It is not surprising, lastly, that these two kinds of knowledge or of certitude 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 æsthetics. One gains nothing by attempting to demonstrate objectively the existence of God. 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 naïvely 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 versâ, 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 antithesis 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, à 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.