The alleged reconciliation of science and religion in Spencer’s pages is not made out except by virtue of an ambiguity in terms. Partisans of religion have, however, hastened to welcome these apparent concessions in their favour and have based on them an argument for the perpetuity of dogmas. Jouffroy has told us how dogmas become extinct; recently one of his successors at the Sorbonne endeavoured to show “how dogmas come into being again,” and he took his stand with Spencer on an ambiguity in terms. By dogmas M. Caro meant the principal points of the original doctrine of the soul—as if one could apply the name dogma to philosophical hypotheses, even though they be eternal hypotheses! The important thing, however, is to understand each other; if problems which constantly recur, and constantly receive hypothetical solutions, are to be called dogmas, then dogmas do come to life again, and may be expected always to do so; multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere, cadentque.... But if terms be employed as a philosopher should employ them, with precision, how can metaphysical conclusions be regarded as dogmas? Examine the writings of Heraclitus, the evolutionist; Plato, the contemplator of ideas; Aristotle, the formulater of the laws of thought; Descartes, the inquirer who sought in an abyss of doubt for the absolute criterion of truth; Leibnitz, who regarded himself as the mirror of the universe; Spinoza, lost in the heart of infinite substance; Kant, resolving the universe into thought and thought into the moral law; where are the dogmas in these great metaphysical poems? They are not systems of dogma, they are systems marked by the individuality of genius, although containing something of the eternal philosophy, the perennis philosophia of Leibnitz. Every system, as such, is precisely the means of demonstrating the insufficiency of the central idea which dominates it, and the necessity for the human mind of passing beyond it. To systematize is to develop a group of ideas to their logical conclusion, and, by that very fact, to show how much they do not include, how far they fall short of exhausting human thought as a whole; to construct is to demonstrate the weight of the material one is building with, and the impossibility of piling it up to heaven. Every system requires a certain number of years to bring it to completion, and then, when the edifice is achieved, one may one’s self mark the points where it will begin to crack, what columns will yield first, where its ultimate decay will begin. To recognize that the subsidence and decay of a thing is rational, is to be resigned to it and in some measure consoled for it; but whatever is useful is necessarily transitory, for it is useful for an end; and it is thus that the utility of a system implies that it will some day make way for something else. “Ἀνάγκη στῆναι,” says dogma; “ἀνάγκη μὴ στῆναι,” the philosopher says. Systems die and dogmas die; sentiments and ideas survive. Whatever has been set in order falls into disorder, boundaries become obliterated, structures fall into dust; what is eternal is the dust itself, the dust of doctrine, which is always ready to take on a new form, to fill a new mould, and which, far from receiving its life from the fugitive forms it fills, lends them theirs. Human thoughts live, not by their contours but from within. To understand them they must be taken, not as they appear in any one system, but as they appear in a succession of different and often diverse systems.
Instability of metaphysics.
As speculation and hypothesis are eternal, so also is the instinct for philosophy and metaphysics which corresponds to them eternal, though it is perpetually changing. It appears at the present day as something widely different from the intimate certitude of dogma, of confident and placid faith. If independence of mind and freedom of speculation are not without their sweetness, their attractiveness, their intoxication, they are not without their bitterness and disquietude. We must make up our minds to-day to accept a certain modicum of intellectual suffering as inseparable from our treasure of intellectual joy; for the life of the spirit, like that of the body, follows a just mean between pleasure and pain. Intense metaphysical emotion, like intense æsthetic emotion, possesses always an element of sadness.[120] The day will come when the graver moods of the human heart will sometimes demand satisfaction as they demanded and found satisfaction in Heraclitus and Jeremiah. It is inevitable that there should be an element of melancholy in the emotional setting of metaphysical speculation—as there inevitably is in the perception of the sublimity we feel ourselves incapable of attaining, in the experience of doubt, of intellectual evil, of moral evil, of sensible evil which are mingled with all our joys, and of which doubt itself is but a reverberation in consciousness. There is an element of suffering in all profound philosophy as in all profound religion.
Communion with the universe.
One day when I was seated at my desk my wife came up to me and exclaimed: “How melancholy you look! What is the matter with you? Tears, mon Dieu! Is it anything that I have done?” “Of course it is not; it is never anything that you have done. I was weeping over a bit of abstract thought, of speculation on the world and the destiny of things. Is there not enough misery in the world to justify an aimless tear? and of joy to justify an aimless smile?” The great totality of things in which man lives may well demand a smile or a tear from him, and it is his conscious solidarity with the universe, the impersonal joy and pain that he is capable of experiencing, the faculty, so to speak, of impersonalizing himself, that is the most durable element in religion and philosophy. To sympathize with the whole universe, to inquire the secret of it, to wish to contribute to its amelioration, to overpass the limits of our egoism and live the life of the universe, is the distinguishing pursuit of humanity.
Summary.
Religion, therefore, may pass away without in the least affecting the metaphysical instinct, or the emotion which accompanies its exercise. When the Hebrews were marching toward the promised land they felt that God was with them, God had spoken and had told them what lay beyond, and at night a pillar of fire lighted them on their way. The pillar of fire has burned out, and we are no longer sure that God is with us; we possess no other fire to light us on our way through infinite night but that of our intelligence. If we could but be sure that there is a promised land—that others may attain it as well as we—that the desert really has an end! But we are not certain even of that; we are seeking for a new world and are not positive that it exists; nobody has journeyed thither, nobody has returned thence, and our sole hope of repose lies in discovering it. And we shall go forward forever, the puppets of an indefatigable hope.