Part 6

You will learn to love life! But Spinoza has a loftier word for it: You will learn to love God. A clearing up of this expression may well end our account of the religion of Spinoza. You must recall our saying that for Spinoza and his fellow rationalists, all truths were deducible from the single one “God is,” as all theorems of geometry are proved from its axioms. If the truths respecting triangles follow from the nature of a triangle and are not merely the result of physical measurement, so too, the truths about the world follow from the nature of God and are not merely brute facts that we have to accept because we are continually bumping against them. To understand a particular experience is to recognize God as its cause. But we have seen that such understanding is the greatest happiness that can come to man, for it is his assurance of power, of freedom from pain. Now Spinoza defines love as “pleasure accompanied with the idea of an external cause.” If understanding is pleasure, and if it is at the same time recognition of God as a cause, it fulfils the condition of being love, and of course, love of God. It is this love of God that is at once knowledge, freedom, virtue and blessedness. “For blessedness,” our philosopher has written, “blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we rejoice in it because we restrain our desires, but on the contrary because we rejoice in it we are able to restrain our desires.”

“I know,” he writes, “that the belief of the multitude is different. Most men seem to think that they are free just in so far as they are permitted to gratify desire, and that they give up their independence just in so far as they are obliged to live according to the precept of the divine law.

“Piety, then, and religion and all things without restriction that are referred to as greatness of soul, they regard as burdens; and they hope after death to receive the reward of their bondage, that is, of piety and religion. And not by this hope alone, but also and chiefly by fear--the fear of being punished after death with dire torments--are they induced to live according to the precept of the divine law so far as their poverty and feebleness of soul permit. If men had not this hope and fear, but if on the contrary they thought that minds perished with the body, and that for the wretched, worn out with the burden of piety, there was no continuance of existence, they would return to their inclinations, and decide to regulate everything according to their lusts and to be governed by chance rather than by themselves. This seems to me no less absurd than it would if some one because he does not believe he can nourish his body with good food to eternity should choose to stuff himself with what is poisonous and deadly; or because he sees that his mind is not eternal or immortal should choose on that account to be mad and to live without reason.”

And Spinoza closes his doctrine of life with a calm hymn to science. “I have completed all that I intended to show regarding the power of the mind over the emotions, and the freedom of the mind. From what I have said it is evident how much stronger and better the wise man is than the ignorant man, who is held by mere desire. For the ignorant man, besides being agitated in many ways by external causes and never attaining to true satisfaction of the soul, lives as it were without consciousness of himself, of God, and of things, and just as soon as he ceases to be acted upon, ceases to be. While on the contrary the wise man is little disturbed in mind, but conscious by a certain eternal necessity of himself, of God, and of things, he never ceases to be, but is always possessed of true satisfaction of soul. If indeed, the path that I have shown to lead to this appear difficult, yet it may be found, and all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”

III

A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA

An Illustration

I have somewhere found it recorded that as Johann Gottlieb Fichte progressed with his first reading of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” he was moved to tears. To those who have labored through the tortured pages of the great German thinker this would be no matter for surprise, were it not for the quality of the tears:--not those of vexation and baffled understanding, indeed, but of enthusiasm and sheer gratitude. For Fichte had fallen into the melancholy persuasion of Spinoza. At least, certain views of this austere thinker of the seventeenth century appeared to Fichte as no less gloomy in their implication than irresistible in the logic which led to them. Irresistible were the reasons which had driven Spinoza to look upon nature as governed by inexorable Fate. In the world as a whole there was no purpose, in its parts there was no freedom. Gloomy, then, was the implication few but Spinoza himself could escape, that man in such a machine had lost all the familiar marks of a moral being. It was from the heavy chains of such bondage that Kant seemed to free the poor Spinozist by holding out to him the hope of a deeper-lying freedom, while not denying his apparent subjection to the universal and necessary laws of physical nature. It was by this promise of freedom that Fichte was moved to the enthusiasm, the gratitude, the tears of which I have spoken.

If I have mentioned these matters, it is not because our present reflections are to dwell upon the philosophy of Fichte, nor yet upon the historic contrast between Spinoza and Kant. It is rather because the seriousness with which Fichte faced the issue between these two thinkers is shared by the men of all times and of all countries who have given themselves to the pleasures and to the burdens of reflection. The issue was not first raised by the seventeenth century, and was not laid with the eighteenth. That it remains one of the most interesting to which we of the twentieth century can turn our attention is just the point which I wish to bring out in the form of an example--an example taken, not indeed from the technical philosophy of our day, but from a writer holding a distinguished place among its novelists. Those of you who have enjoyed the more mundane writings of M. Paul Bourget,--his “Cosmopolis,” his “Coeur de Femme,” his “Complications Sentimentales,”--are perhaps not prepared to meet in him the philosopher and moralist that shows through his less widely known, but sometimes more admired work, “Le Disciple.” You will allow me, then, to present so much as is indispensable of the story of Bourget’s “Disciple.”

* * * * *

Let me begin by giving some idea of the way in which the plot of the tale may have worked itself out in the author’s mind. If a mass of rock were to fall from a cliff, and at its foot to crush before your eyes a human being--and not a mere vague humanity, but, let us say, a young girl just entering upon the promise of life--you would, of course, feel the full horror of the catastrophe. More than that, you would not be a descendant of the myth-makers, as we all of us are, were you not to cast about for some soul in the order of things on whom to blame the calamity as though it were a crime. Such shadowy beings from out of the past as the Fates, the “purblind doomsters,” are creatures of this human instinct to transform physical nature into a moral being. But it is no longer easy to take these inventions of our fancy as seriously as did our forefathers. Galileo and Newton have come between us and the myth-makers. They have enabled us, and at the same time have constrained us, to envisage the event I have just depicted as essentially a conflict between gravitational and elastic forces, not one between the human soul and the soul of Fate. The thing moves us more, no doubt, than it would had the heavy mass rolled quietly on to the bottom of the valley, because the young girl as a possible object of sympathy and love is nearer to ourselves than is a mere topographical contour; but our emotions, be they what they may, are not of themselves enough to transform a physical fact into a moral event, a catastrophe into a crime.

Robert Greslou, the Disciple of our story, is not indeed made to kill such a young girl, but in a singularly detestable fashion to render it inevitable that she should kill herself. The author has taken care that we should have no feeling but loathing for this creature of his brain. We cannot even extend to him that pity and half-forgiveness that the instinctive man commonly feels for the aberrations of passion. To Robert the whole episode was a carefully planned piece of psychological research,--a vivisection of the emotional life. The author, in his anxiety that we should not be tempted to excuse, but should confine ourselves to understanding, has created a monster. “Non, monsieur,” says André de Jussat, the brother of Charlotte, to Robert who has offered him all the satisfaction left in his power, “Non, monsieur, people do not fight men like you, they execute them.”

Now, Bourget’s interest in the situation thus created I conceive to be this: May we not gain sufficient insight into the causes of this young man’s conduct to make it appear as inevitable as the fall of the rock from the cliff? And if we do this, must we not view the catastrophe in which a human being happens to play a part as no less void of moral aspects than that in which a falling mass is concerned? There we could not blame the stone; here, if the case is made out, we should not blame the man. In neither situation is it meaningful to blame the facts and laws of nature.

It is for the right so to regard his own conduct that the Disciple pleads with his old master, Adrien Sixte. At the end of his autobiography he makes a tragic appeal to the man whose writings had formed his mind. “I felt assured,” he writes, “that I should be able to tell you my story as you develop your problems of psychology in the books I have so constantly read, and having finished, I find nothing to offer you but the despairing cry, De profundis! Write to me, cher maître, guide me. Strengthen me in the doctrine which was, which still is, my own,--in that conviction of universal necessity which holds that even our most detestable, our most damning acts, even this cold enterprise of seduction, even my weakness when it came to keeping my side of the compact of death, are the outcome of laws that govern this immense universe. Tell me that I am not a monster, that there is no such thing as a monster, that you will still be there when I come out of this supreme crisis to welcome me as your disciple, as your friend.”

* * * * *

What, then, is the philosophy of this Adrien Sixte that, having brought a human being to such a pass, it could still be appealed to to bring him through?

Adrien Sixte had made two contributions to philosophy. The first was a negative analysis of what Herbert Spencer calls the Unknowable. “Many excellent minds,” the author assures us, “catch a glimpse of the probable reconciliation of science and religion on this ground of the Unknowable. For M. Sixte it is a last illusion which he is hot to destroy with an energy of argument that has not been equalled since Kant.”

“M. Sixte’s second title to honor as a psychologist consists in a quite new and ingenious development of the animal origin of human sensibility.... He undertook for the genesis of types of thought the work that Darwin essayed for the forms of life. Applying the laws of evolution to all the facts that make up the human heart, he thought to show that our most exquisite sensibilities, our most delicate moral discriminations, as well as our most shameful degradations, are the final development, the ultimate metamorphosis of very simple instincts, themselves transformations of the properties of the primitive cell: in such wise that the moral universe exactly reproduces the physical, and that the former is only the consciousness, now painful, now ecstatic, of the latter.”

We owe to M. Sixte some phrases that translate with extreme energy this conviction that all is necessitated in the soul--even the illusion that the soul is free.

“Every act,” he writes, “is but an addition. To say that it is free, is to say that there is in a sum more than there is in the elements added. This is as absurd in psychology as in arithmetic.”

And elsewhere he put it thus: “If we knew truly the relative position of all the phenomena which constitute the actual universe, we could at this moment with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers, tell the day, the hour, the minute at which, say, England will evacuate India, when Europe will have burned its last lump of coal, when such a criminal, still to be born, will assassinate his father, when such a poem, yet to be conceived, will be composed. The future is contained in the present as all the properties of a triangle are contained in its definition.”

The provenance of this type of thought is obvious enough to the experienced reader. Our author has in an ingenious way translated his Spinoza into the language of contemporary science. Let us merely catch up a note or two that will render our Spinozist’s attitude toward common morality, and his understanding of the master’s doctrine of emancipation through science.

In the first sense we find that Adrien Sixte has somewhere written, “All conscious beings must be looked upon by the scientist as experiments set up by nature. Among these experiments some are useful to society, and one hears of virtue; others are destructive, and one hears of vice and of crime.” And he adds, a little by way of flourish, “These last are nevertheless the most significant, and we should lack an essential datum for the science of mind if Nero, say, or such and such a tyrant of the fifteenth century had not existed.” Or again he has said, “To consider one’s destiny as a corollary of this living geometry which is nature, and therefore as an inevitable consequence of the eternal axiom whose indefinite development is prolonged through all time and all space, this is the unique way to emancipation.”

* * * * *

To show that human conduct is so necessitated as to be without moral aspects: “this is the unique way to emancipation.” It was just for the master’s aid over the last rough steps of the path to this emancipation that we left our Disciple crying, “De profundis.” Can the aid be given? Can it not? This is the singularly philosophical catastrophe of this singularly reflective novel.

For us the issue depends upon an analysis of what our philosopher would regard as determinants of human conduct. That it is not meaningless to seek explanations of human acts all admit, for all alike are engaged in the search for them, and much that is of importance to daily life depends upon one’s ability correctly to explain and so to predict the conduct of one’s fellows. The only question is whether the laws by which we explain and predict could conceivably be increased in precision until they completely determined conduct. To judge this we must consider of what nature these laws are, i.e., in the present context, with what illustrations of such laws our author furnishes us.

We are familiar with the idea that the explanation of a fact consists in pointing out its likeness to others. We are not surprised, then, to find our young analyst, following the guide of a master who, we have heard, regarded “our most exquisite sensibilities” as “the development of very simple instincts,” looking upon his relations with a singularly pure young woman as not without likeness to the battle of life throughout the animal kingdom. “It is the law of the world,” he reasons, “that all existence is a conquest carried on and maintained by the stronger at the expense of the weaker. This is as true of the moral universe as of the physical. There are souls of prey as there are wolves, tiger-cats, and hawks,” and he kept repeating to himself, “I am a soul of prey, a soul of prey,” with a furious access of what the mystics call the pride of life.

But if the animal instincts are the most widely related of those that display themselves in human conduct, more special instincts must be appealed to to account for what is special in the act. Well, in its proper place we find that the family of Robert Greslou had its roots in war-trodden Lorraine. Of no very remote peasant origin, son of a conquered race, he catches himself at certain moments reacting with instinctive hate toward an individual whom he hardly knows and who has done him no personal injury, yet whose every aspect shows him to have sprung from the conquerors, in whose most courteous gesture there lurks a polished insolence of aristocracy.