Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

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 balls 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 constitutes 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 constitutes 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 noble and pure in proportion as his life itself has been ennobled and purified. That is why there is a history of morality, of religion, of æsthetics, as there is a history of the natural sciences, although progress in these two classes 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 circumference 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 pass 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 constitution, 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—God, the Good, the Beautiful—these are not phenomena that may be grasped outside the ego and independently of it. God 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 antithesis of the two orders of knowledge. What is at once the basis and the sign of the objectivity of the natural sciences?