analysis and abstraction, which preside over the operations of discursive reason; or, in other words, it is substituting for the idea of the perfect Being — that primitive, natural, spontaneous idea full of reality and life — the abstract and dead I TO FOURTH MEDITATION. conception of the indeterminate being. Certainly, to conceive the Perfect and Absolute Being, is the proper function of reason; and there is not a thought of the mind, an emotion of the heart, an impulse of the imagination, not even a perception of the senses, which does not contain this notion. But what is its real character ? Far from being an abstract idea representing an indeterminate object, it is of all ideas the most determinate and the most concrete. I cannot contemplate being and life under their changeable and imperfect forms ; I cannot see some gleams of intelligence shine around me and in me ; I cannot catch some impressions of strength, of beauty, of justice, of joy, of happiness, without conceiving beyond the beings of visible nature, a First Existence, where plenitude of in- telligence, perfect beauty, and the possession of Almighty Power, compose in their harmonious unity the eternity of a perfect life. The idea of Collect thcse partial acts of a sole and identical the Perfect intellectual function, these divided members of cret? ^°"" an idea always present in the depths of thought. Dissensions ^ud you have the idea of the Perfect Being. And of the Pan- {^^^s is not au abstract idea, nor an idea which re- schooi. presents an indeterminate object; it is emphatically the concrete idea, since it represents the most real being, not potential, but actual being, the pleni- tude of perfection, the accomplishment of all the forms of being, and of all the attributes of life. Here is the real Absolute, here is true perfection, but a determinate living perfection. It is easy to conceive that such an Absolute should be a true principle, really first and really productive, for it is an evident fact that the imperfect has its reason GOD THE CREATOR. iii in the perfect, the finite in the infinite, the relative in the absolute. But what follows from the Pan- theistic system ? They take for their principle a false Absolute, an indeterminate being, a being in potentiality. I say that this principle is radically sterile. In fact, it is inconceivable that this inde- terminate being should become determinate, that this being in potentiality should pass into actuality. It is absolutely impossilDle, and we must here ex- hibit the spectacle of the internal discord of the Pantheistic school, in face of the impossibility of making one step beyond their sterile absolute, which is common to all its masters. It is well-known that Schelling lays down as the ^^^^{\^"f^j origin of things a principle w^hich he calls the iden- tical absolute, or the subject-object. This prin- ciple determines itself, makes itself, objective by its nature, and thus gives to itself a primary form, which it immediately destroys to take up another till it has exhausted its power of objectivity, and has come into full possession of its being. Here Hegel stops his master, and says. You are unfaith- ful to the conditions of science. Science must explain and demonstrate everything. Now you set out with an hypothesis and enigma. You say the absolute can divide itself, the identical can differentiate itself. What is the absolute ? What is the identical ? Why and how should it divide itself or differentiate itself.? The first principle of the system should be particularly clear, since it is to give light to the whole. Your first principle is unintelligible, and it dims the rest of the system with its darkness. Then how will you describe the evolution of the absolute in nature and in man ? 1 1 2 FOURTH MEDITATION. You do not define the essence of the Absolute and the internal laws of its development. How can you see the Absolute in other things, if you cannot see it in itself? You must have recourse to experi- ence, you leave the region of absolute science. We really cannot see what Schelling has to answer to these objections. It is impossible to put him more effectually at variance with his own prin- ciples, and to point out the two things in his system which ought never to be found in a philosophy a priori — unexplained mysteries, and helps drawn from experience. But if Hegel triumphs over Schelling, the master is equally strong against the disciple. It is amusing to hear Schelling following up with his lively dialectic the boastful theories, whose greatest fault is, that they have eclipsed his own. "It has been said," he exclaims, "that in metaphysics one must not suppose anything. I am blamed for making hypotheses : how does my opponent begin ? With a hypothesis, the strangest of all, that of the logi- cal notion, or the idea to which he attributes the faculty of transforming itself by its nature into its contrary, and then of turning back and becoming itself again, a thing that may be imagined of a living real being, but that cannot be said of the simple logical notion, without the most absurd of fictions." Here, according to Schelling, is a perfectly gratuitous first supposition. Nevertheless the system maintains itself well enough, as long as we remain in the sphere of pure logic, which has to do with the combination of abstractions ; but how to pass from the idea to the being is both incon- ceivable and impossible ; and then follows neces- GOD THE CREATOR. 113 sarily a new hypothesis, and a new absurdity, which Schelling shows up with the sharpest irony. " The idea," says he, "Hegel's idea, one cannot tell why, but probably tired of its purely logical exist- ence, takes it into its head to resolve itself into its momenta, in order to explain creation." It could not have been better said, and Schelling revenges himself admirably on his proud and faithless pupil. But what must every disinterested friend of truth think, listening to these two adversaries, who are so clever in attack, so weak in defence ? He will say that the passage so much desired from the abstract to the real is manifestly not to be found by the Pantheists. And I ask them if this passage from power to The /re- act, from indifference to difference, from the inde-^^''^" ^ ^^ terminate to the determinate, is to the Absolute a absolute. progress or a decadence. They may hesitate between these two alternatives, but they must choose. All the Pantheists of Germany, celebrate with one voice the idea of the necessary and in- ternal progress of being (prozess) as the most original idea of modern metaphysics. On the other side, Schelling has often appeared to lean towards the idea of a primitive decadence ; borrow- ing from the latter Pantheists of the Athenian school, particularly from Proclus, their strange doctrine, he has said that the production of the world was a fall of the Absolute. We must confess that the choice is rather dangerous between tv/o such strange alternatives. What ! the perfect being degenerates ! its essence is perfection, and it ceases to be perfect ! The contradiction is palpable. But on the other side, H 1 14 FOURTH MEDITATION. how shall we conceive that the perfect being should grow more perfect; that the complete being should receive an increase of reality ? There is but one idea equal in absurdity to the idea of the decad- ence of God, and that is the idea of His progress. Absurdities It may be thought that I reason from settled Absolute, prejudices, and that I am substituting the old notion of God, the all Perfect Being, for the trans- cendental new idea of the Absolute. Not at all. I demand whether the Absolute of the Pantheist is in itself perfect or imperfect. If it is perfect in itself, it is evident that its perfection can neither be added to nor diminished. They must then ac- knowledge that their absolute is imperfect ; and then they fall into an abyss of absurdities. Ac- cording to this hypothesis, the last which has been put out by the Pantheists of the present day, every- thing begins with imperfection, and perfection is at the term. But if the Absolute be imperfect in itself, it has not its reason of existence in itself, it has no reason for its existence. Supposing it to exist, why should it develope itself .^^ — this is also inexplicable and impossible. The expedient of the Pantheists is to say that it developes itself necessarily; but this is no answer. For whence this necessity ? They will tell us that as a fact the world exists. But this fact is only a fact, which cannot establish an absolute necessity, so that the necessity is purely gratuitous. Not only one cannot conceive that the absolute should be developed, but one can conceive very clearly that it should not be developed, because it is im- possible that imperfection should be a first principle, that the perfect should proceed from the imperfect. We are forced then to say with Hegel, that it is GOD THE CREATOR. 115 necessai-y that the contradictory should take place, that nothing should become being, and zero should become the origin of the unit and of numbers. Nothing producing everything, that which is absurd in itself become necessary, and entrusted with the task of explaining and throwing light upon all the mysteries of existence — such is the last limit that Pantheism has been destined to reach. I think I have proved, by placing myself with Refutation the Pantheists in the region of speculative reason, P^ Pamhe- ^^ , 11 1 1 • *^"^ from that their Absolute is a false Absolute, that their the Pmcti- impersonal God is a false God, a sterile chimera of ''^^ Reason, abstraction. Can the Pantheists defend themselves better upon the platform of practical reason and experimental facts ? Have they compensated them- selves for having sacrificed divine personality by establishing human personality in the plenitude of its rights ? On this point one would sometimes say that the Pantheists deceive themselves less than on all the rest. They feel so strongly that the authority of experience is not on their side, that they hasten at once to reject it. Hear the Pantheists of all ages. Parmenides, Plotinus, Bruno, Spinoza, Hegel, will tell you that the senses are deceitful, that the vulgar, taking them for guides, feed their intellect with pure delusions, that it belongs to true philosophy to get rid of the senses, and to regard everything with the eye of reason. Has not experience always deceived us, they cry, and after all what does she give us? Phenomena and not causes, existences and not essences, what happens, what is, and not what ought to be, what cannot fail to be. But philosophy is essentially the knowledge of causes and of essences, the science of the how and the why ot ii6 FOURTH MEDITATION. every thing, the contemplation of the necessary and the absolute. Let pure reason then be a torch to lead the philosopher through the pro- found mystery of the origin of things far from the vulgar crowds and the commerce of the senses. Pantheists Such is the haughty language of the Pantheists, despise ^j^j [^ is natural enough that they should despise vS^mTsr' experience, but whether they will or not, a moment Tiv^^^^f ^" comes when the proudest will have to reckon with her. I only know one man who has held for an instant this kind of wager against impossibility, that man is Parmenides. This daring genius alone dared to maintain to the end that philosophy must confine itself to pure reason, to the idea of being, and hold all the rest for nothing.^ The rigorous consequence is, that motion and nature are not, and that there is only the Absolute being, without attributes, without difference, without life. Had they been strictly true to their principles, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel, should have ended in the same result, at once logical and absurd. I defy Plotinus to get out of his absolute unity, Spinoza to make one step beyond the affirmation of sub- stance, Hegel to break the narrow circle of the absolutely indeterminate idea, if they do not bor- row one of her data from experience, if they do not bow to consciousness and the senses. Plotinus sees in his unity the principle of an eter- nal emanation ; Spinoza deduces from substance attribute, and from attribute mode; Hegel explains all the developments of the idea, by a certain internal processus, by a necessary motion obedient to a very simple and uniform law. This is all ' Oi'Se ttot' €K tov iovTos i(f)r,crcL iria-Tios iVx^'S • • yiyi-ea-Oai ti trap mVu — Parmenidis Fragmenta, Ed. Karsten, vers. 67, 68. GOD THE CREATOR. 117 very good; but where did these philosophers find the ideas of emanation, of attribute, of mode, of progress, of motion ? Was it not really experi- ence that furnished them with the type of these notions ? And what advantage can it be to any sincere and serious philosopher, after having made use of these indispensable notions, to conceal their origin ? Pantheism, then, must take its choice ; not more than other systems can it dispense with experience, and it does not, in fact, dispense with it. Pantheism cannot be accepted as repudiating the data of the senses. To deny facts from the vantage-ground of an a priori principle, would be not only to attempt the impossible, and to convict oneself of extravagance, it would be to contradict oneself miserably, to make use of experience when she is useful and necessary, and to proscribe her as soon as she becomes troublesome. Such a posi- tion is not tenable, and I consider it as demon- strated that to reason against Pantheism in the name of experience, is to make use of a right in- contestable in itself, and, what is more, incontest- able to every honest Pantheist. Also, the acknowledged aim of the Hegelians what is to give a satisfactory explanation of human ^^'j^^j^^'^^" personality, and even to be in close communion The moral with the moral and religious traditions of humanity. ^^^ " Now let us see what constitutes human person- ality. How it is that man is not a thing but a person — that he takes a place apart from the other beings of creation — that he pursues an in- finite ideal, and aspires to immortality ? It is be- cause man feels himself a free agent, and respon- sible for his destiny. He bows before order, as before a sacred law; he acknowledges absolute 1 18 FOURTH MEDITATION. obligations and inviolable rights. Whilst the other beings of the universe develope themselves, fatally following laws which they know not and cannot modify, man beholds universal order, and puts himself freely in harmony or in strife with it. Fact rules nature, man inhabits a higher world where right reigns. Responsible for his destiny, man beholds his judge in God. Subject to the trial of labour and of pain, he seeks a con- soler and a support. Filled with an immense love for truth, beauty, and perfection of every kind, and unable to satisfy it perfectly in his earthly condition, he looks towards heaven — he desires, he hopes for a life to come. His thought flies from earth, flings itself into the infi- nite, and enjoys there a foretaste of celestial feli- city. It is thus that man raises himself from the region of fatality to that of liberty and justice, and that morality leads him to religion. Pantheistic There are no truths more simple, none more profession closclv bouud tos^cther. If there be no liberty, of religion J . o ,, ^' r not perhaps there IS uo Hght, no justice, no future lite, no insincere. }^Qpg \^ Qod, UO religion. Let us do justice to the Pantheists. They do not carelessly repudiate these holy truths ; they make sincere eflbrts to bring them into their system. But if thereby they deserve our respect, they lay them- selves open to that pitiless logic which does not give credit for intentions. First let us hear what they say. Spinoza subscribes on his book the sacred name — morality; the final end of his philosophy is, he assures us, the liberty of man. He aflSrms, or I should say, he demonstrates geometrically, the immortality of the soul, and finishes his system with a theory of divine love. GOD THE CREATOR. 119 Hegel's intentions are not less exalted, nor his language less specious. Thus he speaks of reli- gion: "It is the region where the enigmas of life, and all the contradictions of thought, find their solution, where all the pains of sentiment are appeased : the region of eternal truth and eternal peace. There flows the stream of Lethe, there the soul drinks oblivion of all its ills ; there all the clouds of time are dissipated in the brightness of the infinite."^ Hegel flatters himself that he has explained the But most true sense of Christianity, and reconciled for ever ^"^°"^*''" religion and philosophy. In fact, according to him, the common foundation of all philosophy and of all religion is the idea of the Word made flesh, of the man God; in other words, it is the iden- tity of the human mind and the universal mind ; or again, it is the universal mind taking conscious- ness of itself in the human mind. This is, according to Hegel, the real title of human personality; this is the living source of morality and religion. I doubt not of the sincerity and high-mindedness of Hegel, any more than of his genius ; but I have a right to tell him, that these words, liberty, re- sponsibility, duty, right, immortality, adoration, religion, have no sense in his system, and that to give them any meaning he must employ miraculous subtilty and prodigious refinement. The leading idea of Pantheism is the idea of an indeterminate principle, which determines it- self after a necessary law, to become successively everything. Absolute necessity is at the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. Brute nature, living 1 Hegel, Lessons on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. xi. 120 FOURTH MEDITATION. Necessity nature, intellectual nature, individuals, and society, ^■J^Jj^^j J"^"" laws, creeds, manners, and institutions, are ruled scheme, and swayed by her. With Spinoza this neces- sity is clothed in a geometrical form. He believes that the bending of a blade of grass, or the fall of an empire, is as necessary as the proposition, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. Hegel has imagined another necessity, which he calls dialectical. Everything is subject, according to him, to the law of the abso- lute identity of contradictories. Being and nothing, the infinite and the finite, beauty and deformity, good and evil, life and death, are at first wrapped confusedly together in a primary term, they sepa- rate in the second, to come together again in the third. This is the uniform rhythm of the idea, the sovereign law of creation, inconsis- It matters little whether this theory is more or JeiigiTi!^ less original. It is enough to know that for Hegel, as for Spinoza, the evolution of man is subject, as well as that of the stone, to an abso- lute necessity; and certainly he must possess a rare power of self-deception who does not see that such a system strikes at the root of the moral and religious life. What, the actions of my life are to be unrolled like the rings of an iron chain, and I am to think myself responsible ! What is called God is nothing but the dialectic law, and I am to adore that law even when it crushes and destroys me ! I am only a necessary form of being destined to be replaced by another, and I am to hope for a life to come ! And then they tell me that God is myself, and that I should find my happiness in feeling myself to be God. What! con- sciousness in man. GOD THE CREATOR. 121 I feel pain, I must die, and I am God — a strange sort of God ! Shall I not cry out with Pascal, ridicolosisnmo eroe 1 But let us treat this theory seriously, if possi- Position ble. God, you say, takes consciousness of Him- ^^^^ ^"^^ 'J J I assumes self in man. So God in Himself has no con-seif- sciousness of Himself, but He takes consciousness of Himself in another. This is strange, espe- cially when this other is not one individual, but millions of individuals, some dead, some living, others to be born, who do not know each other, and are separated by spaces and ages. Where is the unity of such a consciousness 1 What is the meaning of a consciousness which divides itself, and breaks itself into a thousand pieces ? What is the meaning of a consciousness which is made in time, and which is never made — which is always seeking for itself, and never finds itself .f* Then I who speak am not God, I am only a fragment of that indefinite existence. This is to tell me, in a strange dark language, a very simple thing, most easily knowni, namely, that man is but a necessary form of being, like that tree, or that pebble, or that stream; with this small difference, that man believes himself to be a free agent, without being so in reality; that he sees before him death, with the full certainty of dying, and that in this excess of misery, he has only to persuade himself for a moment that he is God to be consoled for all. The great Pantheists have intellects which are Hegel's and too acute not to have perceived these contradictions. ^ fj"e n^^! So what do they do ? they take away with one hand cessity." what they have given with the other. Spinoza recognises liberty, but he calls it a free necessity; 122 FOURTH MEDITATION. and this is also the sentiment of Hegel. "The moral man," says he, "has consciousness of his action, as of something necessary, and thereby only is he truly free."^ Ultimate There is the same strange agreement between PanthersL ^P^^^^^ ^^"^^ Hegel ou the distinction of good and * evil; they begin by acknowledging it, and a short time after they deny it. Both of them tell us that the soul is immortal, and then they proceed to reduce this immortality to the consciousness that we have, of being an eternally necessary form of the absolute being. Liberty without re- sponsibility, morality without duties, immortality without consciousness, mad idolatry of self — these are the practical conclusions of Pantheism, this is what it makes of human personality. In a word, contemporary Pantheism, forced to choose between an extravagant mysticism which is rejected by all the instincts good and bad of our day, and the contrary tendency, decides for the latter, and sacrifices resolutely the personality of God, in hopes of making more of man. What is the result ? It destroys human person- ality. So true is this profound saying of a con- temporary spiritualist:^ "There are two poles of all human science — the personal I, with whom all ' begins, and the personal God, in whom all ends." Yes, man without God is an enigma. — I know not what, — an inexplicable monster. He has no mission upon earth, and no hope in heaven. Losing his divine ideal, trying to take himself for his ideal, he falls below himself, and his punish- ment for desiring to be God is, that he ceases to be man. ' Hegel, Encyclopedic^ add. an. § 35, 2 Maine de Biran. fiftft iHeisitation. // the World Eternal and Infinite ? There is no more room for hesitation, since I have declared open war against Pantheism; nor is my adversary a phantom; assuredly not; for I have long meditated on those high thoughts with which Hegel and Spinoza have allowed themselves to be intoxicated — those ideas of absolute unity, and of the eternal evolution of beings. I know their seductiveness; I would not willingly v/eaken them; nor would I conceal the terrible difficul- ties which rise against the idea of a God distinct from the universe. Yet they have been overcome. Yes ! the God of science, as well as the God of our hearts and of common sense, is a God distinct from the world, a God living by His own life, an adorable God, God the Creator. He was before the world, He was fully sufficient to Himself; not from ne- cessity, but from love. He became the Creator ; the universe is the work of His goodness. But what am I saying ^. God, the eternal Being, was before His creatures; God, the immutable Being, became a Creator. Is not that a difficulty which I have not resolved, and which the very laws of Ian- 124 FIFTH MEDITATION, guage make palpable — Misery of human speech, or rather, of human reason ! I have mastered a truth of inestimable value ; and when I want to confess it, when a word of adoration would exliale from my lips, my language seems to im- peach my thought; I impose on the Eternal the condition of time, I lend Him the vicissitudes of change. How should God be before creatures if He has not a relation with them ? If time, and if time only, exists as a relation between creatures, what sense is there in the words before creatures ? For what is the meaning of an empty time which neither measures the life of God, since it is supe- rior to time, nor the life of creatures, since it does not yet exist ? And then, how can God become the Creator ? He must change His condition ; He must pass from fecundity in potentiality to fecundity in action ; He must come out of rest to set Himself to work, and He must return again to rest; and all this apparently through caprice, or from being tired of His long inaction. Is the world Away from me, vain phantoms of the imagina- eternai? ^j^j^ j QqJ jg eternally all that He is. If He is the Creator, He creates eternally; if He creates the world, it is not from chance or from caprice, but for reasons worthy of Himself; and these reasons are eternal. Nothing new, nothing for- tuitous can arise in the counsels of eternity. If the world be a work where wisdom and love concur with Almighty power, all that is eternal, and the creative act, is equally so. What more simple and more luminous than these principles ? But here is the difficulty. If the creative act be eter- IS THE WORLD ETERNAL'^ 125 nal, why is not the effect of that act also eternal ? and then we have the world, without beginning or end, partaking of an essential attribute of the Creator. It may be said that this difficulty is not serious — that we are played upon here by the laws of human language, which, using its means of ex- pression in sensible things, transports, by a neces- sary and innocent artifice, the forms of time and space into the things of eternity. In God nothing begins; all is eternal, the creative act as well as the motives of creation; but in the creature every- thing is subject to time, everything must begin to have being — this is the solution of the difficulty. God did not begin to create, but the creature began to exist, and with the creature, time, which is but the relation and the measure of its changes. But does this solve the difficulty.'' I could wish it, but reason is not so easily satisfied ; and I understand too well with what perplexities the Christian soul of St. Augustine was agitated when he raised this question : Has God always been the Lord ? or again — Has God always been adored? It would be very easy to reduce all metaphysical questions to questions of words. Some one even pointed out to St. Augustine a still more expeditious mode of cutting short the difficulty; namely, to reply to those who ask what God was doing before He created the world, that He was preparing punishment for people who asked indiscreet questions. I know not if the question be indiscreet, but I know that the difficulty is inevitable. 126 FIFTH MEDITATION. Nor does it resolve the difficulty to say — God alone is without beginning or end ; the world had a beginning, and time with the world, since the world and time are inseparable. But to speak in this way is to overlook the fact that even if a com- mencement of the world be conceivable and pos- sible, yet as soon as our mind proceeds to assign to the world a definite origin, however remote, it necessarily conceives the possibility of a more re- mote origin, and so on, ad injinitum. In the same way I may possibly assign limits to the extension of the world ; but scarcely has my mind fixed these limits before it displaces them, and conceives be- yond them the possibility of a vaster world, and this without end and cessation. But, if these ages, extensions, and worlds, are not necessary, they are at least possible. So far is certain. But if it be once granted to me that they are possible, must I not, when I consider them in reference to There is no God, couccive them as necessarily realized by His betweST will ? Admit an universe which began to exist finite crea- some ages ago — say a hundred ages or a million; the Creator, admit that this same universe is limited to a certain extent — it matters not whether great or little in re- lation to man — admit all this if you can — I ask you what relation, what proportion, is there between such a creation and the Creator 'i The universe is the image of God, the expression of His all-perfect being ; it is by this right that the universe exists; it is the reason of its being ; and can I picture to myself a finite universe — that is to say, an universe like an atom made to last an instant.'' Could such as that be the image of the eternal and the im- mense? Could God be eternally recognised in uni- verse, in a certain IS THE WORLD INFINITE? 127 this phantom of His thought, and would He will to see as existent, not I will say this image, but this irony on His omnipotence ? Is God, then, a master grudging existence and life ? else why these empty ages before the world ; why these empty spaces be- yond the universe ? I am told that empty ages are not ages, that empty spaces are not spaces, that all this has no effectual existence, since without bodies and without changing realities it is all re- duced to abstraction. Be it so; but these ages are possible, these spaces can be realised, and, to go to the bottom of the matter, there are millions of possible beings to fill all spaces and all ages. Any number of beings, however large, any The number of years, any number of spaces, is not a true expression of the infinity of the Creator, sense, in- We must, then, whether we will or no, come to "^^^ the conclusion that the work of the creation is not only an eternal, immutable, infinite act, as regards the Creator, but that even as regards the creature if we would not make it an accidental and capricious effort of infinite omnipotence, but a work worthy of the Creator, fit to express His eternity. His im- mensity. His fecundity, all His infinite perfections — the universe must extend indefinitely in time, in space, in the infinite greatness, and in the infinite littleness of its parts, in the infinite variety of its species, of its forms, and of its degrees of exist- ence. The finite cannot express the infinite, but by being multiplied infinitely. The finite, so far as it is finite, is not in a reasonable relation or an intelligible proportion to the infinite. But the finite multiplied infinitely, ages upon ages, spaces beyond spaces, stars beyond stars, worlds beyond 128 FIFTH MEDITATION. worlds, is a true expression of the Infinite Being. This view How sublime is this thought of the infinity of "rriivTan- woHds ! I could yield myself to it without the theistic. least scruple, if I did not happen to remember that it was introduced into the modern world by a Pantheist, the bold and unfortunate Bruno. Must I then fall again into the clutches of Pan- theism, at the very moment when I thought I had escaped from it for ever ? Does it follow, because Relative the uuiverse has no limits, either in time or space, lute infi°" or in the number and kind and degree of its parts, ^'^^y- that the universe must therefore be eternal, im- mense, infinite, as God Himself? No ; that is but a vain scruple, which springs from the imagination, and not from the reason. The imagination is al- ways confounding what reason should ever distin- guish, eternity and time, immensity and space, rela- tive infinity and absolute infinity. The Creator alone is eternal, immense, absolutely infinite. The creation is scattered over space and time, subject to division and to limits. Time, in the inexhaustible flux of its moments, endeavours, so to speak, to imitate eternity, as much as its nature will permit. Space, by the infinite development of its extension, tries also to express immensity. In general, the in- exhaustible evolution of finite things represents, as far as the nature of the finite allows, the inter- nal evolution of the divine life. And yet there remains always between the model and the image, between the cause and the effect, together with a certain proportion, an infinite difference, not only in the degree of perfection but in the essence. Ages, spaces, stars, plants, intellectual beings, earth and heaven, each is variable, incomplete, IS THE WORLD INFINITE? 129 contingent, incapable of being or of subsisting in itself. Each is then contained in an ineffable manner in the depths of the self-existent being, who wraps round ages with His eternity, space with His immensity, changeable beings with His immutable being, who alone is really infinite, alone complete, alone in full possession of absolute existence. So I consider myself saved at once from Pan- theism and superstition. I feared the abstract God of Spinoza and Hegel, but I feared also a humanised God, and an accidental, arbitrar)^, or capricious creation. My fears are dispersed. I conceive a God who is not potential being, a sterile germ, but being in action, the perfect being, possessing perfect life, the life of thought and love; and then as the expression of this God, a universe which imitates, as far as may be, infinity, which is not the ephemeral production of caprice, or chance, but the work of an infinite omnipotence, directed by wisdom and inspired by goodness. I am, then, in possession of an idea which can stand the test of reflection and doubt, and which at the same time answers to the deepest and sub- limest instincts of the human heart. The God that my reason and my heart adore is at once a complete ideal of perfection, and an inexhaustible source of life. From His bosom, eternally fertile, across innumerable ages, and immeasurable spaces, life gushes forth and expands in forms ever new ; and He the absolute being. He remains com- plete in Himself, in His incommunicable essence, in His blessed personality and His consciousness. IT. I 130 FIFTH MEDITATION. DISCUSSION OF AN ANTINOMY. I should desire to go on and make fresh pro- gress in the knowledge of divine things, but in vain I try to proceed ; a scruple stops me ; I turn back on one of the antinomies of Kant, that which has for its object the infinity of the universe. If Kant is right, if the human intellect is so framed that the ideas of a finite world and an infinite world are perpetually at war within it, so that the thesis and the anti-thesis can, in turn, be de- monstrated and refuted with equal rigour, what have I done by representing to myself a universe whose illimitable greatness expresses, as I think, the infinity of the Creator ? I have but taken up an old claim of pure reason, without showing the least regard to insoluble objections, and as if the dialectic of Kant did not exist. Famous ^ must then look this famous antinomy in the Antinomy, face — what docs it say? It lays down first a world which has a beginning in time and limits in space. Here is the thesis, and this is how Kant proves it. To suppose that the world had no beginning, is to admit that at any given moment, say the mo- ment in which I speak, an infinite series of suc- cessive states of the world h'ave passed away. Now, that is absurd, for the property of an infinite series is, that in enumerating successively the terms that compose it you can never find an end. An eternity actually past away is then a contradiction. Similarly, if you suppose a world which has no limits in space, you admit an infinite whole, which is contradictory, for in order that a AN JN TINOMT, 1 3 1 whole actually given should be composed of an infinite number of parts, you must be able to count them successively; an impossible operation, since it would require an eternity. Therefore the world is not infinite, therefore it must have a beginning in time, and limits in space. But on the other side, if you suppose a world which did begin, the very idea supposes a time an- terior to the world, an empty time. Now in an empty time nothing can begin, for why should it begin at such a moment, rather than at another ? And in the same way, if you suppose a world limited in space, you suppose a space beyond the world, an infinite empty space. But then you admit a necessary relation between the world and some- thing which yet is nothing. This relation is absurd. Therefore the world is not more limited in space than in time, and therefore it is infinite. This is the anti-thesis. What conclusion does Kant draw from this antinomy .f' Does he pretend that human reason is here taken in the fact of necessary self-contra- diction ^. This consequence would be very serious, for evidently it would bring in its train absolute scepticism. Kant recoils from this extreme, which goes very far beyond the end that he had proposed to him- self. He did not intend to make war with human reason, but with the dogmatism of the schools. He certainly wanted to kill metaphysics, but with- out hurting reason. What does he do in this perplexity.^ After having stated the antinomy, he refutes it, but in a very siup-ular way. ri^i . ' . , -' o J , Kant s Inere is one pomt, he says, common to the solution 132 FIFTH MFDITJTION. thesis and the anti-thesis. When we reason on the dimensions of the universe, whether we hold a finite world, or an infinite world, in both cases we consider the universe as a real thing, we attribute to it an absolute existence independent of our senses. We believe then that the universe is something more than a collection of phenomena, we make of it a mumenon — a being in itself. In the same w^ay we look upon time and space as objec- tive and absolute realities, and when all this is pos- tulated, the thesis and the anti-thesis come into collision and produce an antinomy. Should human reason be moved at this and despair of herself .^^ Not at all, for this antinomy only warns her that she was about to take the wrong road, and fall into an abyss of illusions. Instead of giving to the universe, to space, and to time, an objective and absolute reality, to which they have not reasonable right, let her conceive the universe as a collection of phenomena, let her reduce space and time to simple forms of thought — to purely subjective conditions of experience, then the thesis and the anti-thesis fall together, and w ith them the anti- nomy. We need not inquire any further, if the world be finite or infinite. For the world is nothing but the series of our sensations. Consequently it is not infinite because we are finite beings, neither is it finite because as we go on living, new impressions are added to the old, and that indefinitely. Not satis- This is Kant's ingenious system, but he weaves factor)'. -^ jj^ M■^CLXi. If tliis world, in the bosom of which I am plunged, if these extensions, these motions, these colours, this universal life, if all this is nothing AN ANTINOMT. 133 beyond my own sensations, my reason deceives me, I can no longer trust her, and absolute doubt is inevitable. In vain Kant and his disciples would make a stand against scepticism ; and after having sacrificed to it the objective, would main- tain, as they say, the subjective. From the moment that the universe, God, and the soul itself, are resolved into pure forms of thought, I ask where is the link of these empty forms deprived of all real contents, where is their centre, their unity, their support ? Evidently they have none ; they are all separated, disconcerted, scattered like smoke, and thought after having denied its ob- jects destroys itself. Let us leave this artificial world where the mind is consumed in mortal subtleties. The dif- ficulties which disturbed the strong spirit of Kant are such as speculative reason must meet at every step. He took these difficulties for contradictions, and applying to them his subtle dialectic, com- posed the specious and regular system of his anti- nomies. Only to speak of the one which we have mentioned, I venture to say that the thesis and the anti-thesis are very weakly established. It would have been 'easy for Kant to invoke in favour of his idea of an infinite world, twenty arguments stronger than the only one which it suited him to borrow from Leibnitz. But what ought espe- cially to be remarked is, that the thesis of a finite world, which ought to be rigorously proved, is based upon very insufiicient proofs. If the world had not a beginning, says Kant, an eternity would have flowed away at the moment when I speak. This language is not correct. Eternity is a dif- 134 FIFTH MEDITATION. ferent thing from time, it does not flow away, it does not become, it is. Time only becomes and flows as the world changes and is modified. I admit that it is difficult to conceive the infinite flow of time, but this difficulty only exists in the imagination. Reason conceives distinctly that all duration supposes a be- fore and an after. It may be great or little, millions of ages, or a quarter of a minute, still whoever speaks of duration speaks of past, present, and future. We must then give up the idea of time altogether, or else acknowledge that every moment that flows away, supposes, before it, an infinite series of moments past, and after it an infinite series of moments to come. All duration is com- prised between these two series. Added one to another, they form, not eternity, but time. To man assuredly the difference is great. He sees one of these series, and he is willing to believe it in- finite. The other is behind him, and he can hardly conceive it at all. But for God, who has neither past nor future, who exists outside and above time, the two series exist by the same name, and He surrounds them both with his immutable eternity. This astonishes the imagination, but reason conceives it with clear geometrical precision. In the same way, all finite extension supposes a larger extension. If you pass a line through any point of space, this line divides space into two halves, which are each in its way infinite. Taken together, they constitute unlimited space. Here is no serious difficulty to reason. Kant says, that if the world had not limits in space it would be an infinite whole ; and that a whole must have parts that can be counted. Yes, the totals that AN ANTINOMY. 135 man can master ; but the world is only an infinite whole in the eyes of God. To count the parts of an infinite world, you must have, says Kant, an infinite time. Granted : and man is incapable of embracing the world; he can only conceive it, and he conceives it, not as a real, eternal, absolute, immutable infinite, but as an expression of the infinite, that is to say, as unlimited in space, in time, and in every order of existence. Moreover, is there really any opposition be- There is no tween the senses which explore the world, and ^pp°^'^*°" T-i 11' • \ ... between reason which would impose upon it, a priori^ its the real conditions and its laws : between the real world, ^?^^^ ^^ . ' science, and such as science represents it, and the ideal world, the ideal such as Metaphysics dares to alErm it ? None ; Metfphy. this opposition is only apparent. It belongs tosics. the weakness of our senses, and the progress of science dispels it every day. See what a revolution has been wrought in the The world mind of man since the great discoveries of the sciSce.^*^" three last centuries. When the system of Co- pernicus appeared, it was like the passage from a dream to the awaking. Man had gone to sleep with the idea of a little world made to his own measure ; the earth was its centre, and around it revolved a circumscribed heaven. All at once, at the voice of Copernicus, the human mind awoke. Earth is but one planet, the sun is the centre of one little world; but in space, millions of suns form so many luminous centres, round which move other planets, and other satellites. This idea appeared a vision. But when the discoveries of Galileo, and the laws of Kepler, came to be widely known and to be beheved, prejudice felt itself 136 FIFTH MEDITATION. conquered, and prepared to withdraw. In the meantime, a new philosophy had set aside the philosophy of the schools. Its founder, Descartes, an able physical philosopher, and as great a geometer as he was a metaphysician, got possession of the idea of the infinity of the uni- verse, and communicated it to his numerous dis- ciples. One only, Malebranche, hesitates at the boldness of this conception ; and soon the strength of his own mind, and the logic of his own system, led him to an idea infinitely more audacious, that of a necessary incarnation of God in the universe. Descartes Malebrauche, who adores a wise and good God — holds in- a God who never could do anything but accord- Universe, ing to that which He is ; Malebranche wants to so Male- j^g^yg ^ uuivcrse w^orthy of God, and this imper- brancne ^ after some fect uuivcrse would ucver express the infinite per- scrupies. fectiou of its Author, if God Himself were not joined to it, to give it a supernatural value, and an infinite preciousness. Thus the modern idea of the infinity of the world is set side by side with the faith of Jesus Christ in the soul of the pious Cartesian of the Oratory. We see in another eminent Christian, the same compromise between science and faith. So Pascal. "Let mau, then," says Pascal, ''contemplate entire nature in her high and full majesty. Let him put out of sight the low objects which sur- round him. Let him behold this shining light, set like an eternal lamp to enlighten the universe* Let earth appear to him as a point in comparison of the vast circle that this orb describes ; and let him be further amazed that this vast circle itself is but a very delicate point compared with that AN ANTINOMY. 137 embraced by the stars which roll in fhe firmament. But if our sight must stop here, let imagination pass on, it will sooner be weary of conceiving, than nature of furnishing. All the visible world is but an imperceptible line in the ample bosom of nature. No idea can approach it. We may inflate our conceptions beyond imaginable spaces, we only produce atoms, compared to the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, of which the centre is everywhere, and the circumference no where. "^ Here is the infinity of the universe, conceived as to the extent of its dimensions. Here it is again as to the infinite number of its parts : — '^ What is man in the infinite ? Let him search into what he knows of the minutest things, to find a prodigy as startling. Let him see in the littleness of the maggot's body parts incom- parably smaller, legs with joints, veins in these legs, blood in these veins, humours in this blood, drops in these humours, vapours in these drops. Let him, dividing again these last, exhaust his strength in these conceptions, and let the last object that he reaches be the subject of our discourse ; he will think perhaps that this must be the extreme littleness of nature. But I can show him within it a new abyss. I can show him not only the visible universe, but all that can be conceived of immensity in nature, contained in this small atom. Let him see in it an infinity of uni- verses of which each has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world, in this earth, animals, even maggots, in 1 Pascal. Pensecs, p. I. M. Havet's edition. 138 FIFTH MEDITATION. which he finds all that the first have given, and finding still in others the same thing without end and without rest, let him be lost in these marvels, as astonishing in their littleness as the others in their extension. For is it not worthy of admira- tion that our body, which lately was not percep- tible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, should be now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, with respect to the nothing which cannot be reached."^ Pascal's Pascal was not a man to ignore the objections answer to ^^^ ^^^ ]3g raiscd agaiust an infinite world, either of the re- ou the side of an imagination disturbed by all that mTnd"^ is beyond it, or of a jealous religion, which scru- ples at giving infinity to aught but God. But far from recoiling from these difficulties, he resolves them as a Christian philosopher and a geometrician. He asks himself if the world, from the moment it ceases to have limits in space or time, does not form a kind of infinite and eternal. ''No," he answers, " nothing of that kind can be infinite and eternal ; but these finite beings are multiplied in- finitely." Thus, it appears, it is only the number that multiplies them that is infinite. To the ob- Then there is another objection ; an infinite in^^i'nfinitf ^^^^^^^^ is Something incomprehensible to man. universe is True, replies Pascal, but this incomprehensibility hemThfr' ^^^ '^^^ reason. For what is man in nature? a nothing with regard to Infinity, a whole with re- gard to nothing, a medium between a nothing and all. Infinitely far from comprehending ex- tremes, the end of things and their beginning are * Pascal. Pensees, Art. XXV., p. 9. M. Havet's edition. This pensee is one of those which were not published before 1843. AN ANTINOMY. 139 to him invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secrecy. He is equally incapable of discerning the nothing from whence he is taken, and the infinite where he is swallowed up. What must he do, then, but observe some shadow of the middle of things in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end ? All things have come out of nothing, and are carried on to infinity. Who shall follow this astounding progress ? The Author of these marvels understands them; none other can." Ob- jectors will perhaps insist that the idea of in- finite number implies a contradiction. By no means. ''It is false," says Pascal, ''that numbers are finite ; then it is true that there is an infinite in numbers ; but we know not what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd ; yet it is a number, and every number must be either odd or even. It is true that that is understood of every finite number.'-^ But here is the leading idea which, in Pascal's ^^^"^^Mch eyes, overrules all objections more or less subtle and sokes all embarrassing — namely, that nature being the im- objections, age of God, must bear the impress of the Infinity of the Creator in the greatness as well as in the number of its parts. "^ " A thoughtful man under- stands that nature, having graven its image and that of its Creator on all things, they almost all partake of its double infinity. Thus we perceive that all sciences are infinite in the extension of their researches ; for who doubts that geometry, for example, has an infinitely infinite order of pro- portions to propose. They are equally infinite in 1 Pensees, Art. X., p. i, 2 Pensees, Art. i., p. 9. M. Havet's edition. 140 FIFTH MEDITATION. the multitude and the dehcacy of their principles; for who does not see that those which are con- sidered the last do not sustain themselves, but that they are supported upon others, which, hav- ing others for their support, never allow of a last. But we do with those which appear to our reason to be final, as we do in material things, where we consider that an indivisible point, beyond which our senses can perceive nothing, although it be infinitely divisible by its nature. Of these two infinites of science, that of greatness is much the most sensible. We think ourselves naturally much more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference. The visible extension of the world visibly surpasses us ; but as it is our- selves who surpass little things, we believe our- selves more capable of possessing them ; and yet it requires as great a capacity to reach the nothing as to reach the whole. Infinity is needed for the one as for the other ; and it seems to me that he who understands the last principle of things, might go on to know the Infinite. One depends upon the other, and one leads to the other. The extremities touch each other, and are joined by their very distance, and are found again in God and in God only." Newton One only philosopher, Newton, in the seven- thnnfilik teenth century, wrote against the infinity of the of the uni- uuivcrse. Carried away by his reactionary move- ^''''''''^' ment against the philosophy of Descartes, he re- serves for God infinity in space and duration, and conceives the universe as formed of a number of particles, vast but finite, which the Divine hand has collected for a time in various masses in the AN ANTINOMT. 141 bosom of an infinite void. In vain he tries later to correct the vice of this conception, by the hypothesis of an infinite and imponderable ether, destined to explain the communication of motion across celestial spaces. Leibnitz raises his voice and denounces the Newtonian metaphysics to all Europe, as lowering at once the idea of the Cosmos and the idea of God. What ! would you say that space is unlimited, and that in these immense exten- sions filled by the ever present being of God, float some inert molecules out of all proportion with the infinite void which surrounds them '^. And even this union of lifeless atoms is only transitory, and the laws of nature are not sufficient to guard them against inevitable perturbations; so that the Divinity, Hke a clumsy artist, must retouch His work. That cannot be ; the world is well made ; it is made to last, and God will not change its laws, because that would be to change His own designs. He has commanded once — He obeys always ; or, to speak better, His command is immutable, because it is perfect and eternal. But whilst he is making this protest against a Leibnitz, finite and perishable world, which the researches contrary, of Lagrange and Laplace will one day confirm, ^n^.'^'j^^j'''^ Leibnitz praises the discoveries of Swammerdam, ture "va a of Leuwenhoeck, and of Malpighi, and preludes I'lnfi^^i-" the great hypotheses of modem geology. He knows that a law of gradation links all the beings of the universe, that nature does not go by leaps and bounds, but by an insensible succession of progress.^ Wherever a link of the chain is want- ing, Leibnitz affirms that science will discover it, • [•' Coiitiniio. non Xitro per sa/ti/m."1 142 FIFTH MEDITATION. and the fine discoveries of polypes by Tremblay bear him out. He insists that every thing in the universe tends to the Infinite, the succession of years, the number of species, the series of their metamorphoses, the progress of their evolution. He is told that the actual Infinite cannot be found in nature. He replies, "I am so much in favour of an actual Infinite, that instead of admitting that nature abhors it, as is vulgarly said, I hold that she affects it everywhere, the better to mark the perfections of her author."^ The eighteenth cen- tury and our own have received these great views of Leibnitz as the vivifying principles of science. Astronomy, armed with its gigantic telescopes, conspires with physiology and its powerful micro- scopes to show forth the infinite greatness of the Cosmos. Herschell counts twenty millions of stars in the milky way. Ehrenberg forty millions of animalcule in a cubic inch of Tripoli. The sun is no longer motionless ; Argelander proves that it has a translative motion, and actually directs itself towards a point in the constellation of Hercules. Bessel calculates the swiftness of this progressive motion, and reckons it at more than six hundred thousand myriametres a day. We know twenty-eight thousand stars which have planets circulating round a common centre of gravity in elliptic orbits, and according to the laws of universal gravitation ; and surely Pascal was right to say that our imagination would sooner be tired of conceiving than nature of furnishing. How can imagination represent to itself the dis- tance of a star, whose light requires two millions of years to reach us ! 1 Ldtre a PAble Foucher. Erdmann, p. 1 1 8. AN ANTINOMT. 143 All limits recede, those of time as well as those Modem of space. Comparative anatomy finds out and^"^'^^^^^"" recomposes organic systems which have preceded nitz. the actual system, and which themselves have had ancestors. The face of the earth has changed more than once, and geology has discovered in its entrails the certain trace of vanished ages. Heaven itself has its epochs, and every star its story and its life. Before being what it is, it has passed through a thousand metamorphoses. An ingenious astronomer observes, that ''as we remark in our forests trees of the same species that have reached all possible degrees of growth, so we may observe in the immensity of the celestial plains the different phases of the gradual formation of stars." A particular form of existence may be recent, a certain manifestation of life may have its date, but the world itself has none, at least its first origin flies before the eyes of man when he observes it best, and so do the barriers of exten- sion and the hidden principles of life. Thus for three centuries, experience and pure Thus Me- reason, each beholding the universe from its own ^^P^^.^'ff^ V • r r T • 11 speculation pomt or view, rar rrom contradictmg each other, as and science: Kant says, have always inclined to agree. The'"^^^- ideal speculations of the metaphysician, the posi- tive researches of the observer, the calculations of the geometrician, the conjectures of the historian, all form an irresistible current which undermines every day the old prejudice of a fnite world, and substitutes for it the modern idea of the infinity of the universe. And think not that there is any- ^^^j^ ^,j^^^ thing in this to discourage philosophical observers, encourages Nothing, on the contrary, excites and spurs on science. 144 FIFTH MEDITATION. scientific curiosity like the idea of the infinite greatness of worlds. I appeal to that illustrious and venerable man, who so grandly united in one magnificent whole the discoveries of modern science. I appeal to the author of the Cosmos, to M. de Humboldt. " In the midst of the riches of nature, and of obser^^ations ever increasing, man becomes penetrated with a profound conviction, that on the surface and in the bowels of the earth, in the depths of the seas and in those of the skies, even after millions of years, space will never be wanting to the scientific conqueror. The regret of Alexander can never be addressed to the progress of observation and of intellect."^ 1 [The view maintained by M, Saisset in this chapter is, that the universe expresses the absolute infinity of God by its relative infinity, that is, by illimitable extension in time and space. M. Henri Martin has accused M. Saisset's thesis, or rather his arguments: — (i) of a Pantheistic tendency; and (2) of associating two contradictory ideas, created matter and the Infinite. T have said something on this question at the close of this volume. For my own part, though M. Saisset has elsewhere declared his conviction of the accordance of this theory with the Bible doctrine of the creation, and though he cites St. Augustine and Aquinas as partially, and Descartes, Pascal, and Leibnitz, as alto- gether agreeing with him, I cannot but regret that he should have given such prominence to a speculation based chiefly upon a hypothe- tical view of the Divine character.] ^ixt1i) jHetiitation. Providence in the Universe. I CONTEMPLATE With joy the idea of a universe without limits, unfolding itself through space and time, and expressing, by an inexhaustible multi- tude of created beings, the omnipotence of the immense and eternal Creator. But hitherto I have proceeded in company with Pantheism, and its nearness affrights me. Spinoza and Bruno have each of them a most profound sentiment of the infinity of worlds, and yet their universe can- not be mine, because their God is not my God. They only see in nature and man various forms with which an impersonal activity successively clothes himself beneath the law of a blind destiny. To my eyes, on the contrary, according to the idea that I have formed of the All-perfect Being, this world, which is His image, must everywhere show traces of an intelligent will, on the side of the good and the beautiful, who has freely chosen, formed, and disposed all things for the best end. It must be referred to the universe itself, and to man's observation, whether my idea of it or the Pantheist's is the most right and true. But the problem which overwhelms and makes 146 SIXTH MEDITATION. Three Hie feel most strongly the extent of my ignorance worlds of jg ^]^jg^ Qj^g mwst be a Humboldt to embrace the Gravita- . , . tion, Life, Cosmos J nor IS this enough ; for not only must — 'iJhkhYs °"^ know the heaven and the earth, the world of their law, gravity, and the world of life, but also that invisi- OTNeces"'^^ ble world, more changeable and unapproachable sity ? than the two others — the world of humanity. Thus we must question these three universes, and ask of each if its last word be necessity, or Providence. When I begin to contemplate nature in sim- The first plicity and truth, I find her beautiful, and full of gives the harmonies. The sight of the starry heavens idea of or- throws me into a sort of ecstasy. These stars, Thought these worlds without number, the splendour of in the starry ^l^gjj. £j.gg^ ^]^g prodigy of their greatness and of their distances, that infinite multitude of luminous globes, in their constant and varied groups, ordered in space to accomplish with the same motion their majestic revolution, like an immense concert, where one feels that a superior harmony runs through the different notes of the instru- ments and the voices — in presence of these beau- tiful objects, beneath the charm of their grand impressions, I feel my whole mind penetrated and subdued by the idea of an ordaining thought. And when my thought leaves the vault of heaven So does the ^^ enter into itself, if it find within a soul at peace inner with itself and with its equals, whose every feel- ^°'^ ' ing, insensibly softened by contemplation, has borrowed from the beautiful night something of its serenity, 1 begin to understand that har- mony of visible nature and of internal conscious- ness which made a philosopher^ say, ''Two ob- 1 fKant.] PROVIDENCE IN THE UNIVERSE. 147 jects fill my soul with an ever-increasing admira- tion and respect — above us the starry heaven, within us the moral law." At such moments 1 believe in God, King of Heaven and Ruler of man. 1 believe in Him with a faith without reserve, with that spontaneous faith, which is prompter and sweeter than the faith which reflects. But soon reflection has its way, and I ask myself if I am not the dupe of an illusion. I have just admired the vault of heaven, and I have seen in it worlds without number gravitating through space under the same law of equilibrium and of harmony. Am I sure that my eyes have seen it, or was it Does thi.^ perchance my reason, delivered from its native [jj^^j|j '^^'"^ ignorance, that guessed by a miracle of intuition, Modem the order and the structure of the Heavens.? i^^'^'^"'^^- was modern science that fed me with such thoughts as immense globes, infinite worlds, gravitation, eternal equilibrium. If I had been born among the aborigines of Australia, or if I had lived three thousand years ago, I should have seen in the starry Heaven, only a dark vault, sprinkled with some brilliant vapours. Do what I can, 1 cannot seize again the first simple impressions of nature. On all sides acquired prejudices enwrap me; and the echoes, more or less distant, of modern science, resound in my spirit in spite of myself. What is to be done in this impossibility of hear- Reference ing clearly the voice of nature ? Let us try to find ^^ ^oper- ,1 . 1.1X1 nicus, Ken- out exactly what science says or thmks. In the ler, and first place let us refer to those extraordinary men, Newton. who are considered to have discovered the laws of nicus. 148 SIXTH MEDITATION. creation — Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. One, say the learned, has marked the true place of our earth and our sky in the vast economy of the celestial globes. The other has defined the pre- cise curve that the earth and the other planets describe around their luminous centre. And the last, drawing from the laws of Kepler the con- sequences that they contain, has succeeded, by the matchless power of his calculation, in determining the certain number which subjects all the stars of our world, and moreover all stars and all bodies, in all spaces, and in all time, to one and the same law. Theism of There is a marvellous succession in this series Coper- q£ discoveries, but it is hard to be understood. I am incapable of reading the book of Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbhini ccelestiuni^ or the Har- monice mundi of Kepler. The calculations, the numbers, the figures, the algebra are all beyond me and perplex me. But after all, what I want is to know what these great observers have thought of the plan of the universe, and having reduced it to this single point, I think I may find an end to my labours. If it were true that an eternal and blind necessity presides over the movements of the universe, surely the inventors of astronomy must have known it better than any one. But, on the contrary, I find that the more these great minds succeeded in laying bare the general economy of the world, they recognised in more glowing characters the free and wise hand of the Creator. Copernicus had deeply studied, not only the systems of Ptolemy, but those of Philolaus, of Ecphante, of Hicetas, of Heraclides. PROVIDENCE IN THE UNIVERSE. 149 The first doubts that came into his mind as to the truth of the old systems, arose from his observ- ing one common fauh in all, that of imposing on the universe a plan destitute of simplicity and of symmetry : and he was led to the first idea of his own system, by seeking out the simplest and the most beautiful plan, that which is most conform- able to the idea of a wise and foreseeing Ordainer. It was not necessary in itself that the earth should turn round the sun, but reason told Copernicus that this arrangement was the best, because it was the most simple, and experience and calcula- tion confirmed the inspiration of his reason. Let us hear his own words. '^ By no other com- bination," he exclaims, "have I been able to find so admirable a symmetry in the diverse parts of this great whole, as by placing the torch of the world, the sun which governs the whole family of stars, upon a royal throne, in the centre of Na- ture's temple." This earth forms a part of a collection of planets Kepk which revolve round the sun. Each of these has its own proper orbit, one a circle, another an ellipsis, a third a different curve, or rather we may pre- sume that they describe similar curves ruled by the same laws. Kepler employed more than twenty years in observations, in calculations, in unwearied re- searches, to verify this sublime presentiment. He reached the goal, at last ; he discovered the three laws which immortalize his name, and he ex- claimed — "Now what is it to me that my book be read by the present age, or by a future age ! my book can wait for readers. Has not God waited 150 SIXTH MEDITATION. six thousand years contemplating His work?" I cannot exactly tell by what means Kepler reached these three laws. I know not how much we are to attribute to experiment, how much to calcula- tion, how much again to all sorts of strange mystical, symbolical, Pythagorean ideas ; but that which is the dominant idea of all his calculations, all his observations, all his hypotheses, all his reveries, is his profound conviction that the world is beautiful, that it has been made on an ideal model by an Artist of infinite skill and knowledge. Newton. But there is one yAvo has penetrated further than Copernicus and Kepler ; further than any man before him, into the secrets of celestial things; one who bringing back the laws of Kepler to their generative principle, has demonstrated mathe- matically the system that Copernicus had merely discovered, and made likely : and has fixed finally the sole and supreme condition, whence results the eternal equilibrium of worlds. What would Newton have said if he had been told that the law of universal gravitation, and the magnificent system that it governs, are but a necessary con- sequence of the nature of bodies, that they contain neither order, nor wisdom, nor suitable- ness, nor beauty, nor harmony, but pure and simple necessity ? He would surely have answered, " I know not how you have made yourselves acquainted with the essence of matter and the movements and laws which necessarily result from it. I do not pretend to be so skilful, I profess my ignorance of the essence of bodies. I only know matter by its sensible properties. I have PROVIDENCE IN THE UNIVERSE, 151 made some experiments, and some new calcula- tions, which have taught me that all the motions of the universe may be referred to a single law, which I have called, for want of a better name, the law of attraction. Now as a fact and a law I can take hold of this attraction and demonstrate it ; as a cause I know nothing about it ; I cannot even tell its mode of action, whether it acts from a distance, or by the intermediary of an invisible fluid called ether, or otherwise. Upon this point I dare not pronounce, for want of observations, and sufficient proofs ; but what I do know is, that all these regular movements] suppose a first cause which is not a mechanical cause (£/ bi omnes motus regulares originem non hahent ex causis me- chanicis): that this admirable arrangement of the sun, the planets, and the comets cannot be explained but by the design and government of an intelligent and powerful Cause. {Elegantissima hacce so/is, planet- arum et cometarum^ compages non nisi consilio et dominio entis intelligentis et potentis oriri potuit?) That a blind necessity does not explain anything, for that necessity being the same at all times and in all places, a variety of things cannot proceed from it. {A azcd necessitate metaphysicd qucd iitique eadem est semper et iibique^ nulla oritur rerum var- iatio.) And consequently, the universe, with the order of its parts appropriated to a variety of times and places, can only have originated from a Primi- tive Being, having ideas and a will. (Tota rerum conditarum pro locis ac temporihus diversitas ah ideis et voluntate entis necessario existentis solum modo oriri potuit?) " God must neither be represented as a soul of 152 SIXTH MEDITATION. the world, dispersed in the variety of things, nor as a Being, dead and abstract. He is the Creator, distinct from the world and acting upon it. It is not enough to contemplate Him as an eternal, in- finite, absolute Being, not even enough to admire Him as the infinitely wise Architect of the universe. He must be venerated as our Lord and Sovereign. We do not say, my Eternal, my Infinite ; we say, my God, that is, my Master. God is no longer God, He is but nature and fate, without a Provi- dence. {Deus sine dominio^ providentid et causis finalibus nihil aliud est quam fatum et natura.) The true God is then an intelligent living God, who moves, orders, and governs the universe. Thus natural philosophy teaches us the origin of things, for it belongs to that science, supported by the observation of phenomena, to raise us up to God. {Et hoc de Deo de quo utique ex phceno- minis disserere ad philosophiam naturaleni perti- net.y Objection We cannot fail to be touched with a faith so Tel^men ^^^^^g? exhaling from the lips of Newton in were pre- such grand and simple words. I know it will be judiced." g^-j ^1^^^ Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton speak like Christians rather than philosophers, that Laerancre Slaving breathed from infancy the air of Christi- ana La- anity, and fed upon her milk, they beheld the Thdstic! universe with prejudiced eyes. It will be re- marked how much astronomers must have changed their point of sight, when an age of doubt and negation has succeeded to an age of faith. Na- ture, in the days of Copernicus, apparently was just the same as in the days of d'Alembert. The laws of Kepler, and the attraction of Newton, far PROVIDENCE IN THE UNIVERSE. 153 from having received the sUghtest refutation from the progress of observation and calculation, on the contrary, have shone out with an ever- increasing splendour. Yet in the eighteenth century, new astronomers, new geometricians, those even who have verified, extended, and completed the New- tonian system — a Lagrange, the inventor of the calculus of variations, a Laplace, author of the " Celestial Mechanism," have not found in the heavens a trace of God. The only divinity be- fore which astronomy will henceforth bow, is mathematical science ; the ideas of propriety, of beauty, of free choice, and arrangement have neither sense nor meaning since numbers must govern the universe ; for in geometry and me- chanics everything must be demonstrated rigor- ously, everything is in a chain, and must be deduced by immutable relations, every thing is what it needs must be — it is the empire of neces- sity. I confess these arguments m.ake no impression upon me ; I can see without difficulty that the essential character of mathematical truths is to be absolutely necessary; but this necessity, be it understood, is purely ideal, for this simple reason — that the object of mathematics is also ideal. Numbers, circles, and curves are not real and effective things ; by no means, they only express abstract possibilities which may have an eternally real basis in the intellect of the eternal geome- trician ; but which, taken in themselves, have no force and no virtue, and cannot explain the exis- tence of a grain of sand. You say that it is absolutely necessary that the 154 SIXTH MEDITATION. Necessity radii of a circle should be equal ; that may be, solvl the ^^^ ^^ ^^ ^^^ necessary that there should be a cer- phenowenasoX.2m circukr body, say the sun. Granted a uni- tlmo-ence." ^erse with stars and worlds, governed by the mathematical law of attraction, undoubtedly several things must necessarily follow : for instance, it will be necessary that planets should describe elliptic curves round the sun ; but it is evident that of itself there is nothing necessary in this motion. If the ellipsis were the curve necessary for stars which have a translative motion other stars would not describe different curves. If you tell me that all celestial motions are the necessary consequences of the law of attraction, which is necessary in itself, I ask how you prove it 1 Is the necessity of this law evident 1 Then it would not have needed the labour of ages and the genius of a Newton to discover it. Do you call it a con- sequence of the essence of bodies ? then you must have the kindness to explain what the essence of bodies is, and what attraction is in itself, and what is its mode of action ; and, further, you will have to prove that bodies themselves exist neces- sarily. Away with these childish speculations ! Let us only reason on what modern science has estab- lished — with the help of observation, analogy, and calculation. One thing only is established, that there is a grand, universal, sole, sovereign law, which gives an incomparable beauty, solidity, and har- mony to the universe. Everywhere in the heavens there is order, simplicity, and arrange- ment ; therefore everywhere intelligence and choice ; therefore no where blind necessity. Leaving those immense worlds which human PROVIDENCE IN THE UNIFERSE. 155 science only perceives afar, and in the aggregate The world of their masses and their movements, I turn to^^^?^^^^ the things of earth, which can be taken up and Purpose handled. Here the absolute empire of mathe-^^^^^- matics ceases. There succeeds to the inflexible regularity of the heavenly bodies a harmony more varied, more delicate, more simple. I see around me life. Here I find a flower hidden in the grass ; it rears bravely its frail and flexible stem to seek the sunbeam, which helps it to expand, to tint its leaves with thin, delicate hues, to exhale its sweet perfumiC. Close beside it I see a little insect, which spreads its wings, flutters from flower to flower, sucks out their odorous sweets, and, laden with its spoil, bears it to the hive, where tribes of winged reapers follow. If some one should come and tell me that that flower and that bee are the work of an absolute necessity, without any thought of suitableness, or free and harmo- nious arrangement, I should find it difficult to understand him, and unpleasant to listen to him. I understand and appreciate much more that ob- server (Leibnitz, I think) who, having one day taken a grub from a bush to admire it more closely, was suddenly seized with an involuntary emotion, and hastened to replace the insect on its leaf with a sort of respect, fearing to profane or tarnish one of those living mirrors where the wis- dom of the Creator is reflected. Before allowing myself to mistrust the inspira- Naturalists. tions of nature, or those acquired prejudices which may unconsciously influence me, I will consult again those naturalists, those learned men of genius, Harvey, Linneus, or better still, those last 156 SIXTH MEDITATION. great creators, Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and those whom they have initiated into their researches. I am told, indeed, that these eminent men could not agree — that if the ideas of Cuvier are conformable to a Providential system, those of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire favour that of neces- sity. I am not prepared to enter into the infinite complications of this illustrious controversy, but I may succeed in seizing its great features and their most certain results. Cuvier and Cuvicr was couviuccd that the innumerable Saint Hii- niultitude of individuals which compose the organ- ized world, may be referred to a certain number of essentially different plans and types. In the animal kingdom especially, whatever may be the analogies which are found between different groups, anatomy lays down four plans of organis- ation which it is impossible to confound, and which divide animals for ever into four orders. Geoffroy Saint Hilaire only beheld a factitious work in this great classification, which has overthrown that of Linneus, and which has been succeeded by no other. According to him nature works on a single type. The differences which seem to divide living beings, are purely exterior ; and the philosophical observer finds everywhere the same essential organs. A learner, like myself, cannot decide between Cuvier and his antagonist ; but I ask both, and Cuvier first, what the principles are that have presided over their respective labours. Cuvier answers thus : — " Every organized being forms a whole; a single united system, the parts of which mutually PROVIDENCE IN THE UNIVERSE. iS7 correspond, and concur to the same definitive action, by a reciprocal reaction. None of these parts can change, without the others changing also ; and consequently each of them taken separ- ately indicates and gives all the others. If the intestines of an animal are so organized that they will only digest flesh, and that newly killed ; it follows that his jaws will be constructed todevourhis prey, his claws to lay hold of and tear it, his teeth to cut and divide it, the whole system of his organs of motion to follow and to seize it, his organs of sense to perceive it afar; nature even must have placed in his brain the necessary instinct to know how to hide himself and lay snares for his victims. Such are the general conditions of the carnivorous species. An animal intended to be of this species must infallibly unite them all, for his race could not exist without them." ^ Had Cuvier been told that there has beenCuvier's found, on some old Eg)^ptian monument, the correiTtion figure of an animal, whose strange organisation of organs, would confute the principle of the correlation of organs, how boldly his reserved and positive spirit would have repulsed a priori the authenticity of such a testimony. He would say, you have mistaken the pictures of fantastic animals for de- scriptions of real animals. "In some such design on one of these monuments, Agatharchides must have seen his carnivorous bull, whose jaws reach- ing from ear to ear spared no other animal, but which assuredly would be disowned by natural- ists, since nature never combines cloven feet and horns with sharp teeth." And mixing gracefully ^ Cuvier, Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe^ p. 96. 1 58 SIXTH MED IT AT ION. the serious playfulness of the man of wit with the higher views of the Philosopher, Cuvier thus goes on, — Now- a- days any one who only sees the trace of a cloven foot may conclude that the animal who made it was a ruminating animal ; and this conclusion is as certain as any other in physics or in moral science. This single track, then, gives to him who observes it, both the form of the teeth, and the form of the jaws, and the form of the vertebra, and the form of all the bones of the leg, of the thighs, of the shoulders, and of the stomach of the animal that has just passed by. It is a surer mark than all those of Zadig.^ These great principles of the subordination and correlation of organs, in the hands of Cuvier, have reconstituted, with the help of a few fossil bones, whole races of extinct animals, and have recalled to existence worlds that seemed lost for ever in oblivion. And any one may see that all these labours, all these discoveries, all these mir- aculous resurrections, are inspired by the thought that nature, in her operations, obeys, not blind mathematics, but laws of convenience, harmony, and proportion. Saint Hii- I next inquire of the disciples of Geoffroy Saint- cipUoT^' Hilaire if they have a principle. They have one, analogy, and they call it analogy. To distinguish and to classify animals, to divide them again into species, genera, orders, classes, ramifications ; all this is but the beginning of their science. They must still analyze each of these groups, and grasp analogy under difference, and unity under variety. From one species to another species, from one 2 Cuvier. D'ucours tur Us Revolutions du Globe, p, 103. PROVIDENCE IN THE UNIVERSE. 159 kind to another kind, philosophical anatomy dis- covers or fancies the same elements of organisa- tion. One species, the fish for example, has a skull composed of twenty-six bones ; another, such as the bird, has but eight or ten. Here, then, is a marked diiference, a line of demarcation. So you think, because you have only examined the bird in its adult state. Examine it in its foetal state, and you will find in it all the primitive bones, which, later, will melt together and deceive the artificial observers. At other times you let yourself be deceived by the numerous metamor- phoses that an organ is subject to, when you observe it in the whole course of the animal series. Its visible forms vary, its dimensions change, its structure becomes complicated or simplified, its functions, even may diiFer; for different organs serve sometimes for the same function, as the lungs and the branchiae, and it happens too that the same organ sometimes fulfils different functions, as the organ of loco- motion, and the organ of respiration ; but the relative position and the mutual dependence of organs never vary. Hence that principle which is the torch of anatomical philosophy ; An organ may be maimed or destroyed, it can never be transposed. Nor is it only in one of the ramifications of the animal kingdom that this law is verified. Verte- brated or unvertebrated, whatever artificial bar- riers are raised between animal and animal, still the unity of their organic composition prevails; and thus science verifies every day, that sublime con- ception of the Timeus which Buffon has expressed i6o SIXTH MEDITATION. in language worthy of Plato ; "It seems as if the Supreme Being would make use but of one idea, and at the same time vary it in every possible manner, in order that man might equally admire the magnificence of the execution and the sim- plicity of the design," Monsters. But we have still to explain an immense series of phenomena which have remained till the present time an enigma and a scandal, I allude to the ex- istence of monsters. But that which is called by this name is not a denial given to the general laws of nature. It may all be explained by an arrest of development, ruled by two very simple laws, that of the balance of organs, and that of the attraction of similar parts. Every time that you meet with an organ developed in an exorbitant fashion, instead of believing it a miracle, try if you cannot find in a corresponding organ a defect of its normal development. If on the one side there is hypertrophy, there is atrophy on the other side. As Goethe has ingeniously remarked, Na- ture has a fixed budget, and too great an expen- diture in one department exacts economy in another. Really go- Thus the law of the balance of organs accounts twolaws^ for simple monstrosities — those which are called under the double are explained by the attraction of similar The"- alresf parts, which so act that if two germs, if two of develop- foetuses, sliould happen to join, it is always the "'''"^' heart which will be joined to the heart, the brain to the brain, and so on. We must not then speak of the freaks of nature, of disorder, or of chance.^ ' [rd yap Trapa . and rose- windows; its worship with its ceremonial, its music and chanting, ren- der it so deeply interesting, and it suits marvellously with that vague religiosity which admits all symbols." — Philosophie du Chriitiamxme^ ^ Supplement a la 29. Lettrc du Pantheism:^ vcl. ii. p. 163. ESSAT: BT THE TRANSLATOR. 225 Church has been congealing into symbols and dogmas. And this habit of mind, once acquired, is exercised at last not only upon the symbol, but upon the dogmatic truth which the symbol en- cases. Thus the sacrament becomes a mere beau- tiful expression of the soul's sustenance, and the Resurrection of our immortality, and the holy Trinity of God's attributes, and the Incarnation of the meeting of the finite and infinite. Thus the Gospel narrative becomes, not indeed absolutely dis- believed, but thin and shadowy under these subtle touches, and the Mosaic account of the creation is rather a majestic symbol of the distinctness of God from the universe than the history of a fact, I am not sure that M. Saisset may not have im- bibed something of this spirit. III. And, now, let me sum up the whole impres- sion which I have attempted to convey in this essay. I have translated M. Saisset's book with an admiration of his intellectual power, of his learn- ing, and of his masculine eloquence, which makes me wish that my flattery were worth his accept- ance. I thank him for a noble testimony of reason to the Personality of God. He has drawn out clearly the central idea of Pantheism. He has analyzed its metaphysics from Spinoza to Hegel, gliding subtilly along its finest threads. He has shown that Pantheism is founded upon deduc- tions from that experience which it condemns ; that its vaunted premisses are word-jugglings, false to the verge of madness ; that it promises the soul an ocean of light to lead it into an abyss 226 ESSAY : BT THE TRANSLATOR. of darkness, without morality, immortality, or God — for its morality is a fancy, its immortality is death, and its God is the negation of God. He has done this not merely by demonstrating the impotence of human reason, which might lead us down another abyss, but with metaphy- sical good sense as well as subtlety, showing that God is light as well as darkness, and that reason has its strength as well as its weakness. Nor have his services ended there. He has displayed to us all the great proofs for the existence of God, not isolated as in Descartes or Paley, not sneered down with offensive contempt as only suitable for childhood, but ringed together like adamant. The eye that has been bloodshot from gazing upon the blindiag snows of Scepticism, or filmed over with looking upon the hot iron of Pantheism, is soothed as by the softness of green fields. I have to thank him too for many lights, thrown upon nature, and upon the mind and condition of man. Even after that matchless sentence in which Paley joins together '' at one end of our discoveries, an intelli- gent pow^er constructing a ring of two hundred thousand miles diameter to surround Saturn's body, and be suspended like a magnificent arch over the heads of his inhabitants — at the other, bending a hooked tooth, concerting and providing an appro- priate mechanism, for the clasping and reclasping of the filaments of the feather of the humming birds, "-^ I can turn with pleasure to the Medita- tion in which M. Saisset l3inds together the eigh- teen millions of stars in the Milky Way, and the > Natural Theology, Chap. XXVII. ESSAY : Br THE TRANSLATOR. 227 bee upon the flower. Never have I more clearly seen that, " Our grief is but our grandeur in disguise." Never has the prayer of resignation seemed to me more reasonable or more beautiful. Never has my own personality more irresistibly led me to the Personality of God. These great services have some qualifications. If man, "repelled by intellect, impelled by faith" — as has been so superbly said by Professor Fraser — will spring towards the Infinite, it is well that the bars of his cage should be more securely padded than by mere philosophy. I would ask the author of this Essay — Shall I, or any one in a million, ever find peace as you have done ? The mer-de-glace of the Infinite is covered with myriads of philosophic insects that have been carried up there and lost. Jacob wrestled one night, and found a blessing at break of day. I must wrestle twenty years, if I am to follow you, and perhaps never say Peniel at the end. I mul- tiply figures because I am in earnest. You have stretched a rope over the river. With mighty muscles and unfailing feet, you have come to shore. But your hair is wet, and your garment saturated with spray, and your face is pale as with the agony of death. I had rather pass over the old bridge by which the Church treads, than on your strong shoulders — and after all your rope is fastened to the bridge ! You show me the Personal, Infinite, God, Creator of earth and heaven. But there rises before me the thought of One, without Whom I suspect you would never have told me even that, 228 ESSAT: BY THE TRANSIATOR. and He says what draws me towards God. as all the metaphysics on earth, and all the stars in heaven never could. " No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." The last sentence of your book is a noble one. Let me add five words to it. "The great mystery of existence, the distinction and union of two personalities, that mystery where pure reason is confounded, where reasoning has so often gone astray, is no more a mystery for the soul which has prayed." The grand and simple music of the old Collects is echoing in my heart — and I add, "through Jesus Christ our Lord." 2[ppenti()c. 1. On Natural and Revealed Religion} The celebrated saying of Diderot, that "all the religions in the world are merely sects of natural religion/' characterises with singular exactitude the prevalent opinion of the eighteenth century, upon the nature and value of religious institutions. If we believe the philosophers of that epoch, re- ligions have not been a necessary and fruitful in- strument of civilization, but an obstacle. They have corrupted, instead of perfecting natural reli- gion. They have but added to it a mass of errors and superstitions, the product of the credulity of the weak and the policy of the strong. The history of religions presents us with the \\Tetched spectacle of the aberrations of our ever- credulous and ever-deceived humanity. Religions have no ultimate and solid foundation in the na- ture of man. They are artificial institutions, which have no intimate connection with the moral destiny of our race. All religions are equally false, if not equally malevolent. Moses and Or- pheus, Zoroaster and Confucius, Mahomet and our Lord, are impostors or enthusiasts ! 1 pTranslated from M. Saisset's Essais sur la Philoiophie et la Rdigicn, au XIX. Sucle^ pp. 287-304.] 232 APPENDIX. Such Is the philosophy of religions conceived by the eighteenth century. Pass from Voltaire and David Hume to Boulanger and Dupuis; sink fi-om the brilliant Essais sur les Mceiirs^ and the ingenious sketch of the Natural History of Reli- gions^ to the undigested compilation of the Origine des Cultes^ and the declamatory^ rhetoric of Chris- tianisme Devoile, and you will find the same ideas everywhere. Montesquieu and Rousseau perhaps form the only exception to this general law ; yet it would not be difficult to find traces of it in the celebrated dialogue, Le Raissoneur et V Inspire., as well as in more than one piquant passage of the Lettres Persanes. But what an advance there is from this witty irreverence to the depth and majesty of the Spirit of Laws I In that immortal work, the finest monument which the eighteenth century has bequeathed to us, the eminently be- nevolent and civilizing effect of religions, and above all of Christianity, has been marked in strong and brilliant colours. One feels in each page the genius of a philosophy which rises above the horizon of the eighteenth century, and makes of Montesquieu almost our own contemporary.-^ At the present time, it is clear enough to every 1 ["It is bad reasoning against religion to cram together in a great book a long list of the t-oiU which it has produced, if we will not do the same by the benefits which it has brought with it. Were I to re- count all the evils which have been wrought in the world by civil laws, monarchy, republican government, I could say frightful things." — Esprit des Loit, xxiv. 2. " Plutarch tells us, in his life of Numa, that in the time of Saturn there was neither master nor slave. In our lands, Christianity has brought back that age." — Ibid, xv. 7. "Wonderful fact I the Christian religion, which appears to have no other object than felicity in another life, constitutes also our happiness in this." — Ibid, xxiv. 3.] NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION. 233 mind of any width, that this theory of the eight- eenth century upon religions is radically false. It rests upon one of the strangest hypotheses which have ever been conceived — that of a perfect reli- gion^ supposed to exist at the cradle of societies, and gradually degraded and obscured under the influence of positive religions. This hypothesis is on a par with that which Rousseau imagined when he painted man in a state of nature, primi- tively innocent and happy, but corrupted by civi- lization — a hollow and fantastic theory, w^hich- wrote its own condemnation when it formulated the famous paradox, ''The man who thinks is a depraved animal." Rousseau and Diderot, like poets who sung an age of gold, imagined in the past of the human race that perfection which is really in its future destinies, thus substituting a barren remembrance and empty regret for holy and fruitful hopes/ The hypothesis of a perfect religion, anterior to civilisation, will not bear close examination. What are the dogmas of that religion? A God, who is spiritual, one, intelligent, free, good, who loves all men equally. But it is clear, 1 [The first germ of the philosophy of history, the first conception of a true law of progress in human society, is not to be found in Taci- tus or Thucydides, in Aristotle, or even in Plato, but in St. Augustine. "Divine providence," says the great theologian, '' which conducts all things mar\'ellously, rules the series of human generations from Adam to the end of the world like one man, who, from his infancy to his old age, furnishes forth his career in time in passing through all its ages." — De Qmstionibtis Octoginto tribiis, quasi. 58. Again, " The right education of the human race, so far as concerns the people of God, like that of a single man, advanced through certain divisions of time, as that of the individual does through the consecutive ages of human life." '' Sicut autem unius hominis, ita humani generis, quod ad Dei populum perti- net, recta eruditio per quondam articulos temporam tanquam cetatum profecit accessibus." — De Civ. Dei, lib. x. c. 14. J Does not Bacon imi- 2 34 APPENDIX, that before Christianity men knew not this God. The Jehovah, worshipped under the Mosaic dis- pensation itself, is in many respects a national and local God.^ The idea of the one universal God is essentially and exclusively Christian. Some sages before Christ had spread it among a few select minds; Humanity knew it not. At this very moment, it is utterly unknown to the ma- jority of men. Outside the people of Christen- dom we shall look in vain for the idea of the one universal God. ^ tate this in the celebrated aphorism? " The old age and increasing years of the world should, in reality, be considered as antiquity: and this is the character of our own times rather than of the less advanced age of the world in those of the ancients. For the latter, with respect to ourselves, are ancient and elder, with respect to the world, modem and younger. And as we expect a greater knowledge of human affairs, and mature more judgment, from an old man than from a youth, on account of his experience, so we have reason to expect much greater things of our own age than from antiquity, since the world has grown older." (No\nim Organ, i. Aph. 24.) This doctrine of progress has been denied by Vico, who would subject human affairs to an invariably recurrent and universal rotation, corsi e ricconi. But more generally it has been misunderstood. Herder compares mankind to one bud perpe- tually expanding, and has thus prepared the way for a transcendental Pantheism. Turgot and Condorcet dream of a constant perfectibility, and an indefinite prolongation of our animal and terrestrial existence. The doctrine of progress, without that of the Fall, is always a wild dream. St Augustine's doctrine is — 1. That the human race is one, and needs restoration. 2. That this restoration is the object of the law of progress, in which the preventing action of God and the free effort of his creatures are seen. 3. That this progress is not carried out by the immolation of indi- viduals, but consists in the amelioration of individuals in the develop*- ment of humanity. This moral progress, in comparison with which material progress is nothing, commences in expiation and trial here, and is^ completed in another existence. The '' perfection" of which M. Saisset here speaks is not that of Her- der or of Turgot, but of his favourite Augustine. J ' " I do not deny," says M. Saisset, '' that in the Old Testament, and especially in the Psalms, many passages miy be found of quite a differ- ent character; ex. gr.. Psalm cxlv. 18, 19, Amos ix. 7, contrasted with Deut. iv. 7. [See also specially I. Kings viii. 41. 43,] 2 I do not here distinguish the Mahometan population from the Christian nations, properly so called. Is not the Koran, in fact, as it NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION 235 I would say as much on the score of morality. The idea of human fraternity is a Christian idea. (See also in the Old Testament, Exodus xxiii. 9; Deut. xxiv. 17; Levit. xix. 34.) It is true that the Stoics had elevated themselves to it, just as Plato, before our Lord, had attained to the un- known God, the God who is a Spirit, of the Gospel. But Christianity alone has made the dogma of universal charity known to the human race. Yet what can be more natural or reasonable than to believe in the one God, who hath made men all brethren ? Certainly, it is natural and reasonable, that is to say, conformable to the purest inspirations of nature and of reason. But these sublime instincts would remain dormant within us, without a regular and assiduous culti- vation. This culture is given by civilisation, and the two forces employed by civilisation in this grand work, are religion and philosophy. To speak at present only of religions, surely it is incontestable that they have fulfilled, and are even yet fulfilling in the world an eminently civiliznig action. What but its religious institutions made the greatness of the Jewish people? Where is the source of the unconquerable vitality of that race which neither Babylon, Greece, nor Rome could destroy; but in the strong religion which Moses collected at Sinai, under the dictation of Jehovah ? On what monument is Jewish civiliza- tion, with its poetry, its institutions, its history, has been so well called, a defective edition of the Gospel ? [In days of greater theological accuracy than ours, Mahometanism was always reckoned among Christian heresies. See Lambert Danaus' Edition of August. De Haresibus, Ixcvi.] 236 APPENDIX. its manners, graven in lasting characters? It is a religious monument, the Old Testament. What gave Greece her arts, her literature, her liberty, her philosophy, but the religion of Orpheus and of Hesiod? Try to understand iEschylus and Sophocles, Ictinus and Phidias without the Greek religion. Plato himself would have no meaning without it. The philosophy of religion, received by the eighteenth century, appears infinitely more false and wretched when we come to speak of Chris- tianity. Who, at this time of day, will venture seriously to dispute that Christianity has civilized the modern world? What was natural religion in the days of Clovis and Charlemagne? Find, if you can, its principles among the barbai-ous hordes who thronged the soil of Europe. Who then spoke to men of a spiritual, just, and holy God, of a free and immortal soul, of love and- charity? Was it Christianity, or the fantastic religion of nature which was dreamed of by the philosophy of the eighteenth century ? The eighteenth century did not know itself. It cursed Christianity, of vv^hich it was the legitimate child. ... It is certain that natural religion, as conceived by the eighteenth century, in the name of which that age contended with Christianity and philosophical systems, is the product of Christianity. Let us explain this curious connection at sufficient length. Man is born with two needs, at once distinct and inseparable, the ?noral and the religious instinct. Free, he yet feels that there exists a law which should regulate his will. Capable of intelligence NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION 237 and of love, his mind and his heart require an infinite object. Every man possesses the instinct of the Good, and the instinct of the Infinite, in a word, the instinct of the Divine. Every one who can live without faith in the Divine, or who has smothered that sublime faith within him, does not belong to humanity. The moral and religious instinct, the instinct of the Divine is primordial in man, anterior and supe- rior to every religion and every philosophy, the aliment and the foundation of every religious belief and of every philosophical speculation. This alone is common to all men, savage or civilized, ancient or modern, of the Mongolian or Caucasian race. This alone constitutes the unity of mankind. . . . The com.mon foundation of every religion as of every philosophy, is the invincible need which pushes man on to develope the instinct of his nature, the instinct of the Divine. ... A day came, prepared by Divine Providence, when all the religions of the world became acquainted, and finding themselves diverse and opposed, engaged in strife, and, so to speak, broke each other in pieces, to give place to a religion which collected and organized their fragments. We may mark that day by a date which the human race will never forget — the birth of our Lord. . . . Why did all the religions of antiquity bear in their very heart the germ of inevitable death ? Because no religion before Christianity had succeeded in determining the essential condi- tions of the moral life of man. Because it solved this problem, Christianity comprises all essential truths. It is the heir of all religions and of all 238 APPENDIX. philosophical systems. It has fused together all these apparently discordant elements, Moses and Plato, the wisdom of Memphis and Delphos, and the wisdom of Athens and of Alexandria. It has boiTowed from Greece its metaphysics, from Stoi- cism its morality,^ from Judea its traditions, from the East its mystic breath, from Rome her spirit of government ; and it is thus^ that Christianity has succeeded in uniting all the conditions of the moral life of humanity in one body of durable doctrine. . . . Those who speak of a new religion do not perceive that Christianity is not a religion like others. ... It has solved once for all the problem of positive religions, . . . The eighteenth century was wTong about the nature of religions in general, and about the Christian religion in particular. It believed that religions were the work of credulity and impos- ture, while they are the natural and regular pro- duct of the moral and religious instincts of the human race. It was deceived about Christianity, because it believed that Christianity was a religion like any other, and that it was radically contrary to natural religion and to reason. This is a capital mistake. What the eight- eenth century called natural religion is the foun- dation of Christianity. This position is suffi- ciently proved by looking attentively at the three chief attempts which were made in the eighteenth 1 [This statement requires much qualification. It was his intense perception of the distinction between the haughty morality of stoicism and the doctrines of grace, which finally won the great intellect of Maine de Biran to the cross. J - [M. 8aisset's mode of statement here is, I think, objectionable. If Christianity collected all truths, it was not by an eclectic process, but by a Divine uniJicationS\ NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION 239 century to systematize natural religions. These attempts are connected with the three chief philo- sophical schools of the time — the schools of Kant, Rousseau, and Reid. I put aside the Encyclo- pede, the Materialists and Atheists, who, after having collected natural religions and natural law, end by telling us that morality consists in self- preservation, and religion in believing in nature. The three schools in question profess a great contempt for philosophical systems, and much in- dependence in respect to religious creeds — what, however, with the Scottish thinkers is consistent with the sincerest faith in Christ, with Kant goes no further than respect, and with Rousseau some- times proceeds to hostility. But upon collecting the fundamental articles of natural religion, in Kant's Critique of the Practical Reason^ in Rousseau's Profession de foi du Vic aire Savoyard^ and in Reid's Essays^ what do we find ? The same truths that Christianity had for the first time united in a system appropriate to the human race, and which modern philosophy, the genius of Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz, had established upon the ground of reason. Examine, in fact, the fundamental dogmas upon which Christianity reposes. They may be re- duced to three — the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement. We need not now enter into the depths of these dogmas ; we shall say but little, and that strictly confining ourselves within the limits of our subject. But what is the most evident meaning of these dogmas ? The dogma of the Trinity establishes, in the first place, the absolute unity of God, His spi- 240 APPENDIX. rituality, His incommunicable and absolute perfec- tion. This God, considered in Himself, is not, however, an inert and lifeless being, an abstract and undetermined power, which can only actualize by developing itself, and become real by its works. He is a God in whom perfection and personality are inconceivably united. He knows and loves Himself. He lives in Himself, with a life that is free and independent, beyond time and space. From personality. He excludes nothing but its miseries ; He contains the principle of it, life with intelligence and love. The unity, personality, and independence of God, are implied in the dogma of the Trinity. This God does not remain in the mute depths of His eternal existence. He is love. Love counsels Him to expand His perfection without Himself. He creates. He fills space and time with the marvels of His power. He reflects Himself in a free and intelligent being, made in His likeness, capable of comprehending and ador- ing the Eternal. This supreme creation is finished by the filling up of the chasm which separates the finite from the infinite. God hides himself, so to speak, in nature, under the fatality of its laws. He mani- fests himself in man. He tabernacles in our nature, and is well-pleased with it. More : He wills to unite Himself to our nature by the closest and most incomprehensible of ties. He is made m.an, and is Incarnate. Man separated from God is little but a more perfect animal, the child of time, and made to be devoured by it, ^a weak and wretched part of that NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION. 241 infinite circle of existences, which are incessantly produced and destroyed. By the Incarnation, he becomes a being of a different grade, capable of understanding, loving, and possessing eternal things. But his intellect is yet weak, and his will is subject to failure. Man knows sin, and he is separated from his first principle. To ran- som and restore him, he wants infinite mercy to give infinite value to his repentance. This is the mystery of redemption. God has taken the manhood into God. He died for all. He wills that all should be saved, because all are His children, — furnished with the same gifts, submitted to one law of love. Hence that sublime morality, which has surpassed the purest conceptions of ancient wisdom, and regu- lated for ever the relations and affections of man. Reasonable love of one's self, as made in the image of God : love of one's neighbours, as members of Christ ; all our affections directed towards the general love of God ; — such is the eternal code of morality, founded upon the eternal code of re- ligion. We are not ignorant of many objections which may be raised here, and we cannot discuss them now. Suffice it to say that we have not written a w^ord which is not conformable to the exactest text of the most rigorous orthodoxy, and at the same time to the most enlightened reason. Such is the natural religion which Rousseau developes so eloquently in the Savoyard vicar's Profession de Foi^ whose principles Kant interlinks with superior strength in his Critique of the Prac- tical Reason^ which the Scotch school, in its turn, II. Q 242 APPENDIX. promulgated to the eighteenth century in a form at once less severe and less eloquent, but with admirable good sense and honest conviction. Some have thought that in writing the Gospel of natural religion, Rousseau destroyed that of Christianity. By no means. He merely traced a fine commen- tary upon it. II. Substantial agreement of Christianity and the Pla- tonic Philosophy in reference to certain metaphy- sical problems} The first problem which metaphysics proposes to itself is that of the existence of God. St. Augustine solves it like a genuine disciple of Plato. The Atheists may be confounded by excellent processes of discursive reasoning. Plato himself has perfectly succeeded in proving^ that Atheism is the negation of the simplest and most evident principle of reason — the principle of causality. But in the estimation of a true philo- sopher, the existence of God is a verity so self- evident as to have no need of demonstration. In truth, the mind does not attain to God as the last consequence of anterior principles. It is raised to • [Translated from M. Saisset's Introduction to St, Augustine, De Ci'vitate Lei. Pp. 72-102.] 2 [De Leg. x.] CHRISTIANITT AND PLATONISM. 243 *■ Him as the First Principle of all principles, by a natural and irresistible movement. There are, however, two degrees which may be distinguished in this ascending movement of reason. Just as the sun of the visible world appears to us first as the centre of light, so God is to us, in the first place, the absolute Truth, the one Truth, in which all truths are identified, the universal reason which enlightens all intelligences. He is, says Plato, the sun of the intelligible world. Here is His first claim upon our adoration and rever- ence. But the material sun is not only the centre of light ; it is also the source of heat and life. So God is not only the principle of intelligence, reason, and truth ; He is also the principle of be- ing, the Idea of ideas, absolute unity. Good in itself, in short the ultimate root of all that exists. We have seen St. Augustine in his Confessions elevating his mind to God as the eternal Truth and the uncreated Word. In the De Civitate Dei he places himself with Plato at a still loftier elevation. He demonstrates God as the Being of beings, infinitely above all bodies, above the soul, above all sensible and intelligible forms ; in a word, as the first and immutable form of all life and of every existence. I cite the whole chap- ter, one of the finest in the work, when judged by that severe metaphysical beauty, whose noblest attractions are force and precision. " Those philosophers, therefore, whom we have seen not undeservedly preferred to all others in glory and renown [the Platonists] clearly perceived 244 APPENDIX. that no body was God; and therefore, in their search after God, transcended all bodies. They perceived that whatever is mutable is not the Most High God ; and, therefore, in seeking Him, they transcended also every soul and ail mutable spirits. They then perceived that every form in any mutable thing, by which it is what it is, what- soever its mode and nature may be, cannot be, except from Him who truly exists, because He exists immutably. And thus, whether they consi- dered the body of the universe, its figures, quali- ties, ordered motions, its elements, arranged from heaven even to earth, and whatever bodies are in them ; or, again, all life, whether that which nou- rishes and sustains itself, as in trees, or that which both does this and is sentient, as in beasts ; or that which both has these properties and under- stands, as is the case with man ; or, finally, that which does not want nutritive sustenance, but only maintains itself, is sentient, and intelligent, such as is life in the angels ; they have seen that none of these can be, save from Him who simply is. For to Him existence is not one thing, life another, as though He could exist without life ; nor is life one thing to Him, intelligence another, as though He could live without intelligence ; nor, again, is His intelligence something different from His blessed- ness, as though he could be intelligent, and not blessed — but life, intelligence, blessedness, is with Him the same as being. On account of this im- mutability and simplicity, the Platonists understood both that He made all things, and that He could not have been made of any. For they considered that whatever is, is either body or soul ; that soul CHRISTIANITT AND PLATONISM. 245 is somewhat better than body ; that the form of the body is sensible, and the form of the soul intelligible. Hence they preferred the intelligible to the sensible form. We call those things sen- sible, which can be perceived by corporeal sight and touch — those things intelligible, which can be understood by the look of the soul. For there is no outward beauty, whether in the posture of the body, such as its shape, nor in miOtion, such as is the modulation of music, of which the mind does not judge. Which certainly could not be the case, unless there were in it this better form, with- out the swelling of bulk, without the clamour of sound, without space of place or time. Here, too, unless this form were mutable, no one man would judge better than another of sensible form. In this respect the ingenious would be no quicker than the slow of wit, the experienced than the in- experienced, the ignorant than the educated ; the same person when he is making progress would have no better judgment, in any way, after than he had before. But that which is susceptible of greater and less is unquestionably mutable. Whence those who are gifted with genius and learned in these points have readily come to the conclusion, that the first form cannot be in those things, in which the property of mutability is easily proved to exist. Since, therefore, in their view, both the mind and the body have forms that are more or less fair, and if they had no form would have no existence, they saw that there was something where there is that prime, immutable, and there- fore incomparable form ; and they most justly be- lieved that the principle of things was there, 246 APPENDIX. because it is not made, and all things are made by it. Thus hath God showed unto them, that which may be known of God,^ since the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead."^ God is then at once the principle of truth and the principle of being, the primitive unity, rendered visible to itself and to every intelligence by that splendour of the eternal reason which is the char- acteristic of its essence. But why has this God manifested Himself out- wardly, who manifests Himself eternally to Him- self in the interior light of His word .'* Why has this perfect and self-sufficing Being, gone forth from Himself to produce the universe ? Is it by caprice or chance ? is it by a necessity inherent in His nature ? is it by an act of His will ? It will readily be understood that Plato and St. Augustine could not admit either chance and caprice on one hand, or indigence and necessity on the other, without giving themselves a direct contradiction^ and breaking their metaphysical systems to pieces with their ovm hands. Chance and caprice may be met with in wretched and imperfect beings like men, and even they are subjected to secret laws ; but applied to God, the immutable Being, caprice and chance are unmeaning words. Can God have need of His creatures, and in creating can He be supposed to obey the necessity of com- pleting His being and His life .'* But God is per- fect. He possesses and knows Himself. He enfolds in His being the elements of a blessed life, J Romans i. 19, 20. * d^ Qv. Dei, Lib. viii. C. vi. CHRISTIANITY AND PLATONISM. 247 and of a perfect felicity. If then God becomes fruitful, if He wills to be the Father, if He wills to communicate life and being — it is because God is good. He is not only the Perfect Being and Perfect Intelligence, — He is also Perfect Good- ness. Let us listen alternately to Plato and St. Augustine. "Let us state the cause which has led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and to compose this universe. He was good, and he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, He willed that all things should, as far as possible, be like Him. Whoever, instructed by wise men, shall admit this as the principal reason of the origin and formation of the world will be right." ^ St Augustine accepts unreservedly this explana- tion of the wherefore of creation. He takes up with sympathy, and interprets like a true philo- sopher, the touching and sublime image of God, which Plato presents to us, when he pictures the Father of the universe as full of joy at the spec- tacle of His work in life and motion. St Augus- tine recognises in this trait the God of Genesis, and expounds forcibly, in opposition to a false theology, those much controverted words of the Bible, "And God saw that it was good." " What else are we to understand in the sen- tence which is repeated through all the works of the six days^ — and God saw that it was good — but 1 \Timaus, 29, 30. See the original passage quoted in the note, volume I., p. 230. This passage contains the germ of the optimism of Leibnitz, cf. Estais de Theodicee. — Part I. 8.] [ws 5f KivT]Qhv ai/To Kal ^Qv evev6'r)cre 'o yevvyjcras rrar-qp ■fjydxTdri re Kal ev [^De CivH. Dei, Lib. xii. c, 15. This remarkable chapter illustrates the train of thought by which Leibnitz seems to arrive at the conclu- sion of a world infinite in duration. — See Volume I., P. 240, note.] 264 APPENDIX. being, and that in no being could there be intelli - gence without a soul. Therefore He placed in- telligence in the soul, and the soul in the body ; and He organised the universe so that it should be by its constitution the finest and the most per- fect of works.^ We find the same doctrine and the same language in the i oth book DeLegibiis. "The King of the world imagined, in the distribution of of each part of it, the system which He judged the best, so that the good should be uppermost and the evil undermost in the universe. It is in relation to this view of the whole that He makes His general combination of the places which each being ought to occupy, according to his distinctive qualities."^ In this fine passage Plato does not speak of effective and absolute, but of purely relative evil. For it is his express doctrine that good alone is positive, whilst evil exists merely negatively. St. Augustine is here still full of Plato, and we feel that he finds a pleasure in conciliating without violence, the revered inspirations of the beloved phi- losopher with the express doctrine of Christianity. "In fact, there is no nature originally bad, and this term only indicates the privation of goodness. But from earthly to heavenly things, and from things visible to those which are invisible, there are some good things better than others, unequal for this very reason that they might exist at all. But God is in such sense the great Artificer in great things that He is not less in small things ; and these small things are not to be measured by their greatness, which is nought, but by the wisdom 1 Plato Timxus. 2 d^ l,^ Hb x. CHRISTIANITT AND PLATONISM. 265 of their Framer. As in the visible form of man, if one eyebrow be shaved off almost nothing is subtracted from the body, but much from that beauty which does not consist in bulk, but in similarity and proportion." '^They (certain heretics) do not attentively consider how these things (fire, cold, wild beasts, &c.,) are excellent in their own places and natures, and disposed with admirable order ; and how much beauty they add to the sum-total of things, each for their own part, as to their common country, or how much use they are to us, if we are willing to employ them wisely and well. So certain poisons which are injurious when unfitly used, if properly employed, are changed into wholesome medicines, whilst, on the contrary, even those things by which men are delighted, such as food and drink, and even light, become hurtful by an immoderate and improper use. Whence Divine Providence wai-ns us not to find fault with things foolishly, but rather to search diligently into their real use ; and where our wit falls short, or our weakness fails, to believe that that utility is hidden, just as some things were which we were barely able to discover. The very concealment of their utility is either an exercise in humility, or a diminution of pride. "^ ''It is ridiculous to condemn those defects in animals and trees, and other things mutable and mortal, which are destitute either of sense, or in- tellect, or life, and by which they are subject to dissolution and corruption ; these creatures have De Civ. Dei, lib. XI. c. 22. 266 APPENDIX. received that mode of existence by the will of their Creator, that by their failure and succession they may make up that lower and temporal beauty which is suitable in its kind to the parts of this universe. Things earthly were not to be made equal to things heavenly ; nor was the superiority of the latter a reason why the former should be wanting to the universe. When therefore in those places where it was suitable that these should exist, some spring up as others fail, and the less yield to the greater ; and those which are van- quished acquire the qualities of their conquerors : all this is the order of passing things. The beauty of this order does not please us, because, linked as we are in virtue of our mortality to a portion of it, we cannot take in that universe to which the portions that offend us agree with sufficient fitness and congruity."^ '^All natures, therefore, since they exist, and consequently have their own mode, species, and inner peace and harmony, are assuredly good ; and since they are where they ought to be by the order of nature, they keep what they have re- ceived ; and those things which have not received the gift of perpetual existence, are changed for the better or the worse, according to the need and motion of those things to which they are sub- jected by their Creator's law, tending by Divine Providence to that end, which the mode of the government of the universe includes ; so that not even such corruption as brings on our mortal and mutable natures to dissolution, so makes that which existed to be non-existent, that it does not ■•^ De Civ. Dei, lib. xii. c. 4. PHILOSOPHT AND RELIGION. 267 become in succession what it ought to be. Whence God, who exists in the highest sense, and by whom for this reason all essences are created, which do not exist in the highest sense (because that ought not to be equal to Him which is made out of nothing, and indeed it could not exist at all were it not made by Him), God is not to be blamed through offence at any defects in created objects, and is to be glorified upon the due consideration of all natures." III. Philosophy and Religion. I HAVE said, in one place, that M. Saisset's work, in its second part, leaves the impression upon my mind, that he would have us to consider phi- losophy as the 'TTpoaaycayn to God. Such access to God ('/J '7po6ayo)yr\) is in ScHpture assigned to Christ alone. ^ I am the more bound, in justice to M. Saisset, to cite the following equally Chris- tian and philosophical account of the passage of Augustine from philosophy to Christianity: — ''The reason of Augustine began to gain strength. Could he find repose in the noble doc- trines of Platonism ? His soul was appeased, it was not satisfied. Philosophy was insufficient for him, religion alone could give him unbounded 1 Rom. V, 2; Eph, ii. 18; iii. 12; i Pet. iii. 18. 268 APPENDIX. serenity. Augustine tells us the reason of the insufficiency of spiritual philosophy. Philosophy can enlighten the reason, but it only acts imper- fectly upon the will. It teaches us speculative truths, but it does not bestow upon us the strength to transform them into practical verities. It reveals to us, indeed, on one side, a soul spiritual, free, yearning after virtue, perfection, and happiness ; on the other, a God who is the true God, since He is the principle of all truth, holiness, and happiness. But how shall this soul, at once so sublime and so miserable, attain to this God? Here is what philosophy never taught. Augustine brings out, with wonderful depth and energy of thought, the enormous void w^hich is left in the heart of man, and which reli- gion alone can fill. He gives us his entire con- ception in these strong words : ' Plato made me know the true God, Jesus Christ showed me the way to Him.' This way is Jesus Christ Himself, the God-man, who unites and reconciles the two natures which the voluntary fall of man had sepa- rated. This is the idea which Augustine has conquered for Christianity. Plato had revealed to him the Logos, the Divine Word; but that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, Christianity alone could teach him." — Introduction to De Civitate^ p. 30. INDEX. Absolute, The, li., 55 : Pyrrhonist arguments of the Hamiltonian school ; the Absolute inaccessible to thought, 57 ; Religions so many forms of imagining the Absolute, 61 ; Error in Hamil- tonian proof that the Absolute is unthinkable, 69 ; Pantheistic undetermined Absolute contra- dicts the laws of thought, 74. Anselm, St., on faith and reason, i., 24 ; his ontological argument for the existence of God criticised by Kant, 295. A priori: Existence of God has never been rigorously proved a priori, why, ii., 64, 65. Aquinas: Distinguishes metaphysi- cal evil from rnelum pcena and malum culpa, i., 256, note. Aristotle, quoted i., 136, 137; law in Aristotelian and Baconian systems, 169, 244, 273; ii., 17; on scent in brutes, 176 ; God, the rh vo €P€i(a in Aristotle, 207 ; Aristotelian Theistic proof from primum mobile, 211. Atheism. : Oscillation between Atheism and mysticism of Pan- theistic systems, i., 3-14 ; ii., 103-108 ; the ultimate result of contemporary Pantheism, 122. Augustine, St., Malebranche a J passionate student of, i., 66 ; saved from Pantheism by A . and Plato, 89 ; seems to incline to a world of infinite duration, 240, note ; Christian contrasted with Hegelian immortality, illustrated from, ii., 36, 37; view of God's prescience of man's free actions, 170, 171, note ; quoted ^a«/«z in Appendix II.; "Christianity and Platonic Philosophy in reference to certain metaphysical pro- blems," 242, 269 ; first error of philosophy of history in, 233, 234- Bacon, Lord, quoted to illustrate Kant's "wakening from his dog- matic slumber," i., 272, note ; a famous aphorism derived from St. Augustine, ii., 234, note, Barrow, quoted i., 192, note. Bossuet: Platonic argument forthe existence of God from necessary and universal truths, as stated by, ii., 210, 211, note. Butler, Bishop, i., 85, 139, 157, 161, 164; correspondence be- tween and Clarke, note, i., 183. Cartesianism : see Descartes. Cause, transitive and immanent, ii., 94 ; transitive cause requires matter, ibid, 95 ; immanent cause, 95 ; both imperfect, ibid; to assi- milate God to an immanent cause is to degrade Him, 96 : see Trans- lator's Essay, 216, 218. Comte : quoted, i., 21, note. Consent : argument from, for the existence of God, i., 33, 34, note; omitted by M. Saisset, ii., 214, note. Cuvier: his principle of correlation of organs, ii., 157; opposed by lyo INDEX. Saint-Hilaire's principle of ana- log}"^, 158 ; yet both concur in bringing out one truth of Provi- dence, 161. Descartes : his thorough - paced doubt, i., 29 ; his demonstration that the idea of God comes from Him, 32 ; Cartesian proo{ a firiori, 34 ; God distinct from the uni- verse according to Descartes, 38 ; Descartes inclines to arbitrary will as the cause of cieation, 39; considers God the creator of truth, 41 : Cartesian law of the conser- vation of the same quantity of motion, 43 ; Cartesian theory of an infinite (or indefinite) world, based upon the doctrine of the co- extensiveness of matter with ex- sion, 44. 46 ; the will in some sense infinite, 49 ; strong points in Cartesian philosophy, 52, 54; Pantheistic germs in, 54; abstract and geometrical demonstration of the existence of God, 55 ; danger of theory of continuous creation, 57; reduces spiritual and corpo- real substance to thought and extension, 58-60; felicity of his views on divine and human liberty, 61; Summary', 63. Determinatio : omnis determinatio ne- gatio, Spinozist principle, i., 148; falsity of, ii., 69 ; adopted by Sir W. Hamilton, ibid; arises from the confusion of the limits of a being with its constitutive characte- ristics, 70 ; determination radically different from negation, 70-73. Eternity, notion of, i., 187, 190: see Time. Evil: metaphysical, physical, and moral, i., 256, 260. Fichte : his idealism, ii., 2 ; his primary law of identity, Me= Me, 3 ; his Ego and Non-Ego, 4 ; morality drawn from the Ego, 6. Final Causes: The Socratic proof for the existence of God, first used by Anaxagoras, ii., 206 ; in what sense rejected by Lord Bacon, 207 ; syllogistic form of the argument, ibid; Kant asserts that, pressed too far, it would prove Manicheism, 208 ; recog- nised in Rom. i. 19, 20, ibid, note; its practical power, 209, 210. Finite and Infinite: Two ideas com- mon to all, ii., 201 ; various solu- tions of the problems of their co- existence, 202-205. German philosophy ; weakness of ; the belief that absolute science is attainable by the human mind, ii., 27 ; traced as a common point in Fichte, Schel- ling, and Hegel, 29 ; greatest ideas of, not original, borrowed from Leibnitz and Spinoza, 32, and Alexandria, 35. God : God in the system of Newton. i., 158, 195 ; God, according to Plato, created because he is good, 230, note ; three arguments of rational theology to prove the existence of, 293 ; Kant's ex- posure of defects in these argu- ments does not affect a true Theodicea, ibid; God, according to Kant, one of the three postu- lates of the practical reason, 297 ; weakness of Kantian proof of, 309; exaggerated by Fichte, 310. Is there a God ? ii., 41-45 ; God inconceivable and incomprehen- sible, 48 ; yet not absolutely in- communicable, 53 ; God acces- sible in His manifestation, in- comprehensible in His essence, 66 ; thought In God is not a contradiction, 72 ; can there be anything but God? 77 ; God the Creator, 83 ; a Personal God accused of superstition by the Pantheists, 87 ; the universe the manifestation, not the develop- ment of God, 100 ; His prescience of men's free actions, 171, 172, note. INDEX, 271 Hegel: His Absolute Pantheism, ii., II ; his logic, 12 ; his "identity of contradictories," and of "thought and being," derived from Kant, 1 3 ; the former anti- cipated by Heracletus, 1 7, note. Hegelian principles, 1 6, sqq. ; three momenta of every idea, 12, 20 ; tripartite division of Hege- lian philosophy, 20, 21 ; Hegelian trichotomy carried out through aU science, 23 ; developments of principle of identity of contradic- tories, 24 ; applied to the three great religions, 25 ; Hegelian ism inconsistent with Christianity, or with a belief in personal immor- tality, 36, 37, note. Immensity, i., 187, 190: see Space. Immanent : see Cause. Infinite : see Finite. Infinity of the creation : in what sense taught by Leibnitz, i., 231, 241 ; in what sense by iVT. Saisset, ii., 127; this view not neces- sarily Pantheistic, 128; relative and absolute infinity, 128, sqq.; antinomy upon, 130-144 ; M. Saisset's view not satisfactory, 1 44, note ; taught by the Alex- andrian school, 254 ; St. Augus- tine upon, 255 ; germ of M. Saisset's view in St. Augustine, 262, 263. Kant: The scepticism of, i., 268- 310: Kant, the representative of scepticism, 271 ; his wakening from his dogmatic slumber, 272; first gleam of light supplied to, by certainty of mathematical and physical sciences, 273 ; logic as the formal science of laws of thought shares in that certainty, 274 ; the objective inaccessible, ibid ; the laws which govern human thought have a purely subjective value, 275 ; two ele- ments in the exercise of each of the intellectual functions, 276 ; analytic portion of his work, 277- 284 ; dialectic portion of his work, 284 ; three ideas of pure reason, 285 ; God, the Cosmos, and the soul, have a purely sub- jective value in his system, ibid ; overthrows metaphysics, 286 : answer to his scepticism, 286, sqq. ; antinomies mathematical and dynamic, 289 ; mathemati- cal antinomies not insoluble, 291; rational theology possible, proved against Kant, 292 ; Kant, scep- tical as a metaphysician, dogma- tic as a moralist, 295 ; Kantian idea of duty, 296 ; postulate of the practical reason, 297 ; crite- rion of morality, 298 ; concept of duty, 298 ; of liberty, 299 ; re- ligion attained through morality, 301; chief end of man, 301-303; personal application of the moral law insoluble by Kant, 308 ; weakness of his Theodicea, 309 ; discussion of his famous antinomy on the infinity of the universe, ii., 130-144. Leibnitz : his intellectual career, i., 197; polemics against Cartesian- ism, 207, 208; monadologT/j 209 ; force in the universe, 211; doc- trine fcederis, a difficulty in his system, ibid. ; solution by the theory of pre-established har- mony, 213 ; the " sufficient reason" as a Theistic proof, i.. 215, ii., 213, 214, note ; the Cartesian proof substantially ac- cepted by, i., 216 ; errs in being too exclusive, 217; Spinoza's causa immanens and natura naturens, contrasted with the idea of God the Creator as stated by, 221 ; reality of nature asserted by, against Malebranche, 224; the lex unita, 226, 227 ; latent Pan- theism of denial by Malebranche, ii., 228 ; Plato's answer to the question, " Why this creation rather than another ? " moulded by, into the theory of the "best possible world," i., 230; ques- 72 INDEX. tion why this imperfect world was thought worthy of existence, 231 ; for answer of Malebranche, Leibnitz substitutes that of inf- nity (in a certain sense) of the universe, 231-241 ; objections to that theory, 241-249 ; civHationes caca^ 251; weakness of theor)' of pre-established harmony, 252: the human soul a spiritual auto- maton according to, 254 ; three categories of evil, 256; on the limitation of human knowledge. 261 ; natural immortality of all beings, 261 ; moral personality completes the proof of the im- mortality of the soul, 263 ; beautiful passages quoted from, 261-266; four greatest ideas of Schelling come from, ii., 33. Malebranche, like Spinoza, a pupil of Descartes, i., 66 ; a man of two books, Descartes and St. Augustine, 66 ; how attracted to Cartesianism, 66 ; holds that extension with its modes is the only reality in sensible objects, 68 ; that reason cannot assure us of the existence of bodies, 69 ; that the power of the will is very limited, 72 ; that there is no intermediary idea bejiween us and God, 73 ; seeing all things in God, 74 ; loving all things in God, 75 ; principle of order re- quires a world limited in extent and duration, 78 ; the incarna- tion renders Creation worthy of God, 79 ; theological objection to this view, 80 ; theory of "God's ways" as a solution of disorders in the universe, 81; applied to the solution of theo- logical mysteries, 84 ; rationale of prayer, according to, ii., 188. Newton : his Theism based upon Final Causes, i., 159; difference of Cartesian and Newtonian methods, 161 ; Newtonian me- thod, 162-166 ; definition of law, 169; his Theistic proof, 171-175 ; peculiarities in his Theistic system, 176; his con- ception of infinite space, 177; space according to, in some sense as if God's sensorium, 178 ; Clarke's commentary upon, 181, 183: objections to this, 183; error in Clarke and Ne\^i;on, in conceiving space and time as an attribute of God, 1 94 ; three errors of his Theodicea, 195. Pantheism : Passim, especially, i, , 14; ii., 87-122, 201-205. Pascal, like Descartes and Male- branche, holds infinity of uni- verse, ii., 136; his answer to objections of a religious mind, 138; leading idea which solves them, 139. Personality of God : Passim, especi- ally arguments against, of Fichte, i., 11; of Strauss, 12; person- ality of man as a proof of his immortality, 263. Philosophy : insufficient without revealed religion, ii., 267, 268. Plato : quoted, i., 230 ; time, ac- cording to, a created image of eternity, 239 ; his argument for existence of God from necessary and universal truths, ii., 210; Platonism and Christianity, 242. 266 ; showed St. Augustine the true God, while Jesus Christ alone showed him the way to God, 267, 268. Prayer: not irreconcileable with Divine immutability, ii., 188 ; two degrees of, 189. Progress : first conception of law of, in St. Augustine, ii., 233, 234, note. Religion : on natural and revealed, ii., 231, 242; exaggerated esti- mate of natural religion in i8th centur}', 231, 232; idea of one universal God belongs to revealed INDEX. 273 religion, 234 ; so dois the idea of human fraternity, 235 ; fun- damental articles of natural reli- gion implied in fundamental dogmas of Christianity, 239, sqq. ; natural religion as taught by Kant, Rousseau, and Reid, borrowed from revelation, 241. Saisset : general review of his essay, ii.. 193, 228 ; peculiar merits of, 201, 218 ; his work may in some respects leave an impression which isunfairto the Gospel. 219; defects \ of school of thinkers to which he belongs, 223; questionable view of infinity of creation. 144, note ; of prayer, 190, note. Scaliger : quoted, ii., 177, and passim in notes. Space : notion of indefinite, i., 186; notion of ideal not chimerical^ 1 90 ; error of Ne\vtonian school in conceiving as real as an attribute i of God, and confusing with im- I mensity, 194, 195. Spinoza : violent reaction in favour of> i-? 93 5 his life, 94, 99 ; his Ethica, its mathematical form, 99 ; his De Intellect us Emendatione i a treatise upon Method, 100 ; four degrees in human know- ledge, 100, ic6 ; banishes experi- ence from knowledge, 106 ; his philosophy starts from the idea of "substance," 107; substance in one sense unconditioned, in another determined by attributes, 107 ; thought and extension re- latively infinite, 108; modes of attributes, 109; substance, attri- bute, and mode, 1 1 1 ; no other substance but God, according to, 112; Deus est res extensa, 114; three degrees of the infinite, 116; his conclusion that God is ex- tended, and yet incorporeal, 117; God is absolute thought, accord- ing to, 118; human intellect and Divine thought, 119; asserts that Divine thought has nothing in common with ours, 120; fi-ee will a delusion, 121 ; triple con- clusion on the Divine nature, 123 ; his natura naturens and na- tura naturata, 126, 1 2 7 ; grand total of Spinoza's theology or Pantheism, 129: his anthropo- log)', 130; definition of man, 131 ; of soul, 132; general re- sult of this psychology', 133 ; liberty and moral order denied by, 134; good and evil practi- cally overthrown by, 135; way of putting the moral problem, 137 : his view of the faculties of the soul excludes personal immor- tality, 140, 141 ; theor)' that pas- sive faculties perish with death, but that reason remains, 142 ; theory of future happiness and miser}'-, 142, 143 ; erroneousness of his method, 144 ; dilemma addressed to Spinozists on sub- stance, 145, 147 ; dilemma upon Spinoza's notion of God, 147, 152; general conclusions, 152- 157- Time : investigation of the notion of, i., 185 ; finite and concrete duration, 185, 186 (compare ii., 257, 258, from which it appears that St. Augustine contains the germ of M. Saisset's doctrine) ; notion of indefinite time, 186; notion of ideal, not chimerical, 190. Ultramontanism : position that be- tween Pantheism and itself there is no intermediate position, i., 2 ; mental habits engendered by, in those who are said to be both Christian and philosopher, ii., 224, 225. Waterland: his writings and Bishop Bull's, a safe-guard against Pan- theism, i., II, note; quoted ii., 250, note. Edinburgh . lurnhuU \^ Shears, Prinias, 21 George Street.