APPENDIX REPLY TO CRITICISMS

Before laying down the pen, I ought perhaps to reply to one or two objections.

The first reproach that has been addressed to me is contained in the words, "Naturalistic Evolutionism." A conception more or less materialistic of the universe is thus attributed to me, according to which, like Herbert Spencer, I should explain all things by the single law of evolution, and end sooner or later by reducing the laws of the moral world to the laws of the physical world, since I make of the first a simple transformation of the second. Need I say that this is the very opposite of my thought? It is true that I like to use the word evolution, and to consider all phenomena in their natural succession. But this is not a metaphysical doctrine; it is a process of study, a method which consists in these two essential rules: to observe each fact as it presents itself; and to observe it in its order, i.e. in the conditions in which it presents itself, because a fact only possesses its truth and value in that order and succession. On our planet, moral life emerges slowly and painfully out of organic life. Must we therefore conclude that there is no more in the one than in the other, and that they are of equal value? Certainly not. Both these series of phenomena must be placed in their relations and connections; but the method which makes them known to me gives me no more right to confound them than to separate them, to ignore their differences than to forget their analogies. It shows me, on the contrary, that there is advance, real progress from the one to the other; that the first in date has its end in the second; that there is a sort of living and continuous creation, each stage and degree of which reveals new riches and new glories. This is so thoroughly the oasis of my religious philosophy that there would be more ground or, at all events, more excuse for accusing me of denying the reality of the world than the continuous action of the Divine Creator.

It is true that the one reproach has not saved me from the other. Both have been addressed to me by persons who have not taken the trouble to reconcile them. The accusation of Pantheism, contradictory as it may seem, has been added to that of Naturalistic Evolutionism. I have been made to appear the blind and docile disciple of an idealism more or less Hegelian, which would annihilate the reality of second causes in order to contemplate in the universe the flux and transformation of a first cause or substance, of which one might either say that it is everything or that it is nothing. But here, again, they lose sight of the character of the method that I follow. It leads me to discover in my consciousness the mysterious and real co-existence of a particular cause, which is myself, and of a universal cause, which is God. That, I repeat, is a mystery impenetrable to analysis, but undeniable by any man who examines himself and enters into the ultimate basis of his life. It is the mystery out of which religion springs by an invincible necessity. Now, as this mystery is posited by me at the very outset of my researches, and maintained to the end, how can they legitimately reproach me with sacrificing either of the two terms which constitute it to the other—the first effect of which would be to dissipate and make impossible my theory of the psychological origin of religion? "In me," said Charles Secretan, "lives some one greater than me"—a mysterious guest whose universal and eternal action I feel beneath the variable phenomena of my empirical activity, to Whom, when I am good, confiding, humble, brave, I always attribute my goodness, my faith, my courage, my humility, as to Him I attribute my whole life.

I cannot comprehend the co-existence of the finite and the infinite; but this duality is everywhere. I observe that in the physical as in the moral world there is, in each phenomenon, a latent force, a sort of potential energy, which raises it and urges it beyond itself. Nature is perpetually becoming, that is to say, in perpetual travail. It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the future must simply repeat the past. Creation is not yet completed. "My Father worketh hitherto," said Jesus. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." But the little that I perceive of the Divine work demonstrates to me that it is progressive, that it raises and enriches life at every step, and that this progress accounts exactly for the essential antinomies amid which my reason loses itself and my heart adores. To wish to reduce everything to unity is to turn the kingdom of life into the domain of death. For my part, I have long since renounced what is justly called "the philosophy of identity," that abstract dialectic which, throwing all things back to their point of logical departure, renders perfectly incomprehensible and superfluous the ephemeral development which they have in our consciousness and in history. The painful contradictions observed by Pascal in our moral life, and the insoluble antinomies in our thought unveiled by Kant, always seem to me to go nearer to the bottom of things than the ontological deductions of Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel.

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In this book I have hardly noted any but facts that have been verified in myself and by myself. It is true that I suppose that every reflective reader is capable of finding them and tracing them out in his own personal experience. Those who are able and wishful to re-read my book in themselves, and thus verify my analyses, may perhaps draw some profit from it. Those who read me otherwise will not only lose their time and pains—they will misunderstand at every step the meaning of my phrases and the direction of my ideas. Beneath my reasonings or my images they will put other ideas and other intentions than mine, and they may afterwards, with an apparent good conscience, deduce from them the most terrible consequences.... Philosophical language lends itself to all and permits all; and the mischief of it is that it would be useless to desire to prevent these quarrels. New explanations only give rise to new misunderstandings, and simply serve to perpetuate a dispute without interest and without fruit. We can only repeat the saying of the ancient sages of Arabia: Magna est veritas et prævalebit.

THE END