necessary. The recognition of universal and necessary principles
in knowledge is the essential point in psychology; it ought to
Impersonality
of reason.
be put first and emphasized to the last that these
exist, and that they are wholly impersonal or absolute.
The number of these principles, their enumeration
and classification, is an important point, but it is
secondary to that of the recognition of their true nature. This
was the point which Kant missed in his analysis, and this is the
fundamental truth which Cousin thinks he has restored to the
integrity of philosophy by the method of the observation of
consciousness. And how is this impersonality or absoluteness of
the conditions of knowledge to be established? The answer is in
substance that Kant went wrong in putting necessity first as the
criterion of those laws. This brought them within the sphere of
reflection, and gave as their guarantee the impossibility of
thinking them reversed; and led to their being regarded as
wholly relative to human intelligence, restricted to the sphere of
the phenomenal, incapable of revealing to us substantial reality—necessary,
yet subjective. But this test of necessity is a wholly
secondary one; these laws are not thus guaranteed to us; they
are each and all given to us, given to our consciousness, in an
act of spontaneous apperception or apprehension, immediately,
instantaneously, in a sphere above the reflective consciousness,
yet within the reach of knowledge. And “all subjectivity with
all reflection expires in the spontaneity of apperception. The
reason becomes subjective by relation to the voluntary and free
self; but in itself it is impersonal; it belongs not to this or to that
self in humanity; it belongs not even to humanity. We may say
with truth that nature and humanity belong to it, for without
its laws both would perish.”
But what is the number of those laws? Kant reviewing the enterprise of Aristotle in modern times has given a complete list of the laws of thought, but it is arbitrary in classification and may be legitimately reduced. According to Cousin, there are but two primary laws of thought, that Laws of reason. of causality and that of substance. From these flow naturally all the others. In the order of nature, that of substance is the first and causality second. In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.
These principles of reason, cause and substance, given thus psychologically, enable us to pass beyond the limits of the relative and subjective to objective and absolute reality,—enable us, in a word, to pass from psychology, or the science of knowledge, to ontology or the science of being. These laws are inextricably mixed in consciousness with the data of volition and sensation, with free activity and fatal action or impression, and they guide us in rising to a personal being, a self or free cause, and to an impersonal reality, a not-me—nature, the world of force—lying out of us, and modifying us. As I refer to myself the act of attention and volition, so I cannot but refer the sensation to some cause, necessarily other than myself, that is, to an external cause, whose existence is as certain for me as my own existence, since the phenomenon which suggests it to me is as certain as the phenomenon which had suggested my reality, and both are given in each other. I thus reach an objective impersonal world of forces which corresponds to the variety of my sensations. The relation of these forces or causes to each other is the order of the universe.
But these two forces, the me and the not-me, are reciprocally
limitative. As reason has apprehended these two simultaneous
phenomena, attention and sensation, and led us
immediately to conceive the two sorts of distinct
causes, correlative and reciprocally finite, to which
The infinite
or absolute.
they are related, so, from the notion of this limitation,
we find it impossible under the same guide not to conceive a
supreme cause, absolute and infinite, itself the first and last
cause of all. This is relatively to self and not-self what these
are to their proper effects. This cause is self-sufficient, and
is sufficient for the reason. This is God; he must be conceived
under the notion of cause, related to humanity and the world.
He is absolute substance only in so far as he is absolute cause,
and his essence lies precisely in his creative power. He thus
creates, and he creates necessarily.
This theodicy of Cousin laid him open obviously enough to the charge of pantheism. This he repels, and his answer may be summed up as follows. Pantheism is properly the deification of the law of phenomena, the universe God. But I distinguish the two finite causes self and not-self Charge of Pantheism. from each other and from the infinite cause. They are not mere modifications of this cause or properties, as with Spinoza,—they are free forces having their power or spring of action in themselves, and this is sufficient for our idea of independent finite reality. I hold this, and I hold the relation of these as effects to the one supreme cause. The God I plead for is neither the deity of Pantheism, nor the absolute unity of the Eleatics, a being divorced from all possibility of creation or plurality, a mere metaphysical abstraction. The deity I maintain is creative, and necessarily creative. The deity of Spinoza and the Eleatics is a mere substance, not a cause in any sense. As to the necessity under which Deity exists of acting or creating, this is the highest form of liberty, it is the freedom of spontaneity, activity without deliberation. His action is not the result of a struggle between passion and virtue. He is free in an unlimited manner; the purest spontaneity in man is but the shadow of the freedom of God. He acts freely but not arbitrarily, and with the consciousness of being able to choose the opposite part. He cannot deliberate or will as we do. His spontaneous action excludes at once the efforts and the miseries of will and the mechanical operation of necessity.
The elements found in consciousness are also to be found in the history of humanity and in the history of philosophy. In external nature there are expansion and contraction which correspond to spontaneity and reflection. External nature again in contrast with humanity expresses History of philosophy. spontaneity; humanity expresses reflection. In human history the East represents the spontaneous stage; the Pagan and Christian world represent stages of reflection.
This was afterwards modified, expanded and more fully expressed by saying that humanity in its universal development has three principal moments. First, in the spontaneous stage, where reflection is not yet developed, and art is imperfect, humanity has thought only of the immensity around it. It is preoccupied by the infinite. Secondly, in the reflective stage, mind has become an object to itself. It thus knows itself explicitly or reflectively. Its own individuality is now the only or at least the supreme thing. This is the moment of the finite. Thirdly, there comes an epoch in which the self or me is subordinated. Mind realizes another power in the universe. The finite and the infinite become two real correlatives in the relation of cause and product. This is the third and highest stage of development, the relation of the finite and the infinite. As philosophy is but the highest expression of humanity, these three moments will be represented in its history. The East typifies the infinite, Greece the finite or reflective epoch, the modern era the stage of relation or correlation of infinite and finite. In theology, the dominant philosophical idea of each of these epochs results in pantheism, polytheism, theism. In politics we have in correspondence also with the idea, monarchy, democracy, constitutionalism.
Eclecticism thus means the application of the psychological method to the history of philosophy. Confronting the various systems co-ordinated as sensualism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, with the facts of consciousness, the result was reached “that each system expresses an Eclecticism.order of phenomena and ideas, which is in truth very real, but which is not alone in consciousness, and which at the same time holds an almost exclusive place in the system; whence it follows that each system is not false but incomplete, and that in re-uniting all incomplete systems, we should have a complete philosophy, adequate to the totality of consciousness.” Philosophy, as thus perfected, would not be a mere aggregation of systems, as is ignorantly supposed, but an integration of the truth in each system after the false or incomplete is discarded.
