The human mind, according to the positivists, is radically incapable of knowing causes, and if it attempts to know them it exhausts itself with fruitless efforts. This is wherefore they treat as illusions all the causes which philosophers assign to phenomena. They deny the metaphysical being, God as cause; yet they substitute the metaphysical being humanity, and not content with affirming it, they even define it, both as principle and cause, to be a great collective beings— living a life of its own, and advancing continually through the ages from progress to progress, and from whom all individual existences proceed as their beginning, and to whom they all return as their end. Nor is this all. After having defined this metaphysical being, they explain it, and pretend to know what it has been, what it is, and what it will be—they, who declare that Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Des Cartes, and Leibnitz have done nothing, because in attempting to penetrate the mystery of human life these master minds broke against an insolvable problem—they, we say, do not hesitate to raise the veil, and to give us the complete solution of the far more formidable mystery of human destiny. They know its origin. Humanity has begun in fetichism; M. Littré, however, has discovered, since the death of his master, that prior to fetichism there was a state in which man like the brute sought only to satisfy his physical wants; but he maintains that at any rate, if fetichism was not the first it was at least the second state of humanity. If we ask him what proofs he has of this, he confesses that if direct facts are demanded he has none; but he has arguments, and here is the way in which he argues:
In America and the unexplored regions of Africa savage tribes are found who were and still are fetich worshippers, therefore so was it with all men in the beginning! Such is the positivist induction. [Footnote 117]
[Footnote 117: How know the positivists that these savage tribes do not represent the degenerate man, rather than the primitive man—man cut off from communion with the central life of humanity, not man in his first developments?—TRANSLATOR.]
Positivism continues: From fetichism humanity passed to polytheism, and then from polytheism to monotheism. But it forgets that it is not permitted to take the part for the whole, and if Europe became Christian after having been pagan, it has not been the same with all the world, for on one side we find the people Jewish, who have always believed in the unity of God, and, on the other side, we find many nations still remaining immersed in the darkness of idolatry. But we must not be too exacting with the positivists. They have here really some partial facts which they can use, though not legitimately as the basis of an argument. [Footnote 118]
[Footnote 118: Truth is older than error, and man began not in error, but in the truth, the sole principle of life and growth. Monotheism preceded, historically, both fetichism and polytheism, and the earliest and most authentic historical documents that we have prove that all the world began by believing in and worshipping one God. Polytheism bears evident traces of a prior religion which asserted the unity of God, of being not a development of fetichism, but a corruption of monotheism, as positivism bears unmistakable traces of its being a corruption of Christianity; a conclusive evidence that it never could have originated in a society that had never known and believed the Christian religion.—TRANSLATOR.]
As to the future, who can doubt that humanity will be positivist? Can any one prove the contrary? Is not the future a domain open to all, and where each may imagine for himself the part that pleases him? And yet, even in regard to the future, it is necessary to be circumspect. Young as positivism is, it has had the pain of seeing more than one of its predictions falsified by the event. In 1850 M. Littré assured us that the race had arrived at that degree of civilization that rendered war henceforth impossible, and that the republic was definitively established in France. What does he think of either prediction now? He would have obliged us if he had given us his explanations of these predictions in his last publication. The first would, perhaps, have embarrassed him; the second would give him less trouble, because the destruction of the republic of 1848 by the empire accords only too well with the positivist hostility to a really representative government.
It is useless to press the matter further. There is in the positivist induction no trace of a rational process, and positivism in the last analysis is simply the product of pure imagination. Moreover, M. Littré is so well aware of it that he has taken in advance his precautions against all unfavorable criticism. It may say what it pleases, he will not hear or heed it; he professes to be a positivist, and positivist he will live and die. His decision is made. Beside, no one who has not taken his degree of doctor in the mathematical, astronomical, physical, and chemical sciences, understands or can understand anything of positivism, and is incompetent to its discussion. But if instead of opposing one is disposed to accept it, he is very accommodating, and by no means exacts so laborious and painful an initiation. He requires only one thing—namely, the denial of the supernatural order. To be received into the positivist school it is not necessary to affirm or to believe anything—simple denial suffices.
We must in concluding make a single reference to M. Taine. As the positivists, M. Taine denies metaphysics, all metaphysical (spiritual) beings, God, and the human soul, and like them he substitutes for these others of his own fashioning. From Messrs. Comte and Littré he separates only on a single point. To the cause humanity he prefers the cause nature. There is no disputing about tastes. We add merely a word on one of the fundamental maxims of M. Taine's method. The philosopher, he says, must be in the study of science perfectly disinterested, and even to the degree of forgetting that he is a father, a son, a husband, a citizen. He must take account only of the facts furnished by observation, and in no respect trouble himself about their practical consequences. Were the facts observed to prove that paternal love, filial respect, conjugal tenderness, and devotion to one's country are empty words or dangerous illusions, he must not hesitate to immolate these sentiments on the altar of reality—or science. We do not discuss such a doctrine. The irreflection of the author (we can suppose nothing else) is so great that we need only indicate it. Does not M. Taine comprehend that the disinterestedness or indifference of the philosopher must consist not in abjuring the eternal principles of the just, the true, the good, the beautiful, and the noblest sentiments of the human heart, but simply in silencing within [{739}] him the voice of prejudice and passion, so as to leave his understanding free and unbiased? Knows he not that to know a fact he must study it first in himself and in its essence, and then in its manifold applications? The chemist asserts a substance only after, having resolved it into its elements, he has experimented on it in all its effects; in like manner, it is not enough for the philosopher to have studied a doctrine in its principle, he must go further, and establish that in its applications it conforms to the laws of the just, the true, and the beautiful. It is, in fact, this accordance that is, all things considered, the surest test of its truth. The moral is the counter-proof of the intellectual. M. Taine and his school recognize, it is true, no principles anterior to facts, and therefore want, as M. Comte avows, a type-law, a term of comparison, which may serve as the criterion of the judgment of facts themselves; but is there a more manifest mark of the falsity of a theory than that it leaves the human mind without any means of determining the significance of phenomena, without a touchstone to determine whether the metal be gold or copper?
But it is time to close. It is assuredly a grave fact, and one that merits more attention than it receives, that a doctrine so thoroughly materialistic and atheistic can be produced in our age, that it can obtain adherents, and be recognized by important and widely influential public journals, which, without openly displaying its flag, insinuate its principles, and strive to infuse it into the minds of their readers. Yet this fact is nothing new. There are always atheists in the world; even in the time of the Prophet King the impious said: There is no God. Non est Deus. But we discover in the positivist system a sign or symptom, if not graver at least more alarming, in the manifest enfeeblement in our time of reason, and the rational faculties of the soul, which it supposes. We know that society is not responsible for all that is said or done in its bosom, but we know also that people are in general treated as they deserve to be treated, and that writers, journalists, and system-mongers, when they believe they are addressing a community accustomed to think, to reason, to reflect, and to render an account to themselves of what is addressed to them, are on their guard and weigh carefully what they say. They may assign bad reasons, but they will at least assign reasons of some sort, and take great pains to do it, as the thing most essential to their success. There have always been sophists, but the sophist of former times reasoned; the sophist of to-day reasons not, he simply imagines. Do not attempt to refute him; he will not listen to you, for he understands not the language you speak; he denies or affirms with assurance, with audacity, even at the command of his passions or his caprices; he seeks not to convince, but to startle, to astonish, and neither proves nor cares to prove anything. Things have come to such a pass that Voltaire himself, if he could return, would blush with shame for his children. He might still smile approvingly on their blasphemies; his good sense would be shocked with the incoherence and extravagance of their theories; and he would say to them. Continue, my children, to deny, to crush l'infame, all that is well, but do have the grace not to attempt to put anything in place of what you deny. You are not equal to that, and can only render yourselves ridiculous.
The evil is very real and very great, but it has already been denounced by an authority so high, and with so much eloquence, that I need not any further insist on it. I would simply add that it calls for a prompt remedy, since the peril is great and imminent. When faith grows weak in souls, and reason remains, there is hope; for reason well directed leads back to faith, since human reason is the child of the divine reason, and [{740}] cannot persist in denying her mother; but when reason in her turn goes, and leaves only imagination in her place, there is no ground of hope; and everything is to be feared, for no means of salvation remain. Imagination is, indeed, one of the powers and one of the grandeurs of the human mind, which it elevates and adorns; but if it comes to predominate alone, without supporting itself on reason, it loses its virtue and its beauty, and is proper only to dazzle, to pervert, to bewilder and mislead. It sheds darkness, not light, or if it emits still some gleams, it is only to gild with a last and false splendor a dying civilization. When the barbarians thundered at her gates, Rome still imagined, but she had long since ceased to reason.