M. Cousin called his philosophical system eclecticism. He starts with the assumption that each philosophical school has its special point of view, its special truth, which the others neglect or unduly depress, and that the true philosopher weds himself to no particular school, but studies them all with impartiality, accepts what each has that is positive, and rejects what each has that is exclusive or negative. He resolves all possible schools into four—1st. The Sensist; 2d, the Idealistic—subjectivistic; 3d, the Sceptical; 4th, the Mystic. Each of these four systems has its part of truth, and its part of error. Take the truth of each, and exclude the error, and you have true philosophy, and the whole of it. Truth is always something positive, affirmative; what then is the truth of scepticism, which is a system of pure negation, and not only affirms nothing, but denies that anything can be affirmed? How, moreover, can scepticism, which is universal nescience, be called a system of philosophy? Finally, if you know not the truth in its unity and integrity beforehand, how are you, in studying those several systems, to determine which is the part of truth and which the part of error?
There is no doubt that all schools, as all sects, have their part of truth, as well as their part of error; for the human mind cannot embrace pure unmixed error any more than the will can pure unmixed evil; but the eclectic method is not the method of constructing true philosophy any more than it is the method of constructing true Christian theology. The Catholic acknowledges willingly the truth which the several sects hold; but he does not derived it from them, nor arrived at it by studying their systems. He holds it independently of them; and having it already in its unity and integrity, he is able, in studying them, to distinguish what they have that is true from the errors they mix up with it. It must be the same with the philosopher. M. Cousin was not unaware of this, and he finally asserted eclecticism rather as a method of historical verification, than as the real and original method of constructing philosophy. The name was therefore unhappily chosen, and is now seldom heard.
Eclecticism can never be a philosophy. All it can be is a method, and is, as Cousin held, a method of verification rather than of construction. Cousin's own method was not the eclectic, but avowedly the psychological; that is, by careful observation and profound study of the phenomena of consciousness, to attain to a real ontological science, or science of the soul, of God, and nature. This method was severely criticised by Schelling and other German philosophers, and has been objected to by ontologists generally, as giving not a real ontology, but only a generalization. Dr. Channing called the God asserted by Cousin "a splendid generalization"—a very just criticism, but perhaps not for the precise reason the eloquent Unitarian preacher assigned. Cousin does not maintain, theoretically at least, that we can, by way of induction or deduction from purely psychological facts, attain to a real ontological order. His real error was in the misapplication of his method, which led him to deny what he calls necessary and absolute ideas, and terms the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, and the idea of the good, are being, and therefore God, and to represent them as the word of God—the precise error which, Gioberti rightly or wrongly maintains, was committed by Rosmini. It must be admitted that Cousin is not on this point very clear, and that he often speaks of ontology as an induction from psychology, in which case the God he asserts would be, for the reason Channing supposes, only a generalization.
But we think it is possible to clear him from this charge, so far as his intention went, and to defend the psychological method as he professed to apply it. He professed to attain to ontology from the phenomena of consciousness, or the facts revealed to consciousness; but he labors long and hard, as does every psychologist who admits ontology at all, to show, by a careful analysis and classification of these phenomena or facts, that there are among them some, at least, which are not derived from the soul itself, which do not depend on it, and do actually extend beyond the region of psychology, and lead at once into the ontological order. In other words, he claims to find in his psychological observation and analysis real ontological facts. It is from these, not from purely psychological phenomenon, that he professes to rise to ontology. So understood, what is called the psychological method is strictly defensible. Every philosopher does and must begin by the analysis of thought, that is, in the language of Cousin, the fact of consciousness, and there is no other way possible. That the ideal formula enters into every one of my thoughts is not a fact that I know without thought, and it can be determined only by analyzing the thought one thinks, that is, the fact of consciousness. The quarrel here between the psychologists and the ontologists is quite unnecessary.
What is certain, and this is all the ontologist need assert, or, in fact, can assert, that ontology is neither an induction nor a deduction from psychological data. God is not, and cannot be, the generalization of our own souls. But it does not follow from this that we do not think that which is God, and that it is from thought we do and must take it. We take it from thought and by thinking. What is objected to in the psychologists is the assumption that thought is a purely psychological or subjective fact, and that from this psychological or subjective fact we can by way of induction attain to ontological truth. But as we understand M. Cousin, and we studied his works with some care thirty or thirty-five years ago, and had the honor of his private correspondence, this he never pretends to do. What he claims is that in the analysis of consciousness we detect a class of facts or ideas which are not psychological or subjective, but really ontological, and do actually carry us out of the region of psychology into that of ontology. That his account of these facts or ideas is to be accepted as correct or adequate we do not pretend, but that he professes to recognize them and distinguish them from purely psychological facts is undeniable.
The defect or error of M. Cousin on this point was in failing, as we have already observed, to identify the absolute or necessary ideas he detects and asserts with God, the only ens necessarium et reale, and in failing to assert their objectivity to the whole subject, and in presenting them only as objective to the human personality. He never succeeded in cutting himself wholly loose from the German nonsense of a subjective-object or objective-subject, and when he had clearly proved an idea to be objective to the reflective reason and the human personality, he did dare assert it to be objective in relation to the whole subject. It was impersonal, but might be in a certain sense subjective, as Kant maintained with regard to the categories. There always seemed to remain in his mind some confusion between the subject and object, and hence his translator in Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, never ventures to translate le moi et le non-moi, subject and object, or the soul and the world, but introduces into the language such barbarisms as the me and the not-me. Indeed, at the time those Specimens were published, there were few, if any, of the scholars of the modern Athens that understood or could be made to understand the real distinction between objective and subjective; and we observed the other day, in looking over the Einleitung of a German professor, that he speaks of the objective-object, the objective-subject, the subjective-object, and the subjective-subject.
It is very easy to understand why Kant should assert objective-subjective, for he held that the categories are necessary, irresistible, and indestructible forms of the subject, but independent of the human will or personality, or of proper human activity, nay, the very conditions of that activity, imposed on us not by our will, but by the very constitution all of our intellectual nature. But why Cousin should have hesitated to assert the complete disjunction between subject and object in thought is what we are unable to explain. He maintains strenuously that the object is distinct from the personality of the subject, or that it is always, in his own language, le-non-moi, but not that it is distinct from the whole soul. He distinguishes the subject between personal activity and impersonal. The personal is subjective, the impersonal is objective, but objective in relation to what? To the personal only. There is, no doubt, the distinction he asserts, and it is recognized by all our theologians in their distinction between actus humanus and actus hominis. The actus humanus is an act of free will, the actus hominis is an involuntary act; but both are acts of the subject, man. All action of man, whether personal or impersonal, voluntary or involuntary, is subjective, but for involuntary acts he is not held morally accountable.
This same failure to mark the real distinction between subjective and objective, and making it simply the distinction between personal and impersonal, le moi and le non-moi, has greatly deprecated the value in his philosophy of the distinction M. Cousin notes between intuition and reflection. According to him they are but two modes of the activity of one in the same reason—which reason, he asserts is our faculty of intelligence. Reason, he says, is our only faculty of knowing, by which we know all that we do know, whatever the sphere or object of our knowledge. Reason, then, is subjective, and consequently so are all its modes of activity. Intuition is as subjective as reflection, and hence the distinction between intuition and reflections, really so important when rightly understood, says nothing in favor of the objectivity of what M. Cousin calls absolute or necessary ideas. It is in his philosophy simply a distinction between personal and impersonal, between the spontaneous activity and the reflective of the same subject; yet it is on this very distinction that he bases the validity of his ontology and his whole metaphysical system. By it he explains genius, inspiration, revelation, and religious faith. These are operations of the spontaneous reason, and divine because the activity of the spontaneous reason is not personal. In this way, he legitimates all the religions of all ages and nations. He places prophetic and apostolic inspiration and the inspiration of genius in the same category, and resolves them all, in the last analysis, into what we commonly called enthusiasm. But as reason, whether personal or impersonal, is subjective, a faculty of the human soul, it is not easy to see why its spontaneous activity should be more divine or authoritative then its reflective activity. Does M. Cousin hold with the Arabs that the ravings of the maniac are divine inspirations?
Cousin seems to us never to have clearly understood the real character of the distinction between intuition and reflection, on which he rightly insists. Intuition is impersonal, divine, infallible, authoritative, he maintains, while reflection, partaking of the imperfections and pettiness of our own personality, is individual, fallible, and without authority, save as supported by intuition. All that we ever do or can know is given us primarily in intuition, and what is so given constitutes the common sense, the common faith or belief of the race. There is less, but there can never be more, in reflection than in intuition. The difference between the two is the difference between seeing and beholding. I see what is before me, but to behold it I look. I look that I may determine what it is I see. But it is clear from this illustration that the intuition is as much the act of the subject as is the reflection. The only difference between them is that asserted by Leibnitz between simple perception and apperception. In simple perception I perceive all the objects before me, without noting or distinguishing them; in apperception I note that it is I who perceive them, and distinguish them both from myself and from one another. The intuition is à posteriori, and is no synthetic judgment à priori, as Kant terms what must precede experience in order to render experience possible.