Page images
PDF
EPUB

been forgotten. Herder stepped out of Romanic negativeness into Germanic positiveness, and began to reconstruct. Himself a theologian, he universalized Semitic tradition and inspiration, as well as he could, into Japhetic science and philosophy. Religion and language are to him the primitive organic manifestations of the divine life in man. 66 Religion is the most ancient and most holy tradition of the earth: "— this is the text of his ninth book. Man, according to him, evolves Reason, Humanity, Religion, organically, in consequence of the faculties divinely united in his mind; and he does so under divine guidance. Herder's ideas, though of course incomplete and defective in their development, are great and profound.

C

TENTH CHAPTER.

THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN DESTINIES, FROM CONDORCET TO LA MENNAIS AND COUSIN, AND TO THE MODERN CATHOLIC SCHOOL.

MODERN France has taken a noble part in these highest aspirations of the European mind. As Montesquieu was its patriarch, Condorcet is its martyr. His "Esquisse d'un Tableau historique des Progrès de l'Esprit humain" connects the two periods: that of Condillac, and that of a higher philosophy. It is however more remarkable as a testimony of his earnestness of mind, and from being written in political imprisonment, with the prospect of death before him, than as a lasting monument of philosophy.

Since 1815 three eminent men have taken up this grand subject in the modern French school of philosophy: Cousin, in three Essays or Fragments; and his disciples, Jouffroy and Edgar Quinet, the former particularly in his "Lecture on the human Destinies," the latter in his "Introduction to Herder's Ideas." These writers are living proofs of the progress which the French mind has made since Voltaire, in its view of the destinies of man, and of the philosophy of history. It is to be regretted that Cousin has not made the philosophy of history the centre of his own philosophical system. There is at present no connexion between his speculative principles and his historical views. His acute and methodic mind, by combining the two, would have discovered that the formula at which he and his school have hitherto arrived, as to the relation between philosophy and Christianity, between speculative research and religious worship, is and will remain unsatisfactory, and cannot

be the last expression of the philosophy of the mind. It is negative, and, like all negations, a dissonance. It looks at reality, but it does not enter into it, as if it was an extraneous thing for a philosopher, not the house of his own mind. A serious philosopher, who acknowledges and respects Christianity, must make its records and history the subject of critical inquiry, both historical and philosophical, in order to find out in what form it agrees or does not agree with philosophy. Having found that form which appears to him the one most conformable to the mind of its Divine Author, the philosopher ought not merely to approve it theoretically, but to adopt it practically. If not, either the philosopher will live without religion, or the religious people without philosophy. A religiously disposed philosopher must be a worshipper, and an active member of the Christian fellowship. For it is a sad mistake, or a merely defensive provisional position, to suppose that because in France philosophy has now begun to take account of the religious element, religion will cease and be replaced by religious philosophy. Philosophy must go a step further, and the philosophic mind join conscientiously in religious worship and congregational life, proposing their reform, if reform appear necessary. But how can it do so, without instituting an independent, conscientious, and free inquiry into the claims and truths of Christianity? This requires erudition, but Cousin has it.

This truth has been deeply felt by some younger philosophers of the same school, such as Barthélemy de St. Hilaire, Lerminier, Jules Simon, and particularly by Saisset, in his "Essais sur la Philosophie et la Religion du 19e siècle" (1848), especially in the second section, which treats of the philosophical school of Alexandria. Through all these works there is visible a very marked progress in the positive philosophy of history and of religion. German philosophers and historians might learn much from the method, clearness, and precision of such researches as these.

The thoughtful works of these theodicean apostles in France exhibit undoubted signs of life. Nothing, on the other hand, excepting only the reactionary clerical tendencies and productions, is more destructive and distracting than the popular philosophy of France, as manifested in French novels. The doctrines of the school of Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas are built upon the despairing consciousness of a torn and lacerated age, incapable of believing in anything, although religion be made the principal spice to season their fictions. These writers exert a marked influence over the reading public of Europe; and the rhapsodies of Eugene Sue have shown what power the dark suspicion looming in the recesses of society, exercises over the masses of the European people. The spectre of despair, which pervades their songs of death, passes into nine-tenths of the productions of the European stage, particularly into the ever new forms of that sad, barbarous changeling, that favourite of the highest classes of society, the opera, which has been substituted for the ancient national drama. There the rags of religion are thrown over the spectre of death. Religion is used as a "sauce piquante" for the putrid dish of incredulity. It is a sauce "au moyen age à la dernière mode de Paris." Organs on the stage instead of flutes, hymns instead of sentimental songs, processions of monks or nuns instead of military shows, are all symptoms of the same elements of destruction which are at work in the age. The public is treated like an expiring frog, which requires galvanic shocks to restore sensation, or make it exhibit symptoms of life: thus fulfilling a prophecy of Lichtenberg's (about 1790), that the time would come when people would not eat their roast meat without molten lead. This philosopher also prophesied that a time would come when it would be thought as ridiculous to believe in a God as it then was to believe in spectres: to which Heinrich Jacobi replied, that another time would come when men would not believe in a God, but would believe in spectres:

(he might have added) aye, and in spirits speaking through wooden tables!

In the same manner the innocent garrulity of historical genre painting has been seasoned into a medieval religious compound of uncritical history and impudent legends: a mixture of Scotch novels and German romances of the school of Görres, in perfect keeping with the rococo style in art, which combines Byzantine proportions, and Giottesque and Peruginesque countenances of angels and saints, with the pigtail of Louis XV.: the bond of union between these contradictions being hypocrisy and artistic as well as moral impotence.

The opponents of the school of Cousin consist in part of the clerical, or so-called Catholic school; in part of the independent philosophers. Ballanche's noble aspirations are feeble and confused both as to thought and knowledge. There is, among much delusion, some real philosophy in Buchez. But considerable progress is visible in St. Bonnet ("De l'Unité spirituelle, ou de la Société dans son but au-delà du Temps," 1841). Pierre Leroux is dialectical in his polemics, but wild in his reconstruction. Comte's Positivism has no place in the philosophy of history. With his new worship, he is no more the religious, than Romieu with his Imperialism is the political, prophet of the age.

One can understand why Cousin's philosophy does not satisfy the mind of reflecting religious persons in France; and why the popular views of philosophy, as to human history and the destinies of mankind, inspire them with fear, if not with horror. It must be confessed, however, that the arguments advanced against them, by what is called the strictly Catholic party, is certainly incapable of satisfying the thinking human mind, and the cravings of the best spirits of that ingenious nation. Guiraud's "Philosophie Catholique de l'Histoire, ou l'Histoire expliquée" (to name one out of many) is a strange compound of

« PreviousContinue »