On the other hand, take the sciences of Nature which deal with the objects most widely removed from man, with astronomy or geology, _e.g._; no longer consider the bare external results; consider rather that spiritual force which we call thought, and which has the virtue of producing these sciences; what are they but the external revelation of the creative and organising energy of the thinking subject, the revelation of spirit to spirit? The work, seen from this subjective side, serves simply to set forth the worth of the worker. You speak then of the ordinary savant or of the intellectual genius, of the good or bad scientific workman. The philosophy of science becomes a necessarily subjective discipline. "Science," in fact, is simply an abstraction. In the reality there are only minds more or less ignorant, conscious, at each step, of their strength and of their impotence, of their defeats and victories,--minds condemned to a perpetual effort to struggle out of the night from which they slowly mount. When you think of this most disinterested side of the scientific life you ask yourself what is the basis, in the last resort, of this confidence of mind in itself--the foundation of all the rest.

You see clearly that this activity of pure intellect demands, like all other human activity, attention, forgetfulness of self, a heroism, in short, going to the point of contempt of common enjoyments, and of the sacrifice of life itself. You have then left the domain of the sciences of Nature and have entered the realms of spirit, and there rise around you the problems which form the object of the moral disciplines.

Such is the intimate complexity of the two orders of knowledge that a persevering reflection discovers them to be everywhere mingled, and it is with difficulty that they are disentangled. All knowledge is an aggregate (_ensemble_) of judgments; but the judgments which const.i.tute physical knowledge and those that const.i.tute moral science are not of the same nature. The first are judgments of _existence_, bearing solely on the causality, the succession, the distribution of phenomena, _i.e._ on the relations of objects to each other, apart from the subject. The basis on which they rest is sensation, and, as sensation has for necessary forms time and s.p.a.ce, time and s.p.a.ce will also be the forms and limits of these judgments. Forming h.o.m.ogeneous quant.i.ties, time and s.p.a.ce give the notion of figure and of number, so that mathematics is the foundation and the necessary framework of all the physical sciences. They rise above this abstract science of the forms of sensibility in the order of their complexity, and form a hierarchy from rational mechanics to sociology, of which Comte and so many others vainly endeavour to make a simple social mechanics. The destiny of this universal objective science is to progress for ever without ever being completed; for it is of the same nature as number--that is to say, essentially indefinite and imperfect. It not only finds an inexhaustible subject of study in the external world; it encounters a mystery impenetrable to its methods and a.n.a.lyses in the very subject that creates it, and which, in creating it, remains outside the mechanism it sets in motion.

In fact, when the thinking subject considers itself, or considers things in relation to itself, it brings to bear upon itself and them a second series of judgments of an altogether different character. It estimates them and it estimates itself according to a _norm_ which is in itself. It declares them to be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor in life, harmonious or discordant. In other words, it is no longer the idea of number--it is the category of _the good_ which becomes the necessary form of these new judgments, which, for this reason, are called judgments of _estimation_ or of dignity, and it is clear that between these two kinds of judgments there is no common measure. They can no more encounter each other than two b.a.l.l.s rolled on different planes.

Will it be said that the judgments founded on the concept of _the good_ are insignificant and worthless because neither man nor the good of man can be the measure of things? If this remark is useful for abating human pride and preventing childish illusions, it does not efface the primordial distinction between good and evil inherent to the human mind, nor would one wish to deduce from it the vanity of all morality, and the equal worth of all the manifestations of life. The proof, moreover, that the rule of _the good_ is above man is that it judges and condemns him pitilessly; it is that consciousness, independently of the painful or agreeable sensations that it receives from things, establishes between them a fitness (_convenance_), a hierarchy, and const.i.tutes the harmonious unity of the universe itself in the supreme idea of the sovereign good. If the legitimacy of the confidence which the conscience has in its rule is to be contested, I do not see why we should not contest that of the confidence of pure thought in itself.

Then everything crumbles to pieces, both science and conscience, in the same abyss.

In reality, the good, the beautiful, the relations of fitness and of harmony, are so many principles of knowledge, which progress, like physical knowledge, by the culture of the mind. The form of the moral judgments is universal, and identical in every man; it is this form alone which const.i.tutes man as a moral being; but the contents of this form vary unceasingly in history, according to times and places.

Everywhere and always man has sought the good, but he has not always placed it in the same things; he has formed different ideas of it, and these ideas have become more and more n.o.ble and pure in proportion as his life itself has been enn.o.bled and purified. That is why there is a history of morality, of religion, of aesthetics, as there is a history of the natural sciences, although progress in these two cla.s.ses has been of an opposite nature and accomplished according to different laws. However this may be, we may conclude that if mathematics, by the concept of number, the abstract form of sensation, is the mould and framework of the sciences of Nature, ethics, by _the categorical imperative_, the abstract form of the activity of spirit, is the foundation of the moral sciences, which are as diverse as the various activities of the ego, each having special rules and criteria, no doubt, but always falling under the common form of obligation.

Distinct and often in conflict, these two orders of knowledge are none the less _solidaire_; they are always developed by their action the one upon the other, and tend to a higher unity, the need for which gives rise to attempts, renewed from age to age, at a metaphysical synthesis.

If you take the disciplines as taught in the schools to-day, you will find that they are almost all mixed sciences such as history, social economy, politics, philosophy, etc. So soon as the savant rises above the simple description of phenomena, and wishes to organise his cosmos by formulating the unity and harmony of it, he necessarily borrows this principle of organisation and of harmony from the experience of his subjective life. On the contrary, religion, art, morality, can only be realised in the conditions prescribed to them by science properly so called, and the last problem always propounded to human thought at each stage of its development is the conciliation of the _moral idea_ acquired by the exercise of the will, and the _scientific idea_ furnished by its experience of the world.

There is no question, then, of separating the two orders of knowledge, but of referring each of them to its true source, and preventing a confusion which, mixing everything up, renders everything uncertain.

It is impossible in good psychology to trace to one centre the divergent manifestations of our spiritual life, and to drive the moral into the physical or the physical into the moral. Our spiritual life is like an ellipse with two centres of light: on the one side, the centre of _receptive life_, where all the sensations received are elaborated into phenomenal knowledge; on the other, the centre of _active life_, at which are concentrated all the revelations of the mind's own inner energy. The line of the ellipse described by the relation and the distance of these two centres is the approximate but never perfect synthesis of the two kinds of data which thus arrive in consciousness. He who does not distinguish these two centres, and transforms the ellipse into a circ.u.mference with equal rays and an unique centre, necessarily remains in chaos and old night.

From these general considerations is naturally deduced the specific character of religious knowledge, its inward nature and its range.

4. _The Subjectivity of Religious Knowledge_

The first contrast that we have seen to arise between the knowledge of Nature and religious knowledge is that the first is _objective_, and that the second can never pa.s.s out of _subjectivity_. This does not mean that the second is less certain, but that it is of another order, and is produced in another way and with other characteristics.

In one sense, the knowledge of Nature is subjective, for it depends on our mental const.i.tution, and on the laws of our knowing faculty. But religious and moral knowledge is subjective in a different manner and for a deeper reason. The object of scientific knowledge is always outside the ego, and it is in knowing it as an object outside the ego that the objectivity of that knowledge consists. But the object of religious or moral knowledge--G.o.d, the Good, the Beautiful--these are not phenomena that may be grasped outside the ego and independently of it. G.o.d only reveals Himself in and by piety; the Good, in the consciousness of the good man; the Beautiful, in the creative activity of the artist. This is only saying that the object of these kinds of knowledge is immanent in the subject himself, and only reveals itself by the personal activity of that subject. Absolutely eliminate the religious and moral subject, or rather take from him all personal activity, and you suppress, for him, the object of morality and religion.

Let us take up again that striking ant.i.thesis of the two orders of knowledge. What is at once the basis and the sign of the objectivity of the natural sciences?

One may theoretically ask whether the world of science, the world that _appears_ to us, is exactly the real world, existing outside of us. It is thus that in the philosophy of Kant the famous question as to _the thing in itself_ is stated. But it is equally certain that in the name of that philosophy this question ought logically to be discarded. One is astonished that the author of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ did not immediately close that door opened to scientific scepticism. After his critique, in fact, it is evident that that substratum which some are forced to imagine as a support to phenomena--that the indeterminate and indeterminable substance that they represent beneath the forms and qualities of things,--is both a non-being and nonsense. _Das Ding an sich ist ein Unding_. (The thing in itself is an unthing.) It is a remnant of ancient metaphysics which ought to be eliminated from modern philosophy. In allowing it to introduce itself into our theory of knowledge, it overturns it as would a heterogeneous element. He that persists in distinguishing between the thing in itself and the phenomenal thing will never be able to give an account of the objectivity of the sciences of Nature, and of the kind of cert.i.tude that belongs to them.

That which appears to us from without is not doubtless all the reality of the world; but it is a real world. By his calculations, Leverrier came first to suspect the existence of a large planet as yet unperceived; then he came to measure its volume, to trace its...o...b..t, and finally to mark its place at a given time. He said to his brother astronomers: "Look there!" and the planet appeared at the end of their telescopes.

How explain, moreover, without this reality of science, the power that science gives to man over Nature? His power, is it not always exactly in proportion to his knowledge?

In what then does this objectivity of science consist if it is not founded on the pretended knowledge of the thing in itself? In the necessary link that scientific thought establishes between phenomena.

This necessity does not come from experience, for it is something ideal, which our mind adds to all experience. But, as we can only think according to these necessary laws, we necessarily objectivise in all scientific study. We thus affirm, of necessity, the fundamental unity of the laws of thought and the laws of phenomena. Experience always confirms this immediate affirmation. Now this necessity, it is objectivity itself; it is the only noumenon that we are authorised to seek behind phenomena in Nature, and behind the manifestations of pure reason in spirit.

The first effect of this objective necessity is to eliminate from the work of science the feelings and the subjective will of the ego. A thinking and acting subject is no doubt necessary in making science; but the characteristic of science is to see what it studies apart from the subject, apart even from the psychical phenomena that it observes in the ego itself. Posited outside the ego, the laws that it promulgates appear to us therefore independent of it. This elimination of the subject from the conclusions of science thus becomes the sign and the measure of their objectivity. Where the elimination is complete, as in astronomy and physics, the objectivity is entire. On the contrary, history, _e.g._ where the elimination can never be absolute, always tends towards objectivity, but never reaches it.

It is altogether otherwise with religious knowledge. With it we enter at once into the subjective order--that is to say, into an order of psychological facts, of determinations and internal dispositions of the subject itself, the succession of which const.i.tutes his personal life.

To eliminate the ego would not here be possible; for this would be both to eliminate the materials and to dry up the living spring of knowledge. An ancient illusion pretended that we know G.o.d, as we know the phenomena of Nature, and that the religious life springs from that objective knowledge as by a sort of practical application. The very opposite is true. G.o.d is not a phenomenon that we may observe apart from ourselves, or a truth demonstrable by logical reasoning. He who does not feel Him inside his heart will never find Him outside. The object of religious knowledge only reveals itself in the subject, by the religious phenomena themselves. It is with the religious consciousness as with the moral consciousness. In this the subject feels obliged, and this obligation itself const.i.tutes the revelation of the moral object which obliges us. There is no good known outside that. The same in religion: we never become conscious of our piety without--at the same time that we feel religiously moved--perceiving, more or less obscurely, in that very emotion the object and the cause of religion, _i.e._ G.o.d.

Observe the natural and spontaneous movement of piety: a soul feels itself to be trusting, that it is established in peace and light; is it strong, humble, resigned, obedient? It immediately attributes its strength, its faith, its humility, its obedience, to the action of the Divine Spirit within itself. Anne Doubourg, dying at the stake, prayed thus: "O G.o.d, Do not abandon me lest I should fall off from Thee." The prophet of Israel said: "Turn me, O Lord, and I shall be turned." And the father in the Gospels cried: "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief." To feel thus in our personal and empirical activity the action and the presence of the Spirit of G.o.d within our own spirit, is the mystery, but it is also the source, of religion.

It will be seen how much religious knowledge and the science of Nature differ by their very origin. The one is the theory of the receptive and logical life of the ego; the other is the theory of its active and spontaneous life. As both the receptive and the active life are one, however, the two orders of knowledge are neither isolated nor independent. But they must never be confounded. Their results will always remain heterogeneous; they are not of the same order, and cannot supply the place of each other. If you were to admit, _e.g._, that philosophers may succeed (as they have often been believed to do) in establishing a veritable objective science of G.o.d, and if they were thus to know G.o.d in Himself and apart from the religious ego, that scientific knowledge of G.o.d, even if it were possible, would not be religious knowledge; for to know G.o.d religiously is to know Him in His relation to us--that is to say, in our consciousness, in so far as He is present in it and determines it towards piety. This is the sense in which it is permissible to maintain that religion is as independent of metaphysics as it is of cosmology. It is the same with the knowledge of the world. To know the world as an astronomer or a physicist is not to know it religiously. To know it religiously is, while taking it as it is, and in no wise contradicting the scientific laws according to which it is governed, to determine its value in relation to the life of spirit; it is to estimate it according as it is a means, a hindrance, or a menace, to the progress of that life. In the same way, to know ourselves religiously is not to construct scientific psychology; but that psychology being once constructed, and properly constructed, it is to realise ourselves in our relation both to G.o.d and to the world, forcing ourselves to surmount the contradictions from which we suffer, in order that we may attain to unity and peace of mind. Thus, not only can religious knowledge never cast off its subjective character; it is in reality nothing but that very subjectivity of piety considered in its action and in its legitimate development.

The inner nature of these two orders of knowledge having been defined, it becomes evident that each of them is valid in its own domain, and that they cannot legitimately encroach upon each other. To try to establish by religious faith the reality of any phenomenon whatsoever, of which experimental science or intellectual criticism are the sole judges; or to wish to formulate by means of objective science a moral judgment which springs from the subjective consciousness--these are two equivalent encroachments and abuses. Experimental science has the right to forbid the religious consciousness to do violence to it; but the religious consciousness has an equal right to restrict science to its true limits. We must prevent confusion if we would put an end to the conflicts between them. To enclose G.o.d in any phenomenal form is, properly speaking, superst.i.tion or _idolatry_; to confine or dissipate the soul in external phenomenism, and to deny the seriousness and value of its religious and moral activity, is _infidelity_, properly so called.

Truths of the religious and moral order are known by a subjective act of what Pascal calls _the heart_. Science can know nothing about them, for they are not in its order. In the same way the phenomena of Nature are only known and measured by observation and calculation. Neither the heart nor religious faith can decide with respect to them. Each order has its cert.i.tude. We must not say that in the one the cert.i.tude is greater than in the other. Science is not more sure of its object than moral or religious faith is of its own; but it is sure in a different way. Scientific cert.i.tude has at its basis intellectual evidence. Religious cert.i.tude has for its foundation the feeling of subjective life, or moral evidence. The first gives satisfaction to the intellect; the second gives to the whole soul the sense of order re-established, of health regained, of force and peace. It is the happy feeling of deliverance, the inward a.s.surance of "salvation."

It is not surprising, lastly, that these two kinds of knowledge or of cert.i.tude should spring up and propagate themselves by different means.

Objective science transmits itself by objective demonstration. The subjective life of the savant has nothing to do with it. To convince us of the reality of his discoveries, an astronomer does not need to be a good man. On the contrary, a fundamentally immoral man will always be a detestable professor of ethics. Religion is only propagated by religious men. It may also be added that, in religious knowledge, the intellectual demonstration or the idea has no value except in so far as it serves as the expression and the vehicle of the personal life of the subject. This is the secret and the mystery of eloquence. The _si vis me flere, dolendum_, is true in all the moral disciplines, as much and more than in aesthetics. One gains nothing by attempting to demonstrate objectively the existence of G.o.d. That demonstration is ineffective towards those who have no piety; for those who have, it is superfluous.

The true religious propaganda is effected by inward contagion. _Ex vivo vivus nascitur_. Accuracy in theology is much less important in religion than warmth of piety. Pitiful arguments have in all ages been followed by admirable conversions. Those who are scandalised at this have not yet penetrated into the essence of religious faith.

For want of this clear and frank separation between our two orders of knowledge, one sees, on the one hand, philosophers pretending to transform ethics and philosophy into objective science, and, on the other, savants navely giving forth their objective science as a metaphysic and as a solution of the enigma of life. Two illusions, in whose train everything is mixed up and founded. Objective ethics are everything you could wish--except ethics. You might as well speak of a round square. When an objective science transforms itself into metaphysics, it ceases to be science and becomes subjective philosophy.

This goes without saying.

And yet, in distinguishing the two orders we must not isolate them, nor above all must we lose sight of their solidarity, their close connection, and correspondence. The subject is one, and has a clear consciousness of his unity; that is why he always tends towards a synthesis. Phenomenal science cannot complete itself without borrowing from the subjective consciousness of the ego the ideas of unity, of plan, and of harmony. On the other hand, the moral and religious consciousness, in order to express itself, needs to borrow from phenomenal science the data which it uses, and, consequently, it should always avoid contradicting them. Thus we tend towards the synthetic harmony of a continuous effort and of an indefectible faith; but we discard none the less resolutely the philosophy of logical unity. We obstinately refuse to admit that the subjective order can ever be deduced, by way of consequence and application, from the objective order of knowledge: that is the error of materialistic Pantheism; and, _vice versa_, that the objective order of phenomenal science can or ought to be deduced from the religious or moral order: that is the opposite error of all the dogmatisms. The mental cannot be simply reduced to the physical, or the physical entirely to the mental. We must respect the fruitful antinomies of life from which the necessary progress springs. The tendency towards harmony is there, not the harmony itself. This is the reward promised, the aim proposed, to effort. Our philosophy ought to regard the spiritual life in its becoming--that is to say, in its growth and in its conflicts, without wishing, like all idealist and materialist speculations, to make of the actual and transient moment the eternal metaphysical reality.

5. _Teleology_

Subjective in essence and origin, religious knowledge is _teleological_ in its procedure, and this second characteristic springs from the first.

Teleology is the form of all organic life and of all conscious activity. Now, what is moral knowledge but the theory of the conscious life of spirit?

Without the principle of causation, phenomena, in science, would not be connected; without the idea of end, or principle of direction, biological and psychical facts could not be organised--that is to say, hierarchised.

Mechanism and teleology: these then are the two new terms for the ant.i.thesis formed by the knowledge of Nature and religious knowledge.

But it is a prejudice to believe that the one form of explanation excludes the other or renders it superfluous. We have examples to the contrary not only in the machines constructed by man, but also in all living organisms, in which, according to Claude Bernard, the _directive idea_ of life is realised in an absolute determinism.

The mechanical explanation of phenomena and the determinism of science only become exclusive of teleology when they are transformed into metaphysical materialism--that is to say, when it is affirmed, _a priori_, and by a subjective act, that there is nothing in the universe but matter and the movements of matter. But then, it is clear that materialism, which believes itself to be scientific, becomes a philosophy, and like all other philosophies it falls under the jurisdiction not only of the objective science of the world, but of the consciousness of the ego.

The ideas of cause and end spring from one and the same source. The idea of cause awakens in us because the ego, as soon as it knows itself, has the clear sense of being the author of its acts; it has this sense by that of the very effort that it has made. But, at the same time, it knows that it made that effort with a view to an end which attracted it. Cause and end, therefore, are the two aspects of the same conscious act. The one is the backward glance of the consciousness; the other is its forward look. As we only know the world by reflecting it in the mirror of our consciousness, it follows that the two categories of cause and end impose themselves on our understanding with an equal necessity.

There is another consequence of this psychological observation. The consciousness of the ego is one; neither the idea of cause nor the idea of end, by itself, would suffice to explain the whole universe to me.

It is easy to see at a glance that the objective science of phenomena is not and never can be completed. The chain into which it introduces each particular phenomenon as a new link is indefinitely lengthened by scientific progress, in time and s.p.a.ce, but without the power to hang on anywhere. Outside s.p.a.ce and time, the principle of causation only engenders insoluble antinomies. Besides, to explain one phenomenon by another is to explain it by a cause which itself needs explanation.

The mechanical reason of things is therefore never a sufficient reason.

It is an indefinite series of insufficient particular reasons. The network of science, however fine and firm it be, does not cover, and cannot cover all reality. The Cosmos that science builds is like the globe; it floats in immensity. "Where, O Lord, goes the earth through the heavens?"

To this question teleology alone responds. But every teleological affirmation respecting the universe is a religious affirmation.

Science, studying only accomplished facts, never establishes anything but phenomena and their antecedent or concomitant conditions. Once the phenomenon is integrated in the causal series, the task of science is accomplished. To ask it to go further is to ask it to go beyond its limits and to denaturalise itself. You can only put teleology into the universe by affirming the sovereignty of spirit. To say that there is reason, that there is thought, in things--that they move towards an end or realise an order, a harmony, a good: this is to say that matter is subordinate to spirit. Now, to affirm this sovereignty of spirit is to commit that act of initial religious faith of which I spoke at the beginning; it is to feel in one's self and in the world something besides matter, the mysterious energy of spirit. This act of faith--legitimate because inevitable--belongs to the subjective order of religious life, not to the objective order of science. Teleology and the theory of final causes have been compromised because their specific character has been mistaken; they have sometimes been a.s.similated to, and sometimes subst.i.tuted for, mechanical causes in the explanation of phenomena. For an unknown scientific explanation has been subst.i.tuted an appeal to a supernatural intention or volition of G.o.d. The savants rightly protested against this. G.o.d, who is the final reason of everything, is the scientific explanation of nothing.

The object of science is to search for second causes; where these do not appear there is no science. It is faith which replaces it. To say that G.o.d created the world, or that the world tends toward the sovereign good, is not to advance positive science a single step. On the other hand, to explain the phenomena of rain, or thunder, or the fall of bodies, is to dissipate some mythological conceptions; but it is not to suppress the religious affirmation of spirit that the mechanism of the universe has an end, and that the laws of gravitation and the material forces serve some purpose of which they are ignorant, and which is of more value than themselves.

Between the discoveries of science and the postulates of the religious and moral life there is always necessarily formed a synthesis which is destroyed at each step, but which rises again higher and larger than before. Mechanism itself, in order to be intelligible, calls for teleology. The text of the material world awaits the interpretation that spirit gives of it. By its discoveries positive science establishes the text. Without this rigorous establishment of the text, the exegesis of consciousness remains a phantasy. But, without that exegesis, the text itself signifies nothing; it is almost as if it did not exist.

There is another reason, a practical reason, which makes of teleology the very essence of the religious consciousness. We must never lose sight of the fact that what we seek in and by religion is the key to the enigma of life. The enigma of the universe only torments us, at the religious point of view, because we believe that in this is the secret of that. We are embarked in the vessel, and we see clearly enough that our destiny depends upon its own. That is why religious faith, perfectly indifferent to the architecture and to the ways and means of the construction of the vessel, regards above all the direction in which the sails are set, and seeks to discover the route which is being followed. Has it a compa.s.s? And is there some one at the helm?

In other words, the religious instinct is the pressing need that spirit has to guarantee itself against the perpetual menaces of Nature. Faith judges everything from the point of view of the sovereign good, and the sovereign good, for spirit, can only be the final and complete expansion of the life of the spirit. Therefore, in every religious notion there will never, at bottom, be anything but a teleological judgment. It is not the essence of things--it is their reciprocal value and their hierarchy which interest religious faith. In the religious notion of G.o.d it is not the metaphysical nature--it is the will of G.o.d in regard to men--which is of most concern; and in the religious notion of the world it is not the mechanical cause of phenomena--it is to know which way the world is going, and whether it has any other end to serve than as the theatre and the organ of spirit.

What does faith itself desire to say when it defines G.o.d as the Eternal and Almighty Spirit, except that man needs to affirm that his own individual spirit does not depend on any but a spiritual power like himself? It is true that to determine this final cause of the world is also to determine its first cause. It is the same thing in other terms; and indeed it is to make metaphysics in the etymological sense of the word. The important point is to know that this decisive step beyond the chain of visible phenomena, whether it be taken by the philosopher or the theologian, is always an act of subjective life, an affirmation of spirit, an act of faith, and not a demonstration of science.

6. _Symbolism_

Thirdly, and lastly, religious knowledge is _symbolical_. All the notions it forms and organises, from the first metaphor created by religious feeling to the most abstract theological speculation, are necessarily inadequate to their object. They are never equivalent, as in the case of the exact sciences.

The reason is easy to discover. The object of religion is transcendent; it is not a phenomenon. Now, in order to express that object, our imagination has nothing at its disposal but phenomenal images, and our understanding, logical categories, which do not go beyond s.p.a.ce and time. Religious knowledge is therefore obliged to express the invisible by the visible, the eternal by the temporary, spiritual realities by sensible images. It can only speak in parables.

The theory of religious knowledge requires for its completion a theory of symbols and symbolism.