Initiation into Philosophy Part 8

CHAPTER VIII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND

The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism: Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.

TRANSFORMISM AND EVOLUTION.--The great philosophic invention of the English of the nineteenth century has been the idea, based on a wide knowledge of natural history, that there never was creation. The animal species had been considered by all the philosophers (except Epicurus and the Epicureans) as being created once and for all and remaining invariable. Nothing of the kind. Matter, eternally fruitful, has transformed itself first into plants, then into lower animals, then into higher animals, then into man; our ancestor is the fish; tracing back yet more remotely, our ancestor is the plant. Transformation (hence the name _transformism_), discrimination and separation of species, the strongest individuals of each kind alone surviving and creating descendants in their image which const.i.tute a species; evolution (hence the name _evolutionism_) of living nature thus operating from the lowest types to the highest and therefore the most complicated; there is nothing but that in the world.

LAMARCK; DARWIN; SPENCER.--The Frenchman Lamarck in the eighteenth century had already conceived this idea; Darwin, purely a naturalist, set it forth clearly, Spencer again stated it and drew from it consequences of general philosophy. Thus, to Spencer, the evolutionist theory contains no immorality. On the contrary, the progressive transformation of the human species is an ascent towards morality; from egoism is born altruism because the species, seeking its best law and its best condition of happiness, perceives a greater happiness in altruism; seeking its best law and its best condition of happiness, perceives that a greater happiness lies in order, regular life, social life, etc.; so that humanity raises itself to a higher and yet higher morality by the mere fact of adapting itself better to the conditions of the life of humanity. Morality develops physiologically as the germ becomes the stem and the bud becomes the flower.

As for religion it is the domain of the unknowable. That is not to a.s.sert that it is nothing. On the contrary it is something formidable and immense. It is the feeling that something, apart from all that we know, surpa.s.ses us and that we shall never know it. Now this feeling at the same time maintains us in a humility highly favourable to the health of the soul and also in a serene confidence in the mysterious being who presides over universal evolution and who, no doubt, is the all-powerful and eternal soul of it.

CHAPTER IX

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE

The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.

The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.

The Kantist School: Renouvier.

Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.

LAROMIGUIeRE: ROYER-COLLARD.--Emerging from the school of Condillac, France saw Laromiguiere who was a sort of softened Condillac, less trenchant, and not insensible to the influence of Rousseau; but he was little more than a clear and elegant professor of philosophy. Royer-Collard introduced into France the Scottish philosophy (Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart) and did not depart from it or go beyond it; but he set it forth with magnificent authority and with a remarkable invention of clear and magisterial formulae.

MAINE DE BIRAN.--Maine de Biran was a renovator. He attached himself to Descartes linking the chain anew that had for so long been interrupted. He devoted his attention to the notion of _ego_. In full reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, he restored a due activity to the _ego_; he made it a force not restricted to the reception of sensations, which transform themselves, but one which seized upon, elaborated, linked together, and combined them. For him then, as for Descartes, but from a fresh point of view, the voluntary deed is the primitive deed of the soul and the will is the foundation of man. Also, the will is not all man; man has, so to say, three lives superimposed but very closely inter-united and which cannot do without one another: the life of sensation, the life of will, and the life of love. The life of sensation is almost pa.s.sive, with a commencement of activity which consists in cla.s.sifying and organizing the sensations; the life of will is properly speaking the "human" life; the life of love is the life of activity and yet again of will, but which unites the human with the divine life. By the ingenious and profound subtlety of his a.n.a.lyses, Maine de Biran has placed himself in the front rank of French thinkers and, in any case, he is one of the most original.

VICTOR COUSIN AND HIS DISCIPLES.--Victor Cousin, who appears to have been influenced almost concurrently by Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, and the German philosophy, yielded rapidly to a tendency which is characteristically French and is also, perhaps, good, and which consists in seeing "some good in all the opinions," and he was eclectic, that is, a borrower. His maxim, which he had no doubt read in Leibnitz, was that the systems are "true in what they affirm and false in what they deny."

Starting thence, he rested upon both the English and German philosophy, correcting one by the other. Personally his tendency was to make metaphysics come from philosophy and to prove G.o.d by the human soul and the relations of G.o.d with the world by the relations of man with matter. To him G.o.d is always an augmented human soul. All philosophies, not to mention all religions, have rather an inclination to consider things thus: but this tendency is particularly marked in Cousin. In the course of his career, which was diversified, for he was at one time a professor and at another a statesman, he varied somewhat, because before 1830 he became very Hegelian, and after 1830 he harked back towards Descartes, endeavouring especially to make philosophic instruction a moral priesthood; highly cautious, very well-balanced, feeling great distrust of the una.s.sailable temerities of the one and in sympathetic relations with the other. What has remained of this eclecticism is an excellent thing, the great regard for the _history_ of philosophy, which had never been held in honour in France and which, since Cousin, has never ceased to be so.

The princ.i.p.al disciples of Cousin were Jouffroy, Damiron, Emile Saisset, and the great moralist Jules Simon, well-known because of the important political part he played.

LAMENNAIS.--Lamennais, long celebrated for his great book, _Essay on Indifference in the Matter of Religion_, then, when he had severed himself from Rome, by his _Words of a Believer_ and other works of revolutionary spirit, was above all a publicist; but he was a philosopher, properly speaking, in his _Sketch of a Philosophy_. To him, G.o.d is neither the Creator, as understood by the early Christians, nor the Being from whom the world emanates, as others have thought. He has not created the world from nothing; but He has created it; He created it from Himself, He made it issue from His substance; and He made it issue by a purely voluntary act. He created it in His own image; it is not man alone who is in the image of G.o.d, but the whole world. The three Persons of G.o.d, that is, the three characteristics, power, intelligence, and love are found--diminished and disfigured indeed, but yet are to be found--in every being in the universe. They are especially our own three powers, under the form of will, reason, sympathy; they are also the three powers of society, under the forms of executive power, deliberation, and fraternity. Every being, individual or collective, has in it a principle of death if it cannot reproduce however imperfectly all the three terms of this trinity without the loss of one.

AUGUSTE COMTE.--Auguste Comte, a mathematician, versed also in all sciences, constructed a pre-eminently negative philosophy in spite of his great pretension to replace the negations of the eighteenth century by a positive doctrine; above all else he denied all authority and denied to metaphysics the right of existence. Metaphysics ought not to exist, do not exist, are a mere nothing. We know nothing, we can know nothing, about the commencement or the end of things, or yet their essence or their object; philosophy has always laid down as its task a general explanation of the universe; it is precisely this general explanation, all general explanation of the aggregate of things, which is impossible. This is the negative part of "positivism." It is the only one which has endured and which is the _credo_ or rather the _non credo_ of a fairly large number of minds.

The affirmative part of the ideas of Comte was this: what can be done is to make a cla.s.sification of sciences and a philosophy of history. The cla.s.sification of sciences according to Comte, proceeding from the most simple to the most complex--that is, from mathematics to astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology to end at sociology, is generally considered by the learned as interesting but arbitrary. The philosophy of history, according to Comte, is this: humanity pa.s.ses through three states: theological, metaphysical, positive. The theological state (antiquity) consists in man explaining everything by continual miracles; the metaphysical state (modern times) consists in man explaining everything by ideas, which he still continues to consider somewhat as beings, by abstractions, ent.i.ties, vital principle, attraction, gravitation, soul, faculty of the soul, etc. The positive state consists in that man explains and will explain all things, or rather limits himself and will limit himself to verifying them, by the links that he will see they have with one another, links he will content himself with observing and subsequently with controlling by experiment. Also there is always something of the succeeding state in the preceding state and the ancients did not ignore observation, and there is always something of the preceding state in the succeeding state and we have still theological and metaphysical habits of mind, theological and metaphysical "residues," and perhaps it will be always thus; but for theology to decline before metaphysics and metaphysics before science is progress.

Over and above this, Comte in the last portion of his life--as if to prove his doctrine of residues and to furnish an example--founded a sort of religion, a pseudo-religion, the religion of humanity. Humanity must be worshipped in its slow ascent towards intellectual and moral perfection (and, in consequence, we should specially worship humanity to come; but Comte might reply that humanity past and present is venerable because it bears in its womb the humanity of the future). The worship of this new religion is the commemoration and veneration of the dead. These last conceptions, fruits of the sensibility and of the imagination of Auguste Comte, have no relation with the basis of his doctrine.

RENOUVIER.--After him, by a vigorous reaction, Renouvier restored the philosophy of Kant, depriving it of its too symmetrical, too minutely systematic, too scholastic character and bringing it nearer to facts; from him was to come the doctrine already mentioned, "pragmatism," which measures the truth of every idea by the moral consequence that it contains.

TAINE.--Very different and attaching himself to the general ideas of Comte, Hippolyte Taine believed only in what has been observed, experimented, and demonstrated; but being also as familiar with Hegel as with Comte, with Spencer as with Condillac, he never doubted that the need of going beyond and escaping from oneself was also a fact, a human fact eternal among humanity, and of this fact he took account as of a fact observed and proved, saying if man is on one side a "fierce and lascivious gorilla," on the other side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a double nature, mysterious hymen," as Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the baseness in ideas and actions as well as all the sublimity in ideas and actions of humanity. Personally he was a Stoic and his practice was the continuous development of the intelligence regarded as the condition and guarantee of morality.

RENAN.--Renan, destined for the ecclesiastical profession and always preserving profound traces of his clerical education, was, nevertheless, a Positivist and believed only in science, hoping everything from it in youth and continuing to venerate it at least during his mature years. Thus formed, a "Christian Positivist," as has been said, as well as a poet above all else, he could not proscribe metaphysics and had a weakness for them with which perhaps he reproached himself. He extricated himself from this difficulty by declaring all metaphysical conceptions to be only "dreams,"

but sheltered, so to say, by this concession he had made and this precaution he had taken, he threw himself into the dream with all his heart and reconst.i.tuted G.o.d, the immortal soul, the future existence, eternity and creation, giving them new, unforeseen, and fascinating names. It was only the idea of Providence--that is, of the particular and circ.u.mstantial intervention of G.o.d in human affairs, which was intolerable to him and against which he always protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, "G.o.d does not act by particular wills." And yet he paid a compliment, which seems sincere, to the idea of grace, and if there be a particular and circ.u.mstantial intervention by G.o.d in human affairs, it is certainly grace according to all appearances.

He was above all an amateur of ideas, a dilettante in ideas, toying with them with infinite pleasure, like a superior Greek sophist, and in all French philosophy no one calls Plato to mind more than he does.

He possessed a charming mind, a very lofty character, and was a marvellous writer.

TO-DAY.--The living French philosophers whom we shall content ourselves with naming because they are living and receive contemporary criticism rather than that of history, are MM. Fouillee, Theodule Ribot, Liard, Durckheim, Izoulet, and Bergson.

THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY.--It is impossible to forecast in what direction philosophy will move. The summary history we have been able to trace sufficiently shows, as it seems to us, that it has no regular advance such that by seeing how it has progressed one can conjecture what path it will pursue. It seems in no sense to depend, or at all events, to depend remarkably little, at any period, on the general state of civilization around it, and even for those who believe in a philosophy of history there is not, as it appears to me, a philosophy of the history of philosophy. The only thing that can be affirmed is that philosophy will always exist in response to a need of the human mind, and that it will always be both an effort to gather scientific discoveries into some great general ideas and an effort to go beyond science and to seek as it can the meaning of the universal enigma; so that neither philosophy, properly speaking, nor even metaphysics will ever disappear. Nietzsche has said that life is valuable only as the instrument of knowledge. However eager humanity may be and become for branches of knowledge, it will be always pa.s.sionately and indefatigably anxious about complete knowledge.