To sum up, the pretension of explaining principles by the ideas which they contain, is a chimerical one. In supposing that all the ideas which enter into principles are anterior to them, it is necessary to show how principles are deduced from these ideas,—which is the first and radical difficulty. Moreover, it is not true that in all cases ideas precede principles, for often principles precede ideas,—a second difficulty equally insurmountable. But whether ideas are anterior or posterior to principles, principles are always independent of them; they surpass them by all the superiority of universal and necessary principles over simple ideas.[35]
We should, perhaps, beg your pardon for the austerity of this lecture. But philosophical questions must be treated philosophically: it does not belong to us to change their character. On other subjects, another language. Psychology has its own language, the entire merit of which is a severe precision, as the highest law of psychology itself is the shunning of every hypothesis, and an inviolable respect for facts. This law we have religiously followed. While investigating the origin of universal and necessary principles, we have especially endeavored not to destroy the thing to be explained by a systematic explanation. Universal and necessary principles have come forth in their integrity from our analysis. We have given the history of the different forms which they successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality and their necessity are manifest. Their certainty is the same under all their forms, in all their applications; it has neither generation nor origin; it is not born such or such a day, and it does not increase with time, for it knows no degrees. We have not commenced by believing a little in the principle of causality, of substances, of time, of space, of the infinite, etc., then believing a little more, then believing wholly. These principles have been, from the beginning, what they will be in the end, all-powerful, necessary, irresistible. The conviction which they give is always absolute, only it is not always accompanied by a clear consciousness. Leibnitz himself has no more confidence in the principle of causality, and even in his favorite principle of sufficient reason, than the most ignorant of men; but the latter applies these principles without reflecting on their power, by which he is unconsciously governed, whilst Leibnitz is astonished at their power, studies it, and for all explanation, refers it to the human mind, and to the nature of things, that is to say, he elevates, to borrow the fine expression of M. Royer-Collard,[36] the ignorance of the mass of men to its highest source. Such is, thank heaven, the only difference that separates the peasant from the philosopher, in regard to those great principles of every kind which, in one way or another, discover to men the same truths indispensable to their physical, intellectual, and moral existence, and, in their ephemeral life, on the circumscribed point of space and time where fortune has thrown them, reveal to them something of the universal, the necessary, and the infinite.
LECTURE III.
ON THE VALUE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.
Examination and refutation of Kant's skepticism.—Recurrence to the theory of spontaneity and reflection.
After having recognized the existence of universal and necessary principles, their actual characters, and their primitive characters, we have to examine their value, and the legitimacy of the conclusions which may be drawn from them,—we pass from psychology to logic.
We have defended against Locke and his school the necessity and universality of certain principles. We now come to Kant, who recognizes with us these principles, but confines their power within the limits of the subject that conceives them, and, so far as subjective, declares them to be without legitimate application to any object, that is to say, without objectivity, to use the language of the philosopher of Kœnigsberg, which, right or wrong, begins to pass into the philosophic language of Europe.
Let us comprehend well the import of this new discussion. The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions,—have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. If it is not absolutely true that every quality has its subject of inherence, it is not, then, certain, that we have a soul, a real substance of all the qualities which consciousness attests. If the principle of causality is only a law of our mind, the external world, which this principle discovers to us, loses its reality, it is only a succession of phenomena, without any effective action over each other, as Hume would have it, and even the impressions of our senses are destitute of causes. Matter exists no more than the soul. Nothing exists; every thing is reduced to mobile appearances, given up to a perpetual becoming, which again is accomplished we know not where, since in reality there is neither time nor space. Since the principle of sufficient reason only serves to put in motion human curiosity, once in possession of the fatal secret that it can attain nothing real, this curiosity would be very good to weary itself in searching for reasons which inevitably escape it, and in discovering relations which correspond only to the wants of our mind, and do not in the least correspond to the nature of things. In fine, if the principle of causality, of substances, of final causes, of sufficient reason, are only our modes of conception, God, whom all these principles reveal to us, will no more be any thing but the last of chimeras, which vanishes with all the others in the breath of the Critique.
Kant has established, as well as Reid and ourself, the existence of universal and necessary principles; but an involuntary disciple of his century, an unconscious servant of the empirical school, to which he places himself in the attitude of an adversary, he makes to it the immense concession that these principles are applied only to the impressions of sensibility, that their part is to put these impressions in a certain order, but that beyond these impressions, beyond experience, their power expires. This concession has ruined the whole enterprise of the German philosopher.
This enterprise was at once honest and great. Kant, grieved at the skepticism of his times, proposed to arrest it by fairly meeting it. He thought to disarm Hume by conceding to him that our highest conceptions do not extend themselves beyond the inclosure of the human mind; and at the same time, he supposed that he had sufficiently vindicated the human mind by restoring to it the universal and necessary principles which direct it. But, according to the strong expression of M. Royer-Collard, "one does not encounter skepticism,—as soon as he has penetrated into the human understanding he has completely taken it by storm." A severe circumspection is one thing, skepticism is another. Doubt is not only permitted, it is commanded by reason itself in the employment and legitimate applications of our different faculties; but when it is applied to the legitimacy itself of our faculties, it no longer elucidates reason, it overwhelms it. In fact, with what would you have reason defend herself, when she has called herself in question? Kant himself, then, overturned the dogmatism which he proposed at once to restrain and save, at least in morals, and he put German philosophy upon a route, at the end of which was an abyss. In vain has this great man—for his intentions and his character, without speaking of his genius, merit for him this name—undertaken with Hume an ingenious and learned controversy; he has been vanquished in this controversy, and Hume remains master of the field of battle.