Second Meditation. Spiritualism.

I witnessed the birth—not, certainly, the birth of Spiritualism, for this was, like its twin brother Materialism, born in the cradle of Philosophy, and while the steps of Philosophy were still those of an infant—but the birth of the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century. This birth was a national reaction against the Sensualism of the eighteenth century—just as the Christian Awakening was a reaction against the impiety of the same epoch. Theories do not escape the influence of events: after the ideas come the facts, to pour upon those ideas floods of light, and to reveal the vices, whether of philosophy or of policy, in all their practical consequences. The Sensualism—that is to say, to style it by its true name, the Materialism—of the eighteenth century, did not pass triumphantly through this test: it still reigned in France at the commencement of the nineteenth century, but it was the reign of an antiquated sovereign in decline—a sovereign of whom the public know the defects, and whose successor is at hand.

M. Royer-Collard was the first who had the merit and the honor of bringing back Spiritualism into the teaching of philosophy and into the minds of the people; his was a return simply to the spiritualistic doctrines of the seventeenth century; but still a real progress, effected by a novel route, and a really scientific method. M. Royer-Collard was neither a philosopher by profession nor the disciple of any master, nor was his mind a mind disposed to take up with systems—he observed, he read, he studied and reflected, as a looker on, and an earnest judge of the world and of men. In philosophy and his professional chair, as later in politics and in the chamber, he was an original and profound thinker. His mind united good sense with loftiness of sentiment, circumspection with self-respect; he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his times, at the same time that he refused to accept its yoke. In his grave and independent course of instruction, he treated philosophical questions as they presented themselves step by step, each on its own account, without troubling himself about anything but the discovery of the truth; and still less with any zealous endeavor to set together or resolve all the questions upon a general system, the result of any learned premeditation. Those who had opportunities of listening to him, and even those whose only means of judgment are the fragments published by M. Jouffroy, [Footnote 34] characterize his lessons as directed, each of them, toward some special questions well determined beforehand, and they regard them as models of analysis and of philosophical criticism, scrupulously confined by the lecturer to the facts and the results that the inductive process discovers in the facts themselves.

He had been a great reader of the writings of the Scotch philosophers, held them in high esteem, and walked in their steps; his views were, however, loftier, and his footing firmer, although not less prudent. He had in his short philosophical career two rare pieces of good fortune: one was, that he had a friend in M. Maine de Biran, a profound and enthusiastic observer of the human soul in his own soul—a subtle metaphysician, almost a mystic, whom I would, if I dared, name the Saint Theresa of philosophy; his other advantage was, that he had for his disciple M. Cousin, the congenial rival and eloquent interpreter of the great philosophers of all ages. M. Cousin, in his turn, has been fortunate in having for his disciple M. Jouffroy—a disciple, of mind original and independent, following a master accomplished in the art of observing intellectual and moral facts, and of describing them and ordering them, without altering their essential character. Sometimes, it is true, M. Cousin yields to the ambition of his thought, or is swayed by the intellectual current of opinions in vogue; but very soon his common sense checks, or at least sets him on his guard—a common sense that finds lucid expression, and is distinguished by probity of intent. Such are the founders and the glorious chiefs of the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century.

Nor have they failed to find disciples and heirs worthy of such predecessors. For some years past it has been the custom, in certain regions of the learned world, to demand, frivolously enough, and in a tone not free from irony, "What has become of the spiritualistic school—what can it be about?" I will not answer for it as Tertullian did to the Pagans, "We are only of yesterday, and we are everywhere—in your domains, your cities, your isles, your fortresses, your communes, your councils, your camps, your tribes, your 'decuries,' in the palace, the senate, the forum; we only leave you your temples." [Footnote 35]

The modern Spiritualists had no such conquests to make, and it is fitting for philosophers to be more modest; but however short my experience may have taught me that the human memory may in similar cases sometimes be, I am astonished that men should so forget facts, and facts, too, that are recent and patent. What school of philosophy ever furnished in half a century so many men and so many works, some of eminence, all of them of distinguished merit? I will cite only a few names: MM. de Rémusat, Damiron, Adolphe Garnier, Franck, Jules Simon, Barthélemy, Saint-Hilaire, Saisset, Caro, Bersot, Lévêque, Bouillier, Janet, some of whom have scarcely disappeared from the stage of the world, and others are only just arrived there—they belong all to the spiritualistic school, to which they have all done honor by important works on philosophy, whether speculative, historical, political, economic, or practical. Their doctrines, it is true, have now been for some time hotly attacked, and the wind of the day does not blow into their sails. They have, besides, in my opinion, been wrong in this respect, that they have not directed sufficient attention to these polemics; that they have combated in a manner too indirect, or with too little energy; the ideas in whose name their own have been assailed; a certain share of languor and of embarrassment is at this moment the malady of the best minds and of the sincerest convictions. But in spite of the blows which it receives and returns, although with insufficient sturdiness, the spiritualistic school, if we judge it by the names and the works which belong to it, by their talent, and their fame, remains in our century in possession of the domain and of the banner of philosophy.

Its merits will present themselves still more clearly if we examine closely the results of its labors.

The first and the most important result, in a point of view purely philosophical, is, that the Spiritualists of our days have given to their researches and to their ideas a character really scientific: they have introduced into the study of man and of the intellectual world, the method practiced with so much success in the study of man and of the material world—that is to say, they have taken the observation of facts as the point of departure and the constant guide of their investigations. Are there in man and in the intellectual world, as there are in man and in the material world, facts capable of being observed, seized, described, classified, generalized? This is the question which the spiritualistic school proposed and discussed at the outset. I have no hesitation in saying, that it resolved it in the affirmative, and that, thanks to this school, psychology has assumed its rank among the positive sciences, just as physiology did. Like physiology, geology, or botany, psychology has its special object, its determined domain, in which it proceeds absolutely according to the same method observed by the physical sciences in their domain. That this method, the observation of facts, of their value and their laws, is in psychology more difficult to be followed than in the physical sciences, is certain; but this certainly does not deprive psychology either of its domain or of its scientific character. It is a science by the same right and upon the same conditions as all the others are so. The labors of the spiritualistic school, and particularly those of M. Jouffroy, have given it a solid foundation: and this has been formally recognized by several even among the adversaries of this school, among others by M. Taine and M. Berthelot. [Footnote 36]

It is in the name of science and by the processes of science that the Spiritualists of the nineteenth have combated the Sensualists of the eighteenth century. They have not, it is true, absolutely crushed Materialism, that child and legitimate heir of Sensualism; but while dethroning the parent, they have compelled the child sometimes to avow himself boldly, sometimes to transform himself, and to assume other features and other arms than those of his cradle. I will only cite the lecture of M. Cousin on the "Sensualistic Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century," and the essay of the Duke de Broglie on the "Existence of the Soul," [Footnote 37] written on the occasion of the work of M. Broussais: "De l'Irrritation et de la Folie."

Whoever, after having read them, would still persist in maintaining the Sensualism of Locke and of Condillac, or in refusing to see the consequences to which Sensualism leads, would prove, in my opinion, that he has not understood either the question put, or the doctrine combated and refuted. We have here a result acquired for the science of the intellectual world, and we owe the result to the polemics of the spiritualistic school.

That school has obtained another result more important still, and which belongs no longer to the polemics of simple negation, but to positive doctrine; it has set in the broad light of day the real and fundamental principle of morals, the distinction as to the essentials of moral good and evil, as well as the law of obligation, that "categorical imperative," the sole refuge which Kant found against Skepticism. 229 Neither the interest well defined of each individual, nor the interest of the greater numbers, nor any sentimental sympathy, nor any system of positive written law, can, for the future, be considered as the basis of morals. An attempt is made in the present day to establish another thesis, and to represent morality as absolutely independent of religion. Grave error, which discards from morality, if not its principle, at least its source and its object, its author and its future; an error, however, very different from those errors which dispense even with the principle of morals, and assign as the rule for the conduct of men, motives having in themselves nothing moral, nothing absolute. The fact that man's conscience and man's reason recognize the distinction of moral good and evil, and at the same time the duty of practicing that good as the law of human actions, is a fact which we may now regard as acquired to philosophy. The treatise "Du Bien," in the work of M. Cousin upon "Le Vrai, le Beau, et le Bien," the preface of M. Jouffroy to the "Outlines of Moral Philosophy," by Dugald Stewart, and the "Essia sur la Morale," in the "Mélanges Philosophiques," which M. Jouffroy published in 1833, the book of M. Jules Simon upon "Le Devoir," these are all solid and brilliant works, by which the spiritualistic school has victoriously established the truth to which I have referred.

And in establishing it, it has paid a remarkable act of homage to another fact, and rendered an immense service by enforcing a truth, with which are intimately connected man's rights in this world, as well as his prospects beyond this world: I mean the fact of man's liberty. This is no question of pure theory and scientific curiosity; but a vital question, whose solution has for man, in time present and time future, the most important practical consequences. Upon what grounds would the claim of man to liberty in the social state rest, what would become of his hopes and fears of a future eternity, if man were not a being morally free and responsible for the decisions which determine his acts? The civil liberty of man during his life on earth, and his future destiny after his life on earth, closely depend upon the fact of his free volition and upon the responsibility which accompanies it. Without free volition man falls in this world, without rights, under the yoke of whatever force may take possession of him, or use him as its instrument; what remains for man, then, but to tremble at the destiny which awaits him beyond this world by virtue of the unknown decree of his Sovereign Master? To the spiritualistic school belongs the honor of having firmly established and rendered plain the psychological fact of the freedom of the human will; nor in doing so has it allowed itself to be troubled and blinded by the ontological questions which that fact suggests, or by the difficulty attending the solution of these questions. Consequently, it has accepted upon this point the limits of man's science, and at the same time maintained the rights of man's nature. It has laid in man's liberty and man's responsibility the legitimate foundation of political liberty, as well as that of the personal morality of man and of man's future.

Thus, then, the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century is at once scientific, moral, liberal. Eminent merits, rare combination in any time, and still more so in our time!

With these great merits, and in spite of them, two omissions are still remarkably striking.

The spiritualistic school, our contemporary, has halted abruptly before the sovereign problems which weigh upon the human soul, and which, in the first series of these "Meditations," I styled natural problems; [Footnote 38] it has in no respect furthered their solution according to reason, or accepted their solution according to Christianity; its "Theodicy" has remained far in arrear of its Psychology.

Halted it has, also, before any practical solution of these same problems; nor has it eliminated either any faith or any law which suffices for man's soul or man's conduct in life—in short, any religion. M. Jules Simon, in his work entitled "La Religion Naturelle," MM. Saisset and De Rémusat, in their "Essais de Philosophie Religieuse," have striven, irrespectively of all positive revelation, to give to man's soul and to man's conduct that satisfaction and that religious rule which both require. I doubt their counting much upon the success of their attempts; I doubt their believing that their natural religion, or their religious philosophy, are sufficient substitutes for Christianity. Far other things than such drops of science are required to appease the thirst of humanity for religion.

Whence, in the spiritualistic school, this double hiatus—this twofold weakness, whence?

In my opinion, the causes are themselves twofold. The spiritualistic school has been at once too timid and too proud. It has not seen in the psychological facts which it was observing and describing, all that they contain and reveal upon the subject of the great natural problems of man and of the world; it has neglected the cosmological facts and the historical facts which concur to throw light upon those problems; its psychology has remained isolated and incomplete. It has, at the same time, failed to see the limits of psychology and of human science in general; not having succeeded in advancing the torch of science into the regions where access to it is denied, it has refused to accept the light descending upon man by another way than that of science.

Like Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Reid, and Kant, M. Cousin, now the most eminent representative of the spiritualistic school, establishes, by virtue of psychological observation, these two great facts: first, that there exist universal and necessary principles manifesting themselves in the human mind, and reigning there without being capable of being subverted, which are called into action by sensations coming from the external world; secondly, that these sensations, so coming from the external world, do not in any way supply the human mind with these universal and necessary principles, and that they can explain neither their presence nor their origin. Such, for instance, are the principles, that everything which begins to appear has a cause—that every quality belongs to a substance! [Footnote 39] Sensualism is not in a position to account in any way for these two principles, or to find them among those facts that form all its psychology.

I am not called upon to develop or to discuss this idea, which, for my part, I fully admit; enough that I mention it as a fundamental doctrine of the spiritualistic school.

The philosophers, who have admitted the existence of these universal and necessary principles, have assigned them different names, and have enumerated and classified them differently; but whether they style them "ideas," or "innate ideas," or "laws," or "forms," or "categories of the understanding"—whether they enlarge or limit their number—they agree as to their nature, and declare them inherent in the human mind itself, which applies them, so to say, as its own peculiar property in its appreciation of the external world; so far is the mind from borrowing them from that world!

These universal and necessary principles once admitted and characterized, some of the philosophers who so admit and characterize them, the Scotch philosophers for instance, go no further, and adhere to the psychological fact without examining its value or its consequences in an ontological sense. Others, like Kant, refuse to that psychological fact all ontological value, and are of opinion that nothing authorizes us in affirming that those principles, inherent in the internal existence of the human mind, are true in the domain beyond the human mind, or that they regulate the realities of the external world, as they regulate our intellectual activity. Others, finally, M. Cousin, with Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Fénélon, and Bossuet, see the work of God, and consequently God himself, in the universal and necessary principles which preside over the intellectual existence of man; and they recognize God as the infinite and sovereign being in whom the necessary principles reside; and they regard these as the manifestations of him, and think that he placed them in the intelligence of man when he placed man himself in the middle of the world.

To this doctrine I firmly adhere; but why does the spiritualistic school so stop short, why does it not advance to the very end of the path upon which it has entered? It admits God as the being in whom these necessary principles reside, and from whom man has received them; what does this mean but that it recognizes in God the author and instructor of man? And to recognize in God the author and the instructor of man, what is this but to recognize the fact of the creation, and the fact of the primitive revelation inherent in the fact of the creation? These two truths are involved in the fact that the necessary principles exist in the mind of man, and that man derives them, not from his relations with the external world, but from himself, and from the source whence he himself emanates—from God, his Creator. God has created man armed at all points, as well in the order of the intellect as of matter, complete in his soul as in his body: that is to say, God has given to him at his creation the necessary principles of his intellectual life, just as he has given him the necessary mechanism of his physical organization. Scientific psychology thus mounts up to that supreme point where it meets Christian revelation. There is, on its part, inconsistency or timidity in not recognizing and proclaiming the existence of that light to which it so attains.

What was the import, what the form, of that primitive revelation? Has the revelation itself been renewed at any epoch subsequent to the creation? If so, by what instruments and with what incidents has it been renewed? These are questions to which I shall recur, but which for the moment I do not approach; I wish here only to establish the fact of the divine revelation in the sphere and in the terms of scientific psychology.

Facts in cosmogony lead to the same conclusion. I repeat here what I said in the first series of these Meditations, when speaking of the dogma of the creation:

"The only serious opponents of the dogma of the creation are those who maintain that the universe, the earth, and man upon the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively, in the state in which they now are. No one, however, can hold this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many ages man has existed on the earth is a question that has been largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry in no way affects the dogma of the creation itself; it is a certain and recognized fact that man has not always existed on the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man, therefore, had a beginning: man has come upon the earth." [Footnote 40]

He did not come there by spontaneous generation—that is to say, by any creative force or organizing power inherent in matter. Scientific observation overturns more and more, every day, this hypothesis, which, in other respects also, it is impossible to admit as any explanation of the first appearance upon the earth of the complete man, the man in a condition to survive. "Another delusion of which we must rid ourselves," said, lately, a member of the Academy of Sciences, as he quitted the lecture-room where M. Pasteur had been throwing upon this subject the light of his luminous and scrupulous criticism. The hypothesis of the progressive transformation of species does not explain better the existence of man, such as we now see him upon the earth. This hypothesis is also rejected by the exact student of facts; even if admitted, it would still leave existing the same problems; for, whence came these primitive types, whose successive transformations have, as supposed, produced the existing species? God is as necessary to create the ape or the primitive type of the ape as he is necessary to create man himself. Scientific cosmology accords with scientific psychology. God, the creator and instructor of man, is the grand fact which each of these sciences encounters at the summit of its labors.

The whole current of history contains the same teaching. I admit that error abounds in history, that it is full of false assertions, of recitals tortured from the truth, facts mutilated, legends invented by men as imaginations. It is not, for all that, the less certain that in a great part the truth still remains there, that certain historical events are authenticated and attested by undeniable testimony. I mention here only two, because connected with the subject which engages me. It is a general belief, a universal tradition in the history of nations, that, either at the moment of the creation, or at some epoch subsequent to creation, the God, or the gods, whom those nations respectively adored, had had direct relations with man; had become manifest to him by different acts or under different forms, and had assumed a place and exercised an active influence upon man's destinies. The idea of a single revelation, or of a succession of revelations—revelations characterized at one time by a strange grossness, at another by a subtle mysticism, is a thing ever recurring in the history of humanity. The tradition of the special revelation, proclaimed first by the Hebrews, and after them by the Christians, is equally undeniable; criticism may apply itself to the volumes that contain the accounts; may contest the authenticity or exactitude or date of particular books; but so far from ever negativing, it will not even weaken the evidence of the existence and the powerful influence of the religious tradition which gave birth to Judaism and to Christianity. We have here a remarkable historical fact, manifesting at once the natural faith of mankind in the divine revelation, and in the relations of the Creator with his creatures.

If the spiritualistic school refused from its very origin to admit these facts, drawn from cosmogony and from man's history, into the sphere of its labors; if it limited psychology to its peculiar scientific object—the study of the human soul—I am far from making such refusal matter of reproach: for the Spiritualists did thereby nothing but what they were entitled and called upon to do. But they have fallen into a twofold error. While observing and describing psychological facts, they did not perceive nor accept all that they imported: they saw in the intelligent man the work and the trace of God; but they did not see what was implied in that man besides—that is, revelation as well as creation. They did not leave pure psychology to demand of kindred sciences, such as cosmology and history, whether their results accorded or did not accord with the results that they had deduced from psychology. In short, on the one side they stopped short of the limits of the domain of psychology; and on the other, they confined themselves to it too exclusively.

From this twofold error sprang another still more serious. Spiritualism gave birth to Rationalism—a transformation as unnatural as unfortunate, which has rendered the science of man and of the intellectual world still more inexact and incomplete!