But the Irish Bishop had reckoned without the Scotch sceptic. David Hume (1711–1776) at the age of twenty-six shocked all Christendom with his highly heretical Treatise on Human Nature,—one of the classics and marvels of modern philosophy. We know the mind, said Hume, only as we know matter: by perception, though it be in this case internal. Never do we perceive any such entity as the “mind”; we perceive merely separate ideas, memories, feelings, etc. The mind is not a substance, an organ that has ideas; it is only an abstract name for the series of ideas; the perceptions, memories and feelings are the mind; there is no observable “soul” behind the process of thought. The result appeared to be that Hume had as effectually destroyed mind as Berkeley had destroyed matter. Nothing was left; and philosophy found itself in the midst of ruins of its own making. No wonder that a wit advised the abandonment of the controversy, saying: “No matter, never mind.”
But Hume was not content to destroy orthodox religion by dissipating the concept of soul; he proposed also to destroy science by dissolving the concept of law. Science and philosophy alike, since Bruno and Galileo, had been making much of natural law, of “necessity” in the sequence of effect upon cause; Spinoza had reared his majestic metaphysics upon this proud conception. But observe, said Hume, that we never perceive causes, or laws; we perceive events and sequences, and infer causation and necessity; a law is not an eternal and necessary decree to which events are subjected, but merely a mental summary and shorthand of our kaleidoscopic experience; we have no guarantee that the sequences hitherto observed will re-appear unaltered in future experience. “Law” is an observed custom in the sequence of events; but there is no “necessity” in custom.
Only mathematical formulas have necessity—they alone are inherently and unchangeably true; and this merely because such formulae are tautological—the predicate is already contained in the subject; “3 X 3 = 9” is an eternal and necessary truth only because “3 X 3” and “9” are one and the same thing differently expressed; the predicate adds nothing to the subject. Science, then, must limit itself strictly to mathematics and direct experiment; it cannot trust to unverified deduction from “laws.” “When we run through libraries, persuaded of these principles,” writes our uncanny sceptic, “what havoc must we make! If we take in our hands any volume of school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, ‘Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?’ No. ‘Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?’ No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”4
Imagine how the ears of the orthodox tingled at these words. Here the epistemological tradition—the inquiry into the nature, sources, and validity of knowledge—had ceased to be a support to religion; the sword with which Bishop Berkeley had slain the dragon of materialism had turned against the immaterial mind and the immortal soul; and in the turmoil science itself had suffered severe injury. No wonder that when Immanuel Kant, in 1775, read a German translation of the works of David Hume, he was shocked by these results, and was roused, as he said, from the “dogmatic slumber” in which he had assumed without question the essentials of religion and the bases of science. Were both science and faith to be surrendered to the sceptic? What could be done to save them?
3. FROM ROUSSEAU TO KANT
To the argument of the Enlightenment, that reason makes for materialism, Berkeley had essayed the answer that matter does not exist. But this had led, in Hume, to the retort that by the same token mind does not exist either. Another answer was possible—that reason is no final test. There are some theoretical conclusions against which our whole being rebels; we have no right to presume that these demands of our nature must be stifled at the dictates of a logic which is after all but the recent construction of a frail and deceptive part of us. How often our instincts and feelings push aside the little syllogisms which would like us to behave like geometrical figures, and make love with mathematical precision! Sometimes, no doubt,—and particularly in the novel complexities and artificialities of urban life,—reason is the better guide; but in the great crises of life, and in the great problems of conduct and belief, we trust to our feelings rather than to our diagrams. If reason is against religion, so much the worse for reason!
Such, in effect, was the argument of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who almost alone, in France, fought the materialism and atheism of the Enlightenment. What a fate for a delicate and neurotic nature, to have been cast amidst the robust rationalism and the almost brutal hedonism5 of the Encyclopedists! Rousseau had been a sickly youth, driven into brooding and introversion by his physical weakness and the unsympathetic attitude of his parents and teachers; he had escaped from the stings of reality into a hothouse world of dreams, where the victories denied him in life and love could be had for the imagining. His Confessions reveal an unreconciled complex of the most refined sentimentality with an obtuse sense of decency and honor; and through it all an unsullied conviction of his moral superiority.6
In 1749 the Academy of Dijon offered a prize for an essay on the question, “Has the Progress of the Sciences and the Arts Contributed to Corrupt, or to Purify, Morals?” Rousseau’s essay won the prize. Culture is much more of an evil than a good, he argued—with all the intensity and sincerity of one who, finding culture out of his reach, proposed to prove it worthless. Consider the frightful disorders which printing has produced in Europe. Wherever philosophy arises, the moral health of the nation decays. “It was even a saying among the philosophers themselves that since learned men had appeared, honest men were nowhere to be found.” “I venture to declare that a state of reflection is contrary to nature; and that a thinking man” (an “intellectual,” as we would now say) “is a depraved animal.” It would be better to abandon our overrapid development of the intellect, and to aim rather at training the heart and the affections. Education does not make a man good; it only makes him clever—usually for mischief. Instinct and feeling are more trustworthy than reason.
In his famous novel, La Nouvelle Héloise (1761), Rousseau illustrated at great length the superiority of feeling to intellect; sentimentality became the fashion among the ladies of the aristocracy, and among some of the men; France was for a century watered with literary, and then with actual, tears; and the great movement of the European intellect in the eighteenth century gave way to the romantic emotional literature of 1789–1848. The current carried with it a strong revival of religious feeling; the ecstasies of Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme (1802) were merely an echo of the “Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” which Rousseau included in his epochal essay on education—Emile (1762). The argument of the “Confession” was briefly this: that though reason might be against belief in God and immortality, feeling was overwhelmingly in their favor; why should we not trust in instinct here, rather than yield to the despair of an arid scepticism?
When Kant read Emile he omitted his daily walk under the linden trees, in order to finish the book at once. It was an event in his life to find here another man who was groping his way out of the darkness of atheism, and who boldly affirmed the priority of feeling over theoretical reason in these supra-sensual concerns. Here at last was the second half of the answer to irreligion; now finally all the scoffers and doubters would be scattered. To put these threads of argument together, to unite the ideas of Berkeley and Hume with the feelings of Rousseau, to save religion from reason, and yet at the same time to save science from scepticism—this was the mission of Immanuel Kant.