Lecture V

ON MYSTICISM.

Distinction between the philosophy that we profess and mysticism. Mysticism consists in pretending to know God without an intermediary.--Two sorts of mysticism.--Mysticism of sentiment. Theory of sensibility. Two sensibilities--the one external, the other internal, and corresponding to the soul as external sensibility corresponds to nature.--Legitimate part of sentiment.--Its aberrations.--Philosophical mysticism. Plotinus: God, or absolute unity, perceived without an intermediary by pure thought.--Ecstasy.--Mixture of superstition and abstraction in mysticism.--Conclusion of the first part of the course.

Whether we turn our attention to the forces and the laws that animate and govern matter without belonging to it, or as the order of our labors calls us to do, reflect upon the universal and necessary truths which our mind discovers but does not constitute, the least systematic use of reason makes us naturally conclude from the forces and laws of the universe that there is a first intelligent mover, and from necessary truths that there is a necessary being who alone is their substance. We do not perceive God, but we conceive him, upon the faith of this admirable world exposed to our view, and upon that of this other world, more admirable still, which we bear in ourselves. By this double road we succeed in going to God. This natural course is that of all men: it must be sufficient for a sound philosophy. But there are feeble and presumptuous minds that do not know how to go thus far, or do not know how to stop there. Confined to experience, they do not dare to conclude from what they see in what they do not see, as if at all times, at the sight of the first phenomenon that appears to their eyes, they did not admit that this phenomenon has a cause, even when this cause does not come within the reach of their senses. They do not perceive it, yet they believe in it, for the simple reason that they necessarily conceive it. Man and the universe are also facts that cannot but have a cause, although this cause may neither be seen by our eyes nor touched by our hands. Reason has been given us for the very purpose of going, and without any circuit of reasoning, from the visible to the invisible, from the finite to the infinite, from the imperfect to the perfect, and also, from necessary and universal truths, which surround us on every side, to their eternal and necessary principle. Such is the natural and legitimate bearing of reason. It possesses an evidence of which it renders no account, and is not thereby less irresistible to whomsoever does not undertake to contest with God the veracity of the faculties which he has received. But one does not revolt against reason with impunity. It punishes our false wisdom by giving us up to extravagance. When one has confined himself to the narrow limits of what he directly perceives, he is smothered by these limits, wishes to go out of them at any price, and invokes some other means of knowing; he did not dare to admit the existence of an invisible God, and now behold him aspiring to enter into immediate communication with him, as with sensible objects, and the objects of consciousness. It is an extreme feebleness for a rational being thus to doubt reason, and it is an incredible rashness, in this despair of intelligence, to dream of direct communication with God. This desperate and ambitious dream is mysticism.

It behooves us to separate with care this chimera, that is not without danger, from the cause that we defend. It behooves us so much the more to openly break with mysticism, as it seems to touch us more nearly, as it pretends to be the last word of philosophy, and as by an appearance of greatness it is able to seduce many a noble soul, especially at one of those epochs of lassitude, when, after the cruel disappointment of excessive hopes, human reason, having lost faith in its own power without having lost the need of God, in order to satisfy this immortal need, addresses itself to every thing except itself, and in fault of knowing how to go to God by the way that is open to it, throws itself out of common sense, and tries the new, the chimerical, even the absurd, in order to attain the impossible.

Mysticism contains a pusillanimous skepticism in the place of reason, and, at the same time, a faith blind and carried even to the oblivion of all the conditions imposed upon human nature. To conceive God under the transparent veil of the universe and above the highest truths, is at once too much and too little for mysticism. It does not believe that it knows God, if it knows him only in his manifestations and by the signs of his existence: it wishes to perceive him directly, it wishes to be united to him, sometimes by sentiment, sometimes by some other extraordinary process.

Sentiment plays so important a part in mysticism, that our first care must be to investigate the nature and proper function of this interesting and hitherto ill-studied part of human nature.

It is necessary to distinguish sentiment well from sensation. There are, in some sort, two sensibilities: one is directed to the external world, and is charged with transmitting to the soul the impressions that it sees; the other is wholly interior, and is related to the soul as the other is to nature,--its function is to receive the impression, and, as it were, the rebound of what passes in the soul. Have we discovered any truth? there is something in us which feels joy on account of it. Have we performed a good action? we receive our reward in a feeling of satisfaction less vivid, but more delicate and more durable than all the agreeable sensations that come from the body. It seems as if intelligence also had its intimate organ, which suffers or enjoys, according to the state of the intelligence. We bear in ourselves a profound source of emotion, at once physical and moral, which expresses the union of our two natures. The animal does not go beyond sensation, and pure thought belongs only to the angelic nature. The sentiment that partakes of sensation and thought is the portion of humanity. Sentiment is, it is true, only an echo of reason; but this echo is sometimes better understood than reason itself, because it resounds in the most intimate, the most delicate portions of the soul, and moves the entire man.

It is a singular, but incontestable fact, that as soon as reason has conceived truth, the soul attaches itself to it, and loves it. Yes, the soul loves truth. It is a wonderful thing that a being strayed into one corner of the universe, alone charged with sustaining himself against so many obstacles, who, it would seem, has enough to do to think of himself, to preserve and somewhat embellish his life, is capable of loving what is not related to him, and exists only in an invisible world! This disinterested love of truth gives evidence of the greatness of him who feels it.

Reason takes one step more:--it is not contented with truth, even absolute truth, when convinced that it possesses it ill, that it does not possess it as it really is; as long as it has not placed it upon its eternal basis; having arrived there, it stops as before its impassable barrier, having nothing more to seek, nothing more to find. Sentiment follows reason, to which it is attached; it stops, it rests, only in the love of the infinite being.

In fact, it is the infinite that we love, while we believe that we are loving finite things, even while loving truth, beauty, virtue. And so surely is it the infinite itself that attracts and charms us, that its highest manifestations do not satisfy us until we have referred them to their immortal source. The heart is insatiable, because it aspires after the infinite. This sentiment, this need of the infinite, is at the foundation of the greatest passions, and the most trifling desires. A sigh of the soul in the presence of the starry heavens, the melancholy attached to the passion of glory, to ambition, to all the great emotions of the soul, express it better without doubt, but they do not express it more than the caprice and mobility of those vulgar loves, wandering from object to object in a perpetual circle of ardent desires, of poignant disquietudes, and mournful disenchantments.

Let us designate another relation between reason and sentiment.

The mind at first precipitates itself towards its object without rendering to itself an account of what it does, of what it perceives, of what it feels. But, with the faculty of thinking, of feeling, it has also that of willing; it possesses the liberty of returning to itself, of reflecting on its own thought and sentiment, of consenting to this, or of resisting it, of abstaining from it, or of reproducing its thought and sentiment, while stamping them with a new character. Spontaneity, reflection,--these are the two great forms of intelligence. One is not the other; but, after all, the latter does little more than develop the former; they contain at bottom the same things:--the point of view alone is different. Every thing that is spontaneous is obscure and confused; reflection carries with it a clear and distinct view.

Reason does not begin by reflection; it does not at first perceive the truth as universal and necessary; consequently, when it passes from idea to being, when it refers truth to the real being that is its subject, it has not sounded, it even has no suspicion of the depth of the chasm it passes; it passes it by means of the power which is in it, but it is not astonished at what it has done. It is subsequently astonished, and undertakes by the aid of the liberty with which it is endowed, to do the opposite of what it has done, to deny what it has affirmed. Here commences the strife between sophism and common sense, between false science and natural truth, between good and bad philosophy, both of which come from free reflection. The sad and sublime privilege of reflection is error; but reflection is the remedy for the evil it produces. If it can deny natural truth, usually it confirms it, returns to common sense by a longer or shorter circuit; it opposes in vain all the tendencies of human nature, by which it is almost always overcome, and brought back submissive to the first inspirations of reason, fortified by this trial. But there is nothing more in the end than there was at the beginning; only in primitive inspiration there was a power which was ignorant of itself, and in the legitimate results of reflection there is a power which knows itself:--one is the triumph of instinct, the other, that of true science.

Sentiment which accompanies intelligence in all its proceedings presents the same phenomena.

The heart, like reason, pursues the infinite, and the only difference there is in these pursuits is, that sometimes the heart seeks the infinite without knowing that it seeks it, and sometimes it renders to itself an account of the final end of the need of loving what disturbs it. When reflection is added to love, if it finds that the object loved is in fact worthy of being loved, far from enfeebling love, it strengthens it; far from clipping its divine wings, it develops them, and nourishes them, as Plato says. But if the object of love is only a symbol of the true beauty, only capable of exciting the desire of the soul without satisfying it, reflection breaks the charm which held the heart, dissipates the chimera that enchained it. It must be very sure in regard to its attachments, in order to dare to put them to the proof of reflection. O Psyche! Psyche! preserve thy good fortune; do not sound the mystery too deeply. Take care not to bring the fearful light near the invisible lover with whom thy soul is enamored. At the first ray of the fatal lamp love is awakened, and flies away. Charming image of what takes place in the soul, when to the serene and unsuspecting confidence of sentiment succeeds reflection with its bitter train. This is perhaps also the meaning of the biblical account of the tree of knowledge. Before science and reflection are innocence and faith. Science and reflection at first engender doubt, disquietude, distaste for what one possesses, the disturbed pursuit of what one knows not, troubles of mind and soul, sore travail of thought, and, in life, many faults, until innocence, forever lost, is replaced by virtue, simple faith by true science, until love, through so many vanishing illusions, finally succeeds in reaching its true object.

Spontaneous love has the native grace of ignorance and happiness. Reflective love is very different; it is serious, it is great, even in its faults, with the greatness of liberty. Let us not be in haste to condemn reflection: if it often produces egotism, it also produces devotion. What, in fact, is self-devotion? It is giving ourselves freely, with full knowledge of what we are doing. Therein consists the sublimity of love, love worthy of a noble and generous creature, not an ignorant and blind love. When affection has conquered selfishness, instead of loving its object for its own sake, the soul gives itself to its object, and miracle of love, the more it gives the more it possesses, nourishing itself by its own sacrifices, and finding its strength and its joy in its entire self-abandonment. But there is only one being who is worthy of being thus loved, and who can be thus loved without illusions, and without mistakes, at once without limits, and without regret, to wit, the perfect being who alone does not fear reflection, who alone can fill the entire capacity of our heart.

Mysticism corrupts sentiment by exaggerating its power.

Mysticism begins by suppressing in man reason, or, at least, it subordinates and sacrifices reason to sentiment.

Listen to mysticism: it says that by the heart alone is man in relation with God. All that is great, beautiful, infinite, eternal, love alone reveals to us. Reason is only a lying faculty. Because it may err, and does err, it is said that it always errs. Reason is confounded with every thing that it is not. The errors of the senses, and of reasoning, the illusions of the imagination, even the extravagances of passion, which sometimes give rise to those of mind, every thing is laid to the charge of reason. Its imperfections are triumphed over, its miseries are complacently exhibited; the most audacious dogmatical system--since it aspires to put man and God in immediate communication--borrows against reason all the arms of skepticism.

Mysticism goes farther: it attacks liberty itself; it orders liberty to renounce itself, in order to identify itself by love with him from whom the infinite separates us. The ideal of virtue is no longer the courageous perseverance of the good man, who, in struggling against temptation and suffering, makes life holy; it is no longer the free and enlightened devotion of a loving soul; it is the entire and blind abandonment of ourselves, of our will, of our being, in a barren contemplation of thought, in a prayer without utterance, and almost without consciousness.

The source of mysticism is in that incomplete view of human nature, which knows not how to discern in it what therein is most profound, which betakes itself to what is therein most striking, most seizing, and, consequently, also most seizable. We have already said that reason is not noisy, and often is not heard, whilst its echo of sentiment loudly resounds. In this compound phenomenon, it is natural that the most apparent element should cover and dim the most obscure.

Moreover, what relations, what deceptive resemblances between these two faculties! Without doubt, in their development, they manifestly differ; when reason becomes reasoning, one easily distinguishes its heavy movement from the flight of sentiment; but spontaneous reason is almost confounded with sentiment,--there is the same rapidity, the same obscurity. Add that they pursue the same object, and almost always go together. It is not, then, astonishing that they should be confounded.

A wise philosophy distinguishes them without separating them. Analysis demonstrates that reason precedes, and that sentiment follows. How can we love what we are ignorant of? In order to enjoy the truth, is it not necessary to know it more or less? In order to be moved by certain ideas, is it not necessary to have possessed them in some degree? To absorb reason in sentiment is to stifle the cause in the effect. When one speaks of the light of the heart, he designates, without knowing it, that light of the spontaneous reason which discovers to us truth by a pure and immediate intuition entirely opposite to the slow and laborious processes of the reflective reason and reasoning.

Sentiment by itself is a source of emotion, not of knowledge. The sole faculty of knowledge is reason. At bottom, if sentiment is different from sensation, it nevertheless pertains on all sides to general sensibility, and it is, like it, variable; it has, like it, its interruptions, its vivacity, and its lassitude, its exaltation and its short-comings. The inspirations of sentiment, then, which are essentially mobile and individual, cannot be raised to a universal and absolute rule. It is not so with reason; it is constantly the same in each one of us, the same in all men. The laws that govern its exercise constitute the common legislation of all intelligent beings. There is no intelligence that does not conceive some universal and necessary truth, and, consequently, the infinite being who is its principle. These grand objects being once known excite in the souls of all men the emotions that we have endeavored to describe. These emotions partake of the dignity of reason and the mobility of imagination and sensibility. Sentiment is the harmonious and living relation between reason and sensibility. Suppress one of the two terms, and what becomes of the relation? Mysticism pretends to elevate man directly to God, and does not see that in depriving reason of its power, it really deprives him of that which makes him know God, and puts him in a just communication with God by the intermediary of eternal and infinite truth.

The fundamental error of mysticism is, that it discards this intermediary, as if it were a barrier and not a tie: it makes the infinite being the direct object of love. But such a love can be sustained only by superhuman efforts that end in folly. Love tends to unite itself with its object: mysticism absorbs love in its object. Hence the extravagances of that mysticism so severely and so justly condemned by Bossuet and the Church in quietism. Quietism lulls to sleep the activity of man, extinguishes his intelligence, substitutes indolent and irregular contemplation for the seeking of truth and the fulfilment of duty. The true union of the soul with God is made by truth and virtue. Every other union is a chimera, a peril, sometimes a crime. It is not permitted man to reject, under any pretext, that which makes him man, that which renders him capable of comprehending God, and expressing in himself an imperfect image of God, that is to say, reason, liberty, conscience. Without doubt, virtue has its prudence, and if we must never yield to passion, there are diverse ways of combating it in order to conquer it. One can let it subside, and resignation and silence may have their legitimate employment. There is a portion of truth, of utility even, in the Spiritual Letters, even in the Maxims of the Saints. But, in general, it is unsafe to anticipate in this world the prerogatives of death, and to dream of sanctity when virtue alone is required of us, when virtue is so difficult to attain, even imperfectly. The best quietism can, at most, be only a halt in the course, a truce in the strife, or rather another manner of combating. It is not by flight that battles are gained; in order to gain them it is necessary to come to an engagement, so much the more as duty consists in combating still more than in conquering. Of the two opposite extremes--stoicism and quietism--the first, taken all in all, is preferable to the second; for if it does not always elevate man to God, it maintains, at least, human personality, liberty, conscience, whilst quietism, in abolishing these, abolishes the entire man. Oblivion of life and its duties, inertness, sloth, death of soul,--such are the fruits of that love of God, which is lost in the sterile contemplation of its object, provided it does not cause still sadder aberrations! There comes a moment when the soul that believes itself united with God, puffed up with this imaginary possession, despises both the body and human personality to such an extent that all its actions become indifferent to it, and good and evil are in its eyes the same. Thus it is that fanatical sects have been seen mingling crime and devotion, finding in one the excuse, often even the motive, of the other, and prefacing infamous irregularities or abominable cruelties with mystic transports,--deplorable consequences of the chimera of pure love, of the pretension of sentiment to rule over reason, to serve alone as a guide to the human soul, and to put itself in direct communication with God, without the intermediary of the visible world, and without the still surer intermediary of intelligence and truth.

But it is time to pass to another kind of mysticism, more singular, more learned, more refined, and quite as unreasonable, although it presents itself in the very name of reason.

We have seen that reason, if one of the principles which govern it be destroyed, cannot lay hold of truth, not even absolute truths of the intellectual and moral order; it refers all universal, necessary, absolute truths, to the being that alone can explain them, because in him alone are necessary and absolute existence, immutability, and infinity. God is the substance of uncreated truths, as he is the cause of created existences. Necessary truths find in God their natural subject. If God has not arbitrarily made them,--which is not in accordance with their essence and his,--he constitutes them, inasmuch as they are himself. His intelligence possesses them as the manifestations of itself. As long as our intelligence has not referred them to the divine intelligence, they are to it an effect without cause, a phenomenon without substance. It refers them, then, to their cause and their substance. And in that it obeys an imperative need, a fixed principle of reason.

Mysticism breaks in some sort the ladder that elevates us to infinite substance: it regards this substance alone, independently of the truth that manifests it, and it imagines itself to possess also the pure absolute, pure unity, being in itself. The advantage which mysticism here seeks, is to give to thought an object wherein there is no mixture, no division, no multiplicity, wherein every sensible and human element has entirely disappeared. But in order to obtain this advantage, it must pay the cost of it. It is a very simple means of freeing theodicea from every shade of anthropomorphism; it is reducing God to an abstraction, to the abstraction of being in itself. Being in itself, it is true, is free from all division, but upon the condition that it have no attribute, no quality, and even that it be deprived of knowledge and intelligence; for intelligence, if elevated as it might be, always supposes the distinction between the intelligent subject and the intelligible object. A God from whom absolute unity excludes intelligence, is the God of the mystic philosophy.

How could the school of Alexandria, how could Plotinus, its founder, in the midst of the lights of the Greek and Latin civilization, have arrived at such a strange notion of the Divinity? By the abuse of Platonism, by the corruption of the best and severest method, that of Socrates and Plato.

The Platonic method, the dialectic process, as its author calls it, searches in particular, variable, contingent things, for what they also have general, durable, one, that is to say, their Idea, and is thus elevated to Ideas, as to the only true objects of intelligence, in order to be elevated still from these Ideas, which are arranged in an admirable hierarchy, to the first of all, beyond which intelligence has nothing more to conceive, nothing more to seek. By rejecting in finite things their limit, their individuality, we attain genera, Ideas, and, by them, their sovereign principle. But this principle is not the last of genera, nor the last of abstractions; it is a real and substantial principle. The God of Plato is not called merely unity, he is called the Good; he is not the lifeless substance of the Eleatics; he is endowed with life and movement; strong expressions that show how much the God of the Platonic metaphysics differs from that of mysticism. This God is the father of the world. He is also the father of truth, that light of spirits. He dwells in the midst of Ideas which make him a true God inasmuch as he is with them. He possesses august and holy intelligence. He has made the world without any external necessity, and for the sole reason that he is good. In fine, he is beauty without mixture, unalterable, immortal, that makes him who has caught a glimpse of it disdain all earthly beauties. The beautiful, the absolute good, is too dazzling to be looked on directly by the eye of mortal; it must at first be contemplated in the images that reveal it to us, in truth, in beauty, in justice, as they are met here below, and among men, as the eye of one who has been a chained captive from infancy, must be gradually habituated to the light of the sun. Our reason, enlightened by true science, can perceive this light of spirits; reason rightly led can go to God, and there is no need, in order to reach him, of a particular and mysterious faculty.

Plotinus erred by pushing to excess the Platonic dialectics, and by extending them beyond the boundary where they should stop. In Plato they terminate at ideas, at the idea of the good, and produce an intelligent and good God; Plotinus applies them without limit, and they lead him into an abyss of mysticism. If all truth is in the general, and if all individuality is imperfection, it follows, that as long as we are able to generalize, as long as it is possible for us to overlook any difference, to exclude any determination, we shall not be at the limit of dialectics. Its last object, then, will be a principle without any determination. It will not spare in God being itself. In fact, if we say that God is a being, by the side of and above being, we place unity, of which being partakes, and which it cannot disengage, in order to consider it alone. Being is not here simple, since it is at once being and unity; unity alone is simple, for one cannot go beyond that. And still when we say unity, we determine it. True absolute unity must, then, be something absolutely indeterminate, which is not, which, properly speaking, cannot be named, the unnamable, as Plotinus says. This principle, which exists not, for a still stronger reason, cannot think, for all thought is still a determination, a manner of being. So being and thought are excluded from absolute unity. If Alexandrianism admits them, it is only as a forfeiture, a degradation of unity. Considered in thought, and in being, the supreme principle is inferior to itself; only in the pure simplicity of its indefinable essence is it the last object of science, and the last term of perfection.

In order to enter into communication with such a God, the ordinary faculties are not sufficient, and the theodicea of the school of Alexandria imposes upon it a quite peculiar psychology.

In the truth of things, reason conceives absolute unity as an attribute of absolute being, but not as something in itself, or, if it considers it apart, it knows that it considers only an abstraction. Does one wish to make absolute unity something else than an attribute of an absolute being, or an abstraction, a conception of human intelligence? Reason could accept nothing more on any condition. Will this barren unity be the object of love? But love, much more than reason, aspires after a real object. One does not love substance in general, but a substance that possesses such or such a character. In human friendships, suppress all the qualities of a person, or modify them, and you modify or suppress the love. This does not prove that you do not love this person; it only proves that the person is not for you without his qualities.

So neither reason nor love can attain the absolute unity of mysticism. In order to correspond to such an object, there must be in us something analogous to it, there must be a mode of knowing that implies the abolition of consciousness. In fact, consciousness is the sign of the me, that is to say, of that which is most determinate: the being who says, me, distinguishes himself essentially from every other; that is for us the type itself of individuality. Consciousness should degrade the ideal of dialectic knowledge, or every division, every determination must be wanting, in order to respond to the absolute unity of its object. This mode of pure and direct communication with God, which is not reason, which is not love, which excludes consciousness, is ecstasy ([Greek: ekstasis]). This word, which Plotinus first applied to this singular state of the soul, expresses this separation from ourselves which mysticism exacts, and of which it believes man capable. Man, in order to communicate with absolute being, must go out of himself. It is necessary that thought should reject all determinate thought, and, in falling back within its own depths, should arrive at such an oblivion of itself, that consciousness should vanish or seem to vanish. But that is only an image of ecstasy; what it is in itself, no one knows; as it escapes all consciousness, it escapes memory, escapes reflection, and consequently all expression, all human speech.

This philosophical mysticism rests upon a radically false notion of absolute being. By dint of wishing to free God from all the conditions of finite existence, one comes to deprive him of all the conditions of existence itself; one has such a fear that the infinite may have something in common with the finite, that he does not dare to recognize that being is common to both, save difference of degree, as if all that is not were not nothingness itself! Absolute being possesses absolute unity without any doubt, as it possesses absolute intelligence; but, once more, absolute unity without a real subject of inherence is destitute of all reality. Real and determinate are synonyms. What constitutes a being is its special nature, its essence. A being is itself only on the condition of not being another; it cannot but have characteristic traits. All that is, is such or such. Difference is an element as essential to being as unity itself. If, then, reality is in determination, it follows that God is the most determinate of beings. Aristotle is much more Platonic than Plotinus, when he says that God is the thought of thought, that he is not a simple power, but a power effectively acting, meaning thereby that God to be perfect, ought to have nothing in himself that is not completed. To finite nature it belongs to be, in a certain sense, indeterminate, since being finite, it has always in itself powers that are not realized; this indetermination diminishes as these powers are realized. So true divine unity is not abstract unity, it is the precise unity of perfect being in which every thing is accomplished. At the summit of existence, still more than at its low degree, every thing is determinate, every thing is developed, every thing is distinct, every thing is one. The richness of determinations is a certain sign of the plenitude of being. Reflection distinguishes these determinations from each other, but it is not necessary that it should in these distinctions see the limits. In us, for example, does the diversity of our faculties and their richest development divide the me and alter the identity and the unity of the person? Does each one of us believe himself less than himself, because he possesses sensibility, reason, and will? No, surely. It is the same with God. Not having employed a sufficient psychology, Alexandrian mysticism imagined that diversity of attributes is incompatible with simplicity of essence, and through fear of corrupting simple and pure essence, it made of it an abstraction. By a senseless scruple, it feared that God would not be sufficiently perfect, if it left him all his perfections; it regards them as imperfections, being as a degradation, creation as a fall; and, in order to explain man and the universe, it is forced to put in God what it calls failings, not having seen that these pretended failings are the very signs of his infinite perfection.

The theory of ecstasy is at once the necessary condition and the condemnation of the theory of absolute unity. Without absolute unity as the direct object of knowledge, of what use is ecstasy in the subject of knowledge? Ecstasy, far from elevating man to God, abases him below man; for it effaces in him thought, by taking away its condition, which is consciousness. To suppress consciousness, is to render all knowledge impossible; it is not to comprehend the perfection of this mode of knowing, wherein the limitation of subject and object gives at once the simplest, most immediate, and most determinate knowledge.

The Alexandrian mysticism is the most learned and the profoundest of all known mysticisms. In the heights of abstraction where it loses itself, it seems very far from popular superstitions; and yet the school of Alexandria unites ecstatic contemplation and theurgy. These are two things, in appearance, incompatible, but they pertain to the same principle, to the pretension of directly perceiving what inevitably escapes all our efforts. On the one hand, a refined mysticism aspires to God by ecstasy; on the other, a gross mysticism thinks to seize him by the senses. The processes, the faculties employed, differ, but the foundation is the same, and from this common foundation necessarily spring the most opposite extravagances. Apollonius of Tyanus is a popular Alexandrianist, and Jamblicus is Plotinus become a priest, mystagogue, and hierophant. A new worship shone forth by miracles; the ancient worship would have its own miracles, and philosophers boasted that they could make the divinity appear before other men. They had demons for themselves, and, in some sort, for their own orders; the gods were not only invoked, but evoked. Ecstasy for the initiates, theurgy for the crowd.

At all times and in all places, these two mysticisms have given each other the hand. In India and in China, the schools where the most subtile idealism is taught, are not far from pagodas of the most abject idolatry. One day the Bhagavad-Gita or Lao-tseu is read, an indefinable God is taught, without essential and determinate attributes; the next day there is shown to the people such or such a form, such or such a manifestation of this God, who, not having a form that belongs to him, can receive all forms, and being only substance in itself, is necessarily the substance of every thing, of a stone and a drop of water, of a dog, a hero, and a sage. So, in the ancient world under Julien, for example, the same man was at once professor in the school of Athens and guardian of the temple of Minerva or Cybele, by turns obscuring the Timaeus and the Republic by subtile commentaries, and exhibiting to the eyes of the multitude sometimes the sacred vale, sometimes the shrine of the good goddess, and in either function, as priest or philosopher, imposing on others and himself, under taking to ascend above the human mind and falling miserably below it, paying in some sort the penalty of an unintelligible metaphysics, in lending himself to the most shameless superstitions.

When the Christian religion triumphed, it brought humanity under a discipline that puts a rein upon this deplorable mysticism. But how many times has it brought back, under the reign of spiritual religion, all the extravagances of the religions of nature! It was to appear especially at the renaissance of the schools and of the genius of Paganism in the sixteenth century, when the human mind had broken with the philosophy of the Middle Age, without yet having arrived at modern philosophy. The Paracelsuses and the Von Helmonts renewed the Apolloniuses and the Jamblicuses, abusing some chemical and medical knowledge, as the former had abused the Socratic and Platonic method, altered in its character, and turned from its true object. And so, in the midst of the eighteenth century, has not Swedenborg united in his own person an exalted mysticism and a sort of magic, opening thus the way to those senseless persons who contest with me in the morning the solidest and best-established proofs of the existence of the soul and God, and propose to me in the evening to make me see otherwise than with my eyes, and to make me hear otherwise than with my ears, to make me use all my faculties otherwise than by their natural organs, promising me a superhuman science, on the condition of first losing consciousness, thought, liberty, memory, all that constitutes me an intelligent and moral being. I should know all, then, but at the cost of knowing nothing that I should know. I should elevate myself to a marvellous world, which, awakened and in a natural state, I am not even able to suspect, of which no remembrance will remain to me:--a mysticism at once gross and chimerical, which perverts both psychology and physiology; an imbecile ecstasy, renewed without genius from the Alexandrine ecstasy; an extravagance which has not even the merit of a little novelty, and which history has seen reappearing at all epochs of ambition and impotence.

This is what we come to when we wish to go beyond the conditions imposed upon human nature. Charron first said, and after him Pascal repeated it, that whoever would become an angel becomes a beast. The remedy for all these follies is a severe theory of reason, of what it can and what it cannot do; of reason enveloped first in the exercise of the senses, than elevating itself to universal and necessary ideas, referring them to their principle, to a being infinite and at the same time real and substantial, whose existence it conceives, but whose nature it is always interdicted to penetrate and comprehend. Sentiment accompanies and vivifies the sublime intuitions of reason, but we must not confound these two orders of facts, much less smother reason in sentiment. Between a finite being like man and God, absolute and infinite substance, there is the double intermediary of that magnificent universe open to our gaze, and of those marvellous truths which reason conceives, but has not made more than the eye makes the beauties it perceives. The only means that is given us of elevating ourselves to the Being of beings, without being dazzled and bewildered, is to approach him by the aid of a divine intermediary; that is to say, to consecrate ourselves to the study and the love of truth, and, as we shall soon see, to the contemplation and reproduction of the beautiful, especially to the practice of the good.

FOOTNOTES:

See the preceding lectures.

See the Phaedrus and the Banquet, vol. vii. of our translation.

We shall not be accused of perverting the holy Scriptures by these analogies, for we give them only as analogies, and St. Augustine and Bossuet are full of such.

See part ii., The Beautiful, lecture 6, and part iii., lecture 13, on the Morals of Sentiment. See also our Pascal, preface of the last edition, p. 8, etc., vol. i. of the 4th Series.

See the admirable work of Bossuet, Instruction sur les etats d'Oraison.

Lecture 4.

See especially in our writings the regular and detailed refutation of the double extravagance of considering substance apart from its determinations and its qualities, or of considering its qualities and its facilities apart from the being that possesses them. 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture 3, On Condillac, and vol. v., lectures 5 and 6, On Kant. We say, the same Series, vol. iv., p. 56: "There are philosophers beyond the Rhine, who, to appear very profound, are not contented with qualities and phenomena, and aspire to pure substance, to being in itself. The problem stated as follows, is quite insoluble: the knowledge of such a substance is impossible, for this very simple reason, that such a substance does not exist. Being in itself, das Ding in sich, which Kant seeks, escapes him, and this does not humiliate Kant and philosophy; for there is no being in itself. The human mind may form to itself an abstract and general idea of being, but this idea has no real object in nature. All being is determinate, if it is real; and to be determinate is to possess certain modes of being, transitory and accidental, or constant and essential. Knowledge of being in itself is then not merely interdicted to the human mind; it is contrary to the nature of things. At the other extreme of metaphysics is a powerless psychology, which, by fear of a hollow ontology, is condemned to voluntary ignorance. We are not able, say these philosophers, Mr. Dugald Stewart, for example, to attain being in itself; it is permitted us to know only phenomena and qualities: so that, in order not to wander in search of the substance of the soul, they do not dare affirm its spirituality, and devote themselves to the study of its different faculties. Equal error, equal chimera! There are no more qualities without being, than being without qualities. No being is without its determinations, and reciprocally its determinations are not without it. To consider the determinations of being independently of the being which possesses them, is no longer to observe; it is to abstract, to make an abstraction quite as extravagant as that of being considered independently of its qualities."

On the school of Alexandria, see 2d Series, vol. ii., Sketch of a General History of Philosophy, lecture 8, p. 211, and 3d Series, vol. i., passim.

See the previous lecture.

3d Series, vol. i., Ancient Philosophy, article Xenophanes, and article Zeno.

The Sophist, vol. xi. of our translation, p. 261.

Republic, book vii., p. 70 of vol. x.

The Sophist, p. 261, 262. The following little-known and decisive passage, which we have translated for the first time, must be cited:--"Stranger. But what, by Zeus! shall we be so easily persuaded that in reality, motion, life, soul, intelligence, do not belong to absolute being? that this being neither lives nor thinks, that this being remains immobile, immutable, without having part in august and holy intelligence?--Theatetus. That would be consenting, dear Eleatus, to a very strange assertion.--Stranger. Or, indeed, shall we accord to this being intelligence while we refuse him life?--Theatetus. That cannot be.--Stranger. Or, again, shall we say that there is in him intelligence and life, but that it is not in a soul that he possesses them?--Theatetus. And how could he possess them otherwise?--Stranger. In fine, that, endowed with intelligence, soul, and life, all animated as he is, he remains incomplete immobility.--Theatetus. All that seems to me unreasonable."

Timaeus, p. 119: "Let us say that the cause which led the supreme ordainer to produce and compose this universe was, that he was good."

Bouquet, discourse of Diotimus, vol. vi., and the 2d part of this vol., The Beautiful, lecture 7.

Republic. Ibid.

Book xii. of the Metaphysics. De la Metaphysique d'Aristotle, 2d edition, p. 200, etc.

On this fundamental point, see lecture 3, in this vol.--2d Series, vol. i., lecture 5, p. 97. "The peculiarity of intelligence is not the power of knowing, but knowing in fact. On what condition is there intelligence for us? It is not enough that there should be in us a principle of intelligence; this principle must be developed and exercised, and take itself as the object of its intelligence. The necessary condition of intelligence is consciousness--that is to say, difference. There can be consciousness only where there are several terms, one of which perceives the other, and at the same time perceives itself. That is knowing, and knowing self; that is intelligence. Intelligence without consciousness is the abstract possibility of intelligence, it is not real intelligence. Transfer this from human intelligence to divine intelligence, that is to say, refer ideas, I mean ideas in the sense of Plato, of St. Augustine, of Bossuet, of Leibnitz, to the only intelligence to which they can belong, and you will have, if I may thus express myself, the life of the divine intelligence ..., etc."

Vol. ii. of the 2d Series, Sketch of a General History of Philosophy*, lectures 5 and 6, *On the Indian Philosophy.

See the Euthyphron, vol. i. of our translation.

Lucien, Apuleius, Lucius of Patras.

2d Series, vol. ii., Sketch of a General History of Philosophy, lecture 10, On the Philosophy of the Renaissance.

One was then ardently occupied with magnetism, and more than a magnetizer, half a materialist, half a visionary, pretended to convert us to a system of perfect clairvoyance of soul, obtained by means of artificial sleep. Alas! the same follies are now renewed. Conjunctions are the fashion. Spirits are interrogated, and they respond! Only let there be consciousness that one does not interrogate, and superstition alone counterpoises skepticism.