I.
FRANCE.
The recent work of M. F. PAULHAN, _Le Nouveau Mysticisme_, places us in the presence of a feature of modern life, if not extremely important, at least very curious.
We assist at the formation of a new spirit. But what is it? What is its value? A reply to this question would exact a long and minute analysis of all social facts. M. Paulhan does not flatter himself that he has exhausted it, and he offers us only portions, although excellent and instructive, of the required work. He shows us in rapid review, the dissolution of the ancient world, the intellectual and moral anarchy which has to-day reached its highest possible point; he seeks, in the ruins amidst which we tread, the constructive elements of a new order of things, and makes an effort to foresee what it will be.
“The scientific mind,” writes he, “the religious spirit, pity for suffering, the sentiment of justice, social mysticism, the attraction for mysterious perhaps dangerous facts that we begin to have a glimpse of, the kind of new power which the knowledge of them can give us, a general need of universal harmony: such are the principal characters of the spirit which is forming itself.” They are not, he himself says, all new. It is not the presence of these elements which is significant, but rather the singular combination in which they occur, and we could say, the precipitate that they give in the particular chemical solution where they find themselves thrown. In every case, the phenomenon does not affect entirely, it seems to us, the same characters, according to whether we observe it in the philosophic or scientific order, in the practical order, or in that of sentiment, which literature represents. The name of mysticism does not belong to every part of the new spirit equally; or more exactly, the spirit which is produced could well not be truly mysticism, but only a side phenomenon, and the very evident resurrection of the spirit which is disappearing.
M. Paulhan, if I do not deceive myself, sometimes allows himself to be too much influenced by a certain literature, to which I do not allow a very great value, and of which even the sincerity may be suspected. It represents at first, to my mind, individual conditions, and it evidently impeaches some authors of a morbid diathesis. Many of our prophets, as is known in the _Quartier Latin_, have or affect vices which exclude by themselves all generating power. Then, it is very difficult, in our age, to appreciate exactly the relations of literature to the public mind, seeing the diversity of romantic books, and the correlation of one to the other is perhaps not so strict, so profound as it has been in other junctures of history. In short, the modern romance is a document the relative value of which needs to be established by a most severe critic.
Some facts dominate the question, viewed as a whole. It is necessary to show the work of the scientific mind, which has the result of creating new mental habits. It is necessary to consider also that the disorder, _the spirit of evil_, so finely analysed by M. Paulhan, corresponds chiefly to the interpretations of ignorance, to the exaggerations of sentiment, and to the dreams, more or less monstrous, of inventive fantasy. It is necessary, finally, if they wish to augur of the future, to endeavor to disengage the laws of construction, still badly defined, of our political fabrics. The thought of M. Paulhan is good at bottom, and the materials with which he constructs the _possible future_ are taken from the positive conditions of our mental and social life: in the practical order, “co-operation” is added to the social systems already existing, although disturbed, such as the family and the nation; in the ideal order, the conception, beyond that of humanity, of a “cosmical whole,” and a “universe,” which, to repeat it after Comte, will be favorable to man, in a certain sense, seeing that he causes it to exist.
We recommend the reading of this book. One’s time is never lost with a thinker of the stamp of M. Paulhan; he has the merit this time of disclosing to us in a few pages a vast horizon, where some points are delineated with clearness. Logicism has caused much evil in our country. Let us now beware of mysticism!
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One of the most curious episodes of this new mysticism is assuredly the Buddhist preaching, begun in France by a small group of writers. M. AUGUSTIN CHABOSEAU, one of the representatives of this religious tendency, publishes a work, _Essai sur la philosophie boudhique_,[50] which it is expedient to mention. M. Chaboseau has thought it would be of interest to sum up in a volume the results of the studies on Buddhism, and to present it “such as science has proved it, that is to say very different from what Christian polemists, worldly amusers, theosophic fanatics, endeavor to disseminate.” He has had the ambition to write this volume, and for my part, I do not refuse him my curiosity.
But that Buddhism truly contains a religious formula capable of attracting to it the souls of our Occident, I have difficulty in believing. This India is very far from us, and its confused philosophy is behind us. I do not think that the nations of to-day will return to a by-gone mode; and then, this doctrine of Sakya-Muni has something against it, that I hesitate to say, as it might seem puerile: its god is too fat. Its god or its sage, as you wish. Yes, that breadth of form, that opulence of flesh, taken as a mark of goodness and power, shocks our artistic taste. Do not forget that every religion which claims our will ought to satisfy our æsthetic sentiment: it is one of the essential factors of the religious sentiment, a compound sentiment where all the emotions of a race ought to find their harmony. The opposition of India to us, so striking in the ideal of the beautiful, still continues in metaphysical speculation. We are too moderate, too sober, for the debauches of imagination in which it delights. Buddhism will be to us only a passing excrescence, and I ask myself if it lives well in the souls where it has sincerely penetrated.
I should have much to do to speak, in the briefest manner, of all the books or treatises, which in a direct or indirect manner relate either to the war of Aryanism against Semitism, and principally against the Christianism in which certain authors see the most disastrous conquest of Semitic genius; or to the reviving of mystic traditions, strange dreams, and monstrous desires; or to a religious restoration, of which the most ordinary prejudice is to assure the immortality of the soul and to reopen the beyond to man. These works are in general of slight value; they are the multiplication of decays, and we are compelled to consider them as social wastes, of which the abundance betrays unquestionably the bad health of the organism, or at least a difficult crisis of its evolution.
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But let us return to the works of philosophy properly so-called. What are we to think of that of M. F. RAUH? I deceive myself much if his _Essai sur le fondement métaphysique der la morale_ is considered of much service in his own circles. M. Rauh, who belongs to the philosophic youth, the youth of the age, can be well assured that the partisans of scientific morality will not upbraid him for “the admiration of high metaphysical thoughts” with which he does himself honor, but he can fear lest the metaphysicians accuse him of further compromising metaphysics by the denser obscurities he casts on it. One is stupefied to find again in a modern book a phraseology so made up of abstract words, of substantives with capitals, and logical shadows which affect the posture of realities. Much study, much work, without advancing one step, and still worse, in order to throw us again into the _culs-de-sac_ from whence we have had so much difficulty to disengage ourselves. All the profit one can derive from this dialectic is to contemplate at the end the vague shadow of its own body that is perceived on the wall.
The metaphysicians of a certain school are not only reluctant to have to accept that morality is a natural formation, a social product, an historical fact; they wish further that the existence even of moral society should depend on the intelligence that they have of it, or of the explanation that they give of it. They affirm boldly, and these are the words even of M. Rauh, that “the fate of morality is united to that of metaphysics”—their metaphysics. This is a pretension as exorbitant as would be that of a naturalist who should refer the reality of the animal world to the idea he formed of zoölogical types, or that of a chemist who should subject the value of the positive results of science to a
## particular hypothesis as to the constitution of bodies.
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There are certain difficulties of language to criticise in the work of M. ISIDORE MAUS, barrister in the Court of Appeals at Brussels, _De la justice pénale, étude philosophique sur le droit de punir_. A curious spectator, he tells us, of the battle waged between the new school of anthropology and the ancient penal jurisprudence, he seeks to divine the issue of it. It will probably end, according to him, in the formation of a medium penal jurisprudence, which will accept limited responsibilities, and which, while protecting society, will do its best “to give to punishment all the advantages it can.”
It would be exaggerated no doubt, I willingly grant it, to take away from repression every mark of moral reparation, all weight of “reformative power”; but I am always shocked to hear partial responsibilities spoken of. From the social point of view, the responsibility remains perfect; it is united, indeed, to the very act of having caused injury, beyond all appreciation. From the point of view of the individual, the word responsibility has the grave inconvenience of implying that the quantity of liberty or free-will attributable to the delinquent is measured. It would be less compromising and more exact, to value simply the quality, the worth of the delinquent, according to the totality of his affective, intellectual, voluntary, and pathological character, according to the nature and the conditions of the act of which he is accused, etc. We should thus escape contradictions of words which easily become contradictions of fact; we should no more stumble at this latent difficulty of free-will, in medium cases—for _serious cases_ are never difficult. Words exercise a tyranny which jurists would do well to distrust.
Is not this, moreover, just about what M. Maus means by his favorite formula—that justice ought “to individualise as much as possible”? It is a pity only that he does not present his conclusions with the requisite clearness. His exposition is not distinct and frank. He has mental habitudes, subtilities of reasoning, which are of value at the Palais, but which it is suitable to rid oneself of when writing a book: his would gain much by being entirely remodeled, made clear and disentangled.
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M. E. DE LAVELEYE offers to the public a fourth edition, revised and considerably augmented, of his great work, _De la propriété et de ses formes primitives_. We have not to recall the numerous facts which this work contains and the knowledge of which has become sufficiently general; nor to commend M. de Laveleye, who no longer expects fresh praises for it. I have only to express the regret that he should have retained the theory of property expounded in the last chapter of his book, or rather the metaphysical conception of right with which he connects it. It seems as if he wished to excuse himself from reducing property to the simple value of a fact, modifiable in its forms, by indicating as a fixed point an “order” which shall be the best, which shall be _known_ and _wished_ of God, _sought_ and _realised_ by man.
M. de Laveleye knows it as well as any one. Right is only a rule, an expression of the relations of men among themselves, in a determined geographical and historical medium. Its changes depend, in part on external conditions, in part on the characters of man himself, the state and variable equilibrium of his passions and of his mentality. If certain forms of right establish themselves proportionally, in the course of the life of nations, the fact is explained by the constancy and the universality of certain conditions, either physical or mental; the repetition of social arrangements, which produces ultimately a more stable structure and constitutes a sort of axis of development, is somewhat analogous, if we may be permitted this comparison, to the repetition of the essential elements in all architecture, or of the primitive forms in all the products of the ceramic art. What is the good of enveloping with mystery the ideal we create ourselves, and of rendering obscure a notion that we can positively explain? But let us leave here this little quarrel, for it does not touch the solid groundwork of the book.
Still to signalise are: _Premiers principes métaphysiques de la science de la nature_, translated from Kant by M. M. CH. ANDLER and ED. CHAVANNES, who have written an interesting introduction _On the philosophy of nature in Kant_; and _L’Année philosophique, Iʳᵉ année_ 1890, published under the direction of F. PILLON, former manager of _La Critique philosophique_. There will be found in this last volume two profound studies, one by M. Renouvier on the phenomenist method, the other by M. Pillon on the criticism of the infinite, an excellent article by M. L. Dauriac on philosophy and particularly on the æsthetics of Guyau, finally a bibliography of French works which appeared in 1890. I wish good success to this publication; it will become valuable, and it will be still more so, in my opinion, if M. Pillon, will not recoil before the fatigue, no doubt sufficiently great, of adding to the Bibliography a critical sketch of the review articles published in the course of the year.
LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] Georges Carré, publisher. The other works mentioned in this article belong to the _Librarie Alcan_.