These questions, together with others which develop and complete them, have excited the deepest interest of the human race since it first existed upon the earth, and it alone is interested in them. They speak only to it; among all living creatures, it alone can comprehend and is affected by them. This painful yet grand privilege is the indisputable evidence of its terrestrial royalty; it is at once its glory and its torment.
This series of questions, or rather mysteries, M. Guizot places at the beginning of his Meditations, under the title of Natural Problems. Man, indeed, possesses them by his very nature; he does not create or invent them, he merely submits to them. We do not mean by this that for humanity in general these problems are not obscure and confused, without a distinct form or outline, surrounded with uncertainties and frequently rather seen than clearly apprehended. This must be true of the great mass of mankind, who live from hand to mouth, who go and come and work, absorbed in petty pleasures or occupied with dreary toil. Still we think that there is not a single one, even among these apparently dull and heedless men, in whatever way he may have lived and whatever hardships he has had to sustain, who has not at least once in his life caught a glimpse of these formidable questions and felt an ardent wish to see them solved. Make as many distinctions as you please between races, sexes, ages, and degrees of civilization; divide the globe and its inhabitants by zones or climates; you will no doubt discover more than one difference in the way in which these problems are presented to the soul; you will find them more or less prominent, and more or less attention paid to them; but you will find a trace of them everywhere and among all people. It is a law of instinct, a general law for all times and places.
If such is our lot, if these questions necessarily weigh upon minds, these questions which are "the burden of the soul," as M. Guizot calls them, are we not really compelled to try to solve them? It is on our part neither vain curiosity, nor capricious desire, nor frivolous habit which leads us to attempt it. It is a necessity, quite as serious and as natural to us as the problems are themselves; a need we feel in some way to have lifted from us the weight which oppresses. We must have a reply at any cost; who can give it to us?
Faith or Reason? Religion or Philosophy? At every moment we see in what a very limited manner reason, science, and all purely human resources suffice to satisfy us. It can be said that, from the very infancy of human society up to the present day, it has been from the various religions, thought to be divine and accepted as such by faith, that humanity has asked these indispensable responses.
We readily see from this, what a deep interest is attached to these natural problems. Who will presume to tell us that religion proceeds from an artificial and temporary want, which men have gradually overcome, if the problems to which it answers are inherent in the race and can only perish with it? It is the constant work and watchword of every materialistic and pantheistic system to distort the character of these problems and make them simply accidental and individual, the result of temperament or of circumstances. Farther than this, they had not yet gone. They did not dare to deny, in the face of universal testimony, the continued existence of the problems themselves. They disguised their significance, they did not aspire to destroy them. Now they take another step. In order to get the advantage in answering, they begin by suppressing the questions. This is the characteristic feature, the first step of a system which makes a great deal of noise in the world to-day, although it only claims to reproduce efforts which have been already more than once defeated. It has, however, this kind of novelty, this advantage over its associates which, like it, have issued from pantheism, that it is not vague. It sets forth its opinions clearly and without equivocation, and by this fact this school of philosophy has gained the title by which it is commonly known. We need hardly say that it is to Positivism that we are alluding. This promises with the greatest seriousness, if we will only lend it our attention, to free humanity from these untoward problems which now torment it.
Its remedy is extremely simple: it simply says to the human race, Why do you seek to know whence you have come and what is your destiny? You will never find out a word of this. Do then your real duty. Leave these vain fancies. Live, become learned, study the evolution of things, that is to say, secondary causes and their relations; on this subject science has wonders to reveal to you; but final causes and first causes, our origin and our destiny, the beginning and the end of the world, these are all pure reveries, words completely without meaning! The perfection of man as well as of society consists in taking no notice of these things. The mind becomes more enlightened, the more it leaves in obscurity your pretended natural problems. These problems are really a disease, and the way to cure it is, not to think of them at all.
Not to think of them! Ingenuous proposition! Wonderful ignorance of the eternal laws of human nature! "Our age," say they, "inclines to these ideas: but let us not be disturbed by this." Men will not be persuaded by speaking to them in such a clear way, any more than Don Juan could overcome Sganarelle by his discourses on "two and two are four." Positivism not only attempts the impossible, but it frankly acknowledges it. Let us suppose for a moment that by some miracle it should triumph; that man, in order to please this system, should cease to pay any attention to the problems which beset him, should renounce the idea of fathoming these questions, and should despise every attempt at a religious or even a metaphysical solution, every inspiration toward the Infinite. How long does any one believe this would continue? We do not think that the human mind would consent to be thus mutilated and imprisoned for two days in succession. Were this system far more fascinating, the human soul would still rise above the limit to which Positivism would confine it, and would say with a great poet:
"Je ne puis, l'infini malgré moi me tourmente."
And so we see, whatever may happen, Positivism is not destined to give us the solution of these natural problems. After, as before, its appearance, the mystery of our destiny claims the attention of the human race.