There is a perplexity more serious and more profound—a perplexity really religious—one suggested not merely by the necessity of social order, but by that of moral security, of harmony, of confidence, and of intimate hopefulness in the presence of the problems and of the chances that weigh upon man. This perplexity takes place not merely in the minds of thinking men—of men who render to themselves an account of their internal troubles, and who avow them undisguisedly; it causes agitation and spreads desolation among multitudes of single-minded, modest, and silent men, who suffer from the antichristian malaria spread around them. What framer of statistics shall count their number? what philosopher minister successfully to their disease?
I go further still. I listen to contemporary philosophers themselves, and I find in the cases of some of the more eminent an intellectual perplexity, showing itself clearly through opinions the most systematic, and the furthest removed from the Christian religion. I shall name but two—M. Vacherot and M. Edmond Scherer. I have no intention of entering here into a special examination of their ideas; I seek only to show the state of their minds and of their souls, as it results from the tenor of their works.
I have read, and read over again, with scrupulous attention, the two principal philosophical treatises of M. Vacherot, La Métaphysique et la Science ou Principes de Philosophie Positive, [Footnote 79] and the Essais de Philosophie Critique. [Footnote 80]
[Footnote 79: Second edition, three vols. 12mo., 1863.]
[Footnote 80: One vol. 8vo., 1864.]
M. Vacherot does not desire to be, nor is he really, in his conscience and in his own eyes, an advocate either of Materialism, or Positivism, or Pantheism, or Atheism, or Skepticism. He analyzes and he refutes successively these different systems, as conceived and expounded by their most distinguished representatives; he defends himself, and with warmth, from the charge of adhering to them: "a man," he says, "is not an Atheist, a Materialist, a Pantheist, an Idealist, because he does not believe in God, soul, mind, matter, world—in all these metaphysical words taken in a given acceptation. The true Atheist, if such a one exists, is he whose mind is grossly empirical, and wanting in the sense of what is intelligible, ideal, and divine. The true Pantheist is he who identifies truth and reality, God and the world, whether, like Spinoza and Goethe, he deifies the world, or like the Stoics, he materializes God. The true Materialist is he who degrades man to the beast, either by denying him his superior and really human faculties, or by deriving these from animal faculties. The true Idealist, like Berkeley, is he who rejects all external reality as an illusion, whatever the conception of that reality; whether it be as a thing made up of forces and of laws, or as consisting of extended matter. … All these words require to be defined and explained, or they necessarily occasion mysteries, contradictions, and absurdities. In their vague complexities they do not express ideas of sufficient simplicity, nor do they answer to ideas sufficiently precise for science to adopt them unreservedly and without distinction. … A chosen few exist whose sympathy is dear to me; I remain profoundly attached to all the truths which they, with reason, regard as constituting the strength, life, and honor of philosophy. I remain, like them, a Spiritualist, an Idealist, a Theist, although with other methods, another language, and also, beyond a doubt, with notable reservations." [Footnote 81]
[Footnote 81: La Métaphysique et la science; in the Introduction and the Preface, vol. i., pp. xvi, xxxiv.]
Nor is M. Vacherot more of a Skeptic than of a Materialist and a Pantheist; he believes firmly in absolute truth, in scientific metaphysics, and in the universal and essential principles which form their bases. "Metaphysics," he says, "have nothing to dread from analysis; it is a test from which they can only issue with honor. The truths à priori upon which the science rests, will inspire no more doubt so soon as it comes to be well understood that those truths are founded upon the ordinary principles of demonstration, like all the truths à priori of the other sciences. Metaphysics have, and will ever have for their object, the Being infinite, necessary, absolute, and universal. Now the ideas of being, infinite, necessary, absolute, universal, are so involved in the notion of appearance, finite, contingent, relative, individual, that it is impossible for the human mind to separate them. Accordingly, in order to be entitled to deny Metaphysics, and the truths which are peculiar to them, we must first mutilate the human mind, and reduce it to the pure faculties of sensation and imagination which are common to it with animals. From the moment when the reason, the thought, the faculty peculiar to the human intelligence, enters the field, it brings necessarily with it the object of sensation and of imagination, under the categories of quantity, quality, being, relation, unity. Then it is that appear to the mind the distinction, and afterward the logical connection, of the two terms corresponding to each category, of the finite and the infinite, of the contingent and the necessary, of the individual and the universal, of the relative and the absolute, of appearance and being. The thought enters then perforce, whether it is conscious of it or not, upon the peculiar ground of Metaphysics. Nothing but a gross and, so to say, an animal empiricism, has the right to deny the conceptions and the truths of this science, and the denial is a denegation of the higher faculties of the intelligence." [Footnote 82]
[Footnote 82: La Métaphysique et la science; Preface, vol. i, p. xlviii.]
It is impossible to disavow more indignantly Materialism, Atheism, Skepticism, with their principles and their consequences. But after all these declarations and these disavowals, when M. Vacherot has to draw his conclusions, and has to set the affirmation of his own ideas by the side of his criticism of the ideas of other writers; when he, in his turn, undertakes to explain God and the world, this twofold object of Metaphysics, the perplexity of the thinker becomes at once apparent, and he falls, in spite of himself, into the very paths from which he proposed to escape.