My reply to this question is easy. I reject the distinction made. I admit no such persons as are respectively styled the heart, the reason. Here is only an attempt at a psychological anatomy; no true enunciation of a real fact. Man, the human being, is essentially one, and single: he has the faculty of self-observation and self-study, but in exercising it he does not destroy the unity of his nature; it is not his mere reason, it is himself, and his whole self, that makes himself the object of his observation and of his study, and that cannot but recognize himself and accept himself in his entirety. He has no right to say, with an air of scientific disdain, "My reason comprehends not the reasons of my heart." He must perforce say: "I comprehend not myself;" he must perforce proclaim, not the incoherency of his being, but the insufficiency or the incompetency of what he styles his reason.
Philosophy, like poetry, is full of personifications that mislead; the one personifies by images, the other by abstractions. Both have need of them—the one for its creations, the other for its studies; I am far from seeking to deny their respective use. All that I contend for is, that we must not misconceive the real import of these expedients of human language; we must not, by taking them for realities, lose sight of or destroy what are really and genuinely realities, the entities of divine creation.
I insist the more on this error, because in the philosophy of our time it is a common and a potent error, and the source too of other errors, deplorable as well in a scientific as in a moral and practical point of view. Condillac and his disciples had set apart and specially studied in man the faculty of sensation, and they were thereby led to make out of this faculty, and out of it alone, man himself and the whole man. Kant and his school considered particularly in man the faculty of the reason and judgment, and very soon reason came with them to constitute the whole man. I am far from intending to examine in its fundamental principles and its entirety the system of Kant, the greatest philosophical work upon the human understanding that any man has produced since the time of Plato. I single out this fact, that it treats the reason as the proper, special, and paramount object of philosophy. Warned by his profound, scrupulous genius, Kant did not limit himself to a point of view so narrow, although so lofty; he studied man's reason under its different aspects, he constituted himself the critic of pure reason, the critic of practical reason, the critic of æsthetic reason—that is, of reason applied to the discrimination of the beautiful; he decomposed, so to say, the reason itself into as many different faculties as he found different phases in the intellectual and moral life of man; but the faculty that he styled the reason remained the basis of his study and of his system. It became in his school, and in the schools akin to it, pre-eminently the intellectual substance, the basis of man and of philosophy; and the human being himself, in his personal unity, with all his life and his free will, entirely disappeared from their teaching.
As results of this system I will cite only two facts, very different in their nature, both very foreign to the founder of the system and his disciples, but which serve the better to reveal that system's faultiness, as these facts are, although its indirect, remote, and involuntary, nevertheless, its undeniable consequences.
When, in 1793, the frenzied men who disposed, as masters, of the destinies of France, abolished the Christian religion and Christian worship, they resolved, nevertheless, to give to men an object to adore. They instituted the worship of reason. The church of Notre-Dame at Paris was metamorphosed into a temple of reason; a young woman was made to figure there as the goddess of reason; and the orator of the National Convention, Chaumette, cried aloud as he pointed her out to the people, "Behold living Reason; we celebrate here to-day the sole true worship, the worship of Liberty and of Reason."
At the distance of three quarters of a century from the date of these revolutionary orgies, in 1865, not in France but in England, a man of earnest intentions, superior mind, and extensive learning, whose sincerity is evident, and his sentiments moral at once and moderate, writes a book entitled, "Rationalism in Europe;" and the object of this book is to establish, that all the good effected in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire, all the progress made by states in justice, in humanity, in liberty, and general happiness—whether in the sphere of science or of practical industry—is due to the influence of Rationalism, to its developments and its conquests. Mr. Lecky is not a metaphysician; he attaches no precise and philosophical meaning to the word "Rationalism;" he does not trouble himself about the system of Kant, nor the place occupied in it by the pure, the practical, or the aesthetic reason; he only retraces the intellectual and social history of Europe, and all the happy results that this history commemorates, all the salutary consequences of the activity of the human mind, of the liberty of man's thought, of the amelioration of human institutions and manners, he sums up all in a single name, attributes them to a single cause, and assigns all the honor to the progress of Rationalism!
Arrived, nevertheless, at the conclusion of his work, a single reflection disquiets Mr. Lecky: he asks himself whether, in extolling the happy effects of what he styles Rationalism, he has not gone too far, said too much, and hoped too much:
"Utility is perhaps the highest motive to which reason can attain. … It is from the moral or religious faculty alone that we obtain the conception of the purely disinterested. … The substitution of the philosophical conception of truth for its own sake, for the theological conception of the guilt of error, has been in this respect a clear gain; and the political movement which has resulted chiefly from the introduction of the spirit of Rationalism into politics, has produced, and is producing, some of the most splendid instances of self-sacrifice. On the whole, however, the general tendency of these influences is unfavorable to enthusiasm, and both in actions and in speculations this tendency is painfully visible. With a far higher level of average excellence than in former times, our age exhibits a marked decline in the spirit of self-sacrifice, in the appreciation of the more poetical or religious aspect of our nature. The history of self-sacrifice during the last eighteen hundred years has been mainly the history of the action of Christianity upon the world. Ignorance and error have, no doubt, often directed the heroic spirit into wrong channels, and have sometimes even made it a cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and beauty, the enlarged conception and persuasive power of the Christian faith, that have chiefly called it into being, and it is by their influence alone that it can be permanently sustained. …
"This is the shadow resting upon the otherwise brilliant picture the history of Rationalism presents. The destruction of the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecutions; the decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punishments, which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered the character of mankind; the emancipation of suffering nationalities; the abolition of the belief in the guilt of error, which paralyzed the intellectual, and of the asceticism which paralyzed the material progress of mankind, may be justly regarded as among the greatest triumphs of civilization; but when we look back to the cheerful alacrity with which, in some former ages, men sacrificed all their material and intellectual interests to what they believed to be right, and when we realize the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is impossible to deny that we have lost something in our progress." [Footnote 42]
[Footnote 42: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. ii, 1866, third edition, pp. 403-409.]