Note 224 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

But Cabanis, in his turn, made the mistake of Helvétius and Condillac. Not content with presenting the results of his study in the province in which he was relatively master, he undertook to reach ultimate truth in those of ethics and philosophy, in which he was not so. In the preface to the Rapports he lays down an emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes: “ignorance the most invincible,” he declares, is all that is possible to man on that issue.224 But not only does he in his main work freely and loosely generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the ethical problem: he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les causes premières, addressed to Fauriel,225 in which the aging intelligence is seen reverting to à priori processes, and concluding in favour of a “sort of stoic pantheism”226 with a balance towards normal theism and a belief in immortality. The final doctrine did not in the least affect the argument of the earlier, which was simply one of positive science; but the clerical world, which had in the usual fashion denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the score of any attack by Cabanis upon religion, but because of its incompatibility with the notion of the soul, naturally made much of the mystical,227 and accorded its framer authority from that moment.