Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/558

Rh 526 COUSIN the science if 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. The in- But these two forces, the me and the not-me, are finite or reciprocally limitative. As reason has apprehended these absolute two smlu it a neous phenomena, attention and sensation, and led us immediately to conceive the two sorts of distinct causes, correlative and reciprocally finite, to which 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 con ceived 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. Charge of This theodicy of Cousin laid him open obviously enough pantheism, to the charge of pantheism. This he repels, and his answer may be summed up as follows. Pantheism is pro perly the deification of the law of phenomena, the xtniverse God. But I distinguish the two finite causes self and not-self 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 Pan theism, 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 free dom 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. History of The elements found in consciousness are also to be found philo- in the history of humanity and in the history of philosophy. eophy. j n ex t erna i nature there are expansion and contraction which correspond to spontaneity and reflection. External nature again in contrast with humanity expresses spon taneity ; humanity expresses reflection. In human his tory 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 reflec tively. 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 repre sented 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 wo have in correspondence also with the idea, monarchy, democracy, constitutionalism. Eclecticism thus means the application of the psychologi- I cal method to the history of philosophy. Confronting the c various systems co-ordinated as sensualism, idealism, scep ticism, mysticism, with the facts of consciousness, the result was reached &quot; that each system expresses an order of phe nomena 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 reuniting all incomplete systems, we should have a complete philosophy, adequate to the totality of conscious ness.&quot; 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. Such is the system in outline. The historical position R of the system lies in its relations to Kant, Schelling, aiid tc Hegel. Cousin was opposed to Kant in asserting that the unconditioned in the form of infinite or absolute cause was but a mere unrealizable tentative or effort on the part of the mind, something different from a mere negation, yet not equivalent to a positive thought. With Cousin the absolute as the ground of being is grasped positively by the intelligence, and it renders all else intelligible ; it is not as with Kant a certain hypothetical or regulative need. With Schelling again Cousin agrees in regarding this supreme ground of all as positively apprehended, and as a source of development, but he utterly repudiates Schelling s method. The intellectual intuition either falls under the eye of consciousness, or it does not. If not, how do you know it and its object which are identical ? If it does, it comes within the sphere of psychology; and the objections to it as thus a relative, made by Schelling himself, are to be dealt with. Schelling s intellectual intuition is the mere negation of knowledge. Again, the pure being of Hegel is a mere abstraction, an hypothesis illegitimately assumed, which he has nowhere sought to vindicate. The very point to be established is the possibility of reaching being per se or pure being; yet in the Hegelian system this is the very thing assumed as a starting-point. Besides this, of course, objections might be made to the method of development, as not only sub verting the principle of contradiction, but as galvanizing negation into a means of advancing or developing the whole body of human knowledge and reality. The intellectual intuition of Schelling, as above consciousness, the pure being of Hegel, as an empty abstraction, uuvindicated.