When the reign of Louis Philippe came to a close through the opposition of his ministry, with Guizot at its head, to the demand for electoral reform and through the policy of the Spanish marriages, Cousin, who was opposed to the government on these points, lent his sympathy to Cavaignac and the Provisional government. He published a pamphlet entitled Justice et charité, the purport of which showed the moderation of his political views. It was markedly anti-socialistic. But from this period he passed almost entirely from public life, and ceased to wield the personal influence which he had done during the preceding years. After the coup d’état of the 2nd of December, he was deprived of his position as permanent member of the superior council of public instruction. From Napoleon and the Empire he stood aloof. A decree of 1852 placed him along with Guizot and Villemain in the rank of honorary professors. His sympathies were apparently with the monarchy, under certain constitutional safeguards. Speaking in 1853 of the political issues of the spiritual philosophy which he had taught during his lifetime, he says,—“It conducts human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls, which in our time can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy.”[2]
During the last years of his life he occupied a suite of rooms in the Sorbonne, where he lived simply and unostentatiously. The chief feature of the rooms was his noble library, the cherished collection of a lifetime. He died at Cannes on the 13th of January 1867, in his sixty-fifth year. In the front of the Sorbonne, below the lecture rooms of the faculty of letters, a tablet records an extract from his will, in which he bequeaths his noble and cherished library to the halls of his professorial work and triumphs.
Philosophy.—There are three distinctive points in Cousin’s philosophy. These are his method, the results of his method, and the application of the method and its results to history,—especially to the history of philosophy. It is usual to speak of his philosophy as eclecticism. It is eclectic only in a secondary and subordinate sense. All eclecticism that is not self-condemned and inoperative implies a system of doctrine as its basis,—in fact, a criterion of truth. Otherwise, as Cousin himself remarks, it is simply a blind and useless syncretism. And Cousin saw and proclaimed from an early period in his philosophical teaching the necessity of a system on which to base his eclecticism. This is indeed advanced as an illustration or confirmation of the truth of his system,—as a proof that the facts of history correspond to his analysis of consciousness. These three points—the method, the results, and the philosophy of history—are with him intimately connected; they are developments in a natural order of sequence. They become in practice Psychology, Ontology and Eclecticism in history.
First, as to method. On no point has Cousin more strongly insisted than the importance of method in philosophy. That which he adopts, and the necessity of which he so strongly proclaims, is the ordinary one of observation, Method. analysis and induction. This observational method Cousin regards as that of the 18th century,—the method which Descartes began and abandoned, and which Locke and Condillac applied, though imperfectly, and which Reid and Kant used with more success, yet not completely. He insists that this is the true method of philosophy as applied to consciousness, in which alone the facts of experience appear. But the proper condition of the application of the method is that it shall not through prejudice of system omit a single fact of consciousness. If the authority of consciousness is good in one instance, it is good in all. If not to be trusted in one, it is not to be trusted in any. Previous systems have erred in not presenting the facts of consciousness, i.e. consciousness itself, in their totality. The observational method applied to consciousness gives us the science of psychology. This is the basis and the only proper basis of ontology or metaphysics—the science of being—and of the philosophy of history. To the observation of consciousness Cousin adds induction as the complement of his method, by which he means inference as to reality necessitated by the data of consciousness, and regulated by certain laws found in consciousness, viz. those of reason. By his method of observation and induction as thus explained, his philosophy will be found to be marked off very clearly, on the one hand from the deductive construction of notions of an absolute system, as represented either by Schelling or Hegel, which Cousin regards as based simply on hypothesis and abstraction, illegitimately obtained; and on the other, from that of Kant, and in a sense, of Sir W. Hamilton, both of which in the view of Cousin are limited to psychology, and merely relative or phenomenal knowledge, and issue in scepticism so far as the great realities of ontology are concerned. What Cousin finds psychologically in the individual consciousness, he finds also spontaneously expressed in the common sense or universal experience of humanity. In fact, it is with him the function of philosophy to classify and explain universal convictions and beliefs; but common-sense is not with him philosophy, nor is it the instrument of philosophy; it is simply the material on which the philosophical method works, and in harmony with which its results must ultimately be found.
The three great results of psychological observation Results. are Sensibility, Activity or Liberty, and Reason.
These three facts are different in character, but are not found apart in consciousness. Sensations, or the facts of the sensibility, are necessary; we do not impute them to ourselves. The facts of reason are also necessary, and reason is not less independent of the will than the sensibility. Voluntary facts alone are marked in the eyes of consciousness with the characters of imputability and personality. The will alone is the person or Me. The me is the centre of the intellectual sphere without which consciousness is impossible. We find ourselves in a strange world, between two orders of phenomena which do not belong to us, which we apprehend only on the condition of our distinguishing ourselves from them. Further, we apprehend by means of a light which does not come from ourselves. All light comes from the reason, and it is the reason which apprehends both itself and the sensibility which envelops it, and the will which it obliges but does not constrain. Consciousness, then, is composed of these three integrant and inseparable elements. But Reason is the immediate ground of knowledge and of consciousness itself.
But there is a peculiarity in Cousin’s doctrine of activity or freedom, and in his doctrine of reason, which enters deeply into his system. This is the element of spontaneity in volition and in reason. This is the heart of what is Spontaneity in will. new alike in his doctrine of knowledge and being. Liberty or freedom is a generic term which means a cause or being endowed with self-activity. This is to itself and its own development its own ultimate cause. Free-will is so, although it is preceded by deliberation and determination, i.e. reflection, for we are always conscious that even after determination we are free to will or not to will. But there is a primary kind of volition which has not reflection for its condition, which is yet free and spontaneous. We must have willed thus spontaneously first, otherwise we could not know, before our reflective volition, that we could will and act. Spontaneous volition is free as reflective, but it is the prior act of the two. This view of liberty of will is the only one in accordance with the facts of humanity; it excludes reflective volition, and explains the enthusiasm of the poet and the artist in the act of creation; it explains also the ordinary actions of mankind, which are done as a rule spontaneously and not after reflective deliberation.
But it is in his doctrine of the Reason that the distinctive principle of the philosophy of Cousin lies. The reason given to us by psychological observation, the reason of our consciousness, is impersonal in its nature. We do not make it; its character Impersonality of reason. is precisely the opposite of individuality; it is universal and necessary. The recognition of universal and necessary principles in knowledge is the essential point in psychology; it ought to be put first and emphasized to the last that these exist, and that they are wholly impersonal or absolute. The number of these principles, their enumeration and classification, is an important point, but it is secondary to that of the recognition of their true nature. This was the point which Kant missed in his analysis, and this is the fundamental truth which Cousin thinks he has restored to the integrity of philosophy by the method of the observation of consciousness. And how is this impersonality or absoluteness of the conditions of knowledge to be established? The answer is in substance that Kant went wrong in putting necessity first as the criterion of those laws. This brought them within the sphere of reflection, and gave as their guarantee the impossibility of thinking them reversed; and led to their being regarded as wholly relative to human intelligence, restricted to the sphere of the phenomenal, incapable of revealing to us substantial reality—necessary, yet subjective. But this test of necessity is a wholly secondary one; these laws are not thus guaranteed to us; they are each and all given to us, given to our consciousness, in an act of spontaneous apperception or apprehension, immediately, instantaneously, in a sphere above the reflective consciousness, yet within the reach of knowledge. And “all subjectivity with all reflection expires in the spontaneity of apperception. The reason becomes subjective by relation to the voluntary and free self; but in itself it is impersonal; it belongs not to this or to that self in humanity; it belongs not even to humanity. We may say with truth that nature and humanity belong to it, for without its laws both would perish.”
But what is the number of those laws? Kant reviewing the enterprise of Aristotle in modern times has given a complete list of the laws of thought, but it is arbitrary in classification and may be legitimately reduced. According to Laws of reason. Cousin, there are but two primary laws of thought, that of causality and that of substance. From these flow naturally all the others. In the order of nature, that of substance is the first and causality second. In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.
These principles of reason, cause and substance, given thus psychologically, enable us to pass beyond the limits of the relative and subjective to objective and absolute reality,—enable us, in a word, to pass from psychology, or the science of knowledge, to ontology or the science of being. These laws are inextricably mixed in consciousness with the data of volition and sensation, with free activity and fatal action or impression, and they guide us in rising to a personal being, a self or free cause, and to an impersonal reality, a not-me—nature, the world of force—lying out of us, and modifying us. As I refer to myself the act of attention and volition, so I cannot but refer the sensation to some cause, necessarily other than myself, that is, to an external cause, whose existence is as certain for me as my own existence, since the phenomenon which suggests it to me is as certain as the phenomenon which had suggested my reality, and both are given in each other. I thus reach an objective impersonal world of forces which corresponds to the variety of my sensations. The relation of these forces or causes to each other is the order of the universe.