Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/358

344 Flourens thought he had found a triumphant argument against materialism when he concluded that the brain was a simple and not a multiple organ, the unity of the brain appearing to him to be the proof and the security of the unity of the self. If his argument had been sound, the spiritual doctrine would to-day have been condemned by its own acknowledgment, for it now seems certain that the brain is not a simple but a composite organ.

This kind of independence is generally conceded to all the other sciences which are recognized and have had a long existence. Thus, we do not require political economy to establish the principle of duty, or history to prove the existence of a Providence. There is or there is not a Providence; but the historian knows nothing about it. There is or there is not a principle of duty; but the economist, as an economist, has no cognizance of it. We often even regard as culpable doctrines which make morals intervene in political economy, such as the socialist doctrines which aim to impose devotion and fraternity upon economical transactions. We admit that the law of competition is cruel, but we do not wish as economists to introduce a law of charity to correct it. That is a matter of morals, not of political economy. It is by observing such precise distinctions that political economy has succeeded in constituting itself as a science, This independence is useful not to political economy only, but to morals as well, which has no interest in seeing its peculiar principle confounded with the peculiar principle of the former science, which is mere utility.

The same is the case with history as related to theodicy. Surely, if there is a Providence, it should manifest itself in the series of human events. But no historian of the present, not even the most pious and most Christian, would think of bringing the name and action of God into his history. We explain all historical events by second and profane causes, often also by material or geographical conditions, as when the whole history of England is accounted for by the fact that it is an island. The intervention of gross passions is brought in; sometimes fortuitous encounters or physical needs are invoked; as when the invasions of the barbarians are accounted for by the necessity of their finding food. No historian would say to-day, in a book on the "origins" of France, that God urged the barbarians on, as Salvien did in his "De Gubernatione Dei." One might have religious scruples against pronouncing the name of God in the minor events of history; against saying, for example, that God desired that the Abbé Dubois should be nominated a cardinal, or that Du Barry should enter the bedchamber of the king. What would such a historian reply to a critic who should object to him: "You never pronounce the name of God; you never speak of Providence; your science is