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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Initiation into Philosophy, by Emile Faguet
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: Initiation into Philosophy
+
+Author: Emile Faguet
+
+Translator: Home Gordon
+
+
+Release Date: November, 2005 [EBook #9304]
+This file was first posted on September 19, 2003
+Last Updated: May 8, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Thomas Hutchinson and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
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+
+
+INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+By Emile Faguet
+
+Of the French Academy
+
+
+Author of "The Cult Of Incompetence,"
+"Initiation Into Literature," etc.
+
+
+Translated from the French by Sir Homer Gordon, Bart.
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+This volume, as indicated by the title, is designed to show the way to the
+beginner, to satisfy and more especially to excite his initial
+curiosity. It affords an adequate idea of the march of facts and of
+ideas. The reader is led, somewhat rapidly, from the remote origins to the
+most recent efforts of the human mind.
+
+It should be a convenient repertory to which the mind may revert in order
+to see broadly the general opinion of an epoch--and what connected it with
+those that followed or preceded it. It aims above all at being _a
+frame_ in which can conveniently be inscribed, in the course of further
+studies, new conceptions more detailed and more thoroughly examined.
+
+It will have fulfilled its design should it incite to research and
+meditation, and if it prepares for them correctly.
+
+E. FAGUET.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+ANTIQUITY
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+BEFORE SOCRATES
+
+Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe,
+of the Creation and Constitution of the World.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE SOPHISTS
+
+Logicians and Professors of Logic,
+and of the Analysis of Ideas, and of Discussion.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+SOCRATES
+
+Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality
+Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+PLATO
+
+Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist, but
+he Reverts to General Consideration of the Universe,
+and Deals with Politics and Legislation.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+ARISTOTLE
+
+A Man of Encyclopaedic Learning; as Philosopher,
+more especially Moralist and Logician.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+VARIOUS SCHOOLS
+
+The Development in Various Schools of the General
+Ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+EPICUREANISM
+
+Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to
+seek Happiness, and that Happiness Consists in Wisdom.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+STOICISM
+
+The Passions are Diseases which can and must be Extirpated.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+ECLECTICS AND SCEPTICS
+
+Philosophers who Wished to Belong to No School.
+Philosophers who Decried All Schools and All Doctrines.
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+NEOPLATONISM
+
+Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphysicians
+after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess.
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+CHRISTIANITY
+
+Philosophic Ideas which Christianity Welcomed, Adopted, or Created;
+How it must Give a Fresh Aspect to All Philosophy,
+even that Foreign to Itself.
+
+
+
+PART II
+IN THE MIDDLE AGES
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+FROM THE FIFTH CENTURY TO THE THIRTEENTH
+
+Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma. When it is Declared Contrary to
+Dogma by the Authority of Religion, it is a Heresy. Orthodox and Heterodox
+Interpretations. Some Independent Philosophers.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
+
+Influence of Aristotle. His Adoption by the Church.
+Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
+
+Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the Coming Era.
+Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
+
+It Is Fairly Accurate to Consider that from the Point of View
+of Philosophy, the Middle Ages Lasted until Descartes.
+Free-thinkers More or Less Disguised.
+Partisans of Reason Apart from Faith, of Observation, and of Experiment.
+
+
+
+PART III
+MODERN TIMES
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
+
+Descartes. Cartesianism.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+CARTESIANS
+
+All the Seventeenth Century was under the Influence of Descartes.
+Port-Royal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
+
+Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality,
+General Politics, and Religious Politics.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH
+CENTURY
+
+Berkeley: A Highly Idealist Philosophy
+which Regarded Matter as Non-existent.
+David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy.
+The Scottish School: Philosophy of Common Sense.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH
+CENTURY
+
+Voltaire a Disciple of Locke.
+Rousseau a Free-thinking Christian, but deeply Imbued
+with Religious Sentiments.
+Diderot a Capricious Materialist.
+D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists.
+Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+KANT
+
+Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it on Morality.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY
+
+The Great Reconstructors of the World,
+Analogous to the First Philosophers of Antiquity.
+Great General Systems, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND
+
+The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism:
+Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE
+
+The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.
+The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.
+The Kantist School: Renouvier.
+Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+INITIATION INTO PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+ANTIQUITY
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+BEFORE SOCRATES
+
+
+Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe, of the Creation
+and Constitution of the World.
+
+
+PHILOSOPHY.--The aim of philosophy is to seek the explanation of all
+things: the quest is for the first _causes_ of everything, and also
+_how_ all things are, and finally _why_, with what design, with a
+view to what, things are. That is why, taking "principle" in all the senses
+of the word, it has been called the science of first principles.
+
+Philosophy has always existed. Religions--all religions--are
+philosophies. They are indeed the most complete. But, apart from religions,
+men have sought the causes and principles of everything and endeavoured to
+acquire general ideas. These researches apart from religious dogmas in
+pagan antiquity are the only ones with which we are here to be concerned.
+
+THE IONIAN SCHOOL: THALES.--The Ionian School is the most ancient
+school of philosophy known. It dates back to the seventh century before
+Christ. Thales of Miletus, a natural philosopher and astronomer, as we
+should describe him, believed matter--namely, that of which all things and
+all beings are made--to be in perpetual transformation, and that these
+transformations are produced by powerful beings attached to every portion
+of matter. These powerful beings were gods. Everything, therefore, was full
+of gods. His philosophy was a mythology. He also thought that the
+essential element of matter was water, and that it was water, under the
+influence of the gods, which transformed itself into earth, air, and fire,
+whilst from water, earth, air, and fire came everything that is in nature.
+
+ANAXIMANDER; HERACLITUS.--Anaximander of Miletus, an astronomer
+also, and a geographer, believed that the principle of all things is
+_indeterminate_--a kind of chaos wherein nothing has form or shape;
+that from chaos come things and beings, and that they return thither in
+order to emerge again. One of his particular theories was that fish were
+the most ancient of animals, and that all animals had issued from them
+through successive transformations. This theory was revived for a while
+about fifty years ago.
+
+Heraclitus of Ephesus (very obscure, and with this epithet attached
+permanently to his name) saw all things as a perpetual growth--in an
+indefinite state of becoming. Nothing is; all things grow and are destined
+to eternal growth. Behind them, nevertheless, there is an eternal master
+who does not change. It is our duty to resemble him as much as we can; that
+is to say, as much as an ape can resemble a man. Calmness is imperative: to
+be as motionless as transient beings can. The popular legend runs that
+Heraclitus "always wept"; what is known of him only tends to prove that he
+was grave, and did not favour emotionalism.
+
+ANAXAGORAS; EMPEDOCLES.--Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, above all else a
+natural philosopher, settled at Athens about 470 B.C.; was the master and
+friend of Pericles; was on the point of being put to death, as Socrates was
+later on, for the crime of indifference towards the religion of the
+Athenians, and had to take refuge at Lampsacus, where he died. Like
+Anaximander, he believed that everything emerged from something
+indeterminate and confused; but he added that what caused the emergence
+from that state was the organizing intelligence, the Mind, just as in man,
+it is the intelligence which draws thought from cerebral undulations, and
+forms a clear idea out of a confused idea. Anaxagoras exerted an almost
+incomparable influence over Greek philosophy of the classical times.
+
+Empedocles of Agrigentum, a sort of magician and high-priest, almost a
+deity, whose life and death are but little known, appears to have possessed
+an encyclopaedic brain. From him is derived the doctrine of the four
+elements, for whereas the philosophers who preceded him gave as the sole
+source of things--some water, others air, others fire, others the earth, he
+regarded them all four equally as the primal elements of everything. He
+believed that the world is swayed by two contrary forces--love and hate,
+the one desiring eternally to unite, the other eternally to
+disintegrate. Amid this struggle goes on a movement of organization,
+incessantly retarded by hate, perpetually facilitated by love; and from
+this movement have issued--first, vegetation, then the lower animals, then
+the higher animals, then men. In Empedocles can be found either evident
+traces of the religion of Zoroaster of Persia (the perpetual antagonism of
+two great gods, that of good and that of evil), or else a curious
+coincidence with this doctrine, which will appear again later among the
+Manicheans.
+
+PYTHAGORAS.--Pythagoras appears to have been born about B.C. 500 on
+the Isle of Elea, to have travelled much, and to have finally settled in
+Greater Greece (southern Italy). Pythagoras, like Empedocles, was a sort
+of magician or god. His doctrine was a religion, the respect with which he
+was surrounded was a cult, the observances he imposed on his family and on
+his disciples were rites. What he taught was that the true realities, which
+do not change, were numbers. The fundamental and supreme reality is
+_one_; the being who is one is God; from this number, which is one,
+are derived all the other numbers which are the foundation of beings, their
+inward cause, their essence; we are all more or less perfect numbers; each
+created thing is a more or less perfect number. The world, governed thus by
+combinations of numbers, has always existed and will always exist. It
+develops itself, however, according to a numerical series of which we do
+not possess the key, but which we can guess. As for human destiny it is
+this: we have been animated beings, human or animal; according as we have
+lived well or ill we shall be reincarnated either as superior men or as
+animals more or less inferior. This is the doctrine of _metempsychosis_,
+which had many adherents in ancient days, and also in a more or less
+fanciful fashion in modern times.
+
+To Pythagoras have been attributed a certain number of maxims which are
+called the _Golden Verses_.
+
+XENOPHANES; PARMENIDES.--Xenophanes of Colophon is also a
+"unitarian." He accepts only one God, and of all the ancient philosophers
+appears to be the most opposed to mythology, to belief in a multiplicity of
+gods resembling men, a doctrine which he despises as being immoral. There
+is one God, eternal, immutable, immovable, who has no need to transfer
+Himself from one locality to another, who is _without place_, and who
+governs all things by His thought alone.
+
+Advancing further, Parmenides told himself that if He alone really exists
+who is one and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not only inferior to
+Him, but is only a _semblance_, and that mankind, earth, sky, plants,
+and animals are only a vast illusion--phantoms, a mirage, which would
+disappear, which would no longer exist, and _would never have existed_
+if we could perceive the Self-existent.
+
+ZENO; DEMOCRITUS.--Zeno of Elea, who must be mentioned more
+especially because he was the master of that Gorgias of whom Socrates was
+the adversary, was pre-eminently a subtle dialectician in whom the sophist
+already made his appearance, and who embarrassed the Athenians by captious
+arguments, at the bottom of which always could be found this fundamental
+principle: apart from the Eternal Being all is only semblance; apart from
+Him who is all, all is nothing.
+
+Democritus of Abdera, disciple of Leucippus of Abdera (about whom nothing
+is known), is the inventor of the theory of atoms. Matter is composed of an
+infinite number of tiny indivisible bodies which are called atoms; these
+atoms from all eternity, or at least since the commencement of matter, have
+been endued with certain movements by which they attach themselves to one
+another, and agglomerate or separate, and thence is caused the formation of
+all things, and the destruction, which is only the disintegration, of all
+things. The soul itself is only an aggregation of specially tenuous and
+subtle atoms. It is probable that when a certain number of these atoms quit
+the body, sleep ensues; that when nearly all depart, it causes the
+appearance of death (lethargy, catalepsy); that when they all depart, death
+occurs. We are brought into relation with the external world by the advent
+in us of extremely subtle atoms--reflections of things, semblances of
+things--which enter and mingle with the constituent atoms of our
+souls. There is nothing in our intelligence which has not been brought
+there by our senses, and our intelligence is only the combination of the
+atoms composing our souls with the atoms that external matter sends, so to
+speak, into our souls. The doctrines of Democritus will be found again in
+those of Epicurus and Lucretius.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE SOPHISTS
+
+
+Logicians and Professors of Logic, and of the Analysis of
+Ideas, and of Discussion.
+
+
+DOCTRINES OF THE SOPHISTS.--The Sophists descend from Parmenides and
+Zeno of Elea; Gorgias was the disciple of the latter. By dint of thinking
+that all is semblance save the Supreme Being, who alone is real, it is very
+easy to arrive at belief in all being semblance, including that Being; or
+at least what is almost tantamount, that all is semblance, inclusive of any
+idea we can possibly conceive of the Supreme Being. To believe nothing, and
+to demonstrate that there is no reason to believe in anything, is the
+cardinal principle of all the Sophists. Then, it may be suggested, there is
+nothing for it but to be silent. No, there is the cultivation of one's
+mind (the only thing of the existence of which we are sure), so as to give
+it ability, readiness, and strength. With what object? To become a
+dexterous thinker, which in itself is a fine thing; to be also a man of
+consideration, listened to in one's city, and to arrive at its government.
+
+The Sophists accordingly gave lessons, especially in psychology,
+dialectics, and eloquence. They further taught philosophy, but in order to
+demonstrate that all philosophy is false; and, as Pascal observed later,
+that to ridicule philosophy is truly philosophical. They seem to have been
+extremely intellectual, very learned, and most serious despite their
+scepticism, and to have rendered Greece the very great service of making a
+penetrating analysis--the first recorded--of our faculty of knowledge and
+of the limitations, real, possible, or probable, of that faculty.
+
+PROTAGORAS; GORGIAS; PRODICUS.--They were very numerous, the taste
+for their art, which might be called philosophical criticism, being
+widespread in Attica. It may be believed, as Plato maintains, that some
+were of very mediocre capacity, and this is natural; but there were also
+some who clearly were eminent authorities. The most illustrious were
+Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus of Ceos. Protagoras seems to have been
+the most philosophical of them all, Gorgias the best orator and the chief
+professor of rhetoric, Prodicus the most eminent moralist and poet.
+Protagoras rejected all metaphysics--that is, all investigation of first
+causes and of the universe--and reduced all philosophy to the science of
+self-control with a view to happiness, and control of others with a view to
+their happiness. Like Anaxagoras, he was banished from the city under the
+charge of impiety, and his books were publicly burnt.
+
+Gorgias appears to have maintained the same ideas with more moderation and
+also with less profundity. He claimed, above all, to be able to make a good
+orator. According to Plato, it was he whom Socrates most persistently made
+the butt of his sarcasms.
+
+Prodicus, whom Plato himself esteemed, appears to have been principally
+preoccupied with the moral problem. He was the author of the famous
+apologue which represented Hercules having to choose between two paths, the
+one being that of virtue, the other of pleasure. Like Socrates later on, he
+too was subject to the terrible accusation of impiety, and underwent
+capital punishment. The Sophists furnish the most important epoch in the
+history of ancient philosophy; until their advent the philosophic systems
+were great poems on the total of all things, known and unknown. The
+Sophists opposed these ambitious and precipitate generalizations, in which
+imagination had the larger share, and their discovery was to bring
+philosophy back to its true starting point by affirming that the first
+thing to do, and that before all else, was to know our own mind and its
+mechanism. Their error possibly was, while saying that it was the first
+thing to do, too often to affirm that it was the only thing to do; still
+the fact remains that they were perfectly accurate in their assurance that
+it was primary.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+SOCRATES
+
+
+Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality
+Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity.
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCRATES.--Of Socrates nothing is known except
+that he was born at Athens, that he held many public discussions with all
+and sundry in the streets of Athens, and that he died under the Thirty
+Tyrants. Of his ideas we know nothing, because he wrote nothing, and
+because his disciples were far too intelligent; in consequence of which it
+is impossible to know if what they said was thought by him, had really been
+his ideas or theirs. What seems certain is that neither Aristophanes nor
+the judges at the trial of Socrates were completely deceived in considering
+him a Sophist; for he proceeded from them. It is true he proceeded from
+them by reaction, because evidently their universal scepticism had
+terrified him; but nevertheless he was their direct outcome, for like them
+he was extremely mistrustful of the old vast systems of philosophy, and to
+those men who pretended to know everything he opposed a phrase which is
+probably authentic: "I know that I know nothing;" for, like the Sophists,
+he wished to recall philosophy to earth from heaven, namely from
+metaphysics to the study of man, and nothing else; for, like the Sophists,
+he confined and limited the field with a kind of severe and imperious
+modesty which was none the less contemptuous of the audacious; for,
+finally, like the Sophists, but in this highly analogous to many
+philosophers preceding the Sophists, he had but a very moderate and
+mitigated respect for the religion of his fellow-citizens.
+
+According to what we know of Socrates from Xenophon, unquestionably the
+least imaginative of his disciples, Socrates, like the Sophists, reduced
+philosophy to the study of man; but his great and incomparable originality
+lay in the fact that whereas the Sophists wished man to study himself in
+order to be happy, Socrates wished him to study himself in order to be
+moral, honest, and just, without any regard to happiness. For Socrates,
+everything had to tend towards morality, to contribute to it, and to be
+subordinated to it as the goal and as the final aim. He applied himself
+unceasingly, relates Xenophon, to examine and to determine what is good and
+evil, just and unjust, wise and foolish, brave and cowardly, etc. He
+incessantly applied himself, relates Aristotle--and therein he was as much
+a true professor of rhetoric as of morality--thoroughly to define and
+carefully to specify the meaning of words in order not to be put off with
+vague terms which are illusions of thought, and in order to discipline his
+mind rigorously so as to make it an organ for the ascertainment of truth.
+
+HIS METHOD.--He had dialectical methods, "the art of conferring," as
+Montaigne called it, more or less happy, which he had probably borrowed
+from the Sophists, that contributed to cause him to be considered one of
+them, and exercised a wide vogue long after him. He "delivered men's
+minds," as he himself said--that is, he believed, or affected to believe,
+that the verities are in a latent state in all minds, and that it needed
+only patience, dexterity, and skillful investigation to bring them to
+light. Elsewhere, he _interrogated_ in a captious fashion in order to
+set the interlocutor in contradiction to himself and to make him confess
+that he had said what he had not thought he had said, agreed to what he had
+not believed he had agreed to; and he triumphed maliciously over such
+confusions. In short, he seems to have been a witty and teasing Franklin,
+and to have taught true wisdom by laughing at everyone. Folk never like to
+be ridiculed, and no doubt the recollection of these ironies had much to do
+with the iniquitous judgment which condemned him, and which he seems to
+have challenged up to the last.
+
+HIS INFLUENCE.--His influence was infinite. It is from him that
+morality became the end itself, the last and supreme end of all
+philosophy--the reason of philosophy; and, as was observed by Nietzsche,
+the Circe of philosophers, who enchants them, who dictates to them
+beforehand, or who modifies their systems in advance by terrifying them as
+to what their systems may contain irreverent towards itself or dangerous in
+relation to it. From Socrates to Kant and thence onward, morality has been
+the Circe of philosophers, and morality is, as it were, the spiritual
+daughter of Socrates. On the other hand, his influence was terrible for the
+religion of antiquity because it directed the mind towards the idea that
+morality is the sole object worthy of knowledge, and that the ancient
+religions were immoral, or of such a dubious morality as to deserve the
+desertion and scorn of honest men. Christianity fought paganism with the
+arguments of the disciples of Socrates--with Socratic arguments; modern
+philosophies and creeds are all impregnated with Socraticism. When it was
+observed that the Sophists form the most important epoch in the history of
+ancient philosophy, it was because they taught Socrates to seek a
+philosophy which was entirely human and preoccupied solely with the
+happiness of man. This led a great mind, and in his track other very great
+minds, to direct all philosophy, and even all human science, towards the
+investigation of goodness, goodness being regarded as the condition of
+happiness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+PLATO
+
+
+Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist,
+but he reverts to General Consideration of the Universe
+and Deals with Politics and Legislation.
+
+
+PLATO A DISCIPLE OF SOCRATES.--Plato, like Xenophon, was a pupil of
+Socrates, but Xenophon only wanted to be the clerk of Socrates; and Plato,
+as an enthusiastic disciple, was at the same time very faithful and very
+unfaithful to Socrates. He was a faithful disciple to Socrates in never
+failing to place morality in the foremost rank of all philosophical
+considerations; in that he never varied. He was an unfaithful disciple to
+Socrates in that, imaginative and an admirable poet, he bore back
+philosophy from earth to heaven; he did not forbid himself--quite the
+contrary--to pile up great systems about all things and to envelop the
+universe in his vast and daring conceptions. He invincibly established
+morality, the science of virtue, as the final goal of human knowledge, in
+his brilliant and charming _Socratic Dialogues_; he formed great
+systems in all the works in which he introduces himself as speaking in his
+own name. He was very learned, and acquainted with everything that had been
+written by all the philosophers before Socrates, particularly Heraclitus,
+Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras. He reconsidered all their teaching,
+and he himself brought to consideration a force and a wealth of mind such
+as appear to have had no parallel in the world.
+
+THE "IDEAS."--Seeking, in his turn, what are the first causes of all
+and what is eternally real behind the simulations of this transient world,
+he believed in a single God, as had many before him; but in the bosom of
+this God, so to speak, he placed, he seemed to see, _Ideas_--that is
+to say, eternal types of all things which in this world are variable,
+transient, and perishable. What he effected by such novel, original, and
+powerful imagination is clear. He replaced the Olympus of the populace by a
+spiritual Olympus; the material mythology by an idealistic mythology;
+polytheism by polyideism, if it may be so expressed--the gods by
+types. Behind every phenomenon, stream, forest, mountain, the Greeks
+perceived a deity, a material being like themselves, more powerful than
+themselves. Behind every phenomenon, behind every thought as well, every
+feeling, every institution--behind _everything, no matter what it be_,
+Plato perceived an idea, immortal, eternal, indestructible, and
+incorruptible, which existed in the bosom of the Eternal, and of which all
+that comes under our observation is only the vacillating and troubled
+reflection, and which supports, animates, and for a time preserves
+everything that we can perceive. Hence, all philosophy consists in having
+some knowledge of these Ideas. How is it possible to attain such knowledge?
+By raising the mind from the particular to the general; by distinguishing
+in each thing what is its permanent foundation, what it contains that is
+least changing, least variable, least circumstantial. For example, a man is
+a very complex being; he has countless feelings, countless diversified
+ideas, countless methods of conduct and existence. What is his permanent
+foundation? It is his conscience, which does not vary, undergoes no
+transformation, always obstinately repeats the same thing; the foundation
+of man, the eternal idea of which every man on earth is here the
+reflection, is the consciousness of good; man is an incarnation on earth of
+that part of God which is the will for good; according as he diverges from
+or approaches more nearly to this will, is he less or more man.
+
+THE PLATONIC DIALECTIC AND MORALITY.--This method of raising oneself
+to the ideas is what Plato termed dialectic--that is to say, the art of
+discernment. Dialectic differentiates between the fundamental and the
+superficial, the permanent and the transient, the indestructible and the
+destructible. This is the supreme philosophic method which contains all the
+others and to which all the others are reduced. Upon this metaphysic and by
+the aid of this dialectic, Plato constructed an extremely pure system of
+morality which was simply an _Imitation of God_ (as, later on, came
+the Imitation of Jesus Christ). The whole duty of man was to be as like
+God as he could. In God exist the ideas of truth, goodness, beauty,
+greatness, power, etc.; man ought to aim at relatively realizing those
+ideas which God absolutely realizes. God is just, or justice lies in the
+bosom of God, which is the same thing; man cannot be the just one, but he
+can be a just man, and there is the whole matter; for justice comprises
+everything, or, to express it differently, is the characteristic common to
+all which is valuable. Justice is goodness, justice is beautiful, justice
+is true; justice is great, because it reduces all particular cases to one
+general principle; justice is powerful, being the force which maintains,
+opposed to the force which destroys; justice is eternal and invariable. To
+be just in all the meanings of the word is the duty of man and his proper
+goal.
+
+THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.--Plato shows marked reserve as to the
+immortality of the soul and as to rewards and penalties beyond the
+grave. He is neither in opposition nor formally favourable. We feel that he
+wishes to believe in it rather than that he is sure about it. He says that
+"it is a fine wager to make"; which means that even should we lose, it is
+better to believe in this possible gain than to disbelieve. Further, it is
+legitimate to conclude--both from certain passages in the _Laws_ and
+from the beautiful theory of Plato on the punishment which is an expiation,
+and on the expiation which is medicinal to the soul and consequently highly
+desirable--that Plato often inclined strongly towards the doctrine of
+posthumous penalties and rewards, which presupposes the immortality of the
+soul.
+
+PLATONIC LOVE.--Platonic love, about which there has been so much
+talk and on which, consequently, we must say a word, at least to define it,
+is one of the applications of his moral system. As in the case of all other
+things, the idea of love is in God. There it exists in absolute purity,
+without any mixture of the idea of pleasure, since pleasure is essentially
+ephemeral and perishable. Love in God consists simply in the impassioned
+contemplation of beauty (physical and moral); we shall resemble God if we
+love beauty precisely in this way, without excitement or agitation of the
+senses.
+
+POLITICS.--One of the originalities in Plato is that he busies
+himself with politics--that is, that he makes politics a part of
+philosophy, which had barely been thought of before him (I say
+_barely_, because Pythagoras was a legislator), but which has ever
+since been taken into consideration. Plato is aristocratic, no doubt
+because his thought is generally such, independently of circumstances,
+also, perhaps, because he attributed the great misfortunes of his country
+which he witnessed to the Athenian democracy; then yet again, perhaps,
+because that Athenian democracy had been violently hostile and sometimes
+cruel to philosophers, and more especially to his own master. According to
+Plato, just as man has three souls, or if it be preferred, three centres of
+activity, which govern him--intelligence in the head, courage in the heart,
+and appetite in the bowels--even so the city is composed of three classes:
+wise and learned men at the top, the warriors below, and the artisans and
+slaves lower still. The wise men will govern: accordingly the nations will
+never be happy save when philosophers are kings, or when kings are
+philosophers. The warriors will fight to defend the city, never as
+aggressors. They will form a caste--poor, stern to itself, and
+redoubtable. They will have no individual possessions; everything will be
+in common, houses, furniture, weapons, wives even, and children. The
+people, finally, living in strict equality, either by equal partition of
+land, or on land cultivated in common, will be strictly maintained in
+probity, honesty, austerity, morality, sobriety, and submissiveness. All
+arts, except military music and war dances, will be eliminated from the
+city. She needs neither poets nor painters not yet musicians, who corrupt
+morals by softening them, and by making all feel the secret pang of
+voluptuousness. All theories, whether aristocratic or tending more or less
+to communism, are derived from the politics of Plato either by being
+evolved from them or by harking back to them.
+
+THE MASTER OF THE IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.--Plato is for all thinkers,
+even for his opponents, the greatest name in human philosophy. He is the
+supreme authority of the idealistic philosophy--that is, of all philosophy
+which believes that ideas govern the world, and that the world is
+progressing towards a perfection which is somewhere and which directs and
+attracts it. For those even who are not of his school, Plato is the most
+prodigious of all the thinkers who have united psychological wisdom,
+dialectical strength, the power of abstraction and creative imagination,
+which last in him attains to the marvellous.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ARISTOTLE
+
+
+A Man of Encyclopedic Learning; as Philosopher,
+more especially Moralist and Logician.
+
+
+ARISTOTLE, PUPIL OF PLATO.--Aristotle of Stagira was a pupil of
+Plato, and he remembered it, as the best pupils do as a rule, in order to
+oppose him. For some years he was tutor to Alexander, son of Philip, the
+future Alexander the Great. He taught long at Athens. After the death of
+Alexander, being the target in his turn of the eternal accusation of
+impiety, he was forced to retire to Chalcis, where he died. Aristotle is,
+before all else, a learned man. He desired to embrace the whole of the
+knowledge of his time, which was then possible by dint of prodigious
+effort, and he succeeded. His works, countless in number, are the record of
+his knowledge. They are the _summa_ of all the sciences of his
+epoch. Here we have only to occupy ourselves with his more especially
+philosophical ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more precisely, man is
+composed of soul and body. The body is composed of organs, a well-made
+piece of mechanism; the soul is its final purpose; the body, so to speak,
+results in the soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on the body, and is in it
+not its end but its means of acting upon things, and the whole forms a full
+and continuous harmony. The faculties of the soul are its divers aspects,
+and its divers methods of acting; for the soul is one and
+indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as being able to conceive what
+is most general, and in consequence it forms within us an intermediary
+between ourselves and God. God is unique; He is eternal; from all eternity
+He has given motion to matter. He is purely spiritual, but all is material
+save Him, and He has not, as Plato would have it, _ideas_--immaterial
+living personifications--residing in His bosom. Here may be perceived, in a
+certain sense, progress, from Plato to Aristotle, towards monotheism; the
+Olympus of ideas in Plato was still a polytheism, a spiritual polytheism
+certainly, yet none the less a polytheism; there is no longer any
+polytheism at all in Aristotle.
+
+HIS THEORIES OF MORALS AND POLITICS.--The moral system of Aristotle
+sometimes approaches that of Plato, as when he deems that the supreme
+happiness is the supreme good, and that the supreme good is the
+contemplation of thought by thought--thought being self-sufficing; which is
+approximately the imitation of God which Plato recommended. Sometimes, on
+the contrary, it is very practical and almost mediocre, as when he makes it
+consist of a mean between the extremes, a just measure, a certain tact, art
+rather than science, and practical science rather than conscience, which
+will know how to distinguish which are the practices suitable for an honest
+and a well-born man. It is only just to add that in detail and when after
+all deductions he describes the just man, he invites us to contemplate
+virtues which if not sublime are none the less remarkably lofty.
+
+His very confused political philosophy (the volume containing it, according
+to all appearance, having been composed, after his death, of passages and
+fragments and different portions of his lectures) is specially a review of
+the divergent political constitutions which existed throughout the Greek
+world. The tendencies, for there are no conclusions, are still very
+aristocratic, but less radically aristocratic than those of Plato.
+
+THE AUTHORITY OF ARISTOTLE.--Aristotle, by reason of his
+universality, also because he is clearer than his master, and again because
+he dogmatises--not always, but very frequently--instead of discussing and
+collating, had throughout both antiquity and the Middle Ages an authority
+greater than that of Plato, an authority which became (except on matters of
+faith) despotic and well-nigh sacrosanct. Since the sixteenth century he
+has been relegated to his due rank--one which is still very distinguished,
+and he has been regarded as among the geniuses of the widest range, if not
+of the greatest power, that have appeared among men; even now he is very
+far from having lost his importance. For some he is a transition between
+the Greek genius--extremely subtle, but always poetic and always somewhat
+oriental--and the Roman genius: more positive, more bald, more practical,
+more attached to reality and to pure science.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+VARIOUS SCHOOLS
+
+
+The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas
+of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
+
+
+THE SCHOOL OF PLATO; THEOPHRASTUS.--The school of Plato (not
+regarding Aristotle as belonging entirely to that school) was continued by
+Speusippus, Polemo, Xenocrates, Crates, and Crantor. Owing to a retrograde
+movement, widely different from that of Aristotle, it dabbled in the
+Pythagorean ideas, with which Plato was acquainted and which he often
+appreciated, but not blindly, and to which he never confined himself.
+
+The most brilliant pupil of Aristotle was Theophrastus, naturalist,
+botanist, and moralist. His great claim to fame among posterity, which
+knows nothing of him but this, is the small volume of _Characters_,
+which served as a model for La Bruyere, and before him to the comic poets
+of antiquity, and which is full of wit and flavour, and--to make use of a
+modern word exactly applicable to this ancient work--"humour."
+
+SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS.--We may just mention the very
+celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to us--that
+of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked
+was its predilection for polemics; and that of Elis, which appears to have
+been well versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of Elea and of Gorgias.
+
+THE CYNIC SCHOOL; ANTISTHENES; DIOGENES.--Much more important is the
+Cynic school, because a school, which was nothing less than Stoicism
+itself, emanated or appeared to emanate from it. As often happens, the
+vague commencements of Stoicism bore a close resemblance to its end. The
+Stoics of the last centuries of antiquity were a sort of mendicant friars,
+ill-clothed, ill-fed, of neglected appearance, despising all the comforts
+of life; the Cynics at the time of Alexander were much the same, professing
+that happiness is the possession of all good things, and that the only way
+to possess all things is to know how to do without them. It was
+Antisthenes who founded this school, or rather this order. He had been the
+pupil of Socrates, and there can be no doubt that his sole idea was to
+imitate Socrates by exaggeration. Socrates had been poor, had scorned
+wealth, had derided pleasure, and poured contempt on science. The cult of
+poverty, the contempt for pleasures, for honours, for riches, and the
+perfect conviction that any knowledge is perfectly useless to man--that is
+all the teaching of Antisthenes. That can lead far, at least in systematic
+minds. If all is contemptible except individual virtue, it is reversion to
+savage and solitary existence which is preached: there is no more
+civilization or society or patriotism. Antisthenes in these ideas was
+surpassed by his disciples and successors; they were cosmopolitans and
+anarchists. The most illustrious of this school--illustrious especially
+through his eccentricity--was Diogenes, who rolled on the ramparts of
+Corinth the tub which served him as a house, lighted his lantern in broad
+daylight on the pretext of "searching for a man," called himself a citizen
+of the world, was accused of being banished from Sinope by his
+fellow-countrymen and replied, "It was I who condemned them to remain," and
+said to Alexander, who asked him what he could do for him: "Get out of my
+sunshine; you are putting me in the shade."
+
+CRATES; MENIPPUS; ARISTIPPUS.--Crates of Thebes is also mentioned,
+less insolent and better-mannered, yet also a despiser of the goods of this
+world; and Menippus, the maker of satires, whom Lucian, much later, made
+the most diverting interlocutor of his amusing dialogues. In an opposite
+direction, at the same epoch, Aristippus, a pupil of Socrates, like
+Antisthenes, founded the school of pleasure, and maintained that the sole
+search worthy of man was that of happiness, and that it was his duty to
+make himself happy; that in consequence, it having been sufficiently proved
+and being even self-evident, that happiness cannot come to us from without,
+but must be sought within ourselves, it is necessary to study to know
+ourselves thoroughly (and this was from Socrates) in order to decide what
+are the states of the mind which give us a durable, substantial, and, if
+possible, a permanent happiness. Now the seeker and the finder of
+substantial happiness is wisdom, or rather, there is no other wisdom than
+the art of distinguishing between pleasure and choosing, with a very
+refined discrimination, those which are genuine. Wisdom further consists in
+dominating misfortunes by the mastery of self so as not to be affected by
+them, and in dominating also pleasures even whilst enjoying them, so that
+they may not obtain dominion over us; "possessing without being possessed"
+was one of his mottoes which Horace thus translated: "I strive to subject
+things to myself, not myself to things." This eminently practical wisdom,
+which is only a highly-developed egoism, is that of Horace and Montaigne,
+and was expressed by Voltaire in verses that were sometimes felicitous.
+
+THE SCHOOL OF CYRENE.--Aristippus had for successor in the direction
+of his school, first his daughter Arete, then his grandson. The
+Aristippists, or Cyrenaics (the school being established in Cyrene),
+frankly despised the gods, regarding them as inventions to frighten women
+and little children. One of them, Euhemerus, invented the theory, which in
+part is false and in part accurate, that the gods are simply heroes, kings,
+great men deified after their death by the gratitude or terror of the
+populace. As often happens, philosophic theories being essentially plastic
+and taking the form of the temperament which receives them, a certain
+Cyrenaic (Hegesias) enunciated the doctrine that the supreme happiness of
+man was suicide. In fact, if the object of man is happiness, since life
+affords far fewer joys than sorrows, the philosophy of happiness is to get
+rid of life, and the sole wisdom lies in suicide. It does not appear that
+Hegesias gave the only proof of sincere belief in this doctrine which can
+be given by anyone professing it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+EPICUREANISM
+
+
+Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to Seek
+Happiness, and that Happiness Consists in Wisdom.
+
+
+MORAL PHILOSOPHY.--Continuing to feel the strong impulse which it
+had received from Socrates, philosophy was now for a long while to be
+almost exclusively moral philosophy. Only it divided very sharply in two
+directions. Antisthenes and Aristippus were both pupils of Socrates. From
+Antisthenes came the Cynics; from Aristippus the philosophers of
+pleasure. The Cynics gave birth to the Stoics, the philosophers of pleasure
+to the Epicureans, and these two great schools practically divided all
+antiquity between them. We will take the Epicureans first because,
+chronologically, they slightly preceded the Stoics.
+
+EPICURUS.--Epicurus, born at Athens a little after the death of
+Plato, brought up at Samos by his parents who had been forced to expatriate
+themselves owing to reverses of fortune, returned to Athens about 305 B.C.,
+and there founded a school. Personally he was a true wise man, sober,
+scrupulous, a despiser of pleasure, severe to himself, _in practice_ a
+Stoic. As his general view of the universe, he taught approximately the
+doctrine of Democritus: the world is composed of a multitude of atoms,
+endowed with certain movements, which attach themselves to one another and
+combine together, and there is nothing else in the world. Is there not a
+first cause, a being who set all these atoms in motion--in short, a God?
+Epicurus did not think so. Are there gods, as the vulgar believe? Epicurus
+believed so; but he considered that the gods are brilliant, superior, happy
+creatures, who do not trouble about this world, do not interfere with it,
+and are even less occupied, were it possible, with mankind. Also they did
+not create the world, for why should they have created it? From goodness,
+said Plato; but there is so much evil in the world that if they created it
+from goodness, they were mistaken and must be fools; and if they willingly
+permitted evil, they are wicked; and therefore it is charitable towards
+them to believe that they did not create it.
+
+EPICUREAN MORALITY.--From the ethical point of view, Epicurus
+certainly attaches himself to Aristippus; but with the difference that lies
+between pleasure and happiness. Aristippus taught that the aim of life was
+intelligent pleasure, Epicurus declared that the aim of life was
+happiness. Now, does happiness consist in pleasures, or does it exclude
+them? Epicurus was quite convinced that it excluded them. Like Lord
+Beaconsfield, he would say, "Life would be almost bearable, were it not for
+its pleasures." Happiness for Epicurus lay in "phlegm," as Philinte would
+put it; it lay in the calm of the mind that has rendered itself
+inaccessible to every emotion of passion, which is never irritated, never
+moved, never annoyed, never desires, and never fears. Why, for instance,
+should we dread death? So long as we fear it, it is not here; when it
+arrives, we shall no longer fear it; then, why is it an evil?--But, during
+life itself, how about sufferings?--We greatly increase our sufferings by
+complaints and by self-commiseration. If we acted in the reverse way, if
+when we were tortured by them we recalled past pleasures and thought of
+pleasures to come, they would be infinitely mitigated.--But, of what
+pleasures can a man speak who makes happiness consist in the exclusion of
+pleasures? The pleasures of the wise man are the satisfaction he feels in
+assuring himself of his own happiness. He finds pleasure when he controls a
+passion in order to revert to calmness; he feels pleasure when he converses
+with his friends about the nature of true happiness; he feels pleasure when
+he has diverted a youth from passionate follies or from despair, and
+brought him back to peace of mind, etc.--But what about sufferings after
+death? They do not exist. There is no hell because there is no immortality
+of the soul. The soul is as material as the body, and dies with it.
+
+You will say, perhaps, that this very severe and austere morality more
+nearly approaches to Stoicism than to the teaching of Aristippus. This is
+so true that when Horace confessed with a smile that he returned to the
+morality of pleasure, he did not say, as we should, "I feel that I am
+becoming an Epicurean," he said, "I fall back on the precepts of
+Aristippus;" and Seneca, a professed Stoic, cites Epicurus almost as often
+as Zeno in his lessons. It may not be quite accurate to state, but there
+would not be much exaggeration in affirming, that Epicureanism is a smiling
+Stoicism and Stoicism a gloomy Epicureanism. In the current use of the word
+we have changed the meaning of Epicurean to make it mean "addicted to
+pleasure." The warning must be given that there is no more grievous error.
+
+THE VOGUE OF EPICUREANISM.--Epicureanism had an immense vogue in
+antiquity. The principal professors of it at Athens were Metrodorus,
+Hermarchus, Polystratus, and Apollodorus. Penetrating to Italy Epicureanism
+found its most brilliant representative in Lucretius, who of the system
+made a poem--the admirable _De Natura Rerum_; there were also
+Atticus, Horace, Pliny the younger, and many more. It even became a
+political opinion: the Caesarians were Epicureans, the Republicans
+Stoics. On the appearance of Christianity Epicureanism came into direct
+opposition with it, and so did Stoicism also; but in a far less degree. In
+modern times, as will be seen, Epicureanism has enjoyed a revival.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+STOICISM
+
+
+The Passions are Diseases which can and must be Extirpated.
+
+
+THE LOGIC OF STOICISM.--Stoicism existed as a germ in the Cynic
+philosophy (and also in Socrates) as did Epicureanism in Aristippus. Zeno
+was the pupil of Crates. In extreme youth he opened a school at Athens in
+the Poecile. The Poecile was a portico; portico in Greek is _stoa_,
+hence the name of Stoic. Zeno taught for about thirty years; then, on the
+approach of age, he died by his own hand. Zeno thought, as did Epicurus and
+Socrates, that philosophy should only be the science of life and that the
+science of life lay in wisdom. Wisdom consists in thinking justly and
+acting rightly; but to think justly only in order to act rightly--which is
+quite in the spirit of Socrates, and eliminates all the science of
+research, all consideration of the constitution of the world as well as the
+total and even the details of matter. Therein is Stoicism more narrow than
+Epicureanism.
+
+In consequence, man needs clear, precise, and severe "logic" (the Stoics
+were the first to use this word). Armed with this weapon, and only
+employing it for self-knowledge and self-control, man makes himself
+wise. The "wise man" of the Stoic is a kind of saint--a superman, as it has
+since been called--very analogous to his God. All his efforts are
+concentrated on safeguarding, conquering, and suppressing his passions,
+which are nothing save "diseases of the soul." In the external world he
+disregards all the "things of chance"--everything, that is, that does not
+depend on human will--and considers them as non-existent: the ailments of
+the body, pangs, sufferings, misfortunes, and humiliations are not evils,
+they are things indifferent. On the contrary, crimes and errors are such
+evils that they are _equally_ execrable, and the wise man should
+reproach himself as severely for the slightest fault as for the greatest
+crime--a paradoxical doctrine which has aroused the warmth of even
+respectful opponents of Stoicism, notably Cicero.
+
+MAXIMS OF THE STOICS.--Their most frequently repeated maxim is
+"abstain and endure"; abstain from all evil, suffer all aggression and
+so-called misfortune without rebelling or complaining. Another precept
+widely propagated among them and by them, "Live according to nature,"
+remarkably resembles an Epicurean maxim. This must be made clear. This
+precept as they interpreted it meant: adhere freely and respectfully to the
+laws of the universe. The world is a God who lives according to the laws He
+Himself made, and of which we are not judges. These laws surround us and
+compel us; sometimes they wound us. We must respect and obey them, have a
+sort of pious desire that they should operate even against ourselves, and
+live in reverent conformity with them. Thus understood, the "life in
+conformity with nature" is nothing else than an aspect of the maxim,
+"Endure."
+
+PRINCIPAL STOICS.--The principal adepts and masters of Stoicism with
+and after Zeno were Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Aristo, and Herillus in Greece;
+at Rome, Cato, Brutus, Cicero to a certain degree, Thrasea, Epictetus
+(withal a Greek, who wrote in Greek), Seneca, and finally the Emperor
+Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism rapidly developed into a religion, having its
+rites, obediences, ascetic practices, directors of conscience, examination
+of conscience, and its adepts with a traditional dress, long cloak, and
+long beard. It exerted considerable influence, comparable (comparable
+only) to Christianity, but it penetrated only the upper and middle classes
+of society in antiquity without descending, or barely descending, to the
+masses. Like Epicureanism, Stoicism had a renaissance in modern times in
+opposition to Christianity; this will be dealt with later.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ECLECTICS AND SCEPTICS
+
+
+Philosophers who Wished to Belong to No School
+Philosophers who Decried All Schools and All Doctrines.
+
+
+THE TWO TENDENCIES.--As might be expected to happen, and as always
+happens, the multiplicity of sects brought about two tendencies, one
+consisting in selecting somewhat arbitrarily from each sect what one found
+best in it, which is called "eclecticism," the other in thinking that no
+school grasped the truth, that the truth is not to be grasped, which is
+called "scepticism."
+
+THE ECLECTICS: PLUTARCH.--The Eclectics, who did not form a school,
+which would have been difficult in the spirit in which they acted, had only
+this in common, that they venerated the great thinkers of ancient Greece,
+and that they felt or endeavoured to feel respect and toleration for all
+religions. They venerated Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno,
+Moses, Jesus, St. Paul, and loved to imagine that they were each a partial
+revelation of the great divine thought, and they endeavoured to reconcile
+these divergent revelations by proceeding on broad lines and general
+considerations. Among them were Moderatus, Nicomachus, Nemesius, etc. The
+most illustrious, without being the most profound--though his literary
+talent has always kept him prominent--was Plutarch. His chief effort, since
+then often renewed, was to reconcile reason and faith (I am writing of the
+polytheistic faith). Perceiving in mythology ingenious allegories, he
+showed that under the name of allegories covering and containing profound
+ideas, all polytheism could be accepted by the reason of a Platonist, an
+Aristotelian, or a Stoic. The Eclectics had not much influence, and only
+pleased two sorts of minds: those who preferred knowledge rather than
+conviction, and found in Eclecticism an agreeable variety of points of
+view; and those who liked to believe a little in everything, and possessing
+receptive but not steadfast minds were not far from sceptics and who might
+be called affirmative sceptics in opposition to the negative sceptics:
+sceptics who say, "Heavens, yes," as opposed to sceptics who always say,
+"Presumably, no."
+
+THE SCEPTICS: PYRRHO.--The Sceptics proper were chronologically more
+ancient. The first famous Sceptic was a contemporary of Aristotle; he
+followed Alexander on his great expedition into Asia. This was Pyrrho. He
+taught, as it appears, somewhat obscurely at Athens, and for successor had
+Timon. These philosophers, like so many others, sought happiness and
+affirmed that it lay in abstention from decision, in the mind remaining in
+abeyance, in _aphasia_. Pyrrho being accustomed to say that he was
+indifferent whether he was alive or dead, on being asked, "Then why do you
+live?" answered: "Just because it is indifferent whether one lives or is
+dead." As may be imagined, their favourite sport was to draw the various
+schools into mutual opposition, to rout some by the rest, to show that all
+were strong in what they negatived, but weak in what they affirmed, and so
+to dismiss them in different directions.
+
+THE NEW ACADEMY.--Scepticism, albeit attenuated, softened, and less
+aggressive, reappeared in a school calling itself the New Academy. It
+claimed to adhere to Socrates--not without some show of reason, since
+Socrates had declared that the only thing he knew was that he knew
+nothing--and the essential tenet of this school was to affirm nothing. Only
+the Academicians believed that certain things were probable, more probable
+than others, and they are the founders of probabilism, which is nothing
+more than conviction accompanied with modesty. They were more or less
+moderate, according to personal temperament. Arcesilaus was emphatically
+moderate, and limited himself to the development of the critical faculties
+of his pupil. Carneades was more negative, and arrived at or reverted to
+scepticism and sophistry pure and simple. Cicero, with a certain foundation
+of Stoicism, was a pupil, and one of the most moderate, of the New Academy.
+
+AENESIDEMUS; AGRIPPA; EMPIRICUS.--Others built on experience itself,
+on the incertitude of our sensations and observations, on everything that
+can cheat us and cause us illusion in order to display how _relative_
+and how miserably partial is human knowledge. Such was Aenesidemus, whom
+it might be thought Pascal had read, so much does the latter give the
+reasons of the former when he is not absorbed in faith, and when he assumes
+the position of a sceptic precisely in order to prove the necessity of
+taking refuge in faith. Such was Agrippa; such, too, was Sextus Empiricus,
+so often critical of science, who demonstrates (as to a slight extent M.
+Henri Poincare does in our own day) that all sciences, even those which,
+like mathematics and geometry, are proudest of their certainty, rest upon
+conventions and intellectual "conveniences."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+NEOPLATONISM
+
+
+Reversion to Metaphysics.
+Imaginative Metaphysicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess.
+
+
+ALEXANDRINISM.--Amid all this, metaphysics--namely, the effort to
+comprehend the universe--appears somewhat at a discount. It enjoyed a
+renaissance in the third century of our era among some teachers from
+Alexandria (hence the name of the Alexandrine school) who came to lecture
+at Rome with great success. Alexandrinism is a "Neoplatonism"--that is, a
+renewed Platonism and, as considered by its authors, an augmented one.
+
+PLOTINUS.--Plotinus taught this: God and matter exist. God is one,
+matter is multiple and divisible. God in Himself is incomprehensible, and
+is only to be apprehended in his manifestations. Man rises not to
+comprehension of Him but to the perception of Him by a series of degrees
+which are, as it were, the progressive purification of faith, and which
+lead us to a kind of union with Him resembling that of one being with
+another whom he could never see, but of whose presence he could have no
+doubt. Matter, that is, the universe, is an emanation from God, as perfume
+comes from a flower. All is not God, and only God can be God, but all is
+divine and all participates in God, just as each of our thoughts
+participates of our soul. Now, if all emanates from God, all also tends to
+return to Him, as bodies born of earth, nourished by earth, invigorated by
+the forces proceeding from the earth, tend to return to the earth. This is
+what makes the harmony of the world. The law of laws is, that every
+fragment of the universe derived from God returns to Him and desires to
+return to Him. The universe is an emanation from the perfect, and an
+effort towards perfection. The universe is a God in exile who has
+nostalgia for himself. The universe is a progressive descent from God with
+a tendency towards reintegration with Him.
+
+How does this emanation from God becoming matter take place? That is a
+mystery; but it may be supposed to take place by successive stages. From
+God emanates spirit, impersonal spirit which is not spirit of this or that,
+but universal spirit spread through the whole world and animating it. From
+spirit emanates the soul, which can unite itself to a body and form an
+individual. The soul is less divine than spirit, which in turn is less
+divine than God, but yet retains divinity. From the soul emanates the body
+to which it unites itself. The body is less divine than the soul, which was
+less divine than spirit, which was less divine than God; but it still
+possesses divinity for it has a form, a figure, a design marked and
+impressed with divine spirit. Finally, matter without form is the most
+distant of the emanations from God, and the lowest of the descending stages
+of God. God _is_ in Himself; He thinks in pure thought in spirit; He
+thinks in mixed and confused thought in the soul; He feels in the body; He
+sleeps in unformed matter. The object of unformed matter is to acquire
+form, that is a body; and the object of a body is to have a soul; and the
+aim of a soul is to be united in spirit, and the aim of spirit is to be
+absorbed into God.
+
+Souls not united to bodies contemplate spirit and enjoy absolute
+happiness. Other souls not united to bodies, but solicited by a certain
+instinct to unite themselves to bodies, are of ambiguous but still very
+exalted nature. Souls united to bodies (our own) have descended far, but
+can raise themselves and be purified by contemplation of the eternal
+intelligence, and by relative union with it. This contemplation has
+several degrees, so to speak, of intensity, degrees which Plotinus termed
+hypostases. By perception we obtain a glimpse of ideas, by dialectics we
+penetrate them; by a final hypostasis, which is ecstasy, we can sometimes
+unite ourselves directly to God and live in Him.
+
+THE PUPILS OF PLOTINUS.--Plotinus had as pupils and successors,
+amongst others, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Porphyry achieves little except
+the exposition of the doctrine of his master, and shows originality only as
+a logician. Iamblichus and his school made a most interesting effort to
+revive exhausted and expiring paganism and to constitute a philosophic
+paganism. The philosophers of the school of Iamblichus are, by the way,
+magicians, charlatans, miracle-mongers, men as antipositivist as
+possible. Iamblichus himself sought to reconcile polytheism with
+Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a supreme deity, an essential
+deity from whom he made a crowd of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary
+deities to emanate, ranging from those purely immaterial to those inherent
+in matter. The subtle wanderings of Neoplatonism were continued obscurely
+in the school of Athens until it was closed for ever in 529 by the Emperor
+Justinian as being hostile to the religion of the Empire, which at that
+epoch was Christianity.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+CHRISTIANITY
+
+
+Philosophic Ideas which Christianity Welcomed, Adopted, or Created
+How it must Give a Fresh Aspect to All Philosophy,
+even that Foreign to Itself.
+
+
+CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY AND MORALITY.--Christianity spread through the
+Empire by the propaganda of the Apostles, and more especially St. Paul,
+from about the year 40. Its success was extremely rapid, especially among
+the populace, and little by little it won over the upper classes. As a
+general philosophy, primitive Christianity did not absolutely bring more
+than the Hebrew dogmas: the unity of God, a providential Deity, that is,
+one directly interfering in human affairs; immortality of the soul with
+rewards and penalties beyond the grave (a recent theory among the Jews, yet
+one anterior to Christianity). As a moral system, Christianity brought
+something so novel and so beautiful that it is not very probable that
+humanity will ever surpass it, which may be imperfectly and incompletely
+summed up thus: love of God; He must not only be feared as He was by the
+pagans and the ancient Jews; He must be loved passionately as a son loves
+his father, and all things must be done for this love and in consideration
+of this love; all men are brethren as sons of God, and they should love one
+another as brothers; love your neighbour as yourself, love him who does not
+love you; love your enemies; be not greedy for the goods of this world, nor
+ambitious, nor proud; for God loves the lowly, the humble, the suffering,
+and the miserable, and He will exalt the lowly and put down the mighty from
+their seats.
+
+Nothing like this had been said in all antiquity, and it needs
+extraordinary ingenuity (of a highly interesting character, by the way), to
+find in ancient wisdom even a few traces of this doctrine.
+
+Finally, into politics, so to speak, Christianity brought this novelty:
+there are two empires, the empire of God and the empire of man; you do not
+owe everything to the earthly empire; you are bound to give it faithfully
+only what is needed for it to be strong and to preserve society; apart from
+that, and that done, you are the subject of God and have only to answer to
+God for your thoughts, your belief, your conscience; and over that portion
+of yourself the State has neither right nor authority unless it be usurped
+and tyrannical. And therein lay the charter of individual liberty like the
+charter of the rights of man.
+
+As appeal to the feelings, Christianity brought the story of a young God,
+infinitely good and gentle, who had never cursed, who had been infinitely
+loved, who had been persecuted and betrayed, who had forgiven his
+executioners, and who died in great sufferings and who was to be imitated
+(whence came the thirst for martyrdom). This story in itself is not more
+affecting than that of Socrates, but it is that of a young martyr and not
+of an old one, and therein lies a marked difference for the imagination and
+emotions of the multitude.
+
+THE SUCCESS OF CHRISTIANITY.--The prodigious rapidity of the success
+of Christianity is easily explicable. Polytheism had no longer a great hold
+on the masses, and no philosophic doctrine had found or had even sought the
+path to the crowd; Christianity, essentially democratic, loved the weak and
+humble, had a tendency to prefer them to the great ones of this world, and
+to regard them as being more the children of God, and was therefore
+received by the masses as the only doctrine which could replace the
+worm-eaten polytheism. And in Christianity they saw the religion for which
+they were waiting, and in the heads of Christianity their own protectors
+and defenders.
+
+ITS EVOLUTION.--The evolution of Christianity was very rapid, and
+from a great moral doctrine with a minimum of rudimentary metaphysics it
+became, perchance mistakenly, a philosophy giving account, or desirous of
+giving account of everything; it so to speak incorporated a metaphysic,
+borrowed in great part from Greek philosophy, in great part from the Hebrew
+traditions. It possessed ideas on the origin of matter, and whilst
+maintaining that God was eternal, denied that matter was, and asserted that
+God created it out of nothing. It had theories on the essence of God, and
+saw Him in three Persons, or hypostases, one aspect of God as power,
+another as love, and the other as intelligence. It presented theories on
+the incarnation and humanisation of God, God being made man in Jesus Christ
+without ceasing to be God. It conceived new relationships of man to God,
+man having in himself powers of purgation and perfection, but always
+needing divine help for self-perfection (theory of grace). And this he
+must believe; if not he would feel insolent pride in his freedom. It had
+ideas about the existence of evil, declaring in "justification of God" for
+having permitted evil on earth, that the world was a place of trial, and
+that evil was only a way of putting man to the test and discovering what
+were his merits. It had its notions on the rewards and penalties beyond the
+grave, hell for the wicked and heaven for the good, as had been known to
+antiquity, but added purgatory, a place for both punishment and
+purification by punishment, an entirely Platonic theory, which Plato may
+have inspired but did not himself entertain. Finally, it was a complete
+philosophy answering, and that in a manner often admirable, all the
+questions that mankind put or could ever put.
+
+And, as so often happens, that has proved a weakness and a strength to it:
+a weakness because embarrassed with subtle, complicated, insoluble
+questions wherein mankind will always be involved, it was forced to engage
+in endless discussions wherein the bad or feeble reasons advanced by this
+or that votary compromised the whole work; a strength because whoever
+brings a rule of life is practically compelled to support it by general
+ideas bearing on the relations of things and to give it a place in a
+general survey of the world; otherwise he appears impotent, weak,
+disqualified to give that very rule of life, incapable of replying to the
+interrogations raised by that rule of life; and finally, lacking in
+authority.
+
+SCHISMS AND HERESIES.--Right or wrong, and it is difficult and
+highly hazardous to decide the question, Christianity was a complete
+philosophy, which was why it had its schisms and heresies, a certain number
+of sincere Christians not resolving the metaphysical questions in the way
+of the majority. Heresies were innumerable; only the two shall be cited
+which are deeply interesting in the history of philosophy. Manes, an Arab
+(and Arabia was then a Persian province), revived the old Zoroastrian
+doctrine of two principles of good and evil, and saw in the world two
+contending gods, the God of perfection and the god of sin, and laid upon
+man the duty of assisting the God of goodness so that His kingdom should
+come and cause the destruction of evil in the world. From him proceeded the
+Manicheans, who exerted great influence and were condemned by many Councils
+until their sect died out, only to reappear or seem to reappear fairly
+often in the Middle Ages and in modern times.
+
+Arius denied the Trinity, believing only in one God, not only unique, but
+in one Person, and in consequence denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. He
+was perpetually involved in controversies and polemics, supported by some
+Bishops, opposed by the majority. After his death his doctrine spread
+strangely. It was stifled in the East by Theodosius, but was widely
+adopted by the "barbarians" of the West (Goths, Vandals, Burgundians,
+Lombards). It was revived, more or less exactly, after the Reformation,
+among the Socinians.
+
+ROME AND CHRISTIANITY.--The relations of Christianity with the Roman
+government were in the highest degree tragic, as is common knowledge. There
+were ten sanguinary persecutions, some being atrocious. It has often been
+asked what was the cause of this animosity against the Christians on the
+part of a government which tolerated all religions and all
+philosophies. Persecutions were natural at Athens where a democracy,
+obstinately attached to the local deities, treated as enemies of the
+country those who did not take these gods into consideration; persecutions
+were natural on the part of a Calvin or a Louis XIV who combined in
+themselves the two authorities and would not admit that anyone in the State
+had the right to think differently from its head; but it has been argued
+that they were incomprehensible on the part of a government which admitted
+all cults and all doctrines. The explanation perhaps primarily lies in the
+fact that Christianity was essentially popular, and that the government saw
+in it not only plebeianism, which was disquieting, but an organisation of
+plebeianism, which was still more so. The administration of religion had
+always been in the hands of the aristocracy; the Roman pontiffs were
+patricians, the Emperor was the sovereign pontiff; to yield obedience, even
+were it only spiritually, to private men as priests was to be disobedient
+to the Roman aristocracy, to the Emperor himself, and was properly speaking
+a revolt.
+
+A further explanation, perhaps, is that each new religion that was
+introduced at Rome did not oppose and did not contradict polytheism, the
+principle of polytheism being precisely that there are many gods; whereas
+Christianity denying all those gods and affirming that there is only one,
+and that all others must be despised as non-existent, inveighed against,
+denied, and ruined or threatened to destroy the very essence of
+polytheism. It was not a variation, it was a heresy; it was more than
+heretical, it was anarchical; it did not only condemn this or that
+religion, but even the very tolerance with which the Roman government
+accepted all religions. Hence it is natural enough that it should have been
+combated to the utmost by practically all the Emperors, from the most
+execrable, such as Nero, to the best, such as Marcus Aurelius.
+
+CHRISTIANITY AND THE PHILOSOPHERS.--The relations of Christianity
+with philosophy were confused. The immense majority of philosophers
+rejected it, considering their own views superior to it, and moreover,
+feeling it to be formidable, made use against it of all that could be found
+beautiful, specious, or expedient in ancient philosophy; and the ardour of
+Neoplatonism, which we have considered, in part arose from precisely this
+instinct of rivalry and of struggle. At that epoch there was a throng of
+men like Ernest Havet presenting Hellenism in opposition to Christianity,
+and Ernest Havet is only a Neoplatonist of the nineteenth century.
+
+A certain number of philosophers, nevertheless, either on the
+Jewish-Christian side or on the Hellenic, tried some reconciliation either
+as Jews making advances to Hellenism or as Greeks admitting there was
+something acceptable on the part of Sion. Aristobulus, a Jew (prior to
+Jesus Christ), seems to have endeavoured to bring Moses into agreement with
+Plato; Philo (a Jew contemporary with and surviving Jesus Christ and a
+non-Christian), about whom there is more information, throughout his life
+pursued the plan of demonstrating all the resemblances he could discover
+between Plato and the Old Testament, much in the same way as in our time
+some have striven to point out the surprising agreement of the Darwinian
+theory with Genesis. He was called the Jewish Plato, and at Alexandria it
+was said: "Philo imitates Plato or Plato imitates Philo."
+
+On their side, later on, certain eclectic Greeks already cited, Moderatus,
+Nicomachus, Nemesius, extended goodwill so far as to take into account, if
+not Jesus, at least Moses, and to admit Israelitish thought into the
+history of philosophy and of human wisdom. But, in general it was by the
+schools of philosophy and by the ever dwindling section of society priding
+itself upon its philosophy that Christianity was most decisively repulsed,
+thrust on one side and misunderstood.
+
+CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHERS.--Without dealing with many others who belong
+more especially to the history of the Church rather than to that of
+philosophy, the Christians did not lack two very illustrious philosophers
+who must receive attention--Origen and St. Augustine.
+
+ORIGEN.--Origen was a native of Alexandria at the close of the
+second century, and a pupil of St. Clement of Alexandria. A Christian and a
+Platonist, in order to give himself permission and excuse for reconciling
+the two doctrines, he alleged that the Apostles had given only so much of
+the Christian teaching as the multitude could comprehend, and that the
+learned could interpret it in a manner more subtle, more profound, and more
+complete. Having observed this precaution, he revealed his system, which
+was this: God is a pure spirit. He already has descended one step in
+_spirits_ which are emanations from Him. These spirits are capable of
+good and evil. When addicted to evil, they clothe themselves with matter
+and become souls in bodies;--which is what we are. There are others lower
+than ourselves. There are impure spirits which have clothed themselves
+with unclean bodies; these are demons. Now, as the fallen brethren of
+angels, we are free, less free than they, but still free. Through this
+freedom we can in our present existence either raise or lower
+ourselves. But this freedom does not suffice us; a little help is
+essential. This help comes to us from the spirits which have remained
+pure. The help they afford us is opposed by the efforts of the utterly
+fallen spirits who are lower in the scale than ourselves. To combat these
+fallen spirits, to help the pure spirits who help us, and to help them to
+help us, such is our duty in this life, which is a medicine, the medicine
+of Plato, namely a punishment; sterile when it is not accepted by us,
+salutary when gratefully accepted by us, it then becomes expiation and in
+consequence purification. The part of the Redeemer in all this is the same
+as that of the spirits, but on a grander and more decisive plane. King of
+spirits, Spirit of spirits, by revelation He illumines our confused
+intelligence and fortifies our weak will against temptation.
+
+ST. AUGUSTINE.--St. Augustine of Tagaste (in Africa), long a pagan
+exercising the profession of professor of rhetoric, became a Christian and
+was Bishop of Hippo. It is he who "fixed" the Christian doctrine in the way
+most suitable to and most acceptable to Western intelligence. Instead of
+confusing it, more or less intentionally, more or less inadvertently, with
+philosophy, he exerted all his great talents to make the most precise
+distinction from it. Philosophers (he says) have always regarded the world
+as an emanation from God. Then all is God. Such is not the way to
+reason. There is no emanation, but creation; God created the world and has
+remained distinct from it. He lives in it in such a way that we live in
+Him; in Him we live and move and have our being; He dwells throughout the
+world, but He is not the world; He is everywhere but He is not all. God
+created the world. Then, can it be said that before the world was created
+God remained doing nothing during an immense space of time? Certainly not,
+because time only began at the creation of the world. God is outside
+time. The eternal is the absence of time. God, therefore, was not an
+instant before He created the world. Or, if it be preferred, there was an
+eternity before the birth of the world. But it is the same thing; for
+eternity is the non-existence of time.
+
+Some understand God in three Persons as three Gods. This polytheism, this
+paganism must be rejected. But how to understand? How? You feel in
+yourself several souls? No. And yet there are several faculties of the
+soul. The three Persons of God are the three divine faculties. Man has body
+and soul. No one ought to have doubts about the soul, for to have doubts
+presupposes thought, and to think is to be; above all things we are
+thinking beings. But what is the soul? Something immaterial, assuredly,
+since it can conceive immaterial things, such as a line, a point, surface,
+space. It is as necessary for the soul to be immaterial in order to be able
+to grasp the immaterial, as it is necessary for the hand to be material in
+order that it can grasp a stone.
+
+Whence comes the soul? From the souls of ancestors by transmission? This is
+not probable, for this would be to regard it as material. From God by
+emanation? This is inadmissible; it is the same error as believing that the
+world emanates from God. Here, too, there is no emanation, but creation.
+God creates the souls in destination for bodies themselves born from
+heredity. Once the body is destroyed, what becomes of the soul? It cannot
+perish; for thought not being dependent upon the senses, there is no reason
+for its disappearance on the disappearance of the senses.
+
+Human liberty is an assured fact; we are free to do good or evil. But then
+God has not been able to know in advance what I shall do to-day, and in
+consequence God, at least in His knowledge, has limitations, is not
+omnipotent. St. Augustine replies confusedly (for the question is
+undoubtedly insoluble) that we have an illusion of liberty, an illusion
+that we are free, which suffices for us to acquire merit if we do right and
+demerit if we do wrong, and that this illusion of liberty is a relative
+liberty, which leaves the prescience of God, and therefore His omnipotence,
+absolute. Man is also extremely weak, debilitated, and incapable of good on
+account of original sin, the sin of our first parents, which is transmitted
+to us through heredity and paralyses us. But God helps us, and this is what
+is termed grace. He helps us gratuitously, as is indicated by the word
+"grace"--if He wishes and when He wishes and in the measure that He wishes.
+From this arises the doctrine of "predestination," by which it is
+preordained whether a man is to be saved or lost.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+IN THE MIDDLE AGES
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FROM THE FIFTH CENTURY TO THE THIRTEENTH
+
+
+Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma.
+
+When it is Declared Contrary to Dogma by the Authority of Religion,
+it is a Heresy.
+
+Orthodox and Heterodox Interpretations.
+
+Some Independent Philosophers.
+
+
+DOGMA.--After the invasion of the barbarians, philosophy, like
+literature, sought refuge in monasteries and in the schools which prelates
+instituted and maintained near them. But the Church does not permit the
+free search for truth. The truth has been established by the Fathers of the
+Church and fixed by the Councils. Thenceforth the philosophic life, so to
+speak, which had never been interrupted, assumed a fresh character. Within
+the Church it sheltered--I will not say disguised--itself under the
+interpretation of dogma; it became a sort of respectful auxiliary of
+theology, and was accordingly called the "handmaid of theology," _ancilla
+theologiae_. When emancipated, when departing from dogma, it is a
+"heresy," and all the great heresies are nothing else than schools of
+philosophy, which is why heresies must come into a history of
+philosophy. And at last, but only towards the close of the Middle Ages, lay
+thought without disturbing itself about dogma and no longer thinking about
+its interpretation, created philosophic doctrines exactly as the
+philosophers of antiquity invented them apart from religion, to which they
+were either hostile or indifferent.
+
+SCHOLASTICISM: SCOTUS ERIGENA.--The orthodox philosophy of the
+Middle Ages was the scholastic. Scholasticism consisted in amassing and in
+making known scientific facts and matters of knowledge of which it was
+useful for a well-bred man not to be ignorant and for this purpose
+encyclopaedias were constructed; on the other hand, it consisted not
+precisely in the reconciliation of faith with reason, not precisely and far
+less in the submission of faith to the criticism of reason, but in making
+faith sensible to reason, as had been the office of the Fathers of the
+Church, more especially St. Augustine.
+
+Scotus Erigena, a Scotsman attached to the Palatine Academy of Charles the
+Bald, lived in the eleventh century. He was extremely learned. His
+philosophy was Platonic, or rather the bent of his mind was Platonic. God
+is the absolute Being; He is unnamable, since any name is a delimitation of
+the being; He _is_ absolutely and infinitely. As the creator of all
+and uncreated, He is the cause _per se_; as the goal to which all
+things tend, He is the supreme end. The human soul is of impenetrable
+essence like God Himself; accordingly, it is God in us. We have fallen
+through the body and, whilst in the flesh, we can, by virtue and more
+especially by the virtue of penitence, raise ourselves to the height of the
+angels. The world is the continuous creation of God. It must not be said
+that God created the world, but that He creates it; for if He ceased from
+sustaining it, the world would no longer exist. God is perpetual creation
+and perpetual attraction. He draws all beings to Himself, and in the end He
+will have them all in Himself. There is predestination to perfection in
+everything.
+
+These theories, some of which, as has been seen, go beyond dogma and form
+at least the beginning of heresy, are all impregnated with Platonism,
+especially with Neoplatonism, and lead to the supposition that Scotus
+Erigena possessed very wide Greek learning.
+
+ARABIAN SCIENCE.--A great literary and philosophical fact in the
+eighth century was the invasion of the Arabs. Mahometans successively
+invaded Syria, Persia, Africa, and Spain, forming a crescent, the two
+points of which touched the two extremities of Europe. Inquisitive and
+sagacious pupils of the Greeks in Africa and Asia, they founded everywhere
+brilliant universities which rapidly acquired renown (Bagdad, Bassorah,
+Cordova, Granada, Seville, Murcia) and brought to Europe a new quota of
+science; for instance, all the works of Aristotle, of which Western Europe
+possessed practically nothing. Students greedy for knowledge came to learn
+from them in Spain; for instance, Gerbert, who developed into a man of
+great learning, who taught at Rheims and became Pope. Individually the
+Arabs were often great philosophers, and at least the names must be
+mentioned of Avicenna (a Neoplatonist of the tenth century) and Averroes
+(an Aristotelian of the twelfth century who betrayed tendencies towards
+admitting the eternity of nature, and its evolution through its own
+initiative during the course of time). Their doctrines were propagated,
+and the ancient books which they made known became widely diffused. From
+them dates the sway of Aristotle throughout the middle ages.
+
+ST. ANSELM.--St. Anselm, in the eleventh century, a Savoyard, who
+was long Abbot of Bec in Normandy and died Archbishop of Canterbury, is one
+of the most illustrious doctors of philosophy in the service of theology
+that ever lived. "A new St. Augustine" (as he has been called), he starts
+from faith to arrive at faith after it has been rendered sensible to
+reason. Like St. Augustine he says: "I believe in order to understand"
+(well persuaded that if I never believed I should never understand), and he
+adds what had been in the thought of St. Augustine: "I understand in order
+to believe." St. Anselm proved the existence of God by the most abstract
+arguments. For example, "It is necessary to have a cause, one or multiple;
+one is God; multiple, it can be derived from one single cause, and that one
+cause is God; it can be a particular cause in each thing caused; but then
+it is necessary to suppose a personal force which must itself have a cause
+and thus we work back to a common cause, that is to say to a single one."
+
+He proved God again by the proof which has remained famous under the name
+of the argument of St. Anselm: To conceive God is to prove that He is; the
+conception of God is proof of His existence; for every idea has its object;
+above all, an idea which has infinity for object takes for granted the
+existence of infinity; for all being finite here below, what would give the
+idea of infinity to the human mind? Therefore, if the human brain has the
+idea of infinity it is because of the existence of infinity. The argument
+is perhaps open to difference of opinion, but as proof of a singular vigour
+of mind on the part of its author, it is indisputable.
+
+Highly intellectual also is his explanation of the necessity of
+redemption. _Cur Deus Homo?_ (the title of one of his works) asked
+St. Anselm. Because sin in relation to an infinite God is an infinite
+crime. Man, finite and limited in capacity, could therefore never expiate
+it. Then what could God do to avenge His honour and to have satisfaction
+rendered to Him? He could only make Himself man without ceasing to be God,
+in order that as man He should offer to God a reparation to which as God He
+would give the character of infinitude. It was therefore absolutely
+necessary that at a given moment man should become God, which could only be
+done upon the condition that God made Himself man.
+
+REALISTS; NOMINALISTS; CONCEPTUALISTS.--It was in the time of
+St. Anselm that there arose the celebrated philosophic quarrel between the
+"realists, nominalists, and conceptualists." It is here essential to employ
+these technical terms or else not to allude to the dispute at all, because
+the strife is above all a war of words. The realists (of whom St. Anselm
+was one), said: "The ideas (idea of virtue, idea of sin, idea of greatness,
+idea of littleness) are realities; they exist, in a spiritual manner of
+course, but they really exist; they are: there is a virtue, a sin, a
+greatness, a littleness, a reason, etc. (and this was an exact reminiscence
+of the ideas of Plato). It is indeed only the idea, the general, the
+universal, which is real, and the particular has only the appearance of
+reality. Men do not exist, the individual man does not exist; what exists
+is 'man' in general, and individual men are only the appearance of--the
+coloured reflections of--the universal man." The nominalists (Roscelin the
+Canon of Compiegne, for instance) answered: "No; the general ideas, the
+universals as you say, are only names, are only words, emissions of the
+voice, labels, if you like, which we place on such and such categories of
+facts observed by us; there is no greatness; there are a certain number of
+great things, and when we think of them we inscribe this word 'greatness'
+on the general idea which we conceive. 'Man' does not exist; there are men
+and the word humanity is only a word which to us represents a collective
+idea."
+
+Why did the realists cling so to their universals, held to be realities and
+the sole realities? For many reasons. If the individual alone be real,
+there are not three Persons in the Godhead, there are three Gods and the
+unity of God is not real, it is only a word, and God is not real, He is
+only an utterance of the voice. If the individual is not real, the Church
+is not real; she does not exist, there only exist Christians who possess
+freedom of thought and of faith. Now the Church is real and it is not only
+desirable that she should be real, but even that she alone should possess
+reality and that the individuals constituting her should exist by her and
+not by themselves. (This is precisely the doctrine with regard to society
+now current among certain philosophers: society exists independently of its
+members; it has laws of its own independently of its members; it is a
+reality on its own basis; and its members are by it, not it by them, and
+therefore they should obey it; M. Durckheim is a "realist.")
+
+ABELARD of Nantes, pupil of the nominalist, William of Champeaux,
+learned man, artist, man of letters, an incomparable orator, tried to
+effect a conciliation. He said: "The universal is not a reality, certainly;
+but it is something more than a simple word; it is a conception of the
+mind, which is something more than an utterance of the voice. As conception
+of the mind, in fact, it lives with a life which goes beyond the
+individual, because it can be common to several individuals to many
+individuals, and because in fact it is common to them. The general idea
+that I have and which I have communicated to my hearers, and which returns
+to me from my hearers, is more than a word since it is a link between my
+hearers and myself, and an atmosphere in which I and my hearers live. Is
+the Church only to be a word? God forbid that I should say so. She is a
+bond between all Christians; she is a general idea common to them all, so
+that in her each individual feels himself several, feels himself many;
+although it is true that were she not believed in by anyone she would be
+nothing." At bottom he was a nominalist, but more subtle, also more
+profound and more precise, having a better grasp of what William of
+Champeaux had desired to say. He shared in his condemnation.
+
+Apart from the great dispute, his ideas were singularly broad and
+bold. Half knowing, half guessing at ancient philosophy, he held it in high
+esteem; he found there, because he delighted in finding there, all the
+Christian ideas: the one God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the imputation
+of the merits of the saints, original sin; and he found less of a gulf
+between ancient philosophy and Christianity than between the Old and the
+New Testament (this is because the only Christianity known to Abelard, not
+the primitive but that constituted in the fourth century, was profoundly
+impregnated with Hellenism). He believed the Holy Ghost to have revealed
+Himself to the wise men of antiquity as well as to the Jews and the
+Christians, and that virtuous pagans may have been saved. The moral
+philosophy of Abelard is very elevated and pure. Our acts proceed from
+God; for it is impossible that they should not; but He permits us the
+faculty of disobedience "in order that virtue may exist," to which it
+tends; for if the tendency to evil did not exist, there would be no
+possibility of effort against evil, and if no efforts, then no virtue; God,
+who cannot be virtuous since He cannot be tempted by evil, can be virtuous
+in man, which is why He leaves him the tendency to evil for him to triumph
+over it and be virtuous so that virtue may exist; even if He were Himself
+to lead us into temptation, the tendency would still be the same; He would
+only lead us into it to give us the opportunity for struggle and victory,
+and therefore in order that virtue might exist; the possibility of sin is
+the condition of virtue, and in consequence, even in the admission of this
+possibility and above all by its admission, God is virtuous.
+
+The bad deed, furthermore, is not the most considerable from the point of
+view of guilt; as merit or demerit the intention is worth as much as the
+deed and he is criminal who has had the intention to be so (which is
+clearly according to the Gospel).
+
+HUGO DE SAINT-VICTOR; RICHARD.--Abelard possessed perhaps the
+broadest and greatest mind of the whole of the Middle Ages. After these
+famous names must be mentioned Hugo de Saint-Victor, a somewhat obscure
+mystic of German origin; and the not less mystical Richard, who, thoroughly
+persuaded that God is not attained by reason but by feeling, taught
+exaltation to Him by detachment from self and by six degrees: renunciation,
+elevation, impulsion, precipitation, ecstasy, and absorption.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+Influence of Aristotle
+His Adoption by the Church.
+Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
+
+
+ARISTOTLE AND THE CHURCH.--From the thirteenth century, Aristotle,
+completely known and translated into Latin, was adopted by the Church and
+became in some sort its lay vicar. He was regarded, and I think rightly, as
+of all the Greek thinkers the least dangerous to her and as the one to whom
+could be left all the scientific instruction whilst she reserved to herself
+all the religious teaching. Aristotle, in fact, "defended her from Plato,"
+in whom were always found some germs of adoration of this world, or some
+tendencies in this direction, in whom was also found a certain polytheism
+much disguised, or rather much purified, but actual and dangerous;
+therefore, from the moment when it became necessary to select, Aristotle
+was tolerated and finally invested with office.
+
+ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.--As Aristotelian theologians must be cited
+William of Auvergne, Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus; but the
+sovereign name of this period of the history of philosophy is St. Thomas
+Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote several small works but, surpassing them
+all, the _Summa_ (encyclopaedia) which bears his name. In general
+philosophy St. Thomas Aquinas is an Aristotelian, bending but not
+distorting the ideas of Aristotle to Christian conceptions. Like
+Aristotle, he demonstrated God by the existence of motion and the necessity
+of a first motive power; he further demonstrated it by the contingent,
+relative, and imperfect character of all here below: "There is in things
+more or less goodness, more or less truth." But we only affirm the more or
+less of a thing by comparing it with something absolute and as it
+approaches more or less to this absolute; there is therefore an absolute
+being, namely God--and this argument appeared to him better than that of
+St. Anselm, which he refuted.
+
+HIS CONCEPTION OF NATURE.--He showed the whole of nature as a great
+hierarchy, proceeding from the least perfect and the most shapeless to the
+most complete and determinate; from another aspect, as separated into two
+great kingdoms, that of necessity (mineral, vegetable, animal), and that of
+grace (humanity). He displayed it willed by God, projected by God, created
+by God; governed by God according to antecedent and consequent wills, that
+is, by general wills (God desires man to be saved) and by particular wills
+(God wishes the sinner to be punished), and the union of the general wills
+is the creation, and the result of all the particular wills is
+Providence. Nature and man with it are the work not only of the power but
+of the goodness of God, and it is by love that He created us and we must
+render Him love for love, which is involuntarily done by Nature herself in
+her obedience to His laws, and which we must do voluntarily by obedience to
+His commandments.
+
+THE SOUL.--Our soul is immaterial and more complete than that of
+animals, for St. Thomas does not formally deny that animals have souls; the
+instinct of animals is the sensitive soul according to Aristotle, which is
+capable of four faculties: sensibility, imagination, memory, and
+estimation, that is elementary intelligence: "The bird picks up straw, not
+because it gratifies her feelings [not by a movement of sensibility], but
+because it serves to make her nest. It is therefore necessary that an
+animal should perceive those intuitions which do not come within the scope
+of the senses. It is by opinion or estimation that it perceives these
+intuitions, these distant ends." We, mankind, possess a soul which is
+sensibility, imagination, memory, and reason. Reason is the faculty not
+only of having ideas, but of establishing connections and chains of
+connection between the ideas and of conceiving general ideas. Reason pauses
+before reaching God because the idea of God precisely is the only one which
+cannot be brought to the mind by the interrelation of ideas, for God
+surpasses all ideas; the idea of God is given by faith, which can be
+subsequently helped by reason, for the latter can work to make faith
+perceptible to reason.
+
+Our soul is full of passions, divisible into two great categories, the
+passions of desire and those of anger. The passions of desire are rapid or
+violent movements towards some object which seems to us a good; the
+passions of anger are movements of revolt against something which opposes
+our movement towards a good. The common root of all the passions is love,
+for it is obvious that from it are derived the passions of desire; and as
+for the passions of wrath they would not exist if we had no love of
+anything, in which case our desire not coming into collision would not turn
+into revolt against the obstacle. We are free to do good or evil, to master
+our evil passions and to follow those of which reason approves. Here
+reappears the objection of the knowledge God must have beforehand of our
+actions: if God foresees our actions we are not free; if free, we act
+contrary to his previsions, then He is not all-powerful. St. Thomas makes
+answer thus: "There is not prevision, there is vision, because we are in
+time whereas God is in eternity. He sees at one glance and instantaneously
+all the past, present, and future. Therefore, He does not foresee but see,
+and this vision does not hinder human freedom any more than being seen
+acting prevents one from acting. Because God knows our deeds after they are
+done, no one can plead that that prevents our full liberty to do them; if
+He knew them before it is the same as knowing them after, because for Him
+past, present, and future are all the same moment." This appears subtle but
+is not, for it only amounts to the statement that in speaking of God time
+must not be mentioned, for God is as much outside time as outside space.
+
+THE MORAL SYSTEM OF ST. THOMAS.--The very detailed and
+circumstantial moral system of St. Thomas may thus be summarized: there is
+in conscience, first, an intellectual act which is the distinction between
+good and evil; secondly, an act of will which leads us to the good. This
+power for good urges the practice of virtue. There are human virtues, well
+known to the ancient philosophers, temperance, courage, wisdom, justice,
+which lead to happiness on earth; there are divine virtues, inspired in man
+by God, which are faith, hope, and charity, and they lead to eternal
+happiness. We practise the virtues, when we are well-disposed, because we
+are free; but our liberty and our will do not suffice; it is necessary for
+God to help us, and that is "grace."
+
+FAITH AND REASON.--On the question of the relation of reason to
+faith, St. Thomas Aquinas recognizes, or rather proclaims, that reason will
+never demonstrate faith, that the revealed truths, the Trinity, original
+sin, grace, etc., are above reason and infinitely exceed it. How, then, can
+one believe? By will, aided by the grace of God. Then henceforth must no
+appeal be made to reason? Yes, indeed! Reason serves to refute the errors
+of the adversaries of the faith, and by this refutation to confirm itself
+in belief. The famous _Credo ut intelligam_--I believe in order to
+understand--is therefore true. Comprehension is only possible on condition
+of belief; but subsequently comprehension helps to believe, if not more, at
+least with a greater precision and in a more abundant light. St. Thomas
+Aquinas here is in exactly the position which Pascal seems to have taken
+up: Believe and you will understand; understand and you will believe more
+exactly. Therefore an act of will: "I wish to believe"--a grace of God
+fortifying this will: faith exists--studies and reasoning: faith is the
+clearer.
+
+ST. BONAVENTURA; RAYMOND LULLE.--Beside these men of the highest
+brain-power there are found in the thirteenth century mystics, that is,
+poets and eccentrics, both by the way most interesting. It was St.
+Bonaventura who, being persuaded, almost like an Alexandrine, that one
+rises to God by synthetic feeling and not by series of arguments, and that
+one journeys towards Him by successive states of the soul each more pure
+and more passionate--wrote _The Journey of the Soul to God_, which is,
+so to speak, a manual of mysticism. Learned as he was, whilst pursuing his
+own purpose, he digressed in agreeable and instructive fashion into the
+realms of real knowledge.
+
+Widely different from him, Raymond Lulle or de Lulle, an unbridled
+schoolman, in his _Ars magna_ invented a reasoning machine, analogous
+to an arithmetical machine, in which ideas were automatically deduced from
+one another as the figures inscribe themselves on a counter. As often
+happens, the excess of the method was its own criticism, and an enemy of
+scholasticism could not have more ingeniously demonstrated that it was a
+kind of mechanism. Raymond de Lulle was at once a learned man and a
+well-informed and most enquiring naturalist for whom Arabian science held
+no secrets. With that he was poet, troubadour, orator, as well as very
+eccentric and attractive. He was beloved and persecuted in his lifetime,
+and long after his death still found enthusiastic disciples.
+
+BACON.--Contemporaneously lived the man whom it is generally the
+custom to regard as the distant precursor of experimental science, Roger
+Bacon (who must not be confused with Francis Bacon, another learned man who
+lived much nearer to our own time). Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar,
+occupied himself almost exclusively with physical and natural science. He
+passed the greater portion of his life in prison by reason of alleged
+sorcery and, more especially, perhaps, because he had denounced the evil
+lives of his brethren. He had at least a presentiment of almost all modern
+inventions: gunpowder, magnifying glass, telescope, air-pump; he was
+distinctly an inventor in optics. In philosophy, properly speaking, he
+denounced what was hollow and empty in scholasticism, detesting that
+preference should be given to "the straw of words rather than to the grain
+of fact," and proclaiming that reasoning "is good to conclude but not to
+establish." Without discovering the law of progress, as has too often been
+alleged, he arrived at the conclusion that antiquity being the youth of the
+world, the moderns are the adults, which only meant that it would be at our
+school that the ancients would learn were they to return to earth and that
+we ought not to believe blindly in the ancients; and this was an
+insurrection against the principle of authority and against the idolatry of
+Aristotle. He preached the direct study of nature, observation, and
+experiment with the subsequent application of deduction, and especially of
+mathematical deduction, to experiment and observation. With all that, he
+believed in astrology; for those who are in advance of their time none the
+less belong to it: but he was a very great man.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
+
+
+Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the Coming
+Era. Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery.
+
+
+DECADENCE OF SCHOLASTICISM.--The fourteenth century dated the
+decadence of scholasticism, but saw little new. "Realism" was generally
+abandoned, and the field was swept by "nominalism," which was the theory
+that ideas only have existence in the brains which conceive them. Thus
+Durand de Saint-Pourcain remains famous for having said, "To exist is to be
+individually," which at that epoch was very audacious. William of Ockham
+repeated the phrase with emphasis; there is nothing real except the
+individual. That went so far as to cast suspicion on all metaphysics, and
+somewhat on theology. In fact, _although a devout believer_, Ockham
+rejected theology, implored the Church not to be learned, because her
+science proved nothing, and to content herself with faith: "Science belongs
+to God, faith to men." But, or rather in addition, if the ministers of God
+were no longer imposing because of their ambitious science, it was
+necessary for them to regain their sway over souls by other and better
+means. It was incumbent on them to be saintly, to revert to the purity, the
+simplicity, and the divine childishness of the primitive Church; and here
+he was virtually a forerunner of the Reformation.
+
+Ockham was indeed one of the auxiliaries of Philip the Fair in his struggle
+with the Holy See, suffered excommunication, and sought refuge with the
+Duke of Bavaria, the foe of the Pope.
+
+BURIDAN: THE LIBERTY OF INDIFFERENCE.--Realists and nominalists
+continued their mutual strife, sometimes physically even, until the middle
+of the fifteenth century. But nominalism always gained ground, having
+among other celebrated champions, Peter d'Ailly and Buridan; the one
+succeeded in becoming Chancellor of the University of Paris, the other in
+becoming its Rector. Buridan has remained famous through his death and his
+donkey, both alike legendary. According to a ballad by Villon, Buridan
+having been too tenderly loved by Joan of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair,
+was by his order "thrown in a sack into the Seine." By comparison of
+dates, the fact seems impossible. According to tradition, either in order
+to show the freedom of indifference, or that animals are mere machines,
+Buridan declared that an ass with two baskets full of corn placed one on
+each side of him and at equal distance from him, would never decide from
+which he should feed and would die of starvation. Nothing of the kind is to
+be found in his works, but he may have said so in a lecture and his pupils
+remembering it have handed it down as a proverb.
+
+PETER D'AILLY; GERSON.--Peter d'Ailly, a highly important
+ecclesiastic, head of the College of Navarre, chevalier of the University
+of Paris, Cardinal, a leader in the discussions at the Councils at Pisa and
+Constance, a drastic reformer of the morals and customs of the Church, did
+not evince any marked originality as a philosopher, but maintained the
+already known doctrines of nominalism with extraordinary dialectical skill.
+
+Among his pupils he numbered Gerson, who was also Chancellor of the
+University of Paris, another highly zealous and energetic reformer, a more
+avowed enemy of scholasticism and mysticism, of exaggerated austerity and
+astrology, eminently modern in the best sense of the word, whose political
+and religious enemies are his title of respect. He was the author of many
+small books devoted to the popularization of science, religion, and
+morality. To him was long attributed the _Imitation of Jesus Christ_,
+which on the whole bears no resemblance to his writings, but which he might
+very well have written in old age in his retreat in the peaceful silence of
+the Celestines of Lyons.
+
+THE KABBALA.--From the beginning of the fifteenth century the
+Renaissance was heralded by a revival of Platonism, both in philosophy and
+literature. But it was a Platonism strangely understood, a quaint medley of
+Pythagoreanism and Alexandrinism, the source of which is not very clear
+(the period not having been much studied). Then arose an incredible
+infatuation for the Kabbala--a doctrine which was for a long while the
+secret of the Jews, brooded over by them so to speak during the darkness of
+the Middle Ages, in which are to be found traces of the most sublime
+speculations and of the basest superstitions of antiquity. It contained a
+kind of pantheistic theology closely analogous to those of Porphyry and
+Iamblichus, as well as processes of magic mingled with astrology. The
+Kabbalists believe that the sage, who by his astrological knowledge is
+brought into relation with the celestial powers, can affect nature, alter
+the course of phenomena, and work miracles. The Kabbala forms part of the
+history of the marvelous and of occult science rather than of the history
+of philosophy. Nevertheless men of real learning were initiated and were
+infatuated, among them the marvelous Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, not
+less remarkable as humanist and Hebraist, who would have run grave risk at
+the hands of the Inquisition at Cologne if he had not been saved by Leo
+X. Cardan, a mathematician and physician, was one of the learned men of the
+day most impregnated with Kabbalism. He believed in a kind of infallibility
+of the inner sense, of the intuition, and regarded as futile all sciences
+that proceeded by slow rational operations. He believed himself a mage and
+magician. From vanity he spoke of himself in the highest terms and from
+cynicism in the lowest. Doubt has been cast on his sincerity and also on
+his sanity.
+
+MAGIC.--There were also Paracelsus and Agrippa. Paracelsus, like
+Cardan, believed in an intense light infinitely superior to bestial
+reasoning and calls to mind certain philosophy of intuition of the present
+day. He too believed himself a magician and physician, and effected cures
+by the application of astrology to therapeutics. Agrippa did the same with
+yet stranger phantasies, passing from absolute scepticism through mysticism
+to magi and demonology; in his own time and in subsequent centuries
+enjoying the reputation of a devil incarnate as man.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+It Is Fairly Accurate to Consider that from the Point of
+View of Philosophy, the Middle Ages Lasted until Descartes.
+
+Free-thinkers More or Less Disguised.
+
+Partisans of Reason Apart from Faith, of Observation,
+and Of Experiment.
+
+
+THE FREEDOM OF PHILOSOPHY: POMPONAZZO.--The freedom and even the
+audacity of philosophy rapidly increased. Learned and convinced
+Aristotelians were bent, either from sheer love of truth or from a more
+secret purpose, on demonstrating to what extent Aristotle, accurately read,
+was opposed to the teaching of the Church. For instance, Pomponazzo
+revealed that nothing could be drawn from Aristotle in favour of the
+immortality of the soul, in which he himself believed fervently, but in
+which Aristotle did not believe, hence it was necessary to choose between
+the Church and Aristotle; that without the immortality of the soul there
+could be no rewards beyond the grave, which was entirely his own opinion,
+but whoever should desire to offer excuses for Aristotle could say it was
+precisely the existence of punishments and rewards which deprived virtue of
+existence, which did away with virtue, since the good that is done for the
+sake of reward or from fear of punishment is no longer good; that, still
+according to Aristotle, there could never be miracles; that he, Pomponazzo,
+believed in all the miracles recorded in the Scriptures; but that Aristotle
+would not have believed in them, and could not have believed in them, a
+fact which demanded consideration, not assuredly in order to reject belief
+in miracles, but in order not to bestow on Aristotle that confidence which
+for so long had been too readily placed in him.
+
+In the same way, he took up again the eternal question of the prescience of
+God and of human liberty, and showed that no matter what had been said it
+was necessary to choose: either we are free and God is not omnipotent, or
+God is omnipotent and we are not free. To regard as true this latter
+hypothesis, towards which the philosopher evidently leans, would cause God
+to be the author of evil and of sin. It would not be impossible for God to
+be the author of evil as an essential condition of good, for if evil were
+not to exist then there could not be good; nor would it be impossible that
+He should be the author, not of sin, but of the possibility of sin in order
+that virtue might be possible, there being no virtue where it is impossible
+to commit sin; but therein lies a mystery which faith alone can solve, and
+which Aristotle at any rate has not solved, therefore let us not place
+reliance on Aristotle.
+
+This disguised freethinker, for he does not appear to me to be anything
+else, was one of the most original thinkers of the period intermediate
+between the Middle Ages and Descartes.
+
+MICHAEL SERVETUS; VANINI.--Such instances of temerity were sometimes
+fatal to their authors. Michael Servetus, a very learned Spanish physician
+who perhaps discovered the circulation of the blood before Harvey,
+disbelieved in the Trinity and in the divinity of Jesus, and, as he was a
+Platonist, perceived no intermediaries between God and man save
+ideas. Persecuted by the Catholics, he sought refuge at Geneva, believing
+Calvin to be more merciful than the Inquisitors, and Calvin burned him
+alive.
+
+Vanini, half a century later, that is at the commencement of the
+seventeenth, a restless, vain, and insolent man, after a life full of
+sudden changes of fortune, and yet distinguished, was burnt alive at
+Toulouse for certain passages in his _De admirandis ... arcanis_, and
+for having said that he would not express his opinion on the immortality of
+the soul until he was old, a Jew, and a German.
+
+BRUNO; CAMPANELLA.--Giordano Bruno, an astronomer and one of the
+first to affirm that the sun was the centre of the world, professed,
+despite certain precautions, a doctrine which confused God with the world
+and denied or excluded creation. Giordano Bruno was arrested at Venice in
+1593, kept seven years in prison, and finally burnt at Rome in 1600.
+
+Campanella, likewise an Italian, who spent twenty-seven years in a dungeon
+for having conspired against the Spanish masters of his country, and who
+died in exile in Paris in 1639, was a sceptic in philosophy, or rather an
+anti-metaphysician, and, as would be said nowadays, a positivist. There are
+only two sources of knowledge, observation and reasoning. Observation makes
+us know things--is this true? May not the sensations of things which we
+have be a simple phantasmagoria? No; for we have an internal sense, a sense
+of our own, which cannot deceive us, which affirms our existence (here is
+the _Cogito_ of Descartes anticipated) and which, at the same time,
+affirms that there are things which are not ourselves, so that coincidently
+the ego and the non-ego are established. Yes, but is this non-ego really
+what it seems? It is; granted; but what is it and can we know what it is?
+Not without doubt, and here scepticism is unshakable; but in that there is
+certitude of the existence of the non-ego, the presumption is that we can
+know it, partially, relatively, very relatively, while we remain infinitely
+distant from an absolute knowledge, which would be divine. Therefore let us
+observe and experiment; let us make the "history" of nature as historians
+make the history of the human race. And this is the simple and solid
+philosophy of experiment.
+
+But Campanella, like so many more, was a metaphysician possessed by the
+devil of metaphysics, and after having imperiously recommended the writing
+of only the history of nature, he himself wrote its romance as well. Every
+being, he said (and the thought was a very fine one), exists on condition
+of being able to exist, and on condition that there be an idea of which it
+is the realization, and again on condition that nature is willing to create
+it. In other words, nature can, knows what she wishes, and wishes. Now all
+beings, in a greater or less degree according to their perfection or
+imperfection, feel this triple condition of being able, knowing, and
+wishing. Every being can, knows, and wishes, even inorganic matter (here
+already is the world as will and representation of Schopenhauer), and God
+is only absolute power, absolute knowledge, and absolute will. This is why
+all creative things gravitate to God and desire to return to Him as to
+their origin, and as the perfection of what they are: the universe has
+nostalgia for God.
+
+Campanella was also, as we should say nowadays, a sociologist. He made his
+"Republic" as Plato had made his. The Republic of Campanella was called the
+_City of the Sun_. It was a community republic, leavened with
+aristocracy with "spiritual power" and "temporal power" somewhat after the
+manner of Auguste Comte. Campanella was a great sower of ideas.
+
+FRANCIS BACON.--Francis Bacon, lawyer, member of Parliament, Lord
+Chancellor of England, personal friend of James I, friend, protector, and
+perhaps collaborator with Shakespeare, overthrown as the result of
+political animosity and relegated to private life, was a very learned man
+with a marvellous mind. Like his namesake, Roger Bacon, but in an age more
+favourable to intellectual reform, he attempted a sort of renewal of the
+human mind (_Instauratio Magna_) or at least a radical revolution in
+the methods and workings of the human mind. Although Francis Bacon
+professed admiration for many of the thinkers of antiquity, he urged that
+it was wrong to rely on them because they had not sufficiently observed;
+one must not, like the schoolmen, have ideas _a priori_, which are
+"idols," and there are idols of tribe, of party, of school, of eras;
+intentions must not be perceived everywhere in nature, and we must not,
+because the sun warms, believe it was created to warm, or because the earth
+yields nourishment believe her creation was for the purpose of feeding us,
+and that all things converge to man and are put at his service. It is
+necessary to proceed by observation, by experiment, and then by induction,
+but with prodigious mistrust of induction. Induction consists in drawing
+conclusions from the particular to the general, from a certain number of
+facts to a law. This is legitimate on condition that the conclusion is not
+drawn from a few facts to a law, which is precipitate induction, fruitful
+in errors; but from a very large number of facts to a law, which even then
+is considered as provisional. As for metaphysics, as for the investigation
+of universal law, that should be entirely separated from philosophy itself,
+from the "primary philosophy" which does not lead to it; it has its own
+field, which is that of faith: "Give to faith what belongeth to faith." In
+the main he is uninterested in metaphysics, believing them always to
+revolve in a circle and, I do not say, only believes in science and in
+method, but has hope only from knowledge and method, an enthusiast in this
+respect just as another might be about the super-sensible world or about
+ideas, saying human knowledge and human power are really coincident, and
+believing that knowledge will support humanity in all calamities, will
+prolong human life, will establish a new golden age, etc.
+
+Moreover, let there be none of that eternal and unfounded fear that
+knowledge will cause the disappearance of the religious feeling. With
+profound conviction and judging by himself, Bacon said: "A little
+philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy
+bringeth a man's mind about to religion." Such is true philosophy,
+"subordinate to the object," attentive to the object, listening to the
+voices of the world and only anxious to translate them into human language:
+"that is true philosophy which renders the voices of the world the most
+accurately possible, like an echo, which writes as if at the dictation of
+the world itself, adding nothing of its own, only repeating and
+_resounding_."
+
+And, as a man is always of his time, he believed in alchemy and in the
+possibility of transmuting base metals into gold. But note how he
+understood it: "To create a new nature in a given body or to produce new
+natures and to introduce them ... he who is acquainted with the forms and
+modes of super-inducing yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity,
+solution, and the rest, with their gradations and methods, will see and
+take care that these properties be united in some body, whence its
+transformation into gold may follow." Modern chemistry, with scientific
+methods highly analogous to those which Bacon indicated or foresaw, has not
+made gold, which is not a very useful thing to do, but has done better.
+
+THOMAS HOBBES.--At the end of the sixteenth century, another
+Englishman, Thomas Hobbes, began to think. He was, above all else, a
+literary man and a sociologist; he translated Thucydides and Homer, he
+wrote _Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth_,
+which is a manual of despotism, demonstrating that all men in a natural
+state were beasts of prey with regard to one another, but that they escaped
+this unpleasant fate by submission to a prince who has all rights because
+he is perpetually saving his subjects from death, and who can therefore
+impose on them whatever he pleases, even scientific dogma or religious
+beliefs. Merely regarded as a philosopher, properly so called, Hobbes has
+an important position in the history of ideas. Like Francis Bacon, but more
+rigorously and authoritatively, he began by separating metaphysics and
+theology from philosophy. Philosophy is the art of thinking. That which is
+not sensible--mind, soul, God--cannot be thought: can only be believed;
+philosophy does not deny all that; merely it does not concern itself
+therewith. Here is the whole of positivism established in principle. What
+we can think is what we feel. Things are known to us only through
+sensations; a thought is a sensation, the human mind is a compound of
+sensations.
+
+No; for I can think of a thing without hearing, seeing, feeling it, etc.
+
+This is because we have memory, which is itself a sensation; it is a
+sensation which prolongs itself; to remember is to feel that one has felt;
+it is to feel a former sensation which the brain is able to preserve. We
+think only by combining current sensations with other current sensations,
+or much more often indeed, thanks to memory, by combining current
+sensations with older ones, or former sensations with each other. This is
+but a fragile basis for knowledge and thought, for sensation is only a
+modification of ourselves caused by an external object, and consequently
+gives us nothing at all of the external object, and of itself the external
+world is eternally unknown to us; but we combine with each other the
+illusions that the external world deposits in us through the delusive or
+doubtful intermediary of our senses.
+
+When the sensation thus combined with other sensations has become thought,
+then ideas begin to exist. They are products of sensation detached from
+sensation. They are interassociated by laws that are obscure, yet which can
+be vaguely perceived. They awake, so to speak, and call to one another;
+every time an idea previously acquired reappears, it is followed by the
+thought which accompanied it when it was acquired. In a conversation a
+traitor is spoken of. Someone asks what was the value of a piece of silver
+in ancient times. This appears incoherent; really it is a natural and
+simple association of ideas in which there are few intermediate steps. The
+person who listened as the traitor was mentioned thought of Judas, who was
+the first traitor of whom he had heard, and of the thirty pieces of silver,
+the price of the betrayal by Judas. The association of ideas is more or
+less close, more or less loose; it is disconnected in dreams, irregular in
+musing, close directly it is dominated and in consequence directed by an
+end pursued, by a goal sought; for then there is a desire to attain which
+associates nothing of itself, but which, eliminating all ideas that are not
+pertinent to the end pursued, permits only the association of those which
+have relation to it.
+
+Seeing in the human soul only successive impulses arising from those first
+impulses which are the sensations, Hobbes does not believe we are free to
+do what we wish; we are carried away by the strongest impulse of our
+internal impulses, desire, fear, aversion, love, etc. Nevertheless we
+deliberate, we consider different courses to pursue and we decide on the
+one we desire to choose. No; we do not deliberate, we only imagine we
+deliberate. Deliberation is only a succession of different feelings, and to
+the one that gains the day we give the name of volition. "In the
+[so-called] deliberation, the final desire or the final fear is called
+will." Therefore liberty has no more existence among men than among
+animals; will and desire are only one and the same thing considered under
+different aspects.
+
+UTILITARIAN MORALITY.--Henceforth there is no morality; without the
+power to will this and not to will that, there is no possible
+morality. Hobbes retorts with "utilitarian morality": What man should seek
+is pleasure, as Aristippus thought; but true pleasure--that which is
+permanent and that which is useful to him. Now it is useful to be a good
+citizen, a loyal subject, sociable, serviceable to others, careful to
+obtain their esteem by good conduct, etc. Morality is interest rightly
+understood, and interest rightly understood is absolutely blended with the
+morality of duty. The criminal is not a criminal but an idiot; the honest
+man is not an honest man but an intelligent one. Observe that a man is
+hardly convinced when preached to in the name of duty, but always convinced
+when addressed in the name of his own interest.
+
+All this is fairly sensible; but from the time that freedom ceases there
+can be no morality, _not even utilitarian_; for it is useless even
+from the point of view of his own interests, to preach to a man who is only
+a machine moved by the strongest force; and, if he be only that, to lay
+down a moral code for him either from the point of view of his own
+interests, or from that of morality, or from that of the love of God are
+things which are the same and which are as absurd the one as the other. All
+philosophy, which does not believe in human liberty, yet which enunciates a
+system of morality, is in perpetual contradiction.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+MODERN TIMES
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+Descartes. Cartesianism.
+
+
+DESCARTES.--The seventeenth century, which was the greatest
+philosophic century of modern times and perhaps of any time, began with
+Rene Descartes. Descartes, born at La Haye in Touraine in 1596, of noble
+family (his real name was des Quartes), was educated by the Jesuits of the
+college of La Fleche, followed the military profession for several years,
+then gave himself up to mathematics and became one of the greatest
+mathematicians of Europe, traveled all over Europe for his own amusement
+and instruction, wrote scientific and philosophical works, of which the
+most famous are the _Discourse on_ METHOD, the _Meditations_, and
+the _Rules for the Control of the Mind_, resided sometimes in Paris,
+sometimes in Holland, and finally, at fifty-four years of age, unhappily
+attracted by the flattering invitations of Queen Christina of Sweden,
+proceeded to Stockholm, where he succumbed in four months to the severity
+of the climate. He died in February, 1650.
+
+THE SYSTEM OF DESCARTES.--In the works of Descartes there are a
+general system of philosophy, a psychology, and a method. This order is
+here adopted because of the three, in Descartes; it is the third which is
+the most important, and which has left the most profound traces. The
+foundation of the system of Descartes is belief in God and in the goodness
+of God. I say the foundation and not the starting-point. The starting-point
+is another matter; but it will be clearly seen that the foundation is what
+has just been stated. The starting-point is this: I do not believe,
+provisionally, in anything, not wishing to take into account what I have
+been taught. I doubt everything. Is there anything I cannot doubt? It
+seems to me there is: I cannot doubt that I doubt. Now if I doubt, I
+think; if I think, I am. There is one certainty, I am.
+
+And having arrived there, Descartes is at a dead stop, for from the
+certitude of one's own existence nothing can be deduced save the certitude
+of one's existence. For instance, shall I believe in the existence of
+everything that is not myself? There is no reason why I should believe in
+it. The world may be a dream. But if I believe in God and in a God of
+perfect goodness, I can then believe in something outside of myself, for
+God not being able to deceive Himself or me, if He permits me to see the
+external world, it is because this external world exists. There are
+already, therefore, three things in which I believe: my own existence, that
+of God, and that of the universe. Which of these beliefs is the fundamental
+one? Evidently, the one not demonstrated; the axiom is that upon which one
+rests to demonstrate everything except itself. Now of the three things in
+which Descartes believed, his own existence is demonstrated by the
+impossibility of thinking or feeling, without feeling his own existence;
+the other is demonstrated by the existence of a good God; the existence of
+a good God is demonstrated by nothing. It is believed. Hence belief in a
+good God is Descartes' foundation. This has not been introduced in order
+that he may escape from the _I am_ at which he came to a stop; that
+belief certainly existed previously, and if he had recourse to it, it was
+because it existed first. Without that, he had too much intellectual
+honesty to invent it for a particular need. He had it, and he found it as
+it were in reserve when he asked himself if he could go beyond _I
+am_. Here was his foundation; all the rest would complete the proof.
+
+THE EXISTENCE OF GOD.--Although Descartes rests on God as being his
+first principle, he does not fail to prove His existence, and that is
+begging the question, something proved by what has to be proved. For if
+Descartes believed only in something outside himself because of a good God,
+that Being outside himself, God, he can prove only because of the existence
+of a good God, who cannot deceive us, and thus is God proved by the belief
+in Him. That is begging the question. Descartes does not fail to prove the
+existence of God by superabundance as it were; and this, too, in itself
+indicates clearly that faith in God is the very foundation of the
+philosophy of Descartes. After having taken it as the basis of reasoning,
+he takes it as the goal of reasoning, which indicates that the idea of God,
+so to speak, encircled his mind and that he found it at every ultimate
+point of thought.
+
+He proves it, therefore, first by an argument analogous to that of
+St. Anselm, which is this: we, imperfect and finite, have the idea of a
+perfect and infinite Being; we are not capable of this idea. Therefore it
+must have come to us from a Being really perfect and infinite, and hence
+this perfect Being exists.
+
+Another proof, that of God regarded as cause. First: I exist. Who made me?
+Was it myself? No, if it had been myself I should have endowed myself with
+all the perfections of which I can conceive and in which I am singularly
+deficient. Therefore it must be some other being who created me. It was my
+parents. No doubt, but who created my parents and the parents of my
+parents? One cannot go back indefinitely from cause to cause, and there
+must have been a first one.
+
+Secondly: even my own actual existence, my existence at this very moment,
+is it the result of my existence yesterday? Nothing proves it, and there is
+no necessity because I existed just now that I should exist at
+present. There must therefore be a cause at each moment and a continuous
+cause. That continuous cause is God, and the whole world is a creation
+perpetually continued, and is only comprehensible as continuous creation
+and is only explicable by a Creator.
+
+THE WORLD.--Thus sure of himself, of God, and of the world,
+Descartes studies the world and himself. In the world he sees souls and
+matter; matter is substance in extensions, souls are substance not in
+extension, spiritual substance. The extended substance is endowed with
+impulse. Is the impulse self-generated, are the bodies self-impelled? No,
+they are moved. What is the primary motive force? It is God. Souls are
+substances without extension and motive forces. In this respect they are
+analogous to God. They are united to bodies and act on them. How? This is
+an impenetrable mystery, but they are closely and substantially united to
+the bodies, which is proved by physical pains depressing the soul and moral
+sufferings depressing the body; and they act on them, not by creating
+movements, for the quantity of movements is always the same, but by
+directing the movements after this fashion or that. Souls being spiritual,
+there is no reason for their disaggregation, that is, their demise, and in
+fact they do not die.
+
+It is for this reason that Descartes lays such stress on animals not having
+souls. If they had souls, the souls would be spiritual, they would not be
+susceptible to disaggregation and would be immortal. "Save atheism, there
+is no doctrine more dangerous and detestable than that," but animals are
+soulless and purely mechanism; Descartes exerts himself to prove this in
+great detail, and he thus escapes avowing the immortality of the souls of
+animals, which is repugnant to him, or by allowing that they perish with
+the bodies to be exposed to the objection: "Will it not be the same with
+the souls of men?"
+
+THE FREEDOM OF THE SOUL.--The human soul is endowed with freedom to
+do good or evil. What proof is there of this freedom? First, the inward
+feeling that we have. Every evident idea is true. Now, not only have we
+the idea of this freedom, but it would be impossible for us not to have it.
+Freedom "is known without proofs, merely by the experience we have of it."
+It is by the feeling of our freedom, of our free-will that we understand
+that we exist as a being, as a thing which is not merely a thing. The true
+_ego_ is the will. Even more than an intelligent being, man is a free
+individual, and only feels himself to be a man when feeling himself free,
+so that he might not believe himself to be intelligent, nor think himself
+sensible, etc., but not to think himself free would for him be moral
+suicide; and in fact he actually never does anything which he does not
+believe himself to be free to do--that is, which he does not believe that
+he might avoid doing, if he so wished. Those who say, "It is simply the
+feeling that it is better for ourselves which tends to make us do this
+instead of doing that," are deeply in error. They forget that we often
+prefer the worst for ourselves in order to prove to ourselves that we are
+free and therefore have no other _motive power than our own freedom_.
+(And this is exactly what contemporaneous philosophy has thus formulated:
+"Will is neither determinate nor indeterminate, it is determinative.")
+"Even when a very obvious reason leads us to a thing, although morally
+speaking it is difficult for us to do the opposite, nevertheless, speaking
+absolutely, we can, for we are always free to prevent ourselves from
+pursuing a good thing clearly known ... provided only that _we think it
+is beneficial thereby to give evidence of the truth of our free-will_."
+It is the pure and simple wish to be free which _creates an action;_
+it is the all-powerful liberty.
+
+As has been happily observed, in relation to the universe the philosophy of
+Descartes is a mechanical philosophy; in relation to man the philosophy of
+Descartes is a philosophy of will. As has also been remarked, there are
+very striking analogies between Corneille and Descartes from the point of
+view of the apotheosis of the will, and the _Meditations_ having
+appeared after the great works of Corneille, it is not so much that
+Corneille was a Cartesian, as that Descartes was a follower of Corneille.
+
+PSYCHOLOGY OF DESCARTES.--Descartes has almost written a psychology,
+what with his _Treatise on the Passions_ and his letters and, besides,
+certain passages in his _Meditations_. The soul thinks and has
+passions. There are three kinds of ideas, the factitious, the adventitious,
+and the innate; the factitious ideas are those which the imagination forms;
+the adventitious ideas are those suggested by the external world through
+the intermediary of the senses; the innate ideas are those constituting the
+mind itself, the conditions under which it thinks and apart from which it
+cannot think: we cannot conceive an object not extended, nor an object
+apart from time, nor anything without a cause; the ideas of time, space,
+and cause are innate ideas; we cannot conceive ourselves as other than
+free; the idea of liberty is an innate idea.
+
+The soul has passions; it is therein that, without dependence on the body,
+it has intimate relations with and is modified by it, not radically, but in
+its daily life. There are operations of the soul which cannot strictly be
+termed passions, and yet which are directed or at least _influenced_
+by the body. Memory is passive, and consequently memory is a species of
+passion. The lively sensations which the body transmits to the brain leave
+impressions (Malebranche would say "traces"), and according to these
+impressions the soul is moved a second or a third time, and that is what is
+called memory. "The impressions of the brain render it suitable to stir
+the soul in the same way as it has been stirred before, and also to make it
+recollect something, just as the folds in a piece of paper or linen make it
+more suitable to be folded anew as it was before than if it had never been
+thus folded." Similarly, the association of ideas is passive, and in
+consequence is a kind of passion. The association of ideas is the fact that
+thought passes along the same path it has already traversed, and follows in
+its labyrinth the thread which interlinks its thoughts, and this thread is
+the traces which thoughts have left in the brain. In abandoning ourselves
+to the association of ideas, we are passive and we yield ourselves freely
+to a passion. That is so true that current speech itself recognizes this:
+musing is a passion, it is possible to have a passion for musing, and
+musing is nothing else than the association of ideas in which the will does
+not intervene.
+
+THE PASSIONS.--Coming to the passions strictly speaking, there are
+some which are of the soul and only of the soul; the passion for God is a
+passion of the soul, the passion for liberty is a passion of the soul; but
+there are many more which are the effects of the union of the soul with the
+body. These passions are excited in the soul by a state of the body or a
+movement of the body or of some part of the body; they are "emotions" of
+the soul corresponding to "movements" of the machine. All passions have
+relation to the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain, and according as
+they relate to the former or the latter are they expansive or oppressive.
+There are six principal passions, of which all the rest are only
+modifications: admiration, love, desire, joy, having relation to the
+appetite of happiness; hatred, sadness, having relation to the fear of
+pain. "All the passions are good and may become bad" (Descartes in this
+deviates emphatically from Stoicism for which the passions are simply
+maladies of the soul). All passions are good in themselves. They are
+destined (this is a remarkable theory) to cause the duration of thoughts
+which would otherwise pass and be rapidly effaced; by reason of this, they
+cause man to act; if he were only directed by his thoughts, unaccompanied
+by his passions, he would never act, and if it be recognized that man is
+born for action, it will at the same time be recognized that it is
+necessary he should have passions.
+
+But, you will say, there can be good passions (of a nature to give force to
+just ideas) and evil passions.
+
+No, they are all good, but all also have their bad side, their deviation,
+rather, which enables them to become bad. Therefore, in each passion no
+matter what it be, it is always possible to distinguish between the passion
+itself, which is always good, and the excess, the deviation, the
+degradation or corruption of this passion which constitutes, if it be
+desired to call it so, an evil passion, and this is what Descartes
+demonstrates, passion by passion, in the fullest detail, in his _Treatise
+on the Passions_.
+
+THE PART OF THE SOUL.--If it is thus, what will be the part of the
+soul (the soul is the will)? It will be to abandon itself to good passions,
+or more accurately to the good that is in all passions, and to reduce the
+passions to be "nothing more than themselves." In courage, for example,
+there is courage and temerity. The action of the will, enlightened by the
+judgment, will consist in reducing courage to be nothing but courage. In
+fear, there is cowardice and there is the feeling of self-preservation
+which, according to Descartes, is the foundation of fear and which is a
+very good passion. The action of the soul is to reduce fear to simple
+prudence.
+
+But _how_ will the will effect these metamorphoses or at least these
+departures, these separations, these reductions to the due proportion?
+_Directly_ it can effect _nothing_ upon the passions; it cannot
+_remove_ them; it cannot even remove the baser portions of them; but
+it can exercise influence over them by the intermediary of reasoning; it
+can lead them to the attentive consideration of the thought that they carry
+with them, and by this consideration modify them. For instance, if it is a
+question of fear, the soul forces fear to consider that the peril is much
+less than was imagined, and thus little by little brings it back to simple
+prudence.
+
+Note that this method, although indirect, is very potent; for it ends by
+really transforming the passions into their opposites. Persuade fear that
+there is less peril in marching forward than in flight and that the most
+salutary flight is the flight forward and you have changed fear to
+courage.--But such an influence of the will over the passions is
+extraordinarily unlikely: it will never take place.--Yes, by habit! Habit
+too is a passion, or, if you will, a passive state, like that of memory or
+the association of ideas, and there are men possessed only of that passion.
+But the will, by the means which have been described, by imposing an act, a
+first act, creates a commencement of habit, by imposing a second confirms
+that habit, by imposing a third strengthens it, and so on. In plain words,
+the will, by reasoning with the passions and reasoning with them
+incessantly, brings them back to what is good in them and ends by bringing
+them back there permanently, so that it arrives at having only the passions
+it desires, or, if you prefer it, for it is the same thing, at having only
+the passion for good. Morality consists in loving noble passions, as was
+later observed by Vauvenargues, and that means to love all the passions,
+each for what is good in it, that is to reduce each passion to what real
+goodness is inherent in it, and that is to gather all the passions into
+one, which is the passion of duty.
+
+THE METHOD OF DESCARTES.--As has been observed, not only had
+Descartes influence through all that he wrote, but it was by his method
+that he has exerted the greatest and most durable sway, and that is why we
+conclude with the examination of his method. It is all contained in this:
+to accept nothing as true except what is evident; to accept as true all
+that is evident. Descartes therefore made evidence the touchstone of
+certainty. But mark well the profound meaning of this method: what is it
+that gives me the assurance of the evidence of such or such an idea? How
+shall I know that such an idea is really evident to me? Because I see it in
+perfect clearness? No, that does not suffice: the evidence may be
+deceptive; there can be false evidence; all the wrong ideas of the
+philosophers of antiquity, save when they were sophists, had for them the
+character of being evident. Why? Why should error be presented to the mind
+as an evident truth? Because in truth, in profound truthfulness, it must
+be admitted that judgment does not depend upon the intelligence. And on
+what does it depend? On will, on free-will. This is how. No doubt, error
+depends on our judgment, but our judgment depends on our will in the sense
+that it depends on us whether we adhere to our judgment without it being
+sufficiently precise or do not adhere to it because it is not sufficiently
+precise: "If I abstain from giving my judgment on a subject when I do not
+conceive it with sufficient clearness and distinction, it is evident that I
+shall not be deceived." Evidence is therefore not only a matter of
+judgment, of understanding, of intelligence, it is a matter of energetic
+will and of freedom courageously acquired. We are confronted with evidence
+when, with a clear brain, we are capable, in order to accept or refuse what
+it lays before us, of acting "after such a fashion," of having put
+ourselves in such a state of the soul that we feel "that no external force
+can constrain us to think in such or such a way."
+
+These external forces are authority, prejudices, personal interest, or that
+of party. The faculty of perceiving evidence is therefore the triumph both
+of sound judgment in itself and of a freedom of mind which, supposing
+probity, scrupulousness, and courage, and perhaps the most difficult of all
+courage, supposes a profound and vigorous morality. Evidence is given only
+to men who are first highly intelligent and next, or rather before all
+else, are profoundly honest. Evidence is not a consequence of morality; but
+morality is the _condition_ of evidence.
+
+There is the foundation of the method of Descartes; add to it his advice on
+the art of reasoning, which even in his time was not at all novel, but
+which with him is very precise; not to generalize too hastily, not to be
+put off with words, but to have a clear definition of every word, etc., and
+thus a sufficient idea of it will be obtained.
+
+Now first, to this method Descartes was unfaithful, as always happens, and
+often accepted the suggestions of his magnificent imagination as the
+evidences of his reason; secondly, the touchstone of evidence is certainly
+the best, but is far from being infallible (and Vico has ridiculed it with
+as much sense as wit) and the freest mind can still find false things
+evident; yet, thirdly, favouring freedom of research self-controlled,
+individual and scornful of all authority, the method of Descartes has
+become a banner, a motto, and a flag for all modern philosophy.
+
+DESCARTES THE FATHER OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.--And from all that the
+result has been that all modern philosophy, with few exceptions, has
+recognised Descartes as its parent--that individual evidence, if it may be
+thus expressed, favouring temerity and each believing himself closer to the
+truth the more he differed from others, and consequently was unable to
+suspect himself of being subject to influences, individual evidence has
+provided a fresh opportunity for self-deception; finally, that Descartes,
+by a not uncommon metamorphosis, by means of his system which he did not
+follow, has become the head or the venerated ancestor of doctrines which he
+would have detested and which he already did detest more than all
+others. Because he said that evidence alone and the free investigation of
+evidence led to truth, he has become the ancestor of the sceptics who are
+persuaded that surrender must be made only to evidence and that evidence
+cannot be found; and he has become the ancestor of the positivists who
+believe that evidence certainly exists somewhere, but not in metaphysics or
+in theodicy, or in knowledge of the soul, of immortality, and of God,
+branches of knowledge which surpass our means of knowing, which are in fact
+outside knowledge. So that this man who conceived more than any man, this
+man who so often constructed without a sure foundation, and this man, yet
+again, as has been aptly said, who always thought by innate ideas, by his
+formula has become the master and above all the guarantor of those who are
+the most reserved and most distrustful as to philosophic construction,
+innate ideas, and imagination. This does not in the least diminish his
+brilliant merit; it is only one of those changes of direction in which the
+history of ideas abounds.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CARTESIANS
+
+
+All the Seventeenth Century was under the Influence of Descartes.
+Port-Royal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz.
+
+
+CARTESIAN INFLUENCE.--Nearly all the seventeenth century was
+Cartesian, and in the general sense of the word, not only as supporters of
+the method of evidence, but as adherents of the general philosophy of
+Descartes. Gassendi (a Provencal, and not an Italian), professor of
+philosophy at Aix, subsequently in Paris, was not precisely a faithful
+disciple of Descartes, and he opposed him several times; he had leanings
+towards Epicurus and the doctrine of atoms; he drew towards Hobbes, but he
+was also a fervent admirer of Bacon, and so approached Descartes, who
+thought very highly of him, though impatiently galled by his criticisms.
+After the example of Epicurus he was the most sober and austere of men, and
+of the two it was Descartes rather than he who was Epicurean in the common
+use of the word. According to a tradition, which to my mind rests on
+insufficient proof, he was an instructor of Moliere.
+
+All the thinkers of the seventeenth century came more or less profoundly
+under the Cartesian influence: Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Arnauld, and all
+Port-Royal. This influence was to diminish only in the eighteenth century,
+though kept up by the impenitent Fontenelle, but outweighed by that of
+Locke, to reappear very vigorously in the nineteenth century in France in
+the school of Maine de Biran and of Cousin.
+
+MALEBRANCHE.--A separate niche must be made for the Cartesians,
+almost as great as Descartes, who filled the seventeenth century with their
+renown,--the Frenchman Malebranche, the Dutchman Spinoza, and the German
+Leibnitz. Pushing the theories of Descartes further than Descartes would
+himself in all probability have desired to, from what Descartes had said
+that it was only _through God_ that we perceived accurately,
+Malebranche declared that it was only _in God_ that we perceived
+accurately, and fundamentally this is the same idea; it can only be deemed
+that Malebranche is the more precise: "God alone is known by Himself [is
+believed in without uncertainty]; there is only He that we can see in
+immediate and direct perspective." All the rest we see in Him, in His
+light, in the light He creates in our minds. When we see, it is that we are
+in Him. Evidence is divine light. He is the link of ideas. (And thus
+Malebranche brought Plato near to Descartes and showed that, without the
+latter being aware of it, they both said the same thing.) God is always the
+cause and as He is the cause of all real things, He is cause also of all
+truths, and as He is everywhere in real objects, He is also everywhere in
+the true ideas which we can have, or rather in which we can participate.
+When we seek a truth we pray without thinking we do so; attention is a
+prayer.
+
+In the same way, from the saying of Descartes that the universe is a
+continuous creation, Malebranche deduced or rather concluded that our
+thoughts and actions are acts of God. There can be no action of the body on
+the soul to produce ideas; that would be inconceivable; but on the
+occasion, for instance, of our eyes resting on an object, God gives us an
+idea of that object, whether in conformity or not we cannot tell; but at
+any rate He gives us that idea of the object which He wishes us to have.
+
+There is no action of our soul on our body; that would be
+inconceivable. But God to our will adds a force having a tendency towards
+goodness as a rule, and to each of our volitions adds a force tending to
+its execution and capable of executing it.
+
+Then, when our will is evil and we execute it, does God sin in our name?
+
+Certainly not; because sin is not an act; it consists in doing nothing; it
+consists precisely in the soul not acting on the body; therefore it is not
+a force but a weakness. Sin is that God has withdrawn Himself from us. The
+sinner is only a being who is without strength because he is lacking in
+grace.
+
+The principle of morality is the respect for order and the love of
+order. That makes two degrees, the first of which is regularity and the
+second virtue. To conform to order is highly rational but without merit
+(_e.g._, to give money to the poor from habit or possibly from
+vanity). To love order and to desire that it should be greater, more
+complete, and nearer to the will of God, is to adhere to God, to live in
+God, just as to see rightly is to see in God. All morality, into the
+details of which we will not enter, evolves from the love of order. The
+universe is a vast mechanism, as was stated by Descartes, set in motion and
+directed by God--that is to say, by the laws established by God; for God
+acts only by general dispositions (which are laws) and not by particular
+dispositions. In other words, there exists a will, but there are no
+volitions.
+
+MIRACLES.--But then you will say there are no miracles; for miracle
+is precisely a particular will traversing and interrupting the general
+will.
+
+To begin with, there are very few miracles, which therefore permits order
+to subsist; it would be only if there were incessant miracles that order
+would be non-existent. Next, a miracle is a warning God gives to men
+because of their weakness, to remind them that behind the laws there is a
+Lawgiver, behind the general dispositions a Being who disposes. Because of
+their intellectual weakness, if they never saw any derogation from the
+general laws they would take them to be fatalities. A miracle is a grace
+intervening in things, just as grace properly so-called intervenes in human
+actions. And it is not contradictory to the general design of God, since
+by bringing human minds back to the truth that there is a Being who wills,
+it accustoms them to consider all general laws as permanent acts, but also
+as the acts of the Being who wills. The miracle has the virtue of making
+everything in the world miraculous, which is true. Hence the miracle
+confirms the idea of order. Therein, perhaps alone, the exception proves
+the rule.
+
+SPINOZA.--Spinoza, who during his life was a pure Stoic and the
+purest of Stoics, polishing the lenses of astronomical telescopes in order
+to gain his living, refusing all pensions and all the professorial
+positions offered to him, and living well-nigh on nothing, had read
+Descartes and, to conform to the principle of evidence, had begun by
+renouncing his religion, which was that of the Jews. His general outlook
+on the world was this: There is only one God. God is all. Only He has His
+attributes--that is to say, His manners of being and His modes, that is His
+modifications, as the sun (merely a comparison) has as its manners of
+being, its roundness, colour, and heat, as modifications its rays,
+terrestrial heat, direct and diffused light, etc. Now God has two
+attributes, thought and extension, as had already been observed by
+Descartes; and for modifications He has exactly all we can see, touch, or
+feel, etc. The human soul is an attribute of God, as is everything else; it
+is an attribute of God in His power. It is not free, for all that comes
+from God, all that _is of God_, is a regular and necessary development
+of God Himself. "There is nothing contingent" [nothing which may either
+happen or not happen]. All things are determined, by the necessity of the
+divine nature, to exist and to act in a given manner. There is therefore
+no free-will in the soul, the soul is determined to will this or that by a
+cause which is itself determined by another and that by another, and so on
+to infinity.
+
+Nevertheless we believe ourselves to be free and according to the principle
+of evidence we are; for nothing is more evident to us than our liberty. We
+are as intimately convinced of our liberty as of our existence and we
+_all_ affirm, I am free,--with the same emphasis that Descartes
+affirms: I am. I am and I am free are the two things it is impossible for
+man to doubt, no matter what effort he makes.
+
+No doubt, but it is an illusion. It is the illusion of a being who feels
+himself as cause, but does not feel himself as effect. Try to imagine a
+billiard ball which feels it moves others, but which does not feel that it
+is moved. What we call decision is an idea which decides us because it
+exercises more power over us than the others do; what we term deliberation
+is a hesitancy between two or three ideas which at the moment have equal
+force; what we name volition is an idea, and what we call will is our
+understanding applied to facts. We do not want to fight; we conceive the
+idea of fighting and the idea carries us away; we do not want to hang
+ourselves; we have the obsessing idea of hanging ourselves and this thought
+runs away with us.
+
+HIS MORAL SYSTEM.--Spinoza wrote a system of morality. Is it not
+radically impossible to write a system of morality when the author does not
+believe in free-will? The admirable originality of Spinoza, even though
+his idea can be contested, is precisely that morality depends on belief in
+the necessity of all things--that is, the more one is convinced of this
+necessity so much the more does one attain high morality--that is, the more
+one believes oneself free the more one is _immoral_. The man who
+believes himself free claims to run counter to the universal order, and
+morality precisely is adherence to it; the man who believes himself free
+seeks for an individual good just as if there could be an individual good,
+just as if the best for each one were not to submit to the necessary laws
+of everything, laws which constitute what is good; the man who thinks
+himself free sets himself against God, believes himself God since he
+believes himself to be creator of what he does, and since he believes
+himself capable of deranging something in the mechanism and of introducing
+a certain amount of movement. As a matter of fact, he does nothing of the
+kind; but he believes that he does it, and this mere thought, false and low
+as it is, keeps him in the most miserable condition of life; to sum up, a
+man who believes himself free may not perhaps be an atheist, but he is
+ungodly.
+
+On the contrary, the man who does not believe himself free believes he is
+in the hands of God, and that is the beginning of wisdom and the beginning
+of virtue. We are in the hands of God as the clay is in those of the
+potter; the mad vase would be the one which reproached the potter for
+having made it small instead of big, common instead of decorative. It is
+the beginning of wisdom to believe oneself in the hands of God; to see Him,
+to see Him the least indistinctly that we can, therein lies the highest
+wisdom; we must see His designs, or at least His great design and associate
+ourselves with it, thus becoming not only part of Him, which we always are,
+but a conscient part of Him.
+
+This is the love of God, and the love of God is virtue itself. We ought to
+love God without consideration of the good He can do us and of the
+penalties He can inflict upon us; for to love God from love of a beneficent
+God or from fear of a punitive God is not to love God but to love oneself.
+
+THE PASSIONS.--We have our passions as enemies and as obstacles to
+our elevation to this semi-perfection. It is they which cause us to do
+immoral acts. "Immoral," has that a meaning from the moment that we do
+nothing which we are not obliged to do? Yes, just as when led by our
+deceitful mind we have arrived necessarily at a false idea, the fact of
+this thought being necessary does not prevent it from being false; we may
+have been led by necessity to commit a villainous action, but that does not
+prevent its being immoral. The passions are our imperfections, omissions,
+gaps in a soul which is not full of the idea of God and of universal order
+and the love of God and of universal order, and which, in consequence,
+lives individually--that is, separated from the universe.
+
+The passions are infinite in number and Spinoza, in a bulky volume,
+furnished a minute and singularly profound description of the principal
+ones alone, into the details of which we regret that we cannot enter. The
+_Ethics_ of Spinoza is an incomparable masterpiece.
+
+The study of the passions is very salutary, because in studying them one
+gets so detached from them that one can perceive their emptiness, their
+meanness, and their puerile, nay, even bestial character. It might even be
+added that the mere thought of studying them is already an act of
+detachment in reference to them. "Thou wouldst not seek Me, hadst thou not
+already found Me," said God to Pascal. "Thou wouldst not make
+investigations about us, hadst thou not already quitted us," the passions
+might say to the philosopher.
+
+SANCTIONS OF MORALITY.--What are the sanctions of morality? They are
+necessary sanctions; just as everything is necessary and may even be said
+to be mechanical. There is neither merit nor demerit and the criminal is
+not culpable; only he is outside order, and everything must be in order.
+"He who is maddened by the bite of a mad dog is certainly innocent; yet
+anyone has the right to suffocate him. In the same way, the man who cannot
+govern his passions by fear of the law is a very excusable invalid; yet he
+cannot enjoy peace of mind, or the knowledge of God, or even the love of
+God, and it is necessary that he perish." Through death he has re-entered
+within order.
+
+But does the sanction of beyond-the-grave exist, and is the soul immortal,
+and are we to be rewarded therein in another life? The conclusion of
+Spinoza on this matter is hesitating, but at the risk of misrepresenting
+it, which I fear to do, it seems to me that it can be thus summed
+up--_The soul makes itself immortal_, in proportion as by the
+knowledge and love of God it participates more in God. In proportion it
+makes itself divine; and approaching perfection, by the same progress it
+also approaches immortality. It is conceivable that by error and sin it
+kills itself, and by virtue renders itself imperishable. This immortality
+is not or does not seem to be personal, it is literally a definite re-entry
+into the bosom of God; Spinozian immortality would therefore be a
+prolongation of the same effort which we make in this life to adhere to
+universal order; the recompense for having adhered to it here below is to
+be absorbed in it there, and in that lies true beatitude. Here below we
+ought to see everything from the point of view of eternity (_sub specie
+aeternitatis_), and this is a way of being eternal; elsewhere we shall
+be in eternity itself.
+
+LEIBNITZ.--Leibnitz possessed a universal mind, being historian,
+naturalist, politician, diplomatist, scholar, theologian, mathematician;
+here we will regard him only as philosopher. For Leibnitz the basis, the
+substance of all beings is not either thought or extension as with
+Descartes, but is force, productive of action. "What does not act does not
+exist." Everything that exists is a force, either action or tendency to
+action. And force, all force has two characteristics: it desires to do, it
+wishes to think. The world is the graduated compound of all these
+forces. Above all there is the supreme force, God, who is infinite force,
+infinite thought; by successive descents those base and obscure forces are
+reached which seem to have neither power nor thought, and yet have a
+minimum of power and even of thought, so to speak, latent. God thinks and
+acts infinitely; man thinks and acts powerfully, thanks to reason, which
+distinguishes him from the rest of creation; the animal acts and thinks
+dimly, but it does act and think, for it has a soul composed of memory and
+of the results and consequences of memory, and by parenthesis
+"three-fourths of our own actions are governed by memory, and most
+frequently we act like animals"; plants act, and if they do not think, at
+least feel (which is still thought), though more dimly than animals; and
+finally in the mineral kingdom the power of action and thought slumber, but
+are not non-existent since they can be transformed into plants, animals,
+and men, into living matter which feels and thinks.
+
+Therefore, as was later on to be maintained by Schopenhauer, everything is
+full of souls, and of souls which are forces as well as intelligences. The
+human soul is a force too, like the body. Between these two forces, which
+seem to act on one another and which certainly act in concert in such
+fashion that the movement desired by the soul is executed by the body or
+that the soul obviously assents to a movement desired by the body, what can
+be the affinity and the relation, in what consists their concurrence and
+concord? Leibnitz (and there was already something of the same nature
+suggested by Descartes) believes that all the forces of the world act, each
+spontaneously; but that among all the actions they perform there exists an
+agreement imposed by God, a concord establishing universal order, a
+"preestablished harmony" causing them all to co-operate in the same
+design. Well, then, between the soul, this force, and the body, this force
+also, this harmony reigns as between any force whatever in nature and one
+and all of the others; and that is the explanation of the union and concord
+between the soul and the body. Imagine two well-constructed clocks wound up
+by the same maker; they indicate the same hour, and it might appear that
+this one directs the other, or that the other directs the first. All the
+forces of the world are clocks which agree with each other, because they
+have been regulated in advance by the divine clockmaker, and they all
+indicate the eternal hour.
+
+THE RADICAL OPTIMISM OF LEIBNITZ.--From all these general views on
+matter, on mind and on the mind, Leibnitz arrived at a radical optimism
+which is the thing for which he has since been most ridiculed, and by
+which, at any rate, he has remained famous. He believes that all is good,
+despite the evil of which no one can dispute the existence; and he believes
+that all is the best _possible_ in the best of _possible_
+worlds. In fact, God is supreme wisdom and supreme goodness; that was quite
+evident to Descartes, who in the matter of evidence was not easily
+satisfied. This perfect wisdom and perfect goodness could choose only what
+is best.--But yet evil exists! Diminish it as much as you choose, it still
+exists.--It exists by a necessity inherent in what is created. Everything
+created is imperfect. God alone is perfect; what is imperfect is by its
+definition evil mingled with good. Evil is only the boundary of good, where
+God was compelled to stop in creating beings and things other than Himself,
+and if He had created only according to absolute goodness, He could have
+created only Himself. And that is the precise meaning of this phrase "the
+best of possible worlds"; the world is perfect so far as that which is
+created, and therefore imperfect, can be perfect; so far as what is not God
+can be divine; the world is God Himself as far as He can remain Himself
+whilst being anything else than Himself. THE THREE EVILS.--Let us
+distinguish in order to comprehend better. There are three evils: the
+metaphysical, the physical, and the moral. Metaphysical evil is this very
+fact of not being perfection; it is natural enough that what emanates only
+from perfection should not be perfection. Physical evil is suffering; God
+cannot _will_ suffering, desire it, or cherish it; but He can permit
+it as a means of good, as a condition of good; for there would be no moral
+good if there were not occasion for struggle, and there would be no
+occasion for struggling if physical evil did not exist; imagine a paradise;
+all the inhabitants merely exist and never have cause to show the slightest
+endurance, the least courage, the smallest virtue. And finally, as to
+moral evil, which is sin, God can even less desire that it should exist,
+but He can admit its existence, _allow it to be_, to afford men
+occasion for merit or demerit. Nothing is more easy than to criticize God
+whilst considering only a portion of His work and not considering it as a
+whole. He must have created it to be a whole and it is as a whole that it
+must be judged. And precisely because the whole cannot be comprehended by
+anyone, "hold thy peace, foolish reason," as Pascal said, and judge not or
+judge _a priori_, since here it is not possible to judge by
+experience; and declare that the Perfect can have willed only the most
+perfect that is possible.
+
+THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE.--There still remains the
+fundamental objection: to reduce God to the conditions of the possible is
+to limit Him, and it is useless to say that God is justified if He has done
+all the good possible. He is not; the words "possible" and "impossible"
+having no meaning to Him who is omnipotent, and by definition infinite
+power could effect the impossible.
+
+Yes, Leibnitz replies, there is a metaphysical impossibility, there is an
+impossibility in the infinite; this impossibility is absurdity, is
+contradiction. Could God make the whole smaller than the part or any line
+shorter than a straight one? Reason replies in the negative. Is God
+therefore limited? He is limited by the absurd and that means He is
+unlimited; for the absurd is a falling away. It is therefore credible that
+the mixture of evil and good is a metaphysical necessity to which I will
+not say God submits, but in which He acts naturally, and that the absence
+of evil is a metaphysical contradiction, an absurdity in itself, which God
+cannot commit precisely because He is perfect; and no doubt, instead of
+drawing this conclusion, we should actually see it, were the totality of
+things, of their relations, of their concordance, and of their harmony
+known to us.
+
+The optimism of Leibnitz was ridiculed specially in the _Candide_ of
+Voltaire, ingeniously defended by Rousseau, magnificently defended by
+Victor Hugo in the following verses, well worthy of Leibnitz:
+
+ "Oui peut-etre au dela de la sphere des nues,
+  Au sein de cet azur immobile et dormant,
+  Peut-etre faites-vous des choses inconnues
+  Ou la douleur de l'homme entre comme element."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, General
+Politics, and Religious Politics.
+
+
+LOCKE.--Locke, very learned in various sciences--physics, chemistry,
+medicine, often associated with politics, receiving enlightenment from
+life, from frequent travels, from friendships with interesting and
+illustrious men, always studying and reflecting until an advanced old age,
+wrote only carefully premeditated works: his _Treatise of Government_
+and _Essay on the Human Understanding_.
+
+Locke appears to have written on the understanding only in order to refute
+the "innate ideas" of Descartes. For Locke innate ideas have no
+existence. The mind before it comes into contact with the external world is
+a blank sheet, and there is nothing in the mind which has not first come
+through the senses. What, then, are ideas? They are sensations registered
+by the brain, and they are also sensations elaborated and modified by
+reflection. These ideas then commingle in such a manner as to form an
+enormous mass of combinations. They are commingled either in a natural or
+an artificial manner. In a natural manner, that is in a way conforming to
+the great primary ideas given us by reflection, the idea of cause, the idea
+of end, the idea of means to an end, the idea of order, etc., and it is the
+harmony of these ideas which is commonly termed reason; they become
+associated by accident, by the effects of emotion, by the effect of custom,
+etc., and then they give birth to prejudices, errors, and
+superstitions. The passions of the soul are aspects of pleasure and pain.
+The idea of a possible pleasure gives birth in us to a desire which is
+called ambition, love, covetousness, gluttony; the idea of a possible pain
+gives birth in us to fear and horror, and this fear and horror is called
+hatred, jealousy, rage, aversion, disgust, scorn. At bottom we have only
+two passions, the desire of enjoyment, and the fear of suffering.
+
+THE FREEDOM OF MAN.--Is man free? Appealing to experience and
+making use only of it and not of intimate feeling, Locke declares in the
+negative. A will always seems to him determined by another will, and this
+other by another to infinity, or by a motive, a weight, a motive power
+which causes a leaning to right or left. Will certainly exists--that is to
+say, an exact and lively desire to perform an action, or to continue an
+action, or to interrupt an action, but this will is not free, for to
+represent it as free is to represent it as capable of wishing what it does
+not wish. The will is an anxiety to act in such or such a fashion, and this
+anxiety, on account of its character of anxiety, of strong emotion, of
+tension of the soul, appears to us free, appears to us an internal force
+which is self-governed and independent; we feel consciousness of will in
+the effort. This tension must not be denied, but it must be recognised as
+the effect of a potent desire which the obstacle excites; this tension,
+therefore, is an indication of nothing except the potency of the desire and
+the existence of an obstacle. Now this desire, so potent that it is
+irritated by the obstacle, and, so to speak, unites us against it, is a
+passion dominating and filling our being; so that we are never more swayed
+by passion than when we believe ourselves to be exercising our will, and in
+consequence the more we desire the less are we free.
+
+It is not essential formally and absolutely to confound will with
+desire. Overpowered by heat, we desire to drink cold water, and because we
+know that that would do us harm we have the will not to drink; but although
+this is an important distinction it is not a fundamental one; what incites
+us to drink is a passion, what prevents us is another passion, one more
+general and stronger, the desire not to die, and because this passion by
+meeting with and fighting another produces in all our being a powerful
+tension, it is none the less a passion, even if we ought not to say that it
+is a still more impassioned passion.
+
+LOCKE'S THEORY OF POLITICS.--In politics Locke was the adversary of
+Hobbes, whose theories of absolutism have already been noticed. He did not
+believe that the natural state was the war of all against all. He believed
+men formed societies not to escape cannibalism, but more easily to
+guarantee and protect their natural rights: ownership, personal liberty,
+legitimate defence. Society exists only to protect these rights, and the
+reason of its existence lies in this duty to defend them. The sovereign
+therefore is not the saviour of the nation, he is its law-maker and
+magistrate. If he violates the rights of man, he acts so directly contrary
+to his mission and his mandate that insurrection against him is
+legitimate. The "wise Locke," as Voltaire always called him, was the
+inventor of the Rights of Man.
+
+In religious politics he was equally liberal and advocated the separation
+of Church and State; the State, according to him, should not have any
+religion of its own, its province being only to protect equally the liberty
+of all denominations. Locke was discussed minutely by Leibnitz, who,
+without accepting the innate ideas of Descartes, did not accept the ideas
+through sensation of Locke, and said: "There is nothing in the intelligence
+which has not first been in the senses," granted ... "except the
+intelligence itself." The intelligence has not innate ideas born ready
+made; but it possesses forms of its own in which the ideas arrange
+themselves and take shape, and this is the due province of the
+intelligence. And it was these forms which later on Kant was to call the
+categories of the intellect, and at bottom Descartes meant nothing else by
+his innate ideas. Locke exerted a prodigious and even imperious influence
+over the French philosophers of the eighteenth century.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE
+EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+Berkeley: Highly Idealist Philosophy which Regarded Matter as Non-existent.
+
+David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy.
+
+The Scottish School: Common Sense Philosophy.
+
+
+BERKELEY.--To the "sensualist" Locke succeeded Berkeley, the
+unrestrained "idealist," like him an Englishman. He began to write when
+very young, continued to write until he was sixty, and died at
+sixty-eight. He believed neither in matter nor in the external world. There
+was the whole of his philosophy. Why did he not believe in them? Because
+all thinkers are agreed that we cannot know whether we see the external
+world _as it is_. Then, if we do not know it, why do we affirm that it
+exists? We know nothing about it. Now we ought to build up the world only
+with what we know of it, and to do otherwise is not philosophy but yielding
+to imagination. What is it that we know of the world? Our ideas, and
+nothing but our ideas. Very well then, let us say: there are only
+ideas. But whence do these ideas come to us? To explain them as coming from
+the external world which we have never seen is to explain obscurity by
+denser darkness. They are spiritual, they come to us without doubt from a
+spirit, from God. This is possible, it is not illogical, and Berkeley
+believes it.
+
+This doctrine regarded by the eyes of common sense may appear a mere
+phantasy; but Berkeley saw in it many things of high importance and great
+use. If you believe in matter, you can believe in matter only, and that is
+materialism with its moral consequences, which are immoral; if you believe
+in matter and in God, you are so hampered by this dualism that you do not
+know how to separate nature from God, and it therefore comes to pass that
+you see God in matter, which is called pantheism. In a word, between us and
+God Berkeley has suppressed matter in order that we should come, as it
+were, into direct contact with God. He derives much from Malebranche, and
+it may be said he only pushes his theories to their extreme. Although a
+bishop, he was not checked, like Descartes, by the idea of God not being
+able to deceive us, and he answered that God does not deceive us, that He
+gives us ideas and that it is we who deceive ourselves by attributing them
+to any other origin than to Him; nor was he checked, like Malebranche, by
+the authority of Scripture, which in Genesis portrays God creating
+matter. He saw there, no doubt, only a symbolical sense, a simple way of
+speaking according to the comprehension of the multitude.
+
+DAVID HUME.--David Hume, a Scotsman, better known, at least in his
+own times, as the historian of England than as a philosopher, nevertheless
+well merits consideration in the latter category. David Hume believes in
+nothing, and, in consequence, it may be said that he is not a philosopher;
+he has no philosophic system. He has no philosophic system, it is true; but
+he is a critic of philosophy, and therefore he philosophizes. Matter has no
+existence; as we know nothing about it, we should not say it exists. But we
+ourselves, we exist. All that we can know about that is that in us there is
+a succession of ideas, of representations; but _we_, but _I_,
+what is that? Of that we know nothing. We are present at a series of
+pictures, and we may call their totality the _ego_; but we do not
+grasp ourselves as a thing of unity, as an individual. We are the
+spectators of an inward dramatic piece behind which we can see no
+author. There is no more reason to believe in _oneself_ than in the
+external world.
+
+INNATE IDEAS.--As for innate ideas, they are simply general ideas,
+which are general delusions. We believe, for instance, that every effect
+has a cause, or, to express it more correctly, that everything has a cause.
+What do we know about it? What do we see? That one thing follows another,
+succeeds to another. What tells us that the latter proceeds from the
+former, that the thing B must necessarily come, owing to the thing A
+existing? We believe it because every time the thing A has been, the thing
+B has come. Well, let us say that every time A has been (thus far) B has
+come; and say no more. There are regular successions, but we are completely
+ignorant whether there are causes for them.
+
+THE LIBERTY AND MORALITY OF HUME.--It results from this that for
+Hume there is no liberty. Very obviously; for when we believe ourselves
+free, it is because we believe we can fix upon ourselves as a cause. Now
+the word "cause" means nothing. We are a succession of phenomena very
+absolutely determined. The proof is that we foresee and nearly always
+accurately (and we could always foresee accurately if we completely knew
+the character of the persons and the influences acting on them) what people
+we know will do, which would be impossible if they did as they wished. And
+I, at the very moment when I am absolutely sure I am doing such and such a
+thing because I desired to, I see my friend smile as he says: "I was sure
+you would do that. See, I wrote it down on this piece of paper." He
+understood me as a necessity, when I felt myself to be free. And he,
+reciprocally, will believe himself free in doing a thing I would have
+wagered to a certainty that he would not fail to do.
+
+What system of morality can Hume have with these principles? First of all,
+he protests against those who should deduce from his principles the
+immorality of his system. Take care, said he wittily (just like Spinoza,
+by the way), it is the partisans of free-will who are immoral. No doubt! It
+is when there is liberty that there is no responsibility. I am not
+responsible for my actions if they have no connection in me with anything
+durable or constant. I have committed murder. Truly it is by chance, if it
+was by an entirely isolated determination, entirely detached from the rest
+of my character, and momentary; and I am only infinitesimally
+responsible. But if all my actions are linked together, are conditional
+upon one another, dependent on one another, if I have committed murder it
+is because I am an assassin at every moment of my life or nearly so, and
+then, oh! how responsible I am!
+
+Note that this is the line taken up by judges, since they make careful
+investigation of the antecedents of the accused. They find him all the more
+culpable if he has always shown bad instincts.--Therefore they find him the
+more responsible, the more he has been compelled by necessity.--Yes.
+
+Hume then does not believe himself "foreclosed" in morality; he does not
+believe he is forbidden by his principles to have a system of morality and
+he has one. It is a morality of sentiment. We have in us the instinct of
+happiness and we seek happiness; but we have also in us an instinct of
+goodwill which tends to make us seek the general happiness, and reason
+tells us that there is conciliation or rather concordance between these two
+instincts, because it is only in the general happiness that we find our
+particular happiness.
+
+THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL: REID; STEWART.--The Scottish School (end of the
+eighteenth century) was pre-eminently a school of men who attached
+themselves to common sense and were excellent moralists. We must at any
+rate mention Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. They were bent especially on
+opposing the transcendent idealism of Berkeley and the scepticism of David
+Hume, also in some measure Locke's doctrine of the blank sheet. They
+reconstituted the human mind and even the world (which had been so to speak
+driven off in vapour by their predecessors), much as they were in the time
+of Descartes. Let us believe, they said, in the reality of the external
+world; let us believe that there are causes and effects; let us believe
+there is an _ego,_ a human person whom we directly apprehend, and who
+is a cause; let us believe that we are free and that we are responsible
+because we are free, etc. They were, pre-eminently, excellent describers of
+states of the soul, admirable psychological moralists and they were the
+ancestors of the highly remarkable pleiad of English psychologists of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+Voltaire a Disciple of Locke.
+
+Rousseau a Freethinking Christian, but deeply Imbued
+with Religious Sentiments.
+
+Diderot a Capricious Materialist.
+
+D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists.
+
+Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations.
+
+
+VOLTAIRE; ROUSSEAU.--The French philosophy of the eighteenth
+century, fairly feeble it must be avowed, seemed as if dominated by the
+English philosophy, excepting Berkeley, but especially by Locke and David
+Hume, more particularly Locke, who was the intellectual deity of those
+Frenchmen of that epoch who were interested in philosophy.
+
+Whenever Voltaire dealt with philosophy, he was only the echo of Locke
+whose depths he failed to fathom, and to whom he has done some injury, for
+reading Locke only through Voltaire has led to the belief that Locke was
+superficial.
+
+Rousseau was both the disciple and adversary of Hobbes, as often occurs,
+and dealt out to the public the doctrines of Hobbes in an inverted form,
+making the state of nature angelic instead of infernal, and putting the
+government of all by all in the place of government by one, invariably
+reaching the same point with a simple difference of form; for if Hobbes
+argued for despotism exercised by one over all, Rousseau argued for the
+despotism of all over each. In _Emile_, he was incontestably inspired
+by the ideas of Locke on education in some degree, but in my opinion less
+than has been asserted. On nearly all sides it has been asserted that
+Rousseau exercised great influence over Kant. I know that Kant felt
+infinite admiration for Rousseau, but of the influence of Rousseau upon
+Kant I have never been able to discover a trace.
+
+DIDEROT; HELVETIUS; D'HOLBACH.--It was particularly on David Hume
+that Diderot depended. The difference, which is great, is that David Hume
+in his scepticism remained a grave, reserved man, well-bred and discreet,
+and was only a sceptic, whilst Diderot was violent in denial and a man of
+paradoxes and jests, both impertinent and cynical.
+
+It is almost ridiculous in a summary history of philosophy to name as
+sub-Diderots, if one may so express it, Helvetius and D'Holbach, who were
+merely wits believing themselves philosophers, and who were not always
+wits.
+
+CONDILLAC.--Condillac belongs to another category. He was a very
+serious philosopher and a vigorous thinker. An exaggerated disciple of
+Locke, while the latter admitted sensation _and_ reflection as the
+origin of ideas, Condillac admitted only pure sensation and transformed
+sensation--that is to say, sensation transforming itself. The definition of
+man that he deduces from these principles is very celebrated and it is
+interesting: "The _ego_ of each man is only the collection of the
+sensations that he feels and of those his memory recalls; it is the
+consciousness of what he is combined with the recollection of what he has
+been." To Condillac, the idea is a sensation which has fixed itself and
+which has been renewed and vivified by others; desire is a sensation which
+wishes to be repeated and seeks what opportunity offers for its renewal,
+and the will itself is only the most potent of desires. Condillac was
+voluntarily and systematically limited, but his system is well knit and
+presented in admirably clear and precise language.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+KANT
+
+
+Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it on Morality.
+
+
+KNOWLEDGE.--Kant, born at Koenigsberg in 1724, was professor there
+all his life and died there in 1804. Nothing happened to him except the
+possession of genius. He had commenced with the theological philosophy in
+use in his country, that of Wolf, which on broad lines was that of
+Leibnitz. But he early read David Hume, and the train of thought of the
+sceptical Scotsman at least gave him the idea of submitting all philosophic
+ideas to a severe and close criticism.
+
+He first of all asked himself what the true value is of our knowledge and
+what knowledge is. We believe generally that it is the things which give us
+the knowledge that we have of them. But, rather, is it not we who impose on
+things the forms of our mind and is not the knowledge that we believe we
+have of things only the knowledge which we take of the laws of our mind by
+applying it to things? This is what is most probable. We perceive the
+things by moulds, so to speak, which are in ourselves and which give them
+their shapes and they would be shapeless and chaotic were it
+otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish the matter and the
+form of our knowledge: the matter of the knowledge is the things
+themselves. The form of our knowledge is ourselves: "Our experimental
+knowledge is a compound of what we receive from impressions and of what our
+individual faculty of knowing draws from itself on the occasion of these
+impressions."
+
+SENSIBILITY; UNDERSTANDING; REASON.--Those who believe that all we
+think proceeds from the senses are therefore wrong; so too are those wrong
+who believe that all we think proceeds from ourselves. To say, Matter is an
+appearance, and to say, Ideas are appearances, are equally false doctrines.
+Now we know by sensibility, by understanding, and by reason. By sensibility
+we receive the impression of phenomena; by the understanding we impose on
+these impressions their forms, and link them up together; by reason we give
+ourselves general ideas of things--universal ones, going beyond or
+believing they go beyond the data, even when linked up and systematized.
+
+Let us analyse sensibility, understanding, and reason. Sensibility already
+has the forms it imposes on things. These forms are time and space. Time
+and space are not given us by matter like colour, smell, taste, or sound;
+they are not perceived by the senses; they are therefore the forms of our
+sensibility: we can feel only according to time and space, by lodging what
+we feel in space and time; these are the conditions of sensibility.
+Phenomena are thus perceived by us under the laws of space and of time.
+What do they become in us? They are seized by the understanding, which also
+has its forms, its powers of classification, of arrangement, and of
+connection. Its forms or powers, or, putting it more exactly, its active
+forms are, for example, the conception of quantity being always equal:
+through all phenomena the quantity of substance remains always the same;
+the conception of causality: everything has a cause and every cause has an
+effect and it is ever thus. Those are the conditions of our understanding,
+those without which we do not understand and the forms which within us we
+impose on all things in order to understand them.
+
+It is thus that we know the world; which is tantamount to stating that the
+world exists, so far as we are concerned, only so long as we think
+so. Reason would go further: it would seize the most general, the
+universal, beyond experience, beyond the limited and restricted
+systematizations established by the understanding; to know, for instance,
+the first cause of all causes, the last and collective end, so to speak, of
+all purposes; to know "why is there something?" and "in view of what end is
+there something?" in fact, to answer all the questions of infinity and
+eternity. Be sure that it cannot. How could it? It only operates, can only
+operate, on the data of experience and the systematizations of the
+understanding, which classify experience but do not go beyond it. Only
+operating upon that, having nothing except that as matter, how could it
+itself go beyond experience? It cannot. It is only (a highly important
+fact, and one which must on no account be forgotten)--it is only a sign,
+merely a witness. It is the sign that the human spirit has need of the
+absolute; it is itself that need; without that it would not exist; it is
+the witness of our invincible insistence on knowing and of our tendency to
+estimate that we know nothing if we only know something; it is itself that
+insistence and that tendency: without that it would not exist. Let us pause
+there for the moment. Man knows of nature only those impressions which he
+receives from it, co-ordinated by the forms of sensibility, and further the
+ideas of it which he preserves co-ordinated by the forms of his
+understanding. This is very little. It is all, if we consider only pure
+reason.
+
+PRACTICAL REASON.--_But_ there is perhaps another reason, or
+another aspect of reason--to wit, practical reason. What is practical
+reason? Something in us tells us: you should act, and you should act in
+such a way; you should act rightly; this is not right, so do not do it;
+that is right, do it. As a fact this is uncontestable. What is the
+explanation? From what data of experience, from what systematization of
+the understanding has our mind borrowed this? Where has it got it? Does
+nature yield obedience to a "you ought"? Not at all. It exists, and it
+develops and it goes its way, according to our way of seeing it in time and
+space, and that is all. Does the understanding furnish the idea of "you
+ought"? By no means; it gives us ideas of quantity, of quality, of cause
+and effect, etc., and that is all; there is no "you ought" in all
+that. Therefore this "you ought" is purely human; it is the only principle
+which comes exactly from ourselves only. It might therefore well be the
+very foundation of us.--It may be an illusion.--No doubt, but it is highly
+remarkable that it exists, though nothing gives it birth or is of a nature
+to give it birth. An illusion is a weakness of the senses or an error of
+logic and is thus explained; but an illusion in itself and by itself and
+only proceeding from itself is most singular and not to be explained as an
+illusion. Hence it remains that it is a reality, a reality of our nature,
+and given the coercive force of its voice and act, it is the most real
+reality there is in us.
+
+THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE.--Thus, at least, thought Kant, and he
+said: There is a practical reason which does not go beyond experience and
+does not seek to go beyond it; but which does not depend on it, is
+absolutely separated from it, and is its own (human) experience by
+itself. This practical reason says to us: you ought to do good. The crowd
+call it conscience; I call it in a general way practical reason, and I call
+it the categorical imperative when I take it in its principle, without
+taking into account the applications which I foresee. Why this name? To
+distinguish it clearly; for we feel ourselves commanded by other things
+than it, but not in the same way. We feel ourselves commanded by prudence,
+for instance, which tells us: do not run down that staircase _if_ you
+do not wish to break your neck; we feel ourselves commanded by the
+conventions which say: be polite _if_ you do not wish men to leave you
+severely alone, etc. But conscience does not say _if_ to us: it says
+bluntly "you ought" without consideration of what may or may not happen,
+and it is even part of its character to scorn all consideration of
+consequences. It would tell us: run down that staircase to save that child
+even at the risk of breaking your neck. Because of that I call all the
+other commandments made to us hypothetical imperatives and that of
+conscience, alone, the categorical or absolute imperative. Here is a
+definite result.
+
+MORALITY, THE LAW OF MAN.--Yet reflect: if the foregoing be true,
+morality is the very law of man, his especial law, as the law of the tree
+is to spread in roots and branches. Well. But for man to be able to obey
+his law he must be free, must be able to do what he wishes. That is
+certain. Then it must be believed that we are free, for were we not, we
+could not obey our law; and the moral law would be absurd. The moral law is
+the _sign_ that we are free. Compared to this, all the other proofs of
+freedom are worthless or weak. We are free because we must be so in order
+to do the good which our law commands us to do.
+
+Let us examine further. I do what is right in order to obey the law; but,
+when I have done it, I have the idea that it would be unjust that I should
+be punished for it, or that I should not be rewarded for it, that it would
+be unjust were there not concordance between right and happiness. As it
+happens, virtue is seldom rewarded in this world and often is even
+punished; it draws misfortune or evil on him who practises it. Would not
+that be the sign that there are two worlds of which we see only one? Would
+not that be the sign that virtue unrewarded here will be rewarded elsewhere
+_in order that there should not be injustice?_ It is highly probable
+that this is so.
+
+But for that it is necessary that the soul be immortal. It is so, since it
+is necessary that it should be. The moral law is accomplished and
+consummated in rewards or penalties beyond the grave, which pre-suppose the
+immortality of the soul. All the other proofs of the immortality of the
+soul are worthless or feeble beside this one which demonstrates that were
+there no immortality of the soul there would be no morality.
+
+GOD.--And, finally, if justice is one day to be done, this supposes
+a Judge. It is neither ourselves who in another life will do justice to
+ourselves nor yet some force of circumstances which will do it to us. It is
+necessary to have an intelligence conceiving justice and a will to realise
+it. God is this intelligence and this will.
+
+All the other proofs of God are weak or worthless beside this one. The
+existence of God has been deduced from the idea of God: if we have the idea
+of God, it is necessary that He should exist. A weak proof, for we can have
+an idea which does not correspond with an object. The existence of God has
+been deduced from the idea of causality; for all that is, a cause is
+necessary, this cause is God. A weak proof, for things being as they are,
+there is necessity for ... cause; but a cause and a _single_ cause,
+why? There could be a series of causes to infinity and thus the cause of
+the world could be the world itself. The existence of God has been deduced
+from the idea of design well carried out. The composition, the ordering of
+this world is admired; this world is well made; it is like a clock. The
+clock supposes a clock-maker; the fine composition of the world supposes an
+intelligence which conceived a work to be made and which made it. Perhaps;
+but this consideration only leads to the idea of a manipulation of matter,
+of a demiurge, as the Greeks said, of an architect, but not to the idea of
+a _Creator;_ it may even lead only to the idea of several architects
+and the Greeks perfectly possessed the idea of a fine artistic order
+existing in the world when they believed in a great number of deities. This
+proof also is therefore weak, although Kant always treats it with respect.
+
+The sole convincing proof is the existence of the moral law in the heart of
+man. For the moral law to be accomplished, for it not to be merely a tyrant
+over man, for it to be realised in all its fullness, weighing on man here
+but rewarding him infinitely elsewhere, which means there is justice in all
+that, it is necessary that somewhere there should be an absolute realizer
+of justice. God must exist for the world to be moral.
+
+Why is it necessary for the world to be moral? Because an immoral world
+with even a single moral being in it would be a very strange thing.
+
+Thus, whilst the majority of philosophers deduced human liberty from God,
+and the spirituality of the soul from human liberty, the immortality of the
+soul from human spirituality, and morality from human immortality, Kant
+starts from morality as from the incontestable fact, and from morality
+deduces liberty, and from liberty spirituality, and God from the
+immortality of the soul with the consequent realization of justice.
+
+He has effected an extraordinarily powerful reversal of the argument
+generally employed.
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF KANT.--The influence of Kant has been incomparable
+or, if you will, comparable only to those of Plato, Zeno, and
+Epicurus. Half at least of the European philosophy of the nineteenth
+century has proceeded from him and is closely connected with him. Even in
+our own day, pragmatism, as it is called--that is, the doctrine which lays
+down that morality is the measure of truth and that an idea is true only if
+it be morally useful--is perhaps an alteration of Kantism, a Kantian
+heresy, but entirely penetrated with and, as it were, excited by the spirit
+of Kant.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY
+
+
+The great reconstructors of the world, analogous to the
+first philosophers of antiquity.
+
+Great general systems: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.
+
+
+FICHTE.--Fichte, embarrassed by what remained of experience in the
+ideas of Kant, by the part, restricted though it was, which Kant left to
+things in the external world, completely suppressed the external world,
+like Berkeley, and affirmed the existence of the human _ego_
+alone. Kant said that the world furnished us with the matter of the idea
+and that we furnished the form. According to Fichte, form and matter alike
+came from us. What then is sensation? It is nothing except the pause of the
+_ego_ encountering what is not self, the impact of the _ego_
+against what limits it.--But then the external world does exist, for how
+could our mind be encountered by nothing and there be an impact of our mind
+against nothing?--But this non-self that encounters self is precisely a
+product of self, a product of the imagination which creates an object,
+which projects outside us an appearance before which we pause as before
+something real which should be outside us.
+
+This theory is very difficult to understand, but indicates a very fine
+effort of the mind.
+
+Yet outside ourselves is there anything? There is pure spirit, God. What
+is God? For Fichte He is moral order (a very evident recollection of
+Kant). Morality is God and God is morality. We are in God, and it is the
+whole of religion, when we do our duty without any regard to the
+consequences of our actions; we are outside God, and it is atheism, when we
+act in view of what results our actions may have. And thus morality and
+religion run into one another, and religion is only morality in its
+plenitude and complete morality is the whole of religion. "The holy, the
+beautiful, and the good are the immediate apparition [if it could be] in us
+of the essence of God."
+
+SCHELLING.--Schelling desired to correct what, according to him, was
+too radical in the idealism of Fichte. He restored the external world; for
+him the _non-ego_ and the _ego_ both exist and the two are
+_nature_, nature which is the object in the world regarded by man, the
+subject when it regards man, subject and object according to the case; in
+itself and in its totality neither subject nor object, but absolute,
+unlimited, indeterminate. Confronting this world (that is nature and man)
+there is another world which is God. God is the infinite and the perfect,
+and particularly the perfect and infinite will. The world that we know is a
+debasement from that without our being able to conceive how the perfect can
+be degraded, and how an emanation of the perfect can be imperfect and how
+the non-being can come out of being, since relatively to the infinite, the
+finite has no existence, and relatively to perfection, the imperfect is
+nothing.
+
+It appears however that it is thus, and that the world is an emanation of
+God in which He degrades Himself and a degradation of God such that it
+opposes itself to Him as nothing to everything. It is a fall. The fall of
+man in the Scriptures may give an idea, however distant, of that.
+
+HEGEL.--Hegel, a contemporary of Schelling, and often in
+contradiction to him, is the philosopher of "_becoming_" and of the
+idea which always "becomes" something. The essence of all is the idea, but
+the idea in progress; the idea makes itself a thing according to a rational
+law which is inherent in it, and the thing makes itself an idea in the
+sense that the idea contemplating the thing it has become thinks it and
+fills itself with it in order to become yet another thing, always following
+the rational law; and this very evolution, all this evolution, all this
+becoming, is that absolute for which we are always searching behind things,
+at the root of things, and which is _in_ the things themselves.
+
+The rationally active is everything; and activity and reality are synonyms,
+and all reality is active, and what is not active is not real, and what is
+not active has no existence.
+
+Let not this activity be regarded as always advancing forward; the becoming
+is not a river which flows; activity is activity and retro-activity. The
+cause is cause of the effect, but also the effect is cause of its cause.
+In fact the cause would not be cause if it had no effect; it is therefore,
+thanks to its effect, because of its effect, that the cause is cause; and
+therefore the effect is the cause of the cause as much as the cause is
+cause of the effect.
+
+A government is the effect of the character of a people, and the character
+of a people is the effect also of its government; my son proceeds from me,
+but he reacts on me, and because I am his father I have the character which
+I gave him, more pronounced than before, etc.
+
+Hence, all effect is cause as all cause is effect, which everybody has
+recognized, but in addition all effect is cause of its cause and in
+consequence, to speak in common language, all effect is cause forward and
+backward, and the line of causes and effects is not a straight line but a
+circle.
+
+THE DEISM OF HEGEL.--God disappears from all that. No, Hegel is very
+formally a deist, but he sees God in the total of things and not outside
+things, yet distinct. In what way distinct? In this, that God is the
+totality of things considered not in themselves but in the spirit that
+animates them and the force that urges them, and because the soul is of
+necessity in the body, united to the body, that is no reason why it should
+not be distinct from it. And having taken up this position, Hegel is a
+deist and even accepts proofs of the existence of God which are regarded by
+some as hackneyed. He accepts them, only holding them not exactly as
+proofs, but as reasons for belief, and as highly faithful descriptions of
+the necessary elevation of the soul to God. For example, the ancient
+philosophers proved the existence of God by the contemplation of the
+marvels of the universe: "That is not a 'proof,'" said Hegel, "that is not
+a proof, but it is a great reason for belief; for it is an exposition, a
+very exact although incomplete account rendered of the fact that by
+contemplation of the world the human mind rises to God." Now this fact is
+of singular importance: it indicates that it is impossible to think
+strongly without thinking of God. "When the passage [although
+insufficiently logical] from the finite to the infinite does not take
+place, it may be said that there is no thought." Now this is a reason for
+belief.'
+
+After the same fashion, the philosophers have said "from the moment that we
+imagine God, the reason is that He is." Kant ridiculed this proof. Granted,
+it is not an invincible proof, but this fact alone that we cannot imagine
+God without affirming His existence indicates a tendency of our mind which
+is to relate finite thought to infinite thought and not to admit an
+imperfect thought which should not have its source in a perfect thought;
+and that is rather an invincible belief than a proof, but that this belief
+is invincible and necessary in itself is an extremely commanding proof,
+although a relative one.
+
+HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.--The philosophy of the human mind and
+political philosophy according to Hegel are these. Primitive man is mind,
+reason, conscience, but he is so only potentially, as the philosophers
+express it; that is to say, he is so only in that he is capable of becoming
+so. Really, practically, he is only instincts: he is egoist like the
+animals [it should be said like the greater part of the animals], and
+follows his egoistical appetites. Society, in whatever manner it has
+managed to constitute itself, transforms him and his "becoming" commences.
+From the sexual instinct it makes marriage, from capture it forms regulated
+proprietorship, out of defence against violence it makes legal punishment,
+etc. Hence-forth, and all his evolution tends to that, man proceeds to
+substitute in himself the general will for the particular will; he tends to
+disindividualize himself. The general will, founded upon general utility,
+is that the man be married, father, head of a family, good husband, good
+father, good relative, good citizen. All that man ought to be in
+consideration of the general will which he has put in the place of his own,
+and which he has made his own will. That is the first advance.
+
+It is realized (always imperfectly) in the smallest societies, in the
+cities, in the little Greek republics, for example.
+
+Here is the second advance. By war, by conquest, by annexations, by more
+gentle means when possible, the stronger cities subdue the weaker, and the
+great State is created. The great State has a more important part than the
+city; it continues to substitute the general will for the particular wills;
+but, _in addition,_ it is an idea, a great civilizing idea,
+benevolent, elevating, aggrandizing, to which private interests must and
+should be sacrificed. Such were the Romans who considered themselves, not
+without reason, as the legislators and civilizers of the world.
+
+THE IDEAL FORM OF STATE.--Putting aside for a while the continuation
+of this subject, what political form should the great State take to conform
+to its destiny? Assuredly the monarchical form; for the republican form is
+always too individualist. To Hegel, the Greeks and even the Romans seem to
+have conceded too much to individual liberty or to the interests of class,
+of caste; they possessed an imperfect idea of the rights and functions of
+the State. The ideal form of the State is monarchy. It is necessary for the
+State to be contracted, gathered up, and personified in a prince who can be
+personally loved, who can be reverenced, which is precisely what is
+needed. These great States are only really great if they possess strong
+cohesion; it is therefore necessary that they should be nationalities, as
+it is called--that is, that they should be inwardly very united and highly
+homogeneous by community of race, religion, customs, language, etc. The
+idea to be realized by a State can only be accomplished if there be a
+sufficient community of ideas in the people constituting it. However the
+great State will be able to, and even ought to, conquer and annex the small
+ones in order to become stronger and more capable, being stronger, of
+realizing its idea. Only this should be done merely when it is certain or
+clearly apparent that it represents an idea as against a people which does
+not, or that it presents a better, greater, and nobler idea than that
+represented by the people it attacks.
+
+WAR.--But, as each people will always find its own idea finer than
+that of another, how is this to be recognized?--By victory itself. It is
+victory which proves that a people ... was stronger than another!--Not
+only stronger materially but representing a greater, more practical, more
+fruitful idea than the other; for it is precisely the idea which supports a
+people and renders it strong. Thus, victory is the sign of the moral
+superiority of a people, and in consequence force indicates where right is
+and is indistinguishable from right itself, and we must not say as may
+already perhaps have been said: "Might excels right," but "Might is right"
+or "Right is might."
+
+For example [Hegel might have said], France was "apparently" within her
+rights in endeavouring to conquer Europe from 1792 to 1815; for she
+represented an idea, the revolutionary idea, which she might consider, and
+which many besides the French did consider, an advance and a civilizing
+idea; but she was beaten, _which proves_ that the idea was false; and
+before this demonstration by events is it not true that the republican or
+Caesarian idea is inferior to that of traditional monarchy? Hegel would
+certainly have reasoned thus on this point.
+
+Therefore war is eternal and must be so. It is history itself, being the
+condition of history; it is even the evolution of humanity, being the
+condition of that evolution; there-fore, it is divine. Only it is purifying
+itself; formerly men only fought, or practically always, from ambition; now
+wars are waged for principles, to effect the triumph of an idea which has a
+future, and which contains the future, over one that is out of date and
+decayed. The future will see a succession of the triumphs of might which,
+by definition, will be triumphs of right and which will be triumphs of
+increasingly fine ideas over ideas that are barbarous and justly condemned
+to perish.
+
+Hegel has exercised great influence on the ideas of the German people both
+in internal and external politics.
+
+ART, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION.--The ideas of Hegel on art, science, and
+religion are the following: Under the shelter of the State which is
+necessary for their peaceful development in security and liberty, science,
+literature, art, and religion pursue aims not superior to but other than
+those of the State. They seek, without detaching the individual from the
+society, to unite him to the whole world. Science makes him know all it
+can of nature and its laws; literature, by studying man in himself and in
+his relations with the world, imbues him with the sentiment of the possible
+concordance of the individual with the universe; the arts make him love
+creation by unravelling and bringing into the light and into relief all
+that is beautiful in it relatively to man, and all that in consequence
+should render it lovely, respected, and dear to him; religion, finally,
+seeks to be a bond between all men and a bond between all men and God; it
+sketches the plan of universal brotherhood which is ideally the last state
+of humanity, a state which no doubt it will never attain, but which it is
+essential it should imagine and believe to be possible, without which it
+always would be drawn towards animality more and much more than it is.
+
+The Hegelian philosophy has exercised an immense influence throughout
+Europe not only on philosophic studies, but on history, art, and
+literature. It may be regarded as the last "universal system" and as the
+most daring that has been attempted by the human mind.
+
+SCHOPENHAUER.--Schopenhauer was the philosopher of the
+will. Persuaded, like Leibnitz, that man is an epitome and a picture of the
+world, and that the world resembles us (which is hypothetical), he takes up
+the thought of Leibnitz, changing and transforming it thus: All the
+universe is not thought, but all the universe is will; thought is only an
+accident of the will which appears in the superior animals; but the will,
+which is the foundation of man, is the foundation of all; the universe is a
+compound of wills that act. All beings are wills which possess organs
+conformed to their purpose. It is _the will to be_ which gave claws to
+the lion, tusks to the boar, and intelligence to man, because he was the
+most unarmed of animals, just as to one who becomes blind it gives
+extraordinarily sensitive and powerful sense of hearing, smell, and
+touch. Plants strive towards light by their tops and towards moisture by
+their roots; the seed turns itself in the earth to send forth its stalk
+upwards and its rootlet downward. In minerals there are "constant
+tendencies" which are nothing but obscure wills; what we currently term
+weight, fluidity, impenetrability, electricity, chemical affinities, are
+nothing but natural wills or inconscient wills. Because of this, the
+diverse wills opposing and clashing with one another, the world is a war of
+all against all and of _everything_ literally against _everything_; and
+the world is a scene of carnage.
+
+The truth is that will is an evil and is the evil. What is needed for
+happiness is to kill the will, to destroy the wish to be.--But this would
+be the end of existence?--And in fact to be no more or not to be at all is
+the true happiness and it would be necessary to blow up the whole world in
+an explosion for it to escape unhappiness. At least, as Buddhism desired
+and, in some degree, though less, Christianity also, it is necessary to
+make an approach to death by a kind of reduction to the absolute minimum of
+will, by detachment and renunciation pushed as far as can be.
+
+NIETZSCHE.--A very respectful but highly independent and untractable
+pupil of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche "turns Schopenhauer inside out" as it
+were, saying: Yes, assuredly the will to be is everything; but precisely
+because of that it is essential not to oppose but to follow it and to
+follow it as far as it will lead us. But is it not true that it will lead
+to suffering? Be sure of that, but in suffering there is an intoxication of
+pain which is quite comprehensible; for it is the intoxication of the will
+in action; and this intoxication is an enjoyment too and in any case a good
+thing; for it is the end to which we are urged by our nature composed of
+will and of hunger for existence. Now wisdom, like happiness, is to follow
+our nature. The happiness and wisdom of man is to obey his will for power,
+as the wisdom and happiness of water is to flow towards the sea.
+
+From these ideas is derived a morality of violence which can be
+legitimately regarded as immoral and which, in any case, is neither
+Buddhist nor Christian, but which is susceptible of several
+interpretations, all the more so because Nietzsche, who was a poet, never
+fails, whilst always artistically very fine, to fall into plenty of
+contradictions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND
+
+
+The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism:
+Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.
+
+
+TRANSFORMISM AND EVOLUTION.--The great philosophic invention of the
+English of the nineteenth century has been the idea, based on a wide
+knowledge of natural history, that there never was creation. The animal
+species had been considered by all the philosophers (except Epicurus and
+the Epicureans) as being created once and for all and remaining
+invariable. Nothing of the kind. Matter, eternally fruitful, has
+transformed itself first into plants, then into lower animals, then into
+higher animals, then into man; our ancestor is the fish; tracing back yet
+more remotely, our ancestor is the plant. Transformation (hence the name
+_transformism_), discrimination and separation of species, the
+strongest individuals of each kind alone surviving and creating descendants
+in their image which constitute a species; evolution (hence the name
+_evolutionism_) of living nature thus operating from the lowest types
+to the highest and therefore the most complicated; there is nothing but
+that in the world.
+
+LAMARCK; DARWIN; SPENCER.--The Frenchman Lamarck in the eighteenth
+century had already conceived this idea; Darwin, purely a naturalist, set
+it forth clearly, Spencer again stated it and drew from it consequences of
+general philosophy. Thus, to Spencer, the evolutionist theory contains no
+immorality. On the contrary, the progressive transformation of the human
+species is an ascent towards morality; from egoism is born altruism because
+the species, seeking its best law and its best condition of happiness,
+perceives a greater happiness in altruism; seeking its best law and its
+best condition of happiness, perceives that a greater happiness lies in
+order, regular life, social life, etc.; so that humanity raises itself to a
+higher and yet higher morality by the mere fact of adapting itself better
+to the conditions of the life of humanity. Morality develops
+physiologically as the germ becomes the stem and the bud becomes the
+flower.
+
+As for religion it is the domain of the unknowable. That is not to assert
+that it is nothing. On the contrary it is something formidable and
+immense. It is the feeling that something, apart from all that we know,
+surpasses us and that we shall never know it. Now this feeling at the same
+time maintains us in a humility highly favourable to the health of the soul
+and also in a serene confidence in the mysterious being who presides over
+universal evolution and who, no doubt, is the all-powerful and eternal soul
+of it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE
+
+
+The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.
+
+The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.
+
+The Kantist School: Renouvier.
+
+Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.
+
+
+LAROMIGUIERE: ROYER-COLLARD.--Emerging from the school of Condillac,
+France saw Laromiguiere who was a sort of softened Condillac, less
+trenchant, and not insensible to the influence of Rousseau; but he was
+little more than a clear and elegant professor of philosophy. Royer-Collard
+introduced into France the Scottish philosophy (Thomas Reid, Dugald
+Stewart) and did not depart from it or go beyond it; but he set it forth
+with magnificent authority and with a remarkable invention of clear and
+magisterial formulae.
+
+MAINE DE BIRAN.--Maine de Biran was a renovator. He attached himself
+to Descartes linking the chain anew that had for so long been
+interrupted. He devoted his attention to the notion of _ego_. In full
+reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, he restored a due activity to
+the _ego_; he made it a force not restricted to the reception of
+sensations, which transform themselves, but one which seized upon,
+elaborated, linked together, and combined them. For him then, as for
+Descartes, but from a fresh point of view, the voluntary deed is the
+primitive deed of the soul and the will is the foundation of man. Also, the
+will is not all man; man has, so to say, three lives superimposed but very
+closely inter-united and which cannot do without one another: the life of
+sensation, the life of will, and the life of love. The life of sensation is
+almost passive, with a commencement of activity which consists in
+classifying and organizing the sensations; the life of will is properly
+speaking the "human" life; the life of love is the life of activity and yet
+again of will, but which unites the human with the divine life. By the
+ingenious and profound subtlety of his analyses, Maine de Biran has placed
+himself in the front rank of French thinkers and, in any case, he is one of
+the most original.
+
+VICTOR COUSIN AND HIS DISCIPLES.--Victor Cousin, who appears to have
+been influenced almost concurrently by Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, and
+the German philosophy, yielded rapidly to a tendency which is
+characteristically French and is also, perhaps, good, and which consists in
+seeing "some good in all the opinions," and he was eclectic, that is, a
+borrower. His maxim, which he had no doubt read in Leibnitz, was that the
+systems are "true in what they affirm and false in what they deny."
+Starting thence, he rested upon both the English and German philosophy,
+correcting one by the other. Personally his tendency was to make
+metaphysics come from philosophy and to prove God by the human soul and the
+relations of God with the world by the relations of man with matter. To him
+God is always an augmented human soul. All philosophies, not to mention all
+religions, have rather an inclination to consider things thus: but this
+tendency is particularly marked in Cousin. In the course of his career,
+which was diversified, for he was at one time a professor and at another a
+statesman, he varied somewhat, because before 1830 he became very Hegelian,
+and after 1830 he harked back towards Descartes, endeavouring especially to
+make philosophic instruction a moral priesthood; highly cautious, very
+well-balanced, feeling great distrust of the unassailable temerities of the
+one and in sympathetic relations with the other. What has remained of this
+eclecticism is an excellent thing, the great regard for the _history_
+of philosophy, which had never been held in honour in France and which,
+since Cousin, has never ceased to be so.
+
+The principal disciples of Cousin were Jouffroy, Damiron, Emile Saisset,
+and the great moralist Jules Simon, well-known because of the important
+political part he played.
+
+LAMENNAIS.--Lamennais, long celebrated for his great book, _Essay
+on Indifference in the Matter of Religion_, then, when he had severed
+himself from Rome, by his _Words of a Believer_ and other works of
+revolutionary spirit, was above all a publicist; but he was a philosopher,
+properly speaking, in his _Sketch of a Philosophy_. To him, God is
+neither the Creator, as understood by the early Christians, nor the Being
+from whom the world emanates, as others have thought. He has not created
+the world from nothing; but He has created it; He created it from Himself,
+He made it issue from His substance; and He made it issue by a purely
+voluntary act. He created it in His own image; it is not man alone who is
+in the image of God, but the whole world. The three Persons of God, that
+is, the three characteristics, power, intelligence, and love are
+found--diminished and disfigured indeed, but yet are to be found--in every
+being in the universe. They are especially our own three powers, under the
+form of will, reason, sympathy; they are also the three powers of society,
+under the forms of executive power, deliberation, and fraternity. Every
+being, individual or collective, has in it a principle of death if it
+cannot reproduce however imperfectly all the three terms of this trinity
+without the loss of one.
+
+AUGUSTE COMTE.--Auguste Comte, a mathematician, versed also in all
+sciences, constructed a pre-eminently negative philosophy in spite of his
+great pretension to replace the negations of the eighteenth century by a
+positive doctrine; above all else he denied all authority and denied to
+metaphysics the right of existence. Metaphysics ought not to exist, do not
+exist, are a mere nothing. We know nothing, we can know nothing, about the
+commencement or the end of things, or yet their essence or their object;
+philosophy has always laid down as its task a general explanation of the
+universe; it is precisely this general explanation, all general explanation
+of the aggregate of things, which is impossible. This is the negative part
+of "positivism." It is the only one which has endured and which is the
+_credo_ or rather the _non credo_ of a fairly large number of
+minds.
+
+The affirmative part of the ideas of Comte was this: what can be done is to
+make a classification of sciences and a philosophy of history. The
+classification of sciences according to Comte, proceeding from the most
+simple to the most complex--that is, from mathematics to astronomy,
+physics, chemistry, biology to end at sociology, is generally considered by
+the learned as interesting but arbitrary. The philosophy of history,
+according to Comte, is this: humanity passes through three states:
+theological, metaphysical, positive. The theological state (antiquity)
+consists in man explaining everything by continual miracles; the
+metaphysical state (modern times) consists in man explaining everything by
+ideas, which he still continues to consider somewhat as beings, by
+abstractions, entities, vital principle, attraction, gravitation, soul,
+faculty of the soul, etc. The positive state consists in that man explains
+and will explain all things, or rather limits himself and will limit
+himself to verifying them, by the links that he will see they have with one
+another, links he will content himself with observing and subsequently with
+controlling by experiment. Also there is always something of the succeeding
+state in the preceding state and the ancients did not ignore observation,
+and there is always something of the preceding state in the succeeding
+state and we have still theological and metaphysical habits of mind,
+theological and metaphysical "residues," and perhaps it will be always
+thus; but for theology to decline before metaphysics and metaphysics before
+science is progress.
+
+Over and above this, Comte in the last portion of his life--as if to prove
+his doctrine of residues and to furnish an example--founded a sort of
+religion, a pseudo-religion, the religion of humanity. Humanity must be
+worshipped in its slow ascent towards intellectual and moral perfection
+(and, in consequence, we should specially worship humanity to come; but
+Comte might reply that humanity past and present is venerable because it
+bears in its womb the humanity of the future). The worship of this new
+religion is the commemoration and veneration of the dead. These last
+conceptions, fruits of the sensibility and of the imagination of Auguste
+Comte, have no relation with the basis of his doctrine.
+
+RENOUVIER.--After him, by a vigorous reaction, Renouvier restored
+the philosophy of Kant, depriving it of its too symmetrical, too minutely
+systematic, too scholastic character and bringing it nearer to facts; from
+him was to come the doctrine already mentioned, "pragmatism," which
+measures the truth of every idea by the moral consequence that it contains.
+
+TAINE.--Very different and attaching himself to the general ideas of
+Comte, Hippolyte Taine believed only in what has been observed,
+experimented, and demonstrated; but being also as familiar with Hegel as
+with Comte, with Spencer as with Condillac, he never doubted that the need
+of going beyond and escaping from oneself was also a fact, a human fact
+eternal among humanity, and of this fact he took account as of a fact
+observed and proved, saying if man is on one side a "fierce and lascivious
+gorilla," on the other side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a double
+nature, mysterious hymen," as Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the
+baseness in ideas and actions as well as all the sublimity in ideas and
+actions of humanity. Personally he was a Stoic and his practice was the
+continuous development of the intelligence regarded as the condition and
+guarantee of morality.
+
+RENAN.--Renan, destined for the ecclesiastical profession and always
+preserving profound traces of his clerical education, was, nevertheless, a
+Positivist and believed only in science, hoping everything from it in youth
+and continuing to venerate it at least during his mature years. Thus
+formed, a "Christian Positivist," as has been said, as well as a poet above
+all else, he could not proscribe metaphysics and had a weakness for them
+with which perhaps he reproached himself. He extricated himself from this
+difficulty by declaring all metaphysical conceptions to be only "dreams,"
+but sheltered, so to say, by this concession he had made and this
+precaution he had taken, he threw himself into the dream with all his heart
+and reconstituted God, the immortal soul, the future existence, eternity
+and creation, giving them new, unforeseen, and fascinating names. It was
+only the idea of Providence--that is, of the particular and circumstantial
+intervention of God in human affairs, which was intolerable to him and
+against which he always protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, "God
+does not act by particular wills." And yet he paid a compliment, which
+seems sincere, to the idea of grace, and if there be a particular and
+circumstantial intervention by God in human affairs, it is certainly grace
+according to all appearances.
+
+He was above all an amateur of ideas, a dilettante in ideas, toying with
+them with infinite pleasure, like a superior Greek sophist, and in all
+French philosophy no one calls Plato to mind more than he does.
+
+He possessed a charming mind, a very lofty character, and was a marvellous
+writer.
+
+TO-DAY.--The living French philosophers whom we shall content
+ourselves with naming because they are living and receive contemporary
+criticism rather than that of history, are MM. Fouillee, Theodule Ribot,
+Liard, Durckheim, Izoulet, and Bergson.
+
+THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY.--It is impossible to forecast in what
+direction philosophy will move. The summary history we have been able to
+trace sufficiently shows, as it seems to us, that it has no regular advance
+such that by seeing how it has progressed one can conjecture what path it
+will pursue. It seems in no sense to depend, or at all events, to depend
+remarkably little, at any period, on the general state of civilization
+around it, and even for those who believe in a philosophy of history there
+is not, as it appears to me, a philosophy of the history of philosophy. The
+only thing that can be affirmed is that philosophy will always exist in
+response to a need of the human mind, and that it will always be both an
+effort to gather scientific discoveries into some great general ideas and
+an effort to go beyond science and to seek as it can the meaning of the
+universal enigma; so that neither philosophy, properly speaking, nor even
+metaphysics will ever disappear. Nietzsche has said that life is valuable
+only as the instrument of knowledge. However eager humanity may be and
+become for branches of knowledge, it will be always passionately and
+indefatigably anxious about complete knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF NAMES
+
+     A
+
+     Aelard
+     Aenesidemus
+     Agrippa
+     Agrippa, Cornelius
+     Ailly, Peter d'
+     Albertus Magnus
+     Alexander the Great
+     Anaxagoras
+     Anaximander
+     Anselm, St.
+     Antisthenes
+     Apollodorus
+     Arcesilaus
+     Arete
+     Aristippus
+     Aristo
+     Aristobulus
+     Aristophanes
+     Aristotle
+     Arius
+     Arnauld
+     Atticus
+     Augustine, St.
+     Averroes
+     Avicenna
+
+     B
+
+     Bacon, Francis
+     Bacon, Roger
+     Beaconsfield
+     Bergson
+     Berkeley
+     Bonaventura, St.
+     Bossuet
+     Bruno, Giordano
+     Brutus
+     Buridan
+
+     C
+
+     Calvin
+     Campanella
+     Cardan
+     Carneades
+     Cato
+     Champeaux, William of
+     Charles the Bald
+     Christina of Sweden
+     Chrysippus
+     Cicero
+     Cleanthes
+     Clement, St., of Alexandria
+     Comte, Auguste
+     Cnodillac
+     Corneille
+     Cousin, Victor
+     Crantor
+     Crates
+
+     D
+
+     Damiron
+     Darwin
+     Democritus
+     Descartes
+     Diderot
+     Diogenes
+     Durand de Saint-Pourcain
+     Durckheim
+
+     E
+
+     Empedocles
+     Epictetus
+     Epicurus
+     Euhemerus
+
+     F
+
+     Fenelon
+     Fichte
+     Fontenelle
+     Fouillee
+     Franklin
+
+     G
+
+     Gassendi
+     Gerbert
+     Gerson
+     Gorgias
+
+     H
+
+     Harvey
+     Havet, Ernest
+     Hegel
+     Hegesias
+     Helvetius
+     Heraclitus
+     Herillus
+     Hermarchus
+     Hobbes, Thomas
+     Holbach, d'
+     Horace
+     Hugo, Victor
+     Hugo de Saint-Victor
+     Hume, David
+
+     I
+
+     Iamblichus
+     Izoulet
+
+     J
+
+     James I
+     Jesus Christ
+     Joan of Navarre
+     Jouffroy
+     Justinian
+
+     K
+
+     Kant
+
+     L
+
+     La Bruyere
+     Lamarck
+     Lamennais
+     Laromiguiere
+     Leibnitz
+     Leo X
+     Leucippus
+     Liard
+     Locke
+     Louis XIV
+     Lucian
+     Lucretius
+     Lulle, Raymond
+
+     M
+
+     Maine de Biran
+     Malebranche
+     Manes
+     Marcus Aurelius
+     Menippus
+     Metrodorus
+     Moderatus
+     Moliere
+     Montaigne
+     Moses
+
+     N
+
+     Nemesius
+     Nero
+     Nicomachus
+     Nietzsche
+
+     O
+
+     Ockham, William of
+     Origen
+
+     P
+
+     Paracelsus
+     Parmenides
+     Pascal
+     Paul, St.
+     Pericles
+     Philips the Fair
+     Philo
+     Pico della Mirandola
+     Plato
+     Pliny the Younger
+     Plotinus
+     Plutarch
+     Poincare, Henri
+     Polemo
+     Polystratus
+     Pomponazzo
+     Porphyry
+     Prodicus
+     Protagoras
+     Pyrrho
+     Pythagoras
+
+     R
+
+     Reid, Thomas
+     Renan
+     Renouvier
+     Reuchlin
+     Ribot, Theodule
+     Richard de Saint-Victor
+     Roscelin
+     Rousseau, J. J.
+     Royer-Collard
+
+     S
+
+     Saisset, Emile
+     Schelling
+     Schopenhauer
+     Scotus Erigena
+     Seneca
+     Servetus, Michael
+     Sextus Empiricus
+     Shakespeare
+     Simon, Jules
+     Socrates
+     Spencer, Herbert
+     Speusippus
+     Spinoza
+     Stewart, Dugald
+
+     T
+
+     Taine, Hippolyte
+     Thales
+     Theodosius
+     Theophrastus
+     Thomas Aquinas, St.
+     Thrasea
+     Timon
+
+     V
+
+     Vanini
+     Vauvenargues
+     Vico
+     Villon
+     Vincent of Beauvais
+     Voltaire
+
+     W
+
+     William of Auvergne
+     Wolf
+
+     X
+
+     Xenocrates
+     Xenophanes
+     Xenophon
+
+     Z
+
+     Zeno (of Citium)
+     Zeno (of Elea)
+     Zoroaster
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Initiation into Philosophy, by Emile Faguet
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