So, from Plato to Leibnitz, the greatest metaphysicians have thought that absolute truth is an attribute of absolute being. Truth is incomprehensible without God, as God is incomprehensible without truth. Truth is placed between human intelligence and the supreme intelligence, as a kind of mediator. In the lowest degree, as well as at the height of being, God is everywhere met, for truth is everywhere. Study nature, elevate yourselves to the laws that govern it and make of it as it were a living truth:—the more profoundly you understand its laws, the nearer you approach to God. Study, above all, humanity; humanity is much greater than nature, for it comes from God as well as nature, and knows him, while nature is ignorant of him. Especially seek and love truth, and refer it to the immortal being who is its source. The more you know of the truth, the more you know of God. The sciences, so far from turning us away from religion, conduct us to it. Physics, with their laws, mathematics, with their sublime ideas, especially philosophy, which cannot take a single step without encountering universal and necessary principles, are so many stages on the way to Deity, and, thus to speak, so many temples in which homage is perpetually paid to him.
But in the midst of these high considerations, let us carefully guard ourselves against two opposite errors, from which men of fine genius have not always known how to preserve themselves,—against the error of making the reason of man purely individual, and against the error of confounding it with truth and the divine reason.[70] If the reason of man is purely individual because it is in the individual, it can comprehend nothing that is not individual, nothing that transcends the limits wherein it is confined. Not only is it unable to elevate itself to any universal and necessary truth, not only is it unable to have any idea of it, even any suspicion of it, as one blind from his birth can have no suspicion that a sun exists; but there is no power, not even that of God, that by any means could make penetrate the reason of man any truth of that order absolutely repugnant to its nature; since, for this end, it would not be sufficient for God to lighten our mind; it would be necessary to change it, to add to it another faculty. Neither, on the other hand, must we, with Malebranche, make the reason of man to such a degree impersonal that it takes the place of truth which is its object, and of God who is its principle. It is truth that to us is absolutely impersonal, and not reason. Reason is in man, yet it comes from God. Hence it is individual and finite, whilst its root is in the infinite; it is personal by its relation to the person in which it resides, and must also possess I know not what character of universality, of necessity even, in order to be capable of conceiving universal and necessary truths; hence it seems, by turns, according to the point of view from which it is regarded, pitiable and sublime. Truth is in some sort lent to human reason, but it belongs to a totally different reason, to wit, that supreme, eternal, uncreated reason, which is God himself. The truth in us is nothing else than our object; in God, it is one of his attributes, as well as justice, holiness, mercy, as we shall subsequently see. God exists; and so far as he exists, he thinks, and his thoughts are truths, eternal as himself, which are reflected in the laws of the universe, which the reason of man has received the power to attain. Truth is the offspring, the utterance, I was about to say, the eternal word of God, if it is permitted philosophy to borrow this divine language from that holy religion which teaches us to worship God in spirit and in truth. Of old, the theory of Ideas, which manifest God to men, and remind them of him, had given to Plato the surname of the precursor; on account of that theory of Ideas he was dear to St. Augustine, and is invoked by Bossuet. It is by this same theory, wisely interpreted, and purified by the light of our age, that the new philosophy is attached to the tradition of great philosophies, and to that of Christianity.
The last problem that the science of the true presented is resolved:—we are in possession of the basis of absolute truths. God is substance, reason, supreme cause, and the unity of all these truths; God, and God alone, is to us the boundary beyond which we have nothing more to seek.
LECTURE V.
ON MYSTICISM.
Distinction between the philosophy that we profess and mysticism. Mysticism consists in pretending to know God without an intermediary.—Two sorts of mysticism.—Mysticism of sentiment. Theory of sensibility. Two sensibilities—the one external, the other internal, and corresponding to the soul as external sensibility corresponds to nature.—Legitimate part of sentiment.—Its aberrations.—Philosophical mysticism. Plotinus: God, or absolute unity, perceived without an intermediary by pure thought.—Ecstasy.—Mixture of superstition and abstraction in mysticism.—Conclusion of the first part of the course.
Whether we turn our attention to the forces and the laws that animate and govern matter without belonging to it, or as the order of our labors calls us to do, reflect upon the universal and necessary truths which our mind discovers but does not constitute, the least systematic use of reason makes us naturally conclude from the forces and laws of the universe that there is a first intelligent mover, and from necessary truths that there is a necessary being who alone is their substance. We do not perceive God, but we conceive him, upon the faith of this admirable world exposed to our view, and upon that of this other world, more admirable still, which we bear in ourselves. By this double road we succeed in going to God. This natural course is that of all men: it must be sufficient for a sound philosophy. But there are feeble and presumptuous minds that do not know how to go thus far, or do not know how to stop there. Confined to experience, they do not dare to conclude from what they see in what they do not see, as if at all times, at the sight of the first phenomenon that appears to their eyes, they did not admit that this phenomenon has a cause, even when this cause does not come within the reach of their senses. They do not perceive it, yet they believe in it, for the simple reason that they necessarily conceive it. Man and the universe are also facts that cannot but have a cause, although this cause may neither be seen by our eyes nor touched by our hands. Reason has been given us for the very purpose of going, and without any circuit of reasoning, from the visible to the invisible, from the finite to the infinite, from the imperfect to the perfect, and also, from necessary and universal truths, which surround us on every side, to their eternal and necessary principle. Such is the natural and legitimate bearing of reason. It possesses an evidence of which it renders no account, and is not thereby less irresistible to whomsoever does not undertake to contest with God the veracity of the faculties which he has received. But one does not revolt against reason with impunity. It punishes our false wisdom by giving us up to extravagance. When one has confined himself to the narrow limits of what he directly perceives, he is smothered by these limits, wishes to go out of them at any price, and invokes some other means of knowing; he did not dare to admit the existence of an invisible God, and now behold him aspiring to enter into immediate communication with him, as with sensible objects, and the objects of consciousness. It is an extreme feebleness for a rational being thus to doubt reason, and it is an incredible rashness, in this despair of intelligence, to dream of direct communication with God. This desperate and ambitious dream is mysticism.
It behooves us to separate with care this chimera, that is not without danger, from the cause that we defend. It behooves us so much the more to openly break with mysticism, as it seems to touch us more nearly, as it pretends to be the last word of philosophy, and as by an appearance of greatness it is able to seduce many a noble soul, especially at one of those epochs of lassitude, when, after the cruel disappointment of excessive hopes, human reason, having lost faith in its own power without having lost the need of God, in order to satisfy this immortal need, addresses itself to every thing except itself, and in fault of knowing how to go to God by the way that is open to it, throws itself out of common sense, and tries the new, the chimerical, even the absurd, in order to attain the impossible.
Mysticism contains a pusillanimous skepticism in the place of reason, and, at the same time, a faith blind and carried even to the oblivion of all the conditions imposed upon human nature. To conceive God under the transparent veil of the universe and above the highest truths, is at once too much and too little for mysticism. It does not believe that it knows God, if it knows him only in his manifestations and by the signs of his existence: it wishes to perceive him directly, it wishes to be united to him, sometimes by sentiment, sometimes by some other extraordinary process.
Sentiment plays so important a part in mysticism, that our first care must be to investigate the nature and proper function of this interesting and hitherto ill-studied part of human nature.