In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is profound; but I do not think that the question between the two has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition has been rightly defined.
To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself, first, to the philosophers.
We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task: "I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained, than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the standard of reason." Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,—"My first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true, unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]
[Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes, vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]
More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the history of its progressive development, did far more than obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas, all his knowledge,—in fact, the entire man himself.
Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption. Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a tabula rasa, and to fill up the void which he has so made, he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the man—the entire man—with all the developments of his nature and of his thought.
I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very commencement of philosophy,—in short, a mere hypothesis. Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the material world; but from their very commencement both these philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two hypotheses, the tabula rasa of Descartes, and the statue of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy, and Christian faith.