CRITICAL THEORY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE
He who says consciousness says science, or at least, the beginning of science. Consciousness implies a representation. In other words, no modification of the ego becomes conscious except by awakening in the mind a representative image of the object that has produced it and of the relation of that object to the ego. All our sensations and all our feelings are accompanied by images. The religious sentiment does not attain to the light of consciousness in any other way. It is because it is a state or conscious movement of the soul that it becomes, it also, a principle of knowledge.
No kind of mental life begins with clear and abstract ideas. An idea is derived from an image, and, in order to produce the image, an external or an internal impression is necessary. It is true that the idea or the image has, in its turn, the mysterious power of reproducing and renewing the sensation or the feeling from which it sprang. On this is based the art of teaching and the power of tradition. But this must not be allowed to produce in us the illusion that originally the idea preceded the sensation. The development of the mental life of children is proof of the contrary. We only know that by which we or our kind have been in some degree affected. Our ideas are simply the algebraic notation of our impressions and movements. That which is outside our life is outside our view. Without the external sensations which represent the action of the world on the ego, we should have no knowledge of the world. Without the subjective reaction of the ego against that action of the world, a reaction which manifests itself in the moral, æsthetic, and religious life of the soul, we should have no moral or religious idea, no notion of the good or the beautiful. All our metaphysical ideas come from that source.
It remains, of course, to inquire what is the worth of ideas of this order. It is the particularly complex and delicate question that we here approach. There is no serious philosophy to-day that does not start with a theory of knowledge. Religious knowledge cannot escape by any special privilege. The criticism of it is all the more necessary, because illusion, in this matter, is so easy, and because it clothes itself in a sacred character. The theologian who undertakes the scientific treatment of dogmas without first measuring the scope of the instrument he employs, and estimating the worth of the materials he uses, knows not what he is doing.
1. Obsolete Theories of Knowledge
Formerly three explanations of our knowledge prevailed in philosophy: the hypothesis of a primitive revelation; the idealist theory; and the sensualist theory.
The first was revived three quarters of a century ago by de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre. It no longer needs to be refuted. According to this hypothesis, our ideas came to us, not from within, from the naturally productive force of the mind, but from without, by way of supernatural communication. This communication from God consisted at the outset in the gift to man of a perfect language. The exact word brought with it the right idea. "Man," said de Bonald, "thought his speech before speaking his thought." If errors have crept in and reigned among men, it is because they were not able to preserve without corruption the sacred deposit of that primitive language and philosophy. Is it necessary to show how thoroughly this theory is contradicted by psychology and history? It is said that in certain countries there still exists a Botany, according to which the Great Spirit, having created the trees of the forest, comes in the night each Spring to stick the leaves and blossoms on the branches. The immediate communication of right ideas and supernatural virtues to man in his infancy implies a contradiction; it forces us to imagine in him thoughts prior to the action of his intellect and virtues previous to the action of his will. Lastly, it is to misconceive the nature of the mind to make of it something passive and inert. The mind is the thinking and willing force—that is to say, a force productive of thoughts and volitions. If it is not this, it is nothing. We must affirm, no doubt, that God creates this force and directs its evolution, but it is a contradiction to say at once that He creates it and that it is unproductive. It cannot exist without being productive. It is of its very essence to produce. Mind is only mind in so far as it is a force that produces thought and volition.
The aim of this hypothesis, moreover, was to found the divine authority of an infallible tradition by making it go back to the earliest times. These revealed ideas, by the very fact that they are the ideas of God, have an absolute and eternal value. Man finds them guaranteed in the religious caste, to which the deposit has been confided, and which has preserved them intact. Thus arose the idea of an infallible authority. So they say. But the idea of dogmatic authority never appears in early times; it is of very late date; it is elaborated very slowly, according to a psychological law that we have already discovered. Everywhere, and in the traditions of all religions and Churches, it appears after all other doctrines as the keystone which closes and binds together the arch. It is an ultimate dogma logically derived from other dogmas, and afterwards used as a warrant for them. Such was the dogma of Papal Infallibility promulgated at the Vatican Council of 1870; such, in Protestantism, was the dogma of Biblical infallibility, completed by the theologians of the seventeenth century. To base the value of religious notions on a supernatural authority, with a view to rendering them indisputable, is a vicious circle; the authority, it is evident, is the product of these notions themselves. All systems of authority end by shutting themselves up in this circle and perishing in it.
The idealist theory of the origin of ideas is but the philosophical form of the preceding one. It also is an endeavour to trace back our general ideas to the divine understanding as their primary source. Pure ideas, type-ideas, according to Plato, constitute the intelligible Cosmos of which material phenomena are but the unreal and ephemeral shadows. Clearly to conceive these divine ideas is to reach the transcendent reality of things—it is to possess true knowledge. From Platonism to the realism of scholasticism, from this to the geometry of Spinoza and the dialectic of Hegel, the form of the theory has varied constantly; the substance of it has remained the same. Hegel always said: "The rational is the real," and, for him, as for Plato, absolute knowledge resolved itself into perfect logic.
Psychology has long since dispelled the scientific illusion of idealism. We do not wish to recall the pitiful failure of all the attempts formerly made, and even in our own times, to deduce à priori the laws of the physical world. Everywhere, in this domain, the method of observation has superseded the deductive method. The reason of it is simple. An idea, however lofty, can only give out what it contains, i.e. other ideas. We know very well that our ideas are in our mind, but they are only in it in the state of ideas. How do we know that the objects which they represent exist outside ourselves? Only by logic can we pass from the idea of a thing to the external reality of that thing. Experience is necessary. Without it our ideas are empty forms. One may conjure with them for ever without ever reaching anything objective. They are shells without kernels. Pure idealism, so far from furnishing a solid theory of knowledge, ends in scepticism, i.e. in the negation of knowledge.