Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 1

Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good.

by Victor Cousin.

DISCOURSE

p.r.o.nOUNCED AT THE OPENING OF THE COURSE,

DECEMBER 4, 1817.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Spirit and general principles of the Course.--Object of the Lectures of this year:--application of the principles of which an exposition is given, to the three Problems of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

It seems natural that a century, in its beginning, should borrow its philosophy from the century that preceded it. But, as free and intelligent beings, we are not born merely to continue our predecessors, but to increase their work, and also to do our own. We cannot accept from them an inheritance except under the condition of improving it. Our first duty is, then, to render to ourselves an account of the philosophy of the eighteenth century; to recognize its character and its principles, the problems which it agitated, and the solutions which it gave of them; to discern, in fine, what it transmits to us of the true and the productive, and what it also leaves of the sterile and the false, in order that, with reflective choice, we may embrace the former and reject the latter.[3] Placed at the entrance of the new times, let us know, first of all, with what views we would occupy ourselves.

Moreover,--why should I not say it?--after two years of instruction, in which the professor, in some sort, has been investigating himself, one has a right to demand of him what he is; what are his most general principles on all the essential parts of philosophic science; what flag, in fine, in the midst of parties which contend with each other so violently, he proposes for you, young men, who frequent this auditory, and who are called upon to partic.i.p.ate in a destiny still so uncertain and so obscure in the nineteenth century, to follow.

It is not patriotism, it is a profound sentiment of truth and justice, which makes us place the whole philosophy now expanded in the world under the invocation of the name of Descartes. Yes, the whole of modern philosophy is the work of this great man, for it owes to him the spirit that animates it, and the method that const.i.tutes its power.

After the downfall of scholasticism and the mournful disruptures of the sixteenth century, the first object which the bold good sense of Descartes proposed to itself was to make philosophy a human science, like astronomy, physiology, medicine, subject to the same uncertainties and to the same aberrations, but capable also of the same progress.

Descartes encountered the skepticism spread on every side in the train of so many revolutions, ambitious hypotheses, born out of the first use of an ill-regulated liberty, and the old formulas surviving the ruins of scholasticism. In his courageous pa.s.sion for truth, he resolved to reject, provisorily at least, all the ideas that hitherto he had received without controlling them, firmly decided not to admit any but those which, after a serious examination, might appear to him evident.

But he perceived that there was one thing which he could not reject, even provisorily, in his universal doubt,--that thing was the existence itself of his doubt, that is to say, of his thought; for although all the rest might be only an illusion, this fact, that he thought, could not be an illusion. Descartes, therefore, stopped at this fact, of an irresistible evidence, as at the first truth which he could accept without fear. Recognizing at the same time that thought is the necessary instrument of all the investigations which he might propose to himself, as well as the instrument of the human race in the acquisition of its natural knowledges,[4] he devoted himself to a regular study of it, to the a.n.a.lysis of thought as the condition of all legitimate philosophy, and upon this solid foundation he reared a doctrine of a character at once certain and living, capable of resisting skepticism, exempt from hypotheses, and affranchised from the formulas of the schools.

Thus the a.n.a.lysis of thought, and of the mind which is the subject of it, that is to say, psychology, has become the point of departure, the most general principle, the important method of modern philosophy.[5]

Nevertheless, it must indeed be owned, philosophy has not entirely lost, and sometimes still retains, since Descartes and in Descartes himself, its old habits. It rarely belongs to the same man to open and run a career, and usually the inventor succ.u.mbs under the weight of his own invention. So Descartes, after having so well placed the point of departure for all philosophical investigation, more than once forgets a.n.a.lysis, and returns, at least in form, to the ancient philosophy.[6]

The true method, again, is more than once effaced in the hands of his first successors, under the always increasing influence of the mathematical method.

Two periods may be distinguished in the Cartesian era,--one in which the method, in its newness, is often misconceived; the other, in which one is forced, at least, to re-enter the salutary way opened by Descartes.

To the first belong Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz himself; to the second, the philosophers of the eighteenth century.

Without doubt Malebranche, upon some points, descended very far into interior investigation; but most of the time he gave himself up to wander in an imaginary world, and lost sight of the real world. It is not a method that is wanting to Spinoza, but a good method; his error consists in having applied to philosophy the geometrical method, which proceeds by axioms, definitions, theorems, corollaries; no one has made less use of the psychological method; that is the principle and the condemnation of his system. The _Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement Humain_ exhibit Leibnitz opposing observation to observation, a.n.a.lysis to a.n.a.lysis; but his genius usually hovers over science, instead of advancing in it step by step; hence the results at which he arrives are often only brilliant hypotheses, for example, the pre-established harmony, now relegated among the a.n.a.logous hypotheses of occasional causes and a plastic mediator. In general, the philosophy of the seventeenth century, by not employing with sufficient rigor and firmness the method with which Descartes had armed it, produced little else than systems, ingenious without doubt, bold and profound, but often also rash,--systems that have failed to keep their place in science.[7] In fact, nothing is durable except that which is founded upon a sound method; time destroys all the rest; time, which re-collects, fecundates, aggrandizes the least germs of truth deposited in the humblest a.n.a.lyses, strikes without pity, engulfs hypotheses, even those of genius. Time takes a step, and arbitrary systems are overturned; the statues of their authors alone remain standing over their ruins. The task of the friend of truth is to search for the useful remains of them, that survive and can serve for new and more solid constructions.

The philosophy of the eighteenth century opens the second period of the Cartesian era; it proposed to itself to apply the method already discovered and too much neglected,--it applied itself to the a.n.a.lysis of thought. Disabused of ambitious and sterile attempts, and, like Descartes, disdainful of the past, the eighteenth century dared to think that every thing in philosophy was to be done over again, and that, in order not to wander anew, it was necessary to set out with the modest study of man. Instead, therefore, of building up all at once systems risked upon the universality of things, it undertook to examine what man knows, what he can know; it brought back entire philosophy to the study of our faculties, as physics had just been brought back to the study of the properties of bodies,--which was giving to philosophy, if not its end, at least its true beginning.

The great schools which divide the eighteenth century are the English and French school, the Scotch school, and the German school, that is to say, the school of Locke and Condillac, that of Reid, that of Kant. It is impossible to misconceive the common principle which animates them, the unity of their method. When one examines with impartiality the method of Locke, he sees that it consists in the a.n.a.lysis of thought; and it is thereby that Locke is a disciple, not of Bacon and Hobbes, but of our great countryman, Descartes.[8] To study the human understanding as it is in each one of us, to recognize its powers, and also its limits, is the problem which the English philosopher proposed to himself, and which he attempted to solve. I do not wish to judge here of the solution which he gave of this problem; I limit myself to indicating clearly what was for him the fundamental problem. Condillac, the French disciple of Locke, made himself everywhere the apostle of a.n.a.lysis; and a.n.a.lysis was also in him, or at least should have been, the study of thought. No philosopher, not even Spinoza, has wandered farther than Condillac[9] from the true experimental method, and has strayed farther on the route of abstractions, even verbal abstractions; but, strange enough, no one is severer than he against hypotheses, save that of the statue-man. The author of the _Traite des Sensations_ has very unfaithfully practised a.n.a.lysis; but he speaks of it without cessation. The Scotch school combats Locke and Condillac; it combats them, but with their own arms, with the same method which it pretends to apply better.[10] In Germany, Kant wishes to replace in light and honor the superior element of human consciousness, left in the shade, and decried by the philosophy of his times; and for that end, what does he do? He undertakes a profound examination of the faculty of knowing; the t.i.tle of his princ.i.p.al work is, _Critique of Pure Reason_;[11] it is a critique, that is to say again, an a.n.a.lysis; the method of Kant is then no other than that of Locke and Reid. Follow it until it reaches the hands of Fichte,[12] the successor of Kant, who died but a few years since; there, again, the a.n.a.lysis of thought is given as the foundation of philosophy. Kant was so firmly established in the subject of knowledge, that he could scarcely go out of it--that, in fact, he never did legitimately go out of it. Fichte plunged into the subject of knowledge so deeply that he buried himself in it, and absorbed in the human _me_ all existences, as well as all sciences--sad s.h.i.+pwreck of a.n.a.lysis, which signalizes at once its greatest effort and its rock!

The same spirit, therefore, governs all the schools of the eighteenth century; this century disdains arbitrary formulas; it has a horror for hypotheses, and attaches itself, or pretends to attach itself, to the observation of facts, and particularly to the a.n.a.lysis of thought.

Let us acknowledge with freedom and with grief, that the eighteenth century applied a.n.a.lysis to all things without pity and without measure.

It cited before its tribunal all doctrines, all sciences; neither the metaphysics of the preceding age, with their imposing systems, nor the arts with their prestige, nor the governments with their ancient authority, nor the religions with their majesty,--nothing found favor before it. Although it spied abysses at the bottom of what it called philosophy, it threw itself into them with a courage which is not without grandeur; for the grandeur of man is to prefer what he believes to be truth to himself. The eighteenth century let loose tempests.

Humanity no more progressed, except over ruins. The world was again agitated in that state of disorder in which it had already been once seen, at the decline of the ancient beliefs, and before the triumphs of Christianity, when men wandered through all contraries, without power to rest anywhere, given up to every disquietude of spirit, to every misery of heart, fanatical and atheistical, mystical and incredulous, voluptuous and sanguinary.[13] But if the philosophy of the eighteenth century has left us a vacuity for an inheritance, it has also left us an energetic and fecund love of truth. The eighteenth century was the age of criticism and destructions; the nineteenth should be that of intelligent rehabilitations. It belongs to it to find in a profounder a.n.a.lysis of thought the principles of the future, and with so many remains to raise, in fine, an edifice that reason may be able to acknowledge.

A feeble but zealous workman, I come to bring my stone; I come to do my work; I come to extract from the midst of the ruins what has not perished, what cannot perish. This course is at once a return to the past, an effort towards the future. I propose neither to attack nor to defend any of the three great schools that divide the eighteenth century. I will not attempt to perpetuate and envenom the warfare which divides them, complacently designating the differences which separate them, without taking an account of the community of method which unites them. I come, on the contrary, a devoted soldier of philosophy, a common friend of all the schools which it has produced, to offer to all the words of peace.

The unity of modern philosophy, as we have said, resides in its method, that is to say, in the a.n.a.lysis of thought--a method superior to its own results, for it contains in itself the means of repairing the errors that escape it, of indefinitely adding new riches to riches already acquired. The physical sciences themselves have no other unity. The great physicians who have appeared within two centuries, although united amongst themselves by the same point of departure and by the same end, generally accepted, have nevertheless proceeded with independence and in ways often opposite. Time has re-collected in their different theories the part of truth that produced them and sustained them; it has neglected their errors from which they were unable to extricate themselves, and uniting all the discoveries worthy of the name, it has little by little formed of them a vast and harmonious whole. Modern philosophy has also been enriched during the two centuries with a mult.i.tude of exact observations, of solid and profound theories, for which it is indebted to the common method. What has hindered her from progressing at an equal pace with the physical sciences whose sister she is? She has been hindered by not understanding better her own interests, by not tolerating diversities that are inevitable, that are even useful, and by not profiting by the truths which all the particular doctrines contain, in order to deduce from them a general doctrine, which is successively and perpetually purified and aggrandized.

Not, indeed, that I would recommend that blind syncretism which destroyed the school of Alexandria, which attempted to bring contrary systems together by force; what I recommend is an enlightened eclecticism, which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence, all schools, borrows from them what they possess of the true, and neglects what in them is false. Since the spirit of party has. .h.i.therto succeeded so ill with us, let us try the spirit of conciliation. Human thought is immense. Each school has looked at it only from its own point of view.

This point of view is not false, but it is incomplete, and moreover, it is exclusive. It expresses but one side of truth, and rejects all the others. The question is not to decry and recommence the work of our predecessors, but to perfect it in reuniting, and in fortifying by that reunion, all the truths scattered in the different systems which the eighteenth century has transmitted to us.

Such is the principle to which we have been conducted by two years of study upon modern philosophy, from Descartes to our times. This principle, badly disengaged at first, we applied for the first time within the narrowest limits, and only to theories relative to the question of personal existence.[14] We then extended it to a greater number of questions and theories; we touched the princ.i.p.al points of the intellectual and moral order,[15] and at the same time that we were continuing the investigations of our ill.u.s.trious predecessor, M.

Royer-Collard, upon the schools of France, England, and Scotland, we commenced the study new among us, the difficult but interesting and fecund study, of the philosophy of Koenigsberg. We can at the present time, therefore, embrace all the schools of the eighteenth century, and all the problems which they agitated.

Philosophy, in all times, turns upon the fundamental ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good. The idea of the true, philosophically developed, is psychology, logic, metaphysic; the idea of the good is private and public morals; the idea of the beautiful is that science which, in Germany, is called aesthetics, the details of which pertain to the criticism of literature, the criticism of arts, but whose general principles have always occupied a more or less considerable place in the researches, and even in the teaching of philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Hutcheson and Kant.

Upon these essential points which const.i.tute the entire domain of philosophy, we will successively interrogate the princ.i.p.al schools of the eighteenth century.

When we examine them all with attention, we can easily reduce them to two,--one of which, in the a.n.a.lysis of thought, the common subject of all their works, gives to sensation an excessive part; the other of which, in this same a.n.a.lysis, going to the opposite extreme, deduces consciousness almost wholly from a faculty different from that of sensation--reason. The first of these schools is the empirical school, of which the father, or rather the wisest representative, is Locke, and Condillac the extreme representative; the second is the spiritualistic or rationalistic school, as it is called, which reckons among its ill.u.s.trious interpreters Reid, who is the most irreproachable, and Kant, who is the most systematic. Surely there is truth in these two schools, and truth is a good which must be taken wherever one finds it. We willingly admit, with the empirical school, that the senses have not been given us in vain; that this admirable organization which elevates us above all other animate beings, is a rich and varied instrument, which it would be folly to neglect. We are convinced that the spectacle of the world is a permanent source of sound and sublime instruction.

Upon this point neither Aristotle, nor Bacon, nor Locke, has in us an adversary, but a disciple. We acknowledge, or rather we proclaim, that in the a.n.a.lysis of human knowledge, it is necessary to a.s.sign to the senses an important part. But when the empirical school pretends that all that pa.s.ses beyond the reach of the senses is a chimera, then we abandon it, and go over to the opposite school. We profess to believe, for example, that, without an agreeable impression, never should we have conceived the beautiful, and that, notwithstanding, the beautiful is not merely the agreeable; that, thank heaven, happiness is usually added to virtue, but that the idea itself of virtue is essentially different from that of happiness. On this point we are openly of the opinion of Reid and Kant. We have also established, and will again establish, that the reason of man is in possession of principles which sensation precedes but does not explain, and which are directly suggested to us by the power of reason alone. We will follow Kant thus far, but not farther.

Far from following him, we will combat him, when, after having victoriously defended the great principles of every kind against empiricism, he strikes them with sterility, in pretending that they have no value beyond the inclosure of the reason which possesses them, condemning also to impotence that same reason which he has just elevated so high, and opening the way to a refined and learned skepticism which, after all, ends at the same abyss with ordinary skepticism.

You perceive that we shall be by turns with Locke, with Reid, and with Kant, in that just and strong measure which is called eclecticism.

Eclecticism is in our eyes the true historical method, and it has for us all the importance of the history of philosophy; but there is something which we place above the history of philosophy, and, consequently, above eclecticism,--philosophy itself.

The history of philosophy does not carry its own light with it, it is not its own end. How could eclecticism, which has no other field than history, be our only, our primary, object?

It is, doubtless, just, it is of the highest utility, to discriminate in each system what there is true in it from what there is false in it; first, in order to appreciate this system rightly; then, in order to render the false of no account, to disengage and re-collect the true, and thus to enrich and aggrandize philosophy by history. But you conceive that we must already know what truth is, in order to recognize it, and to distinguish it from the error with which it is mixed; so that the criticism of systems almost demands a system, so that the history of philosophy is constrained to first borrow from philosophy the light which it must one day return to it with usury.

In fine, the history of philosophy is only a branch, or rather an instrument, of philosophical science. Surely it is the interest which we feel for philosophy that alone attaches us to its history; it is the love of truth which makes us everywhere pursue its vestiges, and interrogate with a pa.s.sionate curiosity those who before us have also loved and sought truth.

Thus philosophy is at once the supreme object and the torch of the history of philosophy. By this double t.i.tle it has a right to preside over our instruction.

In regard to this, one word of explanation, I beg you.

He who is speaking before you to-day is, it is true, officially charged only with the course of the history of philosophy; in that is our task, and in that, once more, our guide shall be eclecticism.[16] But, we confess, if philosophy has not the right to present itself here in some sort on the first plan; if it should appear only behind its history, it in reality holds dominion; and to it all our wishes, as well as all our efforts, are related. We hold, doubtless, in great esteem, both Brucker and Tennemann,[17] so wise, so judicious; nevertheless our models, our veritable masters, always present to our thought, are, in antiquity, Plato and Socrates, among the moderns, Descartes, and, why should I hesitate to say it, among us, and in our times, the ill.u.s.trious man who has been pleased to call us to this chair. M. Royer-Collard was also only a professor of the history of philosophy; but he rightly pretended to have an opinion in philosophy; he served a cause which he has transmitted to us, and we will serve it in our turn.

This great cause is known to you; it is that of a sound and generous philosophy, worthy of our century by the severity of its methods, and answering to the immortal wants of humanity, setting out modestly from psychology, from the humble study of the human mind, in order to elevate itself to the highest regions, and to traverse metaphysics, aesthetics, theodicea, morals, and politics.

Our enterprise is not then simply to renew the history of philosophy by eclecticism; we also wish, we especially wish, and history well understood, thanks to eclecticism, will therein powerfully a.s.sist us, to deduce from the study of systems, their strifes, and even their ruins, a system which may be proof against criticism, and which can be accepted by your reason, and also by your heart, n.o.ble youth of the nineteenth century!

In order to fulfil this great object, which is our veritable mission to you, we shall dare this year, for the first and for the last time, to go beyond the narrow limits which are imposed upon us. In the history of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, we have resolved to leave a little in the shade the history of philosophy, in order to make philosophy itself appear, and while exhibiting to you the distinctive traits of the princ.i.p.al doctrines of the last century, to expose to you the doctrine which seems to us adapted to the wants and to the spirit of our times, and still, to explain it to you briefly, but in its full extent, instead of dwelling upon some one of its parts, as. .h.i.therto we have done. With years we will correct, we will task ourselves to aggrandize and elevate our work. To-day we present it you very imperfect still, but established upon foundations which we believe solid, and already stamped with a character that will not change.

You will here see, then, brought together in a short s.p.a.ce, our principles, our processes, our results. We ardently desire to recommend them to you, young men, who are the hope of science as well as of your country. May we at least be able, in the vast career which we have to run, to meet in you the same kindness which hitherto has sustained us.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] We have so much felt the necessity of understanding well the philosophy of the century that ours succeeds, that three times we have undertaken the history of philosophy in the eighteenth century, here first, in 1818, then in 1819 and 1820, and that is the subject of the last three volumes of the 1st Series of our works; finally, we resumed it in 1829, vol. ii. and iii. of the 2d Series.

[4] This word was used by the old English writers, and there is no reason why it should not be retained.

[5] On the method of Descartes, see 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 20; 2d Series, vol. i., lecture 2; vol. ii., lecture 11; 3d Series, vol. iii., _Philosophie Moderne_, as well as _Fragments de Philosophie Cartesienne_; 5th Series, _Instruction Publique_, vol. ii., _Defense de l'Universite et de la Philosophie_, p. 112, etc.