Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History Part 10

Its relations to philosophy will become clear if we call to mind a very simple distinction. Philosophy to-day comprises two parts very different in nature: a study of the thinking subject, or, as it is sometimes called, a critique of reason, or a theory of knowledge; in the second place, a doctrine on the essence and the necessary relations of beings, a metaphysic, or a theory of the universe.

It is easy to see that all the positive sciences are differently related to these two parts of philosophy. None of them, for instance, can dispense with the first, with the criticism of our faculty of knowing and of our means of reasoning, under penalty of mistaking the worth of its own hypotheses, and even the regularity of its processes.

It is clear that a physicist cannot dispense with correct syllogisms or with vigilance against illusions of the senses and other errors of method. But, on the other hand, no savant would accept the yoke of any metaphysic whatever which should come to him _a priori_ to dictate to him its conclusions. Upon indications of this nature he desires to form hypotheses and make new experiments; but, as a savant, he will never p.r.o.nounce before that supreme and decisive consultation of facts.

It is exactly the same with the relations of dogmatics to philosophy.

It will have recourse to it for all that regards the theory of knowledge in general and the theory of religious knowledge in particular. Like every other science it needs to ascertain the scope of its instrument in order that it may be under no illusion as to the worth of the work it accomplishes. But also, like every other science, it has the right and the duty to challenge and neglect all general metaphysic which, flowing from another principle than that of the Christian religion, would dictate to it articles of faith or rules of morality.

Let it not be said that every theory of knowledge soon begets a metaphysic in its own image. We know theories which deny the very possibility of metaphysics, and it is a question whether a truly Christian dogmatic accommodates itself to it better than any other theory. It may be maintained in fact that the act of faith which is the expression of the conservating energy of the ego and the principle of all religion is accomplished all the more freely when there is no knowledge, properly speaking, there to hinder it. A common prejudice requires that we should have metaphysics as a support to religion. It is on religion, on the contrary, that metaphysics and ethics rest. Man did not become religious when he heard that there were G.o.ds; he only had the idea of G.o.d and believed in Him because he was religious.

Mystery was the natural cradle of piety. Faith is much less an acquisition of knowledge than a means of salvation and a source of strength and life. It is one thing to speculate on the universal problem; it is another to place one's self by the heart in a living relation of trust, of fear, or of love to the mysterious Being on whom all other beings depend. Religion may possibly be under the necessity of ending in a metaphysic, but a metaphysic does not necessarily end in religion, for there are some kinds of metaphysic which either exclude religion or render it impossible.

A theory of religion, dogmatics can have no other starting point than religious phenomena themselves. From this concrete and experimental principle, from this state of soul produced by the immediate feeling of a necessary relation to G.o.d, the entire system should spring and develop. What is not in religious experience should find no place in religious science, and should be banished from it.

It would only be to its detriment, then, that the science of dogmas should throw away its liberty by espousing beforehand metaphysical theses or the final conclusions of any philosophy whatsoever. These theses, springing from another source than religion, have no right, in that religion, to become articles of faith. Rational truths not born of religious feeling would be in dogmatics so many dead weights and heterogeneous elements, which would lead to the greatest incoherence.

To build up a professedly revealed theology on a professedly natural one is to construct a system without either unity or profound connection. Such a dualism of principles is as intolerable to science as to piety. Instead of dogmatics subordinating itself to metaphysics, metaphysics ought to include dogmatics as well as the results of all the other sciences.

It is altogether different with the criticism of our means of knowing.

In every order of science it is mere levity of mind to commence or to conclude researches a little general without having first determined the precise conditions of real knowledge. The absence of a philosophical critique of this nature explains why savants, so rigorous in their special studies, show a philosophical _navety_ so great in the conclusions that they draw from them, and so readily crown their discoveries by a pseudo-metaphysic that they impose upon the mult.i.tude with all the authority and prestige of science. More than any others, theologians are guilty of this abuse when they wish to make their science the sum of universal knowledge. They would be more soundly religious were they more modest and more reserved. An excellent means of putting ourselves on our guard against this illusion and its deplorable consequences will be to inst.i.tute, without further delay, a rigorous criticism of religious knowledge. This task, I believe, has never been seriously attempted in France. It is, however, as indispensable to the right conduct of the mind as it is fitted radically to cure us of our dogmatic pride and to inspire us with tolerance and humility. This will be the object of the following chapter.

CHAPTER IV

CRITICAL THEORY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

He who says consciousness says science, or at least, the beginning of science. Consciousness implies a representation. In other words, no modification of the ego becomes conscious except by awakening in the mind a representative image of the object that has produced it and of the relation of that object to the ego. All our sensations and all our feelings are accompanied by images. The religious sentiment does not attain to the light of consciousness in any other way. It is because it is a state or conscious movement of the soul that it becomes, it also, a principle of knowledge.

No kind of mental life begins with clear and abstract ideas. An idea is derived from an image, and, in order to produce the image, an external or an internal impression is necessary. It is true that the idea or the image has, in its turn, the mysterious power of reproducing and renewing the sensation or the feeling from which it sprang. On this is based the art of teaching and the power of tradition. But this must not be allowed to produce in us the illusion that originally the idea preceded the sensation. The development of the mental life of children is proof of the contrary. We only know that by which we or our kind have been in some degree affected. Our ideas are simply the algebraic notation of our impressions and movements. That which is outside our life is outside our view. Without the external sensations which represent the action of the world on the ego, we should have no knowledge of the world. Without the subjective reaction of the ego against that action of the world, a reaction which manifests itself in the moral, aesthetic, and religious life of the soul, we should have no moral or religious idea, no notion of the good or the beautiful. All our metaphysical ideas come from that source.

It remains, of course, to inquire what is the worth of ideas of this order. It is the particularly complex and delicate question that we here approach. There is no serious philosophy to-day that does not start with a theory of knowledge. Religious knowledge cannot escape by any special privilege. The criticism of it is all the more necessary, because illusion, in this matter, is so easy, and because it clothes itself in a sacred character. The theologian who undertakes the scientific treatment of dogmas without first measuring the scope of the instrument he employs, and estimating the worth of the materials he uses, knows not what he is doing.

1. _Obsolete Theories of Knowledge_

Formerly three explanations of our knowledge prevailed in philosophy: the hypothesis of a primitive revelation; the idealist theory; and the sensualist theory.

The first was revived three quarters of a century ago by de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre. It no longer needs to be refuted. According to this hypothesis, our ideas came to us, not from within, from the naturally productive force of the mind, but from without, by way of supernatural communication. This communication from G.o.d consisted at the outset in the gift to man of a perfect language. The exact word brought with it the right idea. "Man," said de Bonald, "thought his speech before speaking his thought." If errors have crept in and reigned among men, it is because they were not able to preserve without corruption the sacred deposit of that primitive language and philosophy. Is it necessary to show how thoroughly this theory is contradicted by psychology and history? It is said that in certain countries there still exists a Botany, according to which the Great Spirit, having created the trees of the forest, comes in the night each Spring to stick the leaves and blossoms on the branches. The immediate communication of right ideas and supernatural virtues to man in his infancy implies a contradiction; it forces us to imagine in him thoughts prior to the action of his intellect and virtues previous to the action of his will. Lastly, it is to misconceive the nature of the mind to make of it something pa.s.sive and inert. The mind is the thinking and willing force--that is to say, a force productive of thoughts and volitions. If it is not this, it is nothing. We must affirm, no doubt, that G.o.d creates this force and directs its evolution, but it is a contradiction to say at once that He creates it and that it is unproductive. It cannot exist without being productive.

It is of its very essence to produce. Mind is only mind in so far as it is a force that produces thought and volition.

The aim of this hypothesis, moreover, was to found the divine authority of an infallible tradition by making it go back to the earliest times.

These revealed ideas, by the very fact that they are the ideas of G.o.d, have an absolute and eternal value. Man finds them guaranteed in the religious caste, to which the deposit has been confided, and which has preserved them intact. Thus arose the idea of an infallible authority.

So they say. But the idea of dogmatic authority never appears in early times; it is of very late date; it is elaborated very slowly, according to a psychological law that we have already discovered. Everywhere, and in the traditions of all religions and Churches, it appears after all other doctrines as the keystone which closes and binds together the arch. It is an ultimate dogma logically derived from other dogmas, and afterwards used as a warrant for them. Such was the dogma of Papal Infallibility promulgated at the Vatican Council of 1870; such, in Protestantism, was the dogma of Biblical infallibility, completed by the theologians of the seventeenth century. To base the value of religious notions on a supernatural authority, with a view to rendering them indisputable, is a vicious circle; the authority, it is evident, is the product of these notions themselves. All systems of authority end by shutting themselves up in this circle and peris.h.i.+ng in it.

The idealist theory of the origin of ideas is but the philosophical form of the preceding one. It also is an endeavour to trace back our general ideas to the divine understanding as their primary source.

Pure ideas, type-ideas, according to Plato, const.i.tute the intelligible Cosmos of which material phenomena are but the unreal and ephemeral shadows. Clearly to conceive these divine ideas is to reach the transcendent reality of things--it is to possess true knowledge. From Platonism to the realism of scholasticism, from this to the geometry of Spinoza and the dialectic of Hegel, the form of the theory has varied constantly; the substance of it has remained the same. Hegel always said: "The rational is the real," and, for him, as for Plato, absolute knowledge resolved itself into perfect logic.

Psychology has long since dispelled the scientific illusion of idealism. We do not wish to recall the pitiful failure of all the attempts formerly made, and even in our own times, to deduce _a priori_ the laws of the physical world. Everywhere, in this domain, the method of observation has superseded the deductive method. The reason of it is simple. An idea, however lofty, can only give out what it contains, _i.e._ other ideas. We know very well that our ideas are in our mind, but they are only in it in the state of ideas. How do we know that the objects which they represent exist outside ourselves? Only by logic can we pa.s.s from the idea of a thing to the external reality of that thing. Experience is necessary. Without it our ideas are empty forms.

One may conjure with them for ever without ever reaching anything objective. They are sh.e.l.ls without kernels. Pure idealism, so far from furnis.h.i.+ng a solid theory of knowledge, ends in scepticism, _i.e._ in the negation of knowledge.

The excesses and failures of idealist theories of knowledge have always given rise in history to the opposite theory of sensualist nominalism, according to which our ideas are simply transformed sensations.

Unhappily, sensualism, in laying down this axiom, never explained the nature and still less the cause of that marvellous transformation.

"There is nothing in the understanding," said Locke, "that was not previously in the senses." To which Leibniz rightly replied: "Except the understanding itself;" that is to say, the force which from sensation draws knowledge. By suppressing this ideal principle, you remove from science all element of necessity--that is to say, all general worth. With Hume, the sensualist theory, so far from giving an account of knowledge, ended in pure phenomenalism, _i.e._ once more, in scepticism. It is, in fact, with isolated sensation as with pure idea; you may press it as much as you will, you will never get out of it anything but what it contains--that is to say, contingencies without any connection between each other. Materialism is still more embarra.s.sed to furnish any theory whatever of knowledge, for it does not even succeed in explaining sensation. Between a mechanical movement and a phenomenon of consciousness there is an impa.s.sable abyss. One of the most evident marks of the inferiority of the philosophy of French positivism is that it has not even approached this problem of knowledge, and that it has been able to const.i.tute itself without any other than the popular psychology.

2. _The Kantian Theory of Knowledge_

Thinkers may to-day be divided into two cla.s.ses: those who date from before Kant, and those who have received the initiation and, so to speak, the philosophical baptism of his critique. These two cla.s.ses of minds will always have much ado to understand each other. The first are dogmatists or Pyrrhonists. The second no longer comprehend either dogmatism or Pyrrhonism. For them, the point of view has been displaced. Thanks to Kant, we judge both our knowledge and our faculty of knowing; we give an account to ourselves of the conditions in which it performs its functions, of the forms which determine it, and of the limits that it cannot pa.s.s. Kant compared, without exaggeration, the revolution which he effected in philosophy to that which the discovery of Copernicus effected in the system of the world. In philosophy also the sun has ceased to move round the earth, and the ancient illusion has been vanquished and dispersed. The idea and the reality no longer coincide; they are disjoined. The intelligible no doubt is real; but it is not certain that all the real is intelligible. Reality appears to us now as surpa.s.sing not only our knowledge, but our means of knowing. The religious notion of mystery has entered into consciousness. Man has attained to intellectual humility. Like his body, his mind is a mean between the infinitely great and the infinitely little, between nothing and everything. The deductive philosophy of the unity and necessary and continuous unfolding of an eternal substance, gives place to the philosophy of observation, which will be found to be that of the antinomies whose permanent conflict produces the ascensional progress of the world and of life.

To make Kantism end in scepticism shows a lack of intelligence. His system enables us, on the contrary, to form the _scientific_ theory of science. The truth is to be found neither in dogmatism nor in Pyrrhonism, both of which Pascal combated with equal vigour. In modern science there is a cert.i.tude invincible to the subtlest Pyrrhonism; but there is also in it a sense of the limits of our knowing faculty and of the relative character of our most solid constructions which forbids man ever to be puffed up to the point of believing himself to be G.o.d.

To be in this mean is to be in the truth. The same critique which establishes the validity of human knowledge lays down the limits beyond which it cannot go. We have come to know ourselves better, and that is the mark of all true progress in philosophy. _Know thyself_ is always its first rule and its final fruit.

The Kantian theory of knowledge, while satisfying the mind, at the same time sets forth the essential antinomies whose normal play const.i.tutes the very life of the ego and explains its multiple manifestations.

There are two elements in all knowledge: an _a posteriori_ element which comes from experience, and an _a priori_ element which comes from the thinking subject. The first is the _matter_ of knowledge; the second is the _form_. Separate, these two elements are unproductive.

With the first alone we have but a reality not known; with the second alone we have but a knowing without reality. Their union renders them mutually fruitful by organising the data of experience into the necessary forms of thought. The principle of causation, _e.g._, is not in things; it is in the mind, and it is the mind which spontaneously connects all phenomena. Science, at bottom, consists in nothing but the causal connection of things. Where the chain breaks, positive knowledge ends. This clear sense of ignorance on points on which we really are ignorant is still a part of science and one of its princ.i.p.al forces, for it proves that it knows itself very well, and also knows the conditions apart from which it no longer exists. But, whether triumphant or held in check, positive science can neither renounce its task and method nor modify their nature. It can only seek to complete, or rather to lengthen, the chain of phenomena. The success of this ever-identical effort, an effort always in the same direction, is what is called its conquests and its progress. It follows that the irresistible tendency of science will be to extend over the whole of the phenomena the ever-tighter network of an invincible necessity.

Determinism is its last word.

On the other hand, the ego which knows is an acting ego. Its thought itself, properly speaking, and this display of science, are only one of the forms of its inner activity. It wills, and it must will. If the world acts on it by sensation, it acts incessantly on the world by its volitions. And let it not be said that the will simply represents a mechanical reaction of the ego, exactly equivalent to the action of the external world upon it,--that it is a simple transformation of energy,--for this is not true. Without here raising the question of liberty, it is certain that I do not give back in will simply what I have received under the form of sensation. I deliberate on the motives which urge me to act; I choose between them; I feel myself under obligation; I feel that I should will the good. It is impossible to conceive of moral action without the idea of end. I conceive it, therefore, under a different form from that of mechanical action.

Responsibility and obligation are not less the necessary forms of will than logical necessity is the necessary form of thought. But soon there arises in man the most tragical of conflicts. Scientific determinism renders moral activity unintelligible, and moral activity comes into collision with the determinism of science. If mechanical determinism be absolutely true, my will is null; I am simply an automaton. If my responsibility is real, if my personal energy is not an illusion, there is in the world something besides matter, and, for man, there are other than mechanical laws. Thus divided in myself, I ought not to practise what I know, and I cannot do what I ought. I remain floating between a science which is not moral and a morality that I feel to be unscientific. My intellect destroys my will. As the one develops the other dies. The better I know the laws of the world the less reason I have for living and acting. My morality, at each act, gives the lie to my science, and my science, at each affirmation, refutes my morality. Such is the deep malady, the spiritual misery, of the best of our contemporaries. They feel that, with them, vital energy is in inverse proportion to the extent and penetration of thought. It is then that they declare that pessimism, a radical pessimism, is the truth; that existence, will, desire, are the chief evils, and that the supreme effort of science should be to cure us of them by delivering us from all our illusions; after which, in its turn, it will be extinguished itself, like a flame that has consumed the food on which it fed.

Still, the conscious subject is one. You cannot proclaim it vain without at the same time proclaiming the vanity of its ideas as well as of its efforts. The ruin of morality draws after it the ruin of science. Moreover, the conflict of which we speak is different from a theoretical contradiction whose solution may be indefinitely postponed.

The conflict is practical; it is of the vital not of the intellectual order. It is an internal dissolution of the being itself, a struggle between its elementary faculties, in which the mind is weakened, droops, and dies.

The solution, therefore, if there be one, can only be a practical one, a solution springing from the will. What is needed is to give the mind confidence in itself. It is necessary to increase the energy of its inner life in order that it may find the strength to believe and to affirm in face of the universe the sovereignty of spirit. This is the same as saying that the solution of the conflict is religion; not an external religion, doubtless, in whose hands the thought and will of man should abdicate--that would in no wise re-establish their inner and living harmony--but an inward religion, an activity of spirit which grasps in itself the supremacy of the universal spirit, and by an act of intimate confidence, an instinctive impulse of the being ready to perish, affirms to itself its own dignity, and makes to spring up out of its own substance the irresistible religion of spirit. Thus the conflict of the theoretic reason and the practical reason eternally engenders religion in the heart of man. Let us show more clearly still this necessary genesis of religion.

In observing, in reasoning, in generalising, I arrive at a certain knowledge of that which surrounds me; this knowledge of external objects forms within me the contents of what I call my knowledge of the world. On the other hand, in acting, in living, in exercising my will, is formed what I call my knowledge of myself. Consciousness of self, and consciousness of the world, condition and determine each other, and cannot exist without each other. But, at the same time, they enter into mortal conflict. The ego desires to master the world, and the world, in the end, devours the ego. Thought triumphs over Nature and contemns it; Nature takes its revenge and swallows up thought in its abyss. The consciousness of self wishes to bring over to itself the knowledge of the world; and this absorbs and devours the consciousness of self. The synthesis and reconciliation can only be found in the consciousness of something superior to self and the world on which both of them absolutely depend. This synthetic and pacificatory consciousness is the consciousness of universal and sovereign Being; it is the sense of the presence of G.o.d. To escape from his distress, man has never had any but this means of salvation. The savage has recourse to it, according to his degree of intellectual life, when, under terror of the phenomena of Nature, and of ever-threatening death, he calls to his aid the obscure power of his G.o.ds. The philosopher, nourished on speculation, and arrived at the dualistic and divided consciousness of the disciples of Kant, obeys the same instinctive impulse and the same vital necessity when he seeks in the notion of G.o.d the conciliation of the conflict which he feels between the ego and the world, between pure reason and the practical reason. He needs a universal Being on whom he feels himself to depend, and on whom he may equally make to depend the whole universe. In uniting himself to Him, he affirms and confirms his own life; he feels G.o.d to be active and present, in his thought under the form of logical law, in his will under the form of moral law. He is saved by faith in the interior G.o.d, in whom is realised the unity of his being. It is therefore true to say that the human mind cannot believe in itself without believing in G.o.d, and that, on the other hand, it cannot believe in G.o.d without finding Him within itself.

That is a _salto mortale_, some superficial spirits will say, astonished at an apparent deduction which thus makes the religious activity of the ego spring from the depths of its own distress and despair. To which we respond: it is, on the contrary, a _salto vitale_, the instinctive and at the same time reflective act which moves the mind to affirm to itself the absolute value of spirit.

Considered at this first psychological moment of its birth, the religious faith of spirit in itself and in its sovereignty is only the higher form, and, as it were, the prolongation of the instinct of conservation which reigns in all Nature. The mind, crushed beneath the weight of things, stands up and triumphs in the feeling of the eternal dignity of spirit.

Inward religion, sacred instinct of life, divine, immortal force which necessarily appears at the first movement of spirit, how they misunderstand thee who only see in thee the slavery of man! On the contrary, it is thou alone that breakest all the chains that Nature binds on him, that savest him from death and from extinction, and that openest out to his beneficent activity an infinite career by a.s.sociating him with the work of G.o.d: it is thou that renderest his spontaneity creative, that renewest his forces, and that, plunging him into the fountain whence he issued, maintainest in him an eternal youth!

This issue to the conflict of our faculties is exclusively of the practical order; it is an act of trust, not a demonstration; an affirmation which presupposes, not scientific proofs, but an act of moral energy. This act must be performed, or we must die. There is no constraint except the desire to live, but this is irresistible, if not for each individual in particular, at least for mankind in general.

The individual may commit suicide; humanity desires to live, and its life is a perpetual act of faith.

Nevertheless, this practical solution implies the possibility and the hope of a theoretical one; and this in two ways: in the first place, psychologically, because the ego of pure reason is also that of the practical reason and feels itself to be one and the same knowing and acting subject; then, speculatively, because in believing in the sovereignty of spirit in ourselves and in the world we affirm that man and the world have in spirit the principle and the aim of their being.

In G.o.d present in us, are reconciled, at least in hope, the ego and the world. This religious faith of spirit in itself permits us to antic.i.p.ate the future solution, and to affirm that at the summit of their complete development, and in their entire perfection, science and the moral life will rejoin and penetrate each other. Mathematicians tell us that two parallel lines meet in infinity. So in G.o.d are reconciled the pure reason and the practical reason, which here seem to us to develop themselves on parallel lines without ever being able to meet and to unite. Let us never forget that we spring out of nothingness, or, if you will, out of unconsciousness, and that we slowly emerge into the light of consciousness. Man is in course of being made spirit. If it be well considered, it will be seen that this irreducible ant.i.thesis that fills us with despair is the very condition of our spiritual development. The mind only disengages itself from the bonds of its mother, Nature, by an incessant struggle. Struggle means opposition and victory. Experience demonstrates that nothing spiritualises, deepens, or purifies morality more than the contradictions of science; and finally, that nothing helps science more than a high and disinterested morality. These two sisters, enemies in appearance, are twins, and they are seen to grow and triumph together by the exercise they give to each other through their constant contradictions.

3. _The Two Orders of Knowledge_

... The ego can only be conscious of itself and of its modifications.

That which does not touch it in any way remains unknown. Now, the modifications of the ego may be reduced to two groups. The one comes to it from without, representing the action of things upon it; these are sensations. The other springs up within, representing the action of the ego on things, its spontaneous energy, its volitions, and its acts. Thence come the two const.i.tuent elements of every consciousness, the distinction between object and subject, the ego and the non-ego, thought and the object of thought. We call _objective_ every idea or quality that it is possible to refer to the object alone, independently of the action or disposition of the subject. We call _subjective_ all knowledge implying ident.i.ty of subject and object, all discipline bearing on the rules of the spontaneous activity of the ego, since without that activity the rules which should direct it would not exist.

In the first case we are conscious of a distinction and even of a radical opposition between the object and the subject of knowledge; in the second, we are conscious of their fundamental ident.i.ty in this sense, that the thinking and willing subject presents itself to itself as an object of thought and study. In order that the two orders of knowledge, engendered by this duality of origin, may be brought into logical unity, it is necessary either that the subject should enter into the object, that the ego should be absorbed by the non-ego, so that the laws of the non-ego should become the laws of the ego--and that would be materialism; or that the object should enter into the subject so that the laws of the subject should become the law of things--and that would be idealism. Outside these two systems, equally violent and absolute, the two orders of knowledge are irreducible, because in us the consciousness of the ego and the consciousness of the world are at present in conflict. Morality is neither reconciled to science, nor science to morality. In their _rapprochement_, progressive to infinity, a hiatus always subsists.

One would be greatly deceived if he reduced this difference to the ordinary opposition between the physical and the spiritual, between external and internal phenomena. Sensation, the foundation and the starting point of the objective order of knowledge, is just as internal as volition. On the other hand, man is a part of what we call Nature; and, as such, he is the theatre of a crowd of internal and external phenomena which, so far as that is possible, should be observed, described, explained, by the principle of causality, like all the other phenomena of the physical order. For example, the mechanism of memory and that of logic, the correlation between mental activities and the physiological modifications of the cerebro-spinal system, the laws of a.s.sociation of ideas, the stable forms of the human understanding, all that psychology that is now called "scientific psychology," rightfully enters into the domain of the sciences of Nature. It is a province that may be explored like all the others. The psychological observations made in it are objective not less than those of physiology, for the reason that the phenomena that are observed, while occurring in the ego, are nevertheless produced in it without the voluntary intervention of the ego, and even without its express consent. Moreover, they do not imply or provoke on the part of the ego any moral judgment properly so called.