The disciple

by Paul Bourget

“The good God would not be the good God, if he had the heart to damn him.”

These years of continuous labor in this hermitage of the Rue Guy de la Brosse had produced, beside the “Anatomy of the Will,” a “Theory of the Passions,” in three volumes, whose publication would have been still more scandalous than that of the “Psychology of God,” if the extreme liberty of the press for ten years had not accustomed readers to audacities of description which the mild, technical ferocity of a savant could not equal.

In these two books is found, precisely stated, the doctrine of M. Sixte which it is necessary to take up again here, in some of its general features, for the intelligent understanding of the drama to which this short biography serves as prologue. With the critical school sprung from Kant, the author of these three treatises admits that the mind is powerless to know causes and substances, and that it ought only to co-ordinate phenomena.

With the English psychologists, he admits that one group among these phenomena, those which are classed under the name of soul, may be the object of scientific knowledge, on condition of their being studied after a scientific method.

Up to this point, as we all see, there is nothing in these theories which distinguishes them from those which Messrs. Taine, Ribot and their disciples have developed in their principal works.

The two original characteristics of M. Sixte’s inquiries are found elsewhere. The first resides in a negative analysis of what Herbert Spencer calls the Unknowable. We know that the great English thinker admits that all reality rests upon a First Cause which it is impossible to penetrate; consequently it is necessary to use the formula of Fichte, to comprehend this First Cause (arrière-fonds) as incomprehensible; but as the beginning of the “First Principles” strongly attests this Unknowable is real to Mr. Spencer. It exists since we derive our existence from it. From this there is only a step to apprehend that this First Cause of all reality involves a mind and a soul since one finds their source in it. Many excellent minds foresee a probable reconciliation between science and religion on this ground of the Unknowable. For M. Sixte this is a last form of metaphysical illusion which he is rabid to destroy with an energy of argument that has not been seen to this degree since Kant.

His second title of honor as psychologist consists in an exposé, quite novel and very ingenious, of the animal origin of human sensibility.

Thanks to an exhaustive reading and a minute knowledge of the natural sciences, he has been able to attempt for the genesis of human thought the work which Darwin attempted for the genesis of the forms of life. Applying the law of evolution to all the facts which constitute the human heart, he has claimed to show that, our most refined sensations, our most subtile moral delicacies as well as our most shameful failures, are the latest development, the supreme metamorphosis of very simple instincts, which are themselves transformations of the primitive cellule; so that the moral universe exactly reproduces the physical, and the former is the consciousness, either painful or pleasurable, of the latter.

This conclusion presented under the title of hypothesis because of its metaphysical character, is the result of a marvelous series of analyses, among which it is proper to cite two hundred pages on love, which are so audacious as to be almost ludicrous from the pen of so chaste a man. But has not Spinoza himself given us a theory of jealousy which has not been equalled in brutality by any modern novelist? And does not Schopenhauer rival Chamfort in the spirit of his tirades against women?

It is almost unnecessary to add that the most complete positivism pervades these books from one end to the other. We owe to M. Sixte some sentences which express with extreme energy this conviction that everything in the mind is there of necessity, even the illusion, that we are free. “Every act is only an addition. To say he is free, is to say that there is in the total more than there is in the sum of all the parts. That is as absurd in psychology as it is in arithmetic.” And again: “If we could know correctly the relative position of all the phenomena which constitute the actual universe, we could, from the present, calculate with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers the day, the hour, the minute when England, for example, will evacuate India, or Europe will have burned her last piece of coal, or such a criminal, still unborn, will assassinate his father, or such a poem, not yet conceived will be written. The future is contained in the present as all the properties of the triangle are contained in its definition.” Mohammedan fatalism itself is not expressed with more absolute precision.