Part 7

When, then, a human pity for his prospective victim comes upon this “soul of prey,” it is such a hate that neutralizes it. “Why,” he cries, “in so many of my imaginings does Charlotte appear by the side of her brother André? What secret fibre of hatred had this man by his mere existence touched in my heart, that simply to imagine him with his sister dried up the fountain of my pity and left nothing in me but the will to win?”

In answer we are expected to recall the moment when Robert Greslou, introduced into the family of the Marquis de Jussat as tutor to the younger son, finds himself for the first time in the presence of the Comte André, heir and dominating spirit of the house. “I felt then,” our young analyst records, “in its full force, in the depths of that instinct of life into which it is so hard for thought to descend, the revelation of that sense of race which modern science attributes to all nature, and which consequently must be found in man.... Why should not this hostility be an heredity like the rest? The horse that has never approached a lion trembles with fear when his stall is made up with straw on which such a beast of prey has lain. Then fear is inherited, and is not fear a form of hate? Why should not hate be inherited too? And in a thousand cases envy is probably nothing but that--was nothing more than that in my case, certainly,--the echo in us of hatreds long ago acquired by those whose sons we are, and which continue in us the battle of hearts begun hundreds of years ago.”

No less carefully does our author work out another group of influences: those that fall within the experience of the individual. Influences of family, of school, of books read, of friends, of adventures of sex, of religious education, all culminating in the forming of a character whose foundations have already been laid in its heredities, in this case a type for which the French have invented the expressive term, a cérébral. The rest one can readily imagine, the delicate suggestions of daily life, the influences, slight in themselves, that play upon the attuned character and to which it resounds with acts of this kind or that, an instrument touched by the fingers of Fate.

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Such, then, is our author’s understanding of what it means so to explain a human act that it shall appear to follow inevitably from recognized laws of nature. If it do so follow, we ask again: Can it in the end be regarded as either good or bad?

It is not to our author that we may turn for an answer. M. Bourget is an artist, and owes his allegiance to the interests of the heart, not to the curiosities of the intellect. For him it is sufficient to have shown that to have lived out a Spinozistic philosophy would in extreme cases lead to very ugly results. He is addressing himself, as he tells us in his preface, to the youth of France, and it may not be without interest to note the place he gives to the type of philosophy we have just been considering among the influences dangerous to the young France of his day.

“There are two types of young men,” he says, “that I see before me at the present moment, which are before you too, as two forms of temptation equally redoubtable and dangerous. The one is cynical and by preference jovial. He has, since his twentieth year, discounted life, and his religion is contained in the single word, to enjoy,--which is translated by this other, to succeed. Whether he go into politics or business, literature or art, sport or industry, whether he be an officer, diplomat, or lawyer, he has only himself for god, for beginning and for end. This young man is a monster, is he not? For it is to be a monster, to have lived but twenty-five years and to have by way of a soul a calculating machine at the service of a pleasure-machine. Yet I fear him less for you than I do a certain other type. This one has all the aristocratic traits of nervous organization, all those of mentality. He is an intellectual and refined epicure, as the first was a brutal and scientific epicure. This delicate nihilist, how unpleasant he is to encounter, and how he abounds in the land! At twenty-five years he has made the tour of all ideas. His critical spirit, precociously awakened, has grasped the last results of the most subtle philosophy of this age. Do not speak to him of impiety or materialism. He knows that the word matter has no very precise sense. He is, on the other hand, too intelligent not to admit that all religions may have been legitimate in their time, only he has never believed and never will believe any one of them any more than he will ever believe in anything in particular, if not in the amusing play of his mind which he has transformed into an instrument of elegant perversity. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, vice and virtue appear to him objects of simple curiosity. The human soul is for him a clever mechanism which it amuses him to take apart by way of experiment. To him nothing is true, nothing is false; nothing is moral, nothing is immoral. He is an egoist, subtle and refined, whose one occupation lies in adorning his Self, in dressing it out with new sensations. The religious life of humanity is for him only a pretext for such sensations, as is the intellectual life, as is the life of feeling. His corruption is vastly more profound than that of the barbarian of pleasure, is vastly more complicated, and the pretty name of dilettantism with which he covers it hides its cold ferocity, its appalling hardness. Ah, we know him too well, this young man; we have all just missed being such as he is, we whom the paradoxes of too eloquent masters have too much charmed. We have all been this man for a day, for an hour, and if I have written this book, it is to show you, you who are not yet like him, child of twenty whose soul is yet in process of making, what base things such egoism may hide in its depths.”

For Bourget, then, to have justified this picture of the youthful Spinozist, is enough. But for us, who for the moment have become philosophers, who have given ourselves up to the curiosities of the mind, it is not enough to have convinced ourselves that certain teachings are ugly and unpleasant to contemplate; we must know whether they are true or false. While much that is unlovely is also untrue, who but the poet can feel sure in his heart that only the beautiful is true? Well, then, if we were to face the issue that seems to be drawn between that universal necessity which science hopes to establish throughout the domain of nature, and that freedom which ethics regards as indispensable to the existence of moral beings,--if we are to face this issue squarely, on which side should we range ourselves?

I answer: On both sides. If you say: But this is difficult to do, I should not be inclined to dispute it; were it otherwise, opinions on this subject would not be so much at variance. Yet it may not be impossible to do. And that the satisfaction of the result has been thought to be worth any effort it may cost to reach it, is evidenced by the long struggle which the history of human reflection records, to hold at the same time the vital ideals of science and the no less vital ideals of morality. To consider a way in which I believe this may be done, will occupy us throughout the remainder of the present discussion.

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Let us begin by making clear just what is the ideal which guides the scientist in his expectations respecting the world he studies. Perhaps no one accomplishment of science has been more inspiring than the picture of certain large aspects of nature that Newton succeeded in drawing,--such aspects, namely, as are presented in the behavior of suns, and planets, and moons. All these huge masses are governed by a single law, called the law of gravitation. Now to say that they are governed by this law means no more than this, that if we knew the mass, the position, and the velocity of each of these heavenly bodies at a given moment, we should be able by means of the law to predict their masses, positions, and velocities for all future moments. This result is, to be sure, only an approximation, for we know that gravitation is not the only force which bodies exert on each other. We have never succeeded, e.g., in reducing the attractions and repulsions of electrified bodies to gravitation, nor do we any longer try to do this. But Newton’s degree of success provides us with an ideal to which we seem ever more and more closely to approach. Instead of considering such huge bodies as suns and planets and their satellites, we divide these up into extremely minute parts, which we may call for the moment atoms. We struggle then to conceive a law as completely determining the behavior of these atoms, as the law of gravitation determines that of planets. So that, if we knew a limited number of characteristics of each of these atoms at a given moment, our law would enable us to predict their future and to reconstruct their past history. As we approach more and more closely to this ideal, less and less in the behavior of these small parts of nature is left to guess-work. In so far as we hope this ideal may be continuously approached, we hope that in its atomic parts nature is entirely devoid of freedom. And if we hope this, we must inevitably hope, too, that what we have called an atom is neither a moral nor an immoral being. This hope is usually called the mechanical ideal, and nature in the light of it is viewed as a mechanism. It has guided science to victory after victory, and I venture to think that no result of philosophical experience is more firmly established than this, that whatever theory we may in the end accept respecting human nature, its freedom, its moral responsibilities, no assumption of that theory may stand in contradiction with the mechanical ideal. To have recognized this truth and to have had the courage to maintain it at all costs, was the heroic service rendered by Spinoza at a moment in human history when such service was badly needed. It is also the reason why Spinozism, in spite of its apparently gloomy outlook upon the world, has made such a forcible and lasting appeal to the imagination of thinking men. In what follows it is against certain false implications that have been thought to lie in this mechanical ideal, and not against the ideal itself, that our criticism must be directed.

Now there is one implication that lies so near the surface I doubt not most who have followed so far will already have drawn it. If, namely, the atoms of which we have spoken are bound by strict mechanical law, if it is these same atoms that make up the human body and that are concerned in its every act, must not the conduct of that body be an outcome of this same mechanical necessity? And if this be so, must not the science whose ideal we have described set itself once for all against the hope of finding in human conduct any vestige of freedom, any trace of moral responsibility? You remember with what vigor Adrien Sixte drew this very conclusion. “Every act,” he said, “is but an addition. To say that it is free, is to say there is in a sum more than there is in its elements added. This is as absurd in psychology as in arithmetic.”

Yet natural as this inference may seem, we should, I think, see that it is unjustified, that the instinct which has led mankind to read moral aspects into nature was possessed of a deeper insight than was our philosopher with his plausible mathematics. If, indeed, we could construct the notion of a man out of that of atoms by a process of addition, we could not escape the conclusion of Adrien Sixte. Then, truly, moral aspects would be as completely lacking to the whole being as they are to the atoms which enter into his composition. That we cannot do this,--that we can, indeed, offer no mechanical definition of life, is just the insight which permits us, nay, practically forces us, to treat man as a free moral agent.

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We can frame no mechanical definition of life! Nor is this the only example offered by experience of a term applied exclusively to mechanisms and yet meaning nothing mechanical. Let me give a homely illustration. There is, I presume every one would admit, no time-piece which is not a machine. And yet we can offer no mechanical definition of a time piece, for the simple reason that the various machines to which this term applies have no mechanical principle in common. A class which may include such divers mechanisms as a sun dial, an hour glass, a water clock, a pendulum clock, a spring watch, a chronograph, has evidently not been given a single name to mark in the members composing it a single mechanical nature. The only thing these members have in common is a certain function or purpose,--that of producing a movement keeping pace with the apparent motion of the sun. Just so with the class of beings we call living. Each of them at each moment of its existence is a complete illustration of mechanical law, yet all of them offer such divers illustrations of this law that they cannot have been put into a single class because of a common mechanical nature. That which they have in common, by virtue of which they have been grouped under one name, is once more a function or a purpose. For we observe that living things, by whatever mechanical devices, accomplish for the most part a common result, that of self-preservation.

In these two examples, the one taken from the inanimate, the other comprising the animate world, we see how well it may come about that a certain character belong to a whole, no vestige of which is to be found in its constituent parts. A single atom cannot, if the mechanical ideal is maintained, be regarded as acting purposefully, yet a sufficiently complex group of atoms may well enough display purpose in its behavior and to that purpose owe its right to the name we give it. In such cases the real absurdity we are in danger of committing is not the one that Adrien Sixte scoffs at, but the one he unsuspectingly falls into. Axioms of addition are excellent guides for those whose problem is to add. But not all composition of parts into a whole is so simple as the business of forming a sum. And where we are not adding, the axioms of addition may prove the worst of company.

Let us proceed to an immediate consequence of this last observation. If no mechanical definition can be offered for a given term, it is impossible that the things to which this term applies should be governed by mechanical law. We may easily convince ourselves, however, that although not subjected to mechanical law, they are frequently, indeed generally, governed by another kind of law that is of the greatest interest to us. Let me recur to our illustration of the time-piece. There is a trite truth about time-pieces, which we may say holds as a rule, to wit, that cheap time-pieces are poor ones. Yet it would be meaningless to ask for a mechanical explanation of this law, for the mechanical imperfection of the cheap sun dial bears no resemblance whatever to the mechanical imperfection of the cheap watch. The former may be a poor time-keeper because inexpensively (and so grossly) graduated; the latter because the escapement is inexpensively (and so crudely) constructed. So it is in the animal world. Of its members we may lay down the rule, say, that each must eat if it would live, but the physics and chemistry of nutrition in an oak tree are so different from the physics and chemistry of nutrition in a human being, that if anyone were to ask for a mechanical explanation of this rule we could not offer it, or rather we should have to offer a different one for each type of organism we considered. These examples will be sufficient to illustrate the sense of the saying, “Beings whose nature is not capable of mechanical definition cannot be subjected to mechanical law.”

But we said further, that the laws to which such beings were subject were of a peculiar nature, and it is particularly important to point out one respect in which these laws differ from the mechanical. Such laws as we find controlling the behavior of organisms, for example, are of the kind that may be called laws of purpose. We explain, that is to say, the conduct of organisms in terms of the end or purpose for the sake of which that conduct has taken place. This holds from the lowest biological functioning to the highest form of deliberate human behavior. If we consider the explanation which our author offers of the conduct of his unhappy hero, we see that in the end he has been exclusively interested in pointing out the motives to which the young man reacted. To point out motives is simply to recognize the end for the sake of which the act is accomplished. Now, although this type of explanation is in daily use among all men of all times, it was not erected into a scientific system before the reflections of Plato and Aristotle had shown of what extension it was susceptible. Aristotle in particular is responsible for having pushed to the very limit the notion that the greater part of nature’s happenings can be explained in terms of the end for the sake of which they occur. The whole drama of nature was to him what that of organic life is to most of us, the struggle of individual beings to accomplish their natural purposes. But, interested as Aristotle was in pushing this concept of purpose in nature to the limit, he could not blind himself to the fact that no purpose could be found in nature which was always and invariably accomplished or attained by the beings whose nature it was to struggle for it. Consequently, he was in the habit of saying that “laws of nature (by which he meant of laws of purpose) were descriptions of what happens always, or for the most part.” That is to say, they pointed out the behavior that was normal, but not free from exception. Nature was full of the accidental, of the abortive; and although later science did its best to exclude this notion of the accidental in nature’s happenings, the effort was uniformly unsuccessful and, I think, wrongly inspired. For it is exactly to the circumstance that laws of purpose are statements of average and not of unexceptional fact, that they owe their scientific value as labor-saving devices. And what is perhaps of more interest in the present connection, it is to this very lack of rigor in the laws governing animal and human behavior that we owe our right to regard the individual to which they apply as free.

In this respect the contrast between laws of purpose with the situation of the things to which they apply, and the laws of mechanics with the predicament of the things they govern, is complete. For example, the most inveterate statistician will hardly venture beyond the point of asserting that the man of alcoholic heredity will for the most part be unable to resist the attraction of drink. Yet sometimes he will be able to, for sometimes he does resist. Can one conceive of the student of mechanics contenting himself with the result that bodies generally fall to earth with an acceleration of thirty-two feet per second? During all the while Mercury’s unorthodox behavior baffled Newtonian physics, could any astronomer be found suggesting that perhaps this was a case of exceptional gravitation? As with heredity, so with all the other so-called forces our author brings to bear upon the conduct of his hero, giving in the end the illusion of mechanically determined action. Heredity, environment, education, serve their purpose well enough as terms that point out an analogy between the ends that attract beings of like history, but they yield only an expectation of the normal, not an assurance of the inevitable. Nor could any increase of statistical data of this kind do more than give us the materials for a closer calculus of probabilities. It is for the reason that all the laws which apply to human conduct are of this statistical nature, that, being permanently unable to predict it, we must regard it as free. And to be free to attain or not to attain a given end, is to be responsible, is to possess the first condition of a moral nature. Nor, in attaining to this insight have we sacrificed aught of our mechanical ideal. Only, who cares that atoms may neither be saved nor damned, if the beings they so fleetingly compose may be both? One might almost say that moral beings pass over the surface of mechanism as waves upon the face of the waters. But they constitute its beauty and its terror.

May we not then sum up our conclusions in some such form as this?--Mechanical laws do completely determine the conduct of everything to which they may be applied, but they cannot be applied to an animate being, since no mechanical definition of such a being is possible. Laws of purpose can be applied to such a being, but they do not completely determine his conduct. It is because the only law which can thus apply to a human being does not necessitate his behavior, that we are obliged to regard that behavior as free and the being himself as responsible. The most that we can do in terms of such laws is to calculate the chances for or against the individual’s success, for or against his ultimate worth.

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Here let us stop. Our discussion shows signs of falling into the abstract and mathematical, and one may wonder whether anything practical can come of it. One will recall the unhappy disciple of Adrien Sixte, and will ask oneself: What answer, after all, are we return to his cry, “De profundis!” Can we offer him any solace in his wretchedness? I think we can, only it is not the kind of solace he asks for, nor can it come from the direction in which he seeks it. I should be inclined to say to him, to Fichte in his Spinozistic mood, to any other over whom the mechanical ideal hangs heavily: This ideal is a safe guide in all thinking for which it has a meaning; no atom in your body nor out of it, but what is determined by mechanical necessity; but the sum of these atoms is not you; there is a difference between the whole we call a man, and the sum of the atoms that make up the machine that is to him. These atoms may come and go, the man remains. What constitutes his nature as a living being, an animal, a man, can receive no definition in terms of the atoms now in his body, nor those that may later take their place. You as living, as animal, as man, can be defined only in terms of the ends common to the individuals of these classes. In so far as thus natured, you fall under laws not of a mechanical order. They are laws of average which determine not you, but your chances of accomplishing the ends that define your being. In so far as you accomplish such ends, you are good of your kind; in so far as you fail, you are evil,--and if you fail egregiously enough, you are a monster. The most your self-analysis could have made out by the way of excuse is that the chances were against you. And this indeed you may have made out, for who could maintain that all men have equal chances in this world? But to have had the chances against you, is not to have been determined as a falling rock is determined; there is no chance for it.

In the most mechanical system, then, there is, so long as classification of its parts in terms of purpose is possible, a distinction between good and bad, with enough freedom to make this distinction meaningful. But such a philosophy may still seem hard. Even to have the chances against one, is not this a gloomy situation? Is there, then, no supreme end to accomplish which all men’s chances are equal, so that at each moment of life the road to perfection is equally open to all, and equally wide for all? We know how many and how beautiful the dreams of such a world-view, recorded in man’s long history. To judge their rationality is for a deeper insight than mine. But be they real or be they dreams, there is yet one voice from the past whose sanity comes home to us. It is that of our old philosopher of Koenigsberg, which keeps repeating at this moment the sentence, “There is nothing good but a good will.” With this saying of Kant’s I should even hope to breathe inspiration into the souls that cry, “De profundis!” My last word to them would be: Trouble yourselves with nothing but to make the best of the chances that are left to you. There is nothing good but a good will.

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I would willingly take it as evidence that the instinct of the artist and the reflection of the philosopher are not unsympathetic, that when Bourget’s Disciple is at last brought out of his ordeal, it is not to be comforted with the longed-for assurance that all is necessitated in the soul; but rather to find for himself the way to redemption by making the best--the tragic best--of the chances that are left him.

DAVID HUME

1711-1776

The characters that have occupied us on two previous occasions, different as they are, have yet this in common; that their most passionate interest was centred in God, and their theory of what man is and ought to be depended upon the likeness in which God in the end appeared to them.