Religion and Science from Galileo to Bergson

by J. C. Hardwick

Rousseau and Religion.—The intellectualist is ever the aristocrat.[25] Voltaire and the philosophers of the "enlightenment" spoke of the unenlightened multitude as la canaille. Its beliefs were superstitions. Rousseau knew that the things which men have in common are more vital than those in which they differ, and the primitive instincts of the race which we all share, are the most important part of our nature.

Among these primitive instincts, indomitable and irrepressible, is the instinct of religion. Thus Rousseau transferred the religious problem from the sphere of external observation and explanation of the world (to which the rationalists had promoted or degraded it), back to inner personal feeling. This marked an epoch in the philosophy of religion.

Moreover, Rousseau was able to write in a convincing fashion of religion, because (and here he differed from the intellectuals of his day) he had personal experience of what it meant. Hence wherever he alludes to religion his language has the ring of sincerity; it is always spontaneous, and sometimes it is passionate and poetic. His religious experience took the form of nature-mysticism, undogmatic (because non-intellectualist), but rich and deep:

"I can find no more worthy adoration of God than the silent admiration which the contemplation of His works begets in us, and which cannot be expressed by any prescribed acts.... In my room I pray seldomer and more coldly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape moves me, I cannot tell why. I once read of a certain bishop, who, when visiting in his diocese, encountered an old woman whose only prayers consisted in a sigh 'Oh!' The bishop said to her, 'Good mother, always pray like that; your prayer is worth more than ours.' My prayer is of that kind."[26]

Here we have one form of the religious spirit; for the mystic it is always true that "there is neither speech nor language." The mystic and the dogmatist stand at opposite poles, for dogmatism is always an attempt at definition even when that which is to be defined is indefinable; and here is to be found the common denominator between Kant and Rousseau. The former, by his analysis of reason, discredited dogmatism: the latter, by his apotheosis of feeling, contributed towards the same result.

Romanticism in Germany.—This strong movement of feeling, created on the one hand by Kant's Critique, and by the mysticism of Rousseau, took different forms in the two countries to which these two philosophers belonged. In France the new philosophy became the hot-bed of revolutionary ideas; whereas in Germany it found vent in a ferment of speculative systems, and in an outcrop of artistic production. It produced the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the prose and poetry of Goethe and Schiller.

"It was the age of 'beautiful souls' and of 'noble hearts'; men believed themselves capable of the highest things; the immediate needs of the heart were set over against reason ... under many successive forms Romanticism prevailed in literature, effecting the re-birth of human fancy after the long labour of intellect."[27]

The Goal of Philosophy.—Philosophic young Germany had set itself an ambitious programme. Kant, indeed, had cleared the ground for them, but his warnings that an eagle cannot soar beyond the atmosphere which supports it, were disregarded.

The philosophy of Kant himself was felt by the successors to be lacking in the idea of totality—in the conception of a whole. His division of existence into Appearance and Reality seemed to indicate a certain lack of finish in his philosophy; and they set themselves to explore the root of reality which to Kant seemed undiscoverable, but in which the sensuous and super-sensuous worlds are united, and from which they have emerged. This task became and remained the grand problem of philosophy for a whole generation of thinkers. All externality, isolation, and division were to disappear, all existence must be shown to be but degrees and phases of the one infinite reality. Spinoza's work had to be done again in the light of increased psychological knowledge.

Fichte.—Of the thinkers who addressed themselves to this ambitious task, only two need be considered here; and these are chosen because they attacked the problem from different directions.