Fifth Meditation. Pantheism.

No two essays at philosophy are more dissimilar—I should indeed say more contradictory—than Pantheism and Positivism. What Positivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism seeks to accomplish; what Positivism forbids man to seek, Pantheism promises to give him. It is the fundamental principle of Positivism to confine the human mind to the finite world, its facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a knowledge and a comprehension of Infinity, and of the relations of the finite with Infinity. "I have explained God, God's nature and his attributes," says Spinoza. [Footnote 62]

I hasten to explain, in order to prevent misconstruction; it is to Pantheism, properly so called—to the sole system that merits the name—that my remarks are here applicable. "We must," says M. Cousin, "it seems, distinguish two kinds of Pantheism. The assertion that this visible universe, indefinite or infinite, suffices to itself, and that there is nothing to be sought for beyond, is the Pantheism of Diderot, Helvetius, de la Mettrie, d'Holbach. This Pantheism is clearly Atheism, and it would not be very easy to comprehend the complacent indulgence that should spare it that name of Atheism—a name, unfortunately, of ancient date, which would then have no longer any object to fit it, and would need to be erased from our dictionary. But is it possible for a similar Pantheism to be imputed to Spinoza? With the French Encyclopedists, things exist in particularity and individuals singly: the universe is an assemblage of individuals—an assemblage without unity, or of which the sole unity is a presumed primary matter, which the philosopher admits or which he does not admit, but with which his thought has no business, to occupy itself. With Spinoza, on the contrary, the single substance is all, and the individuals are nothing. This substance is not the nominal unity of the assemblage of individuals, each of which exists singly, but is the single really existing substance, and in the presence of that substance the world and man are but shadows; so that from the 'Ethics' may be gathered an exaggerated Theism which leaves no individual existing as such. Rigorously, and at bottom, there is here perhaps only one and the same system, but a system, nevertheless, with two very different forms—the one, where God is nothing but the Universe; the other, where the Universe exists only in God." [Footnote 63]

I think, with M. Cousin, that, rigorously and at bottom, there is here but one and the same system, but in appearance, and I say besides, in the opinion of its authors, the difference is great, and requires to be noticed. I postpone for the subject "Materialism," all that I have to say upon the subject of the so-called Pantheism, which admits no other existence than either that of the individualities that people the visible universe, or that of the primary matter whence they have issued. I occupy myself, at this moment, solely with the idealistic Pantheism.

Do we wish to behold a spectacle of how weak the human mind really is in the midst of all its grandeur, and of the limits which must finally and abruptly check its progress, however high its flight, we will read Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel, three martyrs to intellectual ambition, differing very much according to the difference of the eras and the nations to which they respectively belong, but similar in this point at least, that they ignore the visible world, and leave it behind them, to enter that world which dazzles their sight, where they plunge into a void in quest of what they call "Being!"

Two passions have impelled, are impelling, and will, probably, still occasionally impel men of eminent powers of mind to Pantheism: the passionate craving for an universal science, and the passionate longing for universal unity—feelings noble both, but illegitimate and incapable of satisfaction.

"I have resolved," said Spinoza, "to search if there exist a real Good, a Good capable, singly, of filling the entire soul after it shall have rejected all the rest—in a word, a Good that gives the soul, when the soul finds it and possesses it, the eternal and supreme happiness. … Man is essentially a being that thinks, and the highest degree of human knowledge ought to be the highest degree of human felicity. … My sources of enjoyment consist in the exercise of the reason." [Footnote 64]

What obliviousness of man's nature and of man's life! Man is not merely a being that thinks, but a being that feels, wills, and acts, a being moral and responsible for his acts, at the same time that he is a being of intelligence, and a being insatiate of knowledge. It is by his thought that he accounts to himself for his sentiments, and for the motives of his acts, but it is not from his thought that he derives either his sentiments or his liberty, neither does knowledge constitute his sole enjoyment. Spinoza mutilates man strangely when he places "the highest degree of human felicity in the highest degree of human knowledge." Man is more exacting than the philosopher, and it requires infinitely more to satisfy the most modest human soul than to satisfy the proudest mind. Infinitely more in respect of happiness, infinitely less in respect of science! Not that I would make their intellectual ambition a reproach to philosophers, even when it leads them astray. It is an honor to the human mind that it aspires higher than it can attain, that it torments itself in the struggle to carry its science into that invisible world, which it instinctively feels by anticipation, just as it does into that visible world that it sees. God granted to man this privilege; he implanted in his soul the ardent desire to know him and to possess him fully. But at the same time, God granted to men in general certain instincts and spontaneous beliefs which adequately satisfy this desire without the necessity of any profound study. What would have become of the human race if, in order to believe in God, to hope in him, and to pray to him, man had been obliged to wait until philosophers had resolved the problems which still weigh upon their genius? As God, in creating man free, took care that the maintenance of the general order in this world should not be completely abandoned to the disputes of men, so did he provide for the spiritual nourishment of mankind, without denying to the great ambitious ones of the earth either the prospect of a satisfaction more complete, or the right to search for it.

Let us never tire of repeating, this is the mystery of man's mixed nature—an indication of a destiny in store for him superior to his actual condition. He carries within him the ideas of infinity, of perfection, and yet here below he is nothing but a finite being, imperfect, equally incapable of sufficing to himself and of satisfying himself, either in the domain of thought or of actual life. "There are more things in heaven and upon earth than philosophy—than even the philosophy 'of the absolute'—can explain. … To comprehend God, it needs to be God. A child might have said as much to Hegel." These words I borrow from M. Edmond Scherer's exposition of the doctrine of Hegel. [Footnote 65]

Jesus in effect said, eighteen centuries ago: "I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of M. Scherer, for to enable man to comprehend God, they have found no other expedient than to make of man himself the God that man is desirous of comprehending. The passion for an universal science has ended by receiving no being as God but man.

The passion for universal unity has led to the same result. That truth is one—that is to say, that all truths, whatever their object, are in harmony with one another—the very word truth implies and proclaims. From the unity of truth the Pantheists passed, with a single bound, to the unity of being. They identified idea and reality, science and existence, confounding all things in order to reduce them to one single thing, and abolishing all beings in order to concentrate them all in one and the same being, which, after all, is nothing more than an impersonal notion and a barren name, falling in its turn into the void.

By what path did the Pantheists arrive at this abyss? What was the process employed by men of eminent powers of mind to construct a system so singularly factitious and hypothetical, and yet pretending, at the same time, to be so necessary and so rigorously philosophical?

Like some great men of antiquity, (and their number is considerable,) who sought to explain nature and the physical world by incomplete and precipitate hypotheses and systems, invented irrespectively of either facts or their laws, the Pantheists by similar means proceeded—nay, are proceeding—to explain man, the universe, and God; the Infinite and the finite. The method which for three centuries has constituted the glory of the natural sciences, and made their progress lasting, the exact study of facts and their relations; that method so long strange not only to general philosophy but to the special sciences themselves—I may at once call it by its proper name, the scientific method—was formerly, and remains still, strange to the Pantheists; to Spinoza as to Plotinus, to Hegel as to Spinoza. Whether Plotinus plunges into an ecstacy to arrive at and comprehend God in uniting man to God by the virtue of contemplation; or Spinoza, defining substance, makes it the principle from which to deduce his theory of the universe and of its unity; or Hegel, speaking of idea in order to arrive at the same result as Spinoza, seeks to obtain from his term substance—it is the same defect that appears in the labors of all these potent intelligences, not only in their development, but in the very point from which they start; for observation of facts and of their laws they substitute the affirmation and the definition of an axiom, and the deduction, logical, it is true, of its consequences. They disdain and set aside all study of the realities of the universe, believing themselves to be in possession of a key to open its secrets.

They see not that their key is a deception, that at each step facts evident, indestructible, give the flattest denial to their inferences, and that to maintain their arbitrary and insufficient principle they are forced to ignore and to deny other facts, themselves evident, indestructible.

Psychological observation proves and irresistibly establishes three facts, however the consequences of these facts themselves may lead to questions and controversies.

1. Man believes in his own existence, and in his own personality. He feels himself and perceives himself to be a being, real and distinct from every other being.

2. Man feels himself and knows himself to be a free agent. Of the freedom of his resolves, whatever the motives and deliberations which precede them, man has an intimate and assured consciousness.

3. Good and evil exist in man, and exist in the world; moral good and evil as well as physical good and evil. Whatever may be thought of their origin, the mixture and the struggle of good and of evil, in the moral order and in the physical order, are facts evident in themselves, and attested by the conscience and by the experience of the human race.

Pantheism sometimes ignores and omits, sometimes formally denies, these facts, which psychology attests and proves. There is, however, a notable difference in this point in the three great representatives of Pantheism. Thanks to the Platonic school, from which he sprang, Plotinus, in treating the different questions of man's liberty and of the reality of good and of evil, soars in an elevated region where the truth now shines in splendor, now obscures itself and disappears in the labyrinth in which the philosopher himself is entangled as soon as he attempts to explain the one and infinite Being and that Being's relations with nature and with man. Spinoza is more consequent and plainer. He formally denies all individuality, all human liberty. Substance, "the being" is single and universal. All act of man, as every fact of nature, is produced by fated laws and causes: "Free will is a chimera, flattering to our pride and in reality founded upon our ignorance. All that I can say to those who believe that they can, by virtue of any free decision of the soul, speak or be silent—or, to use a single word, act—is that they dream with their eyes open." [Footnote 66]

… "Nothing," adds he, "is bad in itself. Good and evil indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves, and are nothing but manners of thinking. Not only has every man the right to seek his good, his pleasure, but he cannot do otherwise. … The measure of each man's right is his power. … He who does not yet know reason, or who, having not as yet contracted the habit of virtue, lives according to the laws only of his appetites, is as much in his right as he who regulates his life according to the laws of reason. In other words, just as the sage has an absolute right to do all that his reason dictates to him, or to live according to the laws of his reason, in the same manner has the ignorant man and the madman a right to everything that his appetite impels him to take; in other words, the right to live according to the laws of appetite. … And he is no more obliged to live according to the laws of good sense than a cat is obliged to live under the laws that govern the nature of a lion. … Hence we conclude that a compact has only a value proportioned to its utility; where the utility disappears the compact disappears too with it, and loses all its authority. There is, then, folly in pretending to bind a man forever to his word; unless, at least, man so contrive that the breach of the compact shall entail for him that violates it more danger than profit." [Footnote 67]

Hegel is less absolute and less blind. Of a mind large, and from its greatness naturally just, he escaped at moments the yoke of his system. Struck by the particular truths, moral, historical, æsthetic, that offered themselves to his view in the theater of the universe, he admitted them without very well knowing what place he should assign to them. "He was," said one of his most intelligent disciples, "a conciliator in his philosophy. His philosophy stands midway between Theism and Pantheism; between historical right, as the expression of actual reason, and the absolute right to liberty and equality, as the end of universal history. His system seems to sanction the most profound piety, and to regard Christianity as the true and absolute religion, at the very time when it appears also as its negation; just as in politics it presents itself as at one and the same moment conservative and progressive, favorable to existing rights and yet revolutionary." [Footnote 68]

"It is impossible," says M. Edmond Scherer, "to read Hegel without asking ourselves if he, be serious. He falls incessantly into a style of images and personifications; and one would suppose one's self, in perusing his writings, to be present at the formation of a mythology, at the development of a world like that of the ancient Gnostics, in which notions assumed forms and marched on, passing through all kinds of adventures." [Footnote 69]

M. Edmond Scherer's is a mind hard to please, which is ever struck and offended by incoherence of objects, futility of artificial combinations, and vain play upon words, even where he recognizes or admires the genius. The philosophical "rout" is not embarrassed for so slight a cause; it marches straight to the object toward which the dominant idea, once adopted, gives the impulse. In spite of its complexities and of its craving for the reconciliation of religion and of politics, the Pantheism of Hegel has borne its natural fruits. A school has resulted from it, which, in accordance with its proper and independent manifestations, a learned and moderate judge, M. Willm, characterizes in these words: "The new German philosophy, of which Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Rüge are the principal chiefs, comes, in its ultimate results, in contact with the Humanism of M. Pierre Leroux, the Positivism of M. Auguste Comte, and the Atheism of M. Proudhon. It tends to substitute for the ancient worship the worship of humanity, and to found a new worship dispensing with God, and with morality properly so called. … There is no such thing as theology but only anthropology; for the mind of humanity is the divine mind realized. There is no longer any other piety than devotedness to the objects of humanity; no longer any other prayer than the contemplation of the human mind. … Man accomplishes every reasonable object if he accomplishes his own peculiar object, and he cannot do better than employ all his faculties to realize his own objects. Man's will be done: such is the principle of the new law." [Footnote 70]

Such is the inevitable result at which Pantheism, even that kind termed idealistic Pantheism, ultimately arrives, whatever the elevation of mind and the morality of intent in its first authors. This is no scientific doctrine, founded upon the observation of facts and their laws; it is an hypothesis framed by dint of violent abstractions, verbal commutations and reasoning, in the blindness of a thought drunk with itself. Under the breath of Pantheism all beings—real and personal beings—vanish, and are replaced by an abstraction becoming in its turn the Being par excellence; the sole being, although without personality and without volition, swallowing up all things in a bottomless abyss, which absorbs that being, too, after it has already absorbed everything that it has sought so to explain.

Was there ever, in the conceptions of mythology, or in the mystical dreams of the human imagination, anything so artificial, anything so vain, as this hypothesis, which at its very beginning, as well as throughout its entire course, loses sight of the best attested facts respecting man and the world; and, shocking equally science and common sense, departs as much from the method of philosophy as from the spontaneous instincts of mankind?