What matters it, in fact, whether there may or may not be in the human mind universal and necessary principles, if these principles only serve to classify our sensations, and to make us ascend, step by step, to ideas that are most sublime, but have for ourselves no reality? The human mind is, then, as Kant himself well expressed it, like a banker who should take bills ranged in order on his desk for real values;—he possesses nothing but papers. We have thus returned, then, to that conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence projecting itself everywhere out of itself, at once triumphant and impotent, since it produces every thing, and produces only chimeras.[37]
The reproach which a sound philosophy will content itself with making to Kant, is, that his system is not in accordance with facts. Philosophy can and must separate itself from the crowd for the explanation of facts; but, it cannot be too often repeated, it must not in the explanation destroy what it pretends to explain; otherwise it does not explain, it imagines. Here, the important fact which it is the question to explain is the belief of the human mind, and the system of Kant annihilates it.
In fact, when we are speaking of the truth of universal and necessary principles, we do not believe they are true only for us:—we believe them to be true in themselves, and still true, were there no minds of ours to conceive them. We regard them as independent of us; they seem to us to impose themselves upon our intelligence by the force of the truth that is in them. So, in order to express faithfully what passes within us, it would be necessary to reverse the proposition of Kant, and instead of saying with him, that these principles are the necessary laws of our mind, therefore they have no absolute value out of mind; we should much rather say, that these principles have an absolute value in themselves, therefore we cannot but believe them.
And even this necessity of belief with which the new skepticism arms itself, is not the indispensable condition of the application of principles. We have established[38] that the necessity of believing supposes reflection, examination, an effort to deny and the want of power to do it; but before all reflection, intelligence spontaneously seizes the truth, and, in the spontaneous apperception, is not the sentiment of necessity, nor consequently that character of subjectivity of which the German school speaks so much.
Let us, then, here recur to that spontaneous intuition of truth, which Kant knew not, in the circle where his profoundly reflective and somewhat scholastic habits held him captive.
Is it true that there is no judgment, even affirmative in form, which is not mixed with negation?
It seems indeed that every affirmative judgment is at the same time negative; in fact, to affirm that a thing exists, is to deny its non-existence; as every negative judgment is at the same time affirmative; for to deny the existence of a thing, is to affirm its non-existence. If it is so, then every judgment, whatever may be its form, affirmative or negative, since these two forms come back to each other, supposes a pre-established doubt in regard to the existence of the thing in question, supposes some exercise of reflection, in the course of which the mind feels itself constrained to bear such or such a judgment, so that at this point of view the foundation of the judgment seems to be in its necessity; and then recurs the celebrated objection:—if you judge thus only because it is impossible for you not to do it, you have for a guaranty of the truth nothing but yourself and your own ways of conceiving; it is the human mind that transports its laws out of itself; it is the subject that makes the object out of its own image, without ever going beyond the inclosure of subjectivity.
We respond, going directly to the root of the difficulty:—it is not true that all our judgments are negative. We admit that in the reflective state every affirmative judgment supposes a negative judgment, and reciprocally. But is reason exercised only on the condition of reflection? Is there not a primitive affirmation which implies no negation? As we often act without deliberating on our action, without premeditating it, and as we manifest in this case an activity that is free still, but free with a liberty that is not reflective; so reason often perceives the truth without traversing doubt or error. Reflection is a return to consciousness, or to an operation wholly different from it. We do not find, then, in any primitive fact, that every judgment which contains it presupposes another in which it is not. We thus arrive at a judgment free from all reflection, to an affirmation without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition, the legitimate child of the natural energy of thought, like the inspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet. Such is the first act of the faculty of knowing. If one contradicts this primitive affirmation, the faculty of knowing falls back up upon itself, examines itself, attempts to call in doubt the truth it has perceived; it cannot; it affirms anew what it had affirmed at first; it adheres to the truth already recognized, but with a new sentiment, the sentiment that it is not in its power to divest itself of the evidence of this same truth; then, but only then, appears that character of necessity and subjectivity that some would turn against the truth, as though truth could lose its own value, while penetrating deeper into the mind and there triumphing over doubt; as though reflective evidence of it were the less evidence; as though, moreover, the necessary conception of it were the only form, the primary form of the perception of truth. The skepticism of Kant, to which good sense so easily does justice, is driven to the extreme and forced within its intrenchment by the distinction between spontaneous reason and reflective reason. Reflection is the theatre of the combats which reason engages in with itself, with doubt, sophism, and error. But above reflection is a sphere of light and peace, where reason perceives truth without returning on itself, for the sole reason that truth is truth, and because God has made the reason to perceive it, as he has made the eye to see and the ear to hear.
Analyze, in fact, with impartiality, the fact of spontaneous apperception, and you will be sure that it has nothing subjective in it except what it is impossible it should not have, to wit, the me which is mingled with the fact without constituting it. The me inevitably enters into all knowledge, since it is the subject of it. Reason directly perceives truth; but it is in some sort augmented, in consciousness, and then we have knowledge. Consciousness is there its witness, and not its judge; its only judge is reason, a faculty subjective and objective together, according to the language of Germany, which immediately attains absolute truth, almost without personal intervention on our part, although it might not enter into exercise if personality did not precede or were not added to it.[39]