It was a great misfortune for M. Cousin as a philosopher that he knew so little of Catholic theology, and that what little he did know, apparently caught up at second-hand, only served to mislead him. We are far from building science on faith or founding philosophy on revelation, in the sense of the traditionalists; yet we dare affirm that no man who has not studied profoundly the Gospel of St. John, the Epistles of St. Paul, the great Greek and Latin fathers, and the mediaeval doctors of the church, is in a condition to write anything deserving of serious consideration on philosophy. The great controversies that have been called forth from time to time on the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the two natures and the two wills in the one person of our Lord, the Real Presence of our Lord's body, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist, liberty and necessity, the relations of nature and grace, and of reason and faith, throw a brilliant light on philosophy far surpassing all the light to be derived from Gentile sources, or by the most careful analysis of the facts of our own consciousness. The effort, on the one hand, to demolish, and on the other to sustain, Catholic dogma, has enlightened the darkest and most hidden passages of both psychology and ontology, and placed the Catholic theologian, really master of the history of his science, on a vantage ground which they who know it not are incapable of conceiving. Before him your Descartes, Spinozas, Kants, Fichtes, Schellings, Hegels, Cousins, dwindle to philosophical pigmies.
The excellent M. Augustin Cochin thinks that M. Cousin rendered great service to the cause of religion by the sturdy warfare he carried in defence of spiritualism against the gross sensism and materialism of the eighteenth century, and nobody can deny very considerable merit to his Critical Examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. Dr. C. S. Henry translated it some years ago, in this country, and published it under the rather inappropriate title of Consin's Psychology, and it has no doubt had much influence in unseating Locke from the philosophical throne he formerly occupied. But the reaction against Locke and Condillac, as well as the philosophers of Auteuil, had commenced long before Consin became master of conferences in L'Ecole Normale; and we much doubt if the subtiler and more refined rationalism be has favored is a less dangerous enemy to religion and society than the sensism of Condillac, or the gross materialism of Cabanis, Garat, and Destutt de Tracy. Under his influence infidelity in France has modified its form, but only, as it seems to me, to render itself more difficult of detection and refutation. Pantheism is a far more dangerous enemy than materialism, for its refutation demands an order of thought and reasoning above the comprehension of the great mass of those who are not incapable of being misled by its sophistries. The refutation of the pantheism of our days requires a mental culture and a philosophical capacity by no means common. Thousands could comprehend the refutation of Locke or Condillac, where there is hardly one who can understand the refutation of Hegel or Spinoza.
Besides, we do not think Cousin can be said to have in all cases opposed the truth to sensism. His spiritualism is not more true than sensism itself. He pretends that we have immediate and direct apprehension of spiritual reality—that is, pure intellections. True, he says that we apprehend the noetic only on occasion of sensible affection, but on such occasion we do apprehend it pure and simple. This is as to the apprehension itself exaggerated spiritualism, and would almost justify the fair pupil of Margaret Fuller in her exclamation, "O Miss Fuller! I see right into the abyss of being." Man, not being a pure intelligence, but intelligence clothed with sensibility, has and can have no pure intellections. M. Cousin would have been more correct if instead of saying that the affection of the sensibility is necessary as the occasion, he had said, we know the supersensible indeed, but only as sensibly represented.
In this sense we understand the peripatetics when they say: "Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu." The medium of this sensible representation of the intelligible or spiritual truth to the understanding is language of some sort, which is its sensible sign. M. Cousin would have done well to have studied more carefully on this subject the remarkable work of De Bonald, a work, though it has some errors, of an original genius of the first order, and of a really profound thinker. Had he done this, he might have seen that the reflective reason cannot operate without language, and understood something of the necessity of the infallible church to maintain the unity and integrity of language, whose corruption by philosophers invariably involves the loss of the unity and integrity of the idea. It might also have taught him that a philosophy worth anything cannot be spun by the philosopher out of his own consciousness as the spider spins her web out of her own bowels, and that without as much at least of primitive revelation or the primitive instruction given by God himself to the race, as is embodied in language, no man can successfully cultivate philosophy.
As minister of public instruction under Louis Philippe, M. Cousin labored hard and with some success, we know not how much, to extend primary schools in France; but he in part neutralized his services in this respect by his defence of the university monopoly, his opposition to the freedom of education, his efforts to force his pantheistic or at best rationalistic philosophy into the colleges of the university, and his intense hatred and unrelenting hostility to the Jesuits, who have first and last done so much for education and religion in France as well as elsewhere. Ordinarily a man of great candor, and of a most kindly disposition, his whole nature seemed to change the moment a Jesuit was in question. He was no friend to the Catholic religion, and after the writer of this became a Catholic, he forgot his French politeness, and refused to answer a single one of his letters. To him we were either dead or had become an enemy. He moreover never liked to have his views questioned. In politics he belonged to the Doctrinaire school, and supported the juste milieu. In the Revolution of 1848, and under the Republic, he opposed earnestly socialism, and attempted to stay its progress by writing and publishing a series of philosophical tracts, as if philosophy could cure an evil which it had helped to create. When society is in disorder, old institutions are falling, and civilization is rapidly lapsing into barbarism, it is only religion, speaking from on high with the power of truth and the authority of God, that can arrest the downward tendency. "Religion," said Lamennais in the first volume of his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion, "is found at the cradle of nations; philosophy at their tomb." Woe to the nation that exchanges faith for philosophy! its ruin is at hand, for it has lost the principle of life. After the coup d'état little was heard of Cousin either in the world of politics or philosophy, and his last years appear to have flowed away in the peaceful pursuits of literature.
Rumors from time to time reached us during the last dozen years that M. Cousin had become a Catholic, and for his sake we regret that they have remained unconfirmed. It is reported, on good authority, that he regularly attended mass, and was accustomed to say his morning and evening prayers before an image of Our Lady; but it is agreed by his most intimate Catholic friends that he never made any formal profession of Catholic faith, and died without receiving or asking the sacraments of the church. That in his later years his mind turned at times toward the church, that his feelings toward religion were softened, and that he felt the need of faith, is very probable; but we have seen no evidence that he ever avowed publicly or privately any essential change in his doctrine. He always held that the Catholic faith is the form under which the people do and must receive the truth; but he held that the truth thus received does not transcend the natural order, and is transformed with the élite of the race into philosophy.
We have found in his works no recognition of the supernatural order, or the admission of any other revelation than the inspiration of the impersonal reason. Providence for him was fate, and God was not free to interpose in a supernatural way for the redemption and salvation of men. Creation itself was necessary, and the universe only the evolution of his substance. There is no evidence that we have seen that he ever attained to the conviction that creation is the free act of the creator, or felt even for a moment the deep joy of believing that GOD IS FREE. Yet it is not ours to judge the man. We follow him to the mouth of the grave, and there leave him to the mercy as well as the justice of him whose very justice is love.
We are not the biographer of Victor Cousin; we have only felt that we could not let one so distinguished in life, who had many of the elements of a really great man, and whom the present writer once thought a great philosopher, pass away in total silence. Genius has always the right to exact a certain homage, and Victor Consin had genius, though not, in our judgment, the true philosophical genius. We have attempted no regular exposition or refutation of his philosophy; our only aim has been to call attention to his teachings on those points where he seemed to approach nearest the truth, and on which the young and ardent philosophical student most needs to be placed on his guard, to bring out and place in a clear light certain elements of philosophic truth which he failed to grasp. We place not philosophy above faith, but we do not believe it possible to construct it without faith; we yet hold that it is necessary to every one who would understand the faith or defend it against those who impugn it. If on any point what we have said on the occasion of the departure of the founder of French eclecticism shall serve to make the truth clearer to a single ingenuous and earnest inquirer, we shall thank God that he has permitted us to live not wholly in vain.