Note 306 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Damiron, writing his Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than reassuring, commenting on the “strange skepticism” of Lamennais as to the human reason.306 For himself, he takes up the parable of Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had now reached conviction. It was no longer a question of whether, but of when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller intelligence. “In this religious regeneration we shall be to the Christians what the Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the patriarchs: we shall be Christians and something more.” The theologian of the future will be half-physicist, half-philosopher. “We shall study God through nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our natural lights.” Christianity has been a useful discipline; but “our education is so advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers; and, having no need of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from science.”307 “Prayer is good, doubtless,” but it “has only a mysterious, uncertain, remote action on our environment.”308 All this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the École Normale. Not to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain ventured to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under the Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment of skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne’s, the expression of a temperament slow to reach rational positions, but surely driven thither. As a boy of twelve, when a priest sought to prepare him for communion, he had shown such abnormal incredulity that the priest gave him up; and later he read omnivorously among the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering ground which others traverse early. He did not become a communicant till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at twenty-seven; and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.