CHAPTER VI

ILLUMINISM IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE

The characteristic that distinguishes English Illuminism is the reasonable adaptation of its theories to practical circumstances; this is best illustrated in the greatest man it has produced. Locke was for the preservation of faith in Revelation and tried to make it agree with reason. It was as impossible for him as for Thomas Aquinas to think that God’s world should mean anything in contradiction with the natural light He has granted to man. He sees in the Scriptures the revelation of truths which would have been out of reach of man’s natural powers, limited as they were to sense knowledge. Such a view was characteristic of the fair-mindedness of the practical and political man, but it held a snare in the sanction thus granted to the most unphilosophical and unhistorical notion of Deism and natural religion. The fact is that the most energetic champion of Subjectivism after Descartes could not realise at all the religious position of man towards the Divinity which is assertive of objectivism. His ethics take human felicity as the higher aim of theoretical and practical activity, which is not original at all, but has the merit of being quite consistent with his subjective assertions. In his contribution to pedagogy the commonsense of the practical man comes to temper the theoretical individualism which inspired him and he thus keeps generally on a level above the theory afterwards formulated by Rousseau. But nowhere does this inconsistency of his practical application with his main system appear as clearly as in his work on the State.

William of Orange stands to Locke as Cromwell does to Hobbes, not that the king can be compared to the dictator, but his reign beheld the inauguration of the political system which is the greatest gift of England to mankind; and this practical manifestation of the political genius of that country shows by its coincidence with its greatest theoretical contribution to philosophy how little practice and theory are severed in actual life, that is to say in history. Yet Locke was enforcing the distinction with all his might to avoid the inconsistency already noticed between the theoretical and practical aspects of his work. As Hobbes had done before him in England, and Grotius in Holland, he saw the basis of the State in a contract, but he was the first (although Algernon Sydney had prepared public opinion for such an idea) to assert that the collective will was embodied not in any single person, but in the majority of the people. There he was perfectly consistent with his gnoseology, the multiplicity of the data of sense knowledge destroyed the unity of the metaphysical conception. Only legislation, however, fell to the share of the majority; the executive and foreign policy were to be entrusted to hereditary monarchs. The exigencies of the new notions of liberty and equality of man were tempered by the practical necessity of insuring the continuity and unity of national development, which was the last assertion of historical necessities. Hence politics went on gradually losing touch with historical consciousness.

Yet the necessity under which Locke and the best thinkers of English Illuminism were of tempering their theories through practical considerations was symptomatic of the fundamental weakness of the whole system. Theories springing from a synthetic conception of life do not want readjusting to practical life, do not want a period of assimilation under their theoretical form and another of elaboration into practical systems. The best example of this is the simultaneous production of Gentile’s most important theoretical work known to the English-speaking scholars as the _Pure Act_ and of its practical offspring the _Fondamenti della Filosofia del Diritto_, both of 1916, followed at five years’ distance by their political application by the Fascists who had, so to speak, no direct knowledge of such works; to say nothing of his pedagogy, the application of which the author has had the opportunity of carrying out with her own pupils. But then such theories are conceived without abstracting one minute from practical life, and their basis is history and society as they are in real life. Of Fascism the same may be said; its idealism does not prevent it from being the most thoroughly practical and realistic of movements.

The philosophy of the seventeenth century had, however, made this consistency of theory and practice an obviously unrealisable chimera for the men of the eighteenth century, and whilst French rationalism brought people to think of rational theories as capable of radically reforming society, English empiricism held that ideas may work very well in theory and very badly in practice. Such a distinction was the source of great difficulties. If thought and action were the terms of an irreductible dualism it was natural to say

Meliora video; deteriora sequor.

Indeed, the moral imperative of Kant could not be reached on such ground and in the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century moral treatises and dissertations take such a place that there is no doubt as to the men of the period realising the difficulties of the problem. They had separated religion from philosophy, religion from law and politics, and as they had the _jus naturale_ they must have natural morals. A sense of right and wrong due to the natural light granted to man by God was to be found in Scholasticism as the natural tendency to sociability already mentioned. It could, in fact, be traced to the Stoic school and even farther back. But this did not make things easier to the people who held positive religions to be useless, whilst on the other hand they were ready to admit their value as establishments providing for the moral care of the lower classes. In their abstention from history, the only use of churches they could see was to curb the egoistical tendencies of man in the classes which were denied the enlightenment that could provide educated people with principles of discrimination between right and wrong. They could not realise that this function of the churches is merely a consequence of the position of the believer towards his divinity, that such a position brings man to realise what is to him not-self, thereby giving to the moral law the objectivity which alone can free it from the constant alteration of selfish motives, and bestow the stability necessary to its efficiency.

A natural sense of right and wrong was acknowledged in order to find in Man himself an explanation of his moral life. This original predisposition, that was to ensure autonomy to man’s higher life having been admitted, the psychological mentality of the time did not hesitate to make it a matter of psychology to determine which was the organ of this natural function of man. Whilst such researches proceeded, Cumberland having already illustrated the Ciceronian doctrine of the _lex naturae_ as the natural reaction of altruistic tendencies against the selfish motives of Hobbes’s theory, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a friend of Locke, contributed the best of all these theories. He claimed the autonomy of morals, freeing it no less from physiological than from theological fetters. For the intrinsic value of morals is equally destroyed whether you make good deeds dependent of the fear of punishment and hope of reward or on the mechanism of nature. Goodness, righteousness, and virtue are real of themselves, a reality; they can be conceived and understood; they cannot be inferred from anything else. Why he did not work out so original a notion is easily understood; the philosophy of his time afforded him little more than psychology, and his personal gifts and breeding fitted him rather for æsthetics than for so arduous a task; hence it was perfectly natural that his idea should have developed into a real eudemonism. The nature of virtue is to him harmony, he thus blends the conclusions of materialism and of the doctrine which upheld the social instinct of man; the supremacy was to be ascribed to the egoistic motives by the school of Hobbes, to the sense of altruism by the others. To Shaftesbury each of these schools held half of the truth and only the combination of both tendencies could produce in their harmony real morality. Neither lax nor ascetic morals must result from the harmonious combination of the two opposites. Such a theory implies the perfection of the individual as the ultimate end of all intellectual life; it throws light on the nobler side of Illuminism, and if it is not theoretically sound it is the blending of all that was best in a movement that was generous in its optimism.

The variety of the grounds which were ascribed to morality is sufficient to betray the original flaw of such philosophy. Even Lord Shaftesbury had been unfaithful to Locke, mainly owing to his own strong sense of the æsthetic, but also owing to the unsuitability of the great philosopher’s doctrine, as it was understood then, as a basis for a theory of ethics. Thus Utilitarianism came into being. “The best for the greatest number,” was to remain as the ideal or ideology of Illuminism; and the best in question became more and more the material best, and less and less the moral best. After the natural sense of sociability which had taken the place of the will of God at the basis of the state, after the natural sense of right and wrong which had been elaborated as a substitute for the Decalogue, very little was left of the _tabula rasa_ idea of man’s soul upheld by Locke. All these natural senses were anterior to experience and when natural religion was added to them it was understood that all these innate faculties were constitutive of rationalness in practical life; and Nature was gradually opposed to history as rational to irrational.

This natural religiousness had had its first English assertor in Herbert of Cherbury. To him man’s soul is far from being _tabula rasa_; it is a book that opens naturally and displays its hidden treasure. And John Toland, in his efforts to retrieve free thinking from the interference of the State, determines the limitation of the state’s jurisdiction, to which the citizen’s _actions_ must be subject but never his _opinions_; whilst he limited his request for tolerance for the benefit of that class of men whose social position enabled them to afford a sufficient culture to make a harmless use of such liberty. Then the negativeness of any liberal government was obvious, since in Toland’s notion of it it became like a simple set of brakes destined to act when the machine goes wrong and to keep the serene impossibility of an impeccable butler until order and peace are actually broken. Thus again the radical difference between educated and uneducated which had been fostered by the cultural movement of Humanism and Renaissance, assumed a religious and political significance which made the new idea of class a greater impediment to the self-making man than that of the feudal hierarchy which had always admitted the admission to knighthood of a valorous man whatever his condition. This cautious exclusion of the people from the new intellectual religion was a condemnation; the rational cult proved an artificial theory and could have no vitality. Yet it would be a perversion of facts to present it as due to the personal feeling of Toland or any other man. It was the consequence both of the predominance of Rational Reality in the systems then in honour, and of the traditional Humanism according to which there was the same difference between a scholar and a non-scholar as there had been once between the citizen and the non-citizen of the old pagan world. But the main feature is the anti-historical vision of life that made men incapable of suspecting first the social origin of the religious notions which had flourished from pre-historic time, then the impossibility of introducing social partitions in the life of the Mind. Of religion they only saw its practical organisation in the different churches; of the need from which the pre-Christian forms of religion had sprung they had not the slightest suspicion.

The rough and obscure notion they had of the Middle Ages was too often identified with religion and they had no possibility of realising the part played by the Church to keep the objectivity of a religious creed as a counterpoise to the anarchy-breeding self-assertion of man. Christianity had revealed the profound humanity, that is to say spirituality, of the world, and Man, feeling himself to be the main agent of God in the world, realised his subjective importance. Only God had remained above him—only the notion of God’s presence could enforce objective law. It is not the Decalogue and the Church’s precepts which are meant here. It is the recognition, essential to religion, of a reality existing besides his own self that compels man to realise such objectivity of law. St. Paul laid an emphatic stress on the fact. But the _caritas sibi_ is that which raises the subject, raises us and enlarges our capacity until we are capable of taking in the object, all that we are not, the world in short; what modern philosophy calls the not-self. When man does realise this objectivity, this distinction of the world from him, his attitude is that of respect not only towards God but towards the world. Thus we have the religiousness, that Fascism is striving to enforce until it will pervade the whole of life, practical and theoretical life, since it does not part them. This notion of religiousness, however, is ultra-modern, and could not have been conceived in pre-Kantian days, in pre-Hegelian, pre-Gentilian days. It is not mediæval by any means, and Illuminism is one of the stages through which Mind has had to pass, to realise a subject capable of taking in the object without going back to Pagan objectivism. For this objective world must at all cost be such through subjective objectivity. If it is to remain a Christian world in its very objectivity it must remain a human world, the world of man, the world of the subject whose religious recognition of his not-self is a supreme self-assertion.

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Before the end of the century Reason fell from her enthroned glory, and sentiment was glorified as the purest activity of man’s soul. So that the century of light ended by raising the less rational motives of man’s life to semi-divine honours. This reaction was due to the unilateral dogmatism assumed by philosophy in France owing to the political circumstances of the country.

With a democratic sense that is partly due to the democratic origin of the French monarchy, which to be absolute, had to rest on the support of the people, the thinkers of France did not dream of keeping their conclusions to themselves. What they considered true should be public. Perhaps, in their feeling that it is the duty of the man of science to communicate to the people the result of his studies, they hid the most beautiful motive of the whole century—one that is not brought out by the historians of philosophy—the imperative exigency of Truth that impels divulgation. It is frequently remarked that they were the real champions of Illuminism inasmuch as they claimed the right of the people to be enlightened; the idea of Truth which prompted such a claim is the loftiest part of their contribution to philosophy.

The French mathematical mentality, after having exported Descartes, had imported Newton, and as Hobbes and, before him, Bacon, had come to France to find the yeast they needed to develop their own theories, so now men like Voltaire and Rousseau made their leaven out of Locke’s and Hume’s doctrines and studied the political institutions of England. In France, from Montaigne, from Pascal, men had learned the cautious prudence, and the self-dedication to the object of faith that are nearly antithetic and usually never appear together Montaigne’s influence is due to the fact that he reflects the state of mind of all the western world, tired of religious struggles and the emphatic expressions of dogmatism on all sides; it was due also to his charming style and the purity of his French mind. So French is he, so much a man of the West, that his charm is felt alike by French and Anglo-Saxon minds. One cannot resist him. In his analytic scepticism he is so logically methodic, that his style is like the colour of a piece of antique bronze, inviting the onlooker to touch it whilst its lines, its lights and shadows reveal the powerful mind of the sculptor. Montaigne through his very respect for the Church helped to ruin the religious spirit of his countrymen, and the genius of Pascal could not have made up for it, even if its mysticism and its repugnance for the _Moi haissable_ had not been tinged as they were by the self-assertive spirit of his time. Both mysticism and scepticism take their practical form in Pierre Bayle.

Few men ever enjoyed the gift of sympathy with which he was endowed because few men are so superlatively sincere. He does not renounce religion, he is indeed quite a religious man, but his religion is negative on account of his mysticism as a believer and of his scepticism as a scientist. To him the Thomist and Lockian point of view of the super-rationality of the Revelation is an illusion. In perfect sincerity he could say _credo quia absurdum_, and like Tertullian proclaim definitely the divorce of science from religion, of rationality from irrationality.

His next move was to divorce morality from religion. Men could be excellent in Pagan times and they can be wicked in Christian times, yet Christianity is superior to Paganism; obviously religious opinions are independent of the morality of men.

He then passed to politics. His idea of religion was far too high to allow him to consider it as an auxiliary of the state’s police as English theorists had often done, and since it had nothing to do with morals the Church could have nothing to do with man as a citizen. This evidently made not only for tolerance, but for indifference on the part of the state in all religious matters.

Expelled from science, morality, and politics, religion was thus as good as expelled from life by a mystic simply because he had the sincerity and coherency to be practically consistent with the theoretical ground of the philosophy of the time.

Voltaire overshadows the century as Louis XIV had done the preceding one. His greatness does not depend on his contribution to philosophy, but on his immense efficiency as a propagandist of the conclusions reached by philosophy. Like all the great and best men of Illuminism he was absorbed in the moral and religious problem and had most obviously assimilated the best English theories. Less sincere than Bayle, he took up his sceptical conclusions, without, however, sharing his mysticism, and in the prose of the greatest French writer of the century, he set to work to popularise the destructive criticisms of all dogmas. Voltaire may have been convinced that dogmas were harmful, but as he did not bring forward anything to put in their stead his influence was negative. What it would have been without the constant recall to present experience of English empiricism cannot be gauged; as it was, present experience was rather an incentive to dissolve and destroy the whole social order than to build; and towards past experiences there could be no recall whatsoever, or rather there was only one and an original one, but it could not be heard.

To Voltaire history offered no direct lesson. His belief in the supremacy of reason could only bring him to despise the incoherency of historical facts through which very often the rationality of history displays itself. His clearness of sight limited his outlook to the present, and this focussing of life was an abstraction which prevented him from realising the historical forces at play in the political and social circumstances of his country. His religiousness is strongly tinged with utilitarianism, as he held, like many Englishmen had done, that the purpose of Churches was to act as moral check to the lower class. All these fathers of Liberalism and Radicalism are more aristocrats than democrats. Their worship of culture and reason makes for political tyranny and a social system of caste as distinct as that of the Indians. Hence it evoked a reaction, and this found its spokesman in Jean Jacques Rousseau. People were tired of dry reason and its negativeness, they felt parched and longed for affirmative works; he came out, a man of genius, devoid of the mathematical and classical grounding of the others; entirely led by feelings and, alternately, by the most generous and lowest impulses he was a democrat.

Until Rousseau appeared the writers on political matters had been either followers of the _jus naturalism_ or of the constitutionalist schools.

In Rousseau two streams mingle their waters, for he is an artist as well as the most original thinker France had after Bayle. As an artist he is the spokesman of his generation, and it is as such that his contemporaries took to him as they did in spite of his disreputable personal life. As a thinker, although the statement may sound very daring, he ought to share with Berkeley and Hume the honour of being considered as one who made the way for Kant. His were mere intuitions; they could not be more as he had no scientific or philosophic training. But as Professor Saitta has pointed out, his reaction against rationalism transcends very much what was grasped by most of his readers and even sometimes by recent critics. His passionate claim for the important part played by sentiment in the life of man and by all irrational forces, original though it is, is the impulsive reaction of an artist, whereas by the time he wrote, Italy had already had for some quarter of a century the works of a man who had claimed, with a speculative genius far superior to his, the acknowledgment of all the different activities of mind. And Giambattista Vico had been a jurist and an historian as well as a philosopher. So that his notion of Man was capable of taking in, not only his rational activity, or his sense relation to the exterior world, or his sentimental life, or his religious position, as rationalism, empiricism, sensism and mysticism had respectively done; but the whole range of man’s spiritual manifestations. Therefore, is it that Rousseau’s greatest intuitions are those that could not affect Italy in a speculative way. The man who was to pick them up was a German whose genius had all the robustness of his country at that stage, coming as it was to the fore after having fed on the intellectual production of Italy, France and England.

What affected Italian thought most was the weakest part of Rousseau. The idea to which he owed his immediate fame is that nature made man happy and good, but that society had made him bad and unhappy. He was thereby contradicting rationalism and empiricism, he was flinging his glove in the face of all Illuminism. And he could do it not on philosophical ground, but merely calling upon life to justify his assertion. That age of light was an age of corruption and misery. The lack of religion had brought in its trail the lack of seriousness; the abstract subjectivism of a century had made of each man a self-centred world. Liberty was, so to speak, constantly cried for out of tune since it could not be accompanied by the assertion of law. For all that the Jus-naturalists and Constitutionalists had admitted the liberty of men to make a contract and give themselves the form of government which suited them best; they had denied the citizens the liberty of declaring such contract lapsed when it had ceased to satisfy them. As this was due to their training in a philosophy that considered the world as a machine, Rousseau had no reason to follow them nor to see in the state a mechanism subject to laws as inalterable as those of nature. Therefore he realised the real essence of liberty as inalienable. It could be transferred, not alienated. Strong in this sense of liberty Man must fight all the unnatural edifice of society which, according to him, is the cause of all immorality through the inequalities of men it begets.

Once men accepted the notion of Rousseau—that Nature had made man good and society had made him bad—it became not only permissible but morally right to destroy the order of things which had been evolved by society and to invest man, every single man, with the consciousness of his sovereignty. Of the two tendencies which have been compared to two streams, one was the naturalistic individualism rooted in the thoughts of his contemporaries and which he expressed merely as an artist, as the greatest artist of the time; the other was the idealistic universalism which was personal to him as a thinker, but that was bound to remain a source of fleeting intuitions on account of his incapacity to raise it to speculative consciousness. He roused a powerful echo where men like Voltaire and the Encyclopædists failed to command attention; and even his art of writing could not have provided him with so great a fascination if most of the ideas and feelings he expressed had not been a living reality throbbing in the hearts of his readers, even of the lowest classes. It was the lowest side of his doctrines that spread amongst the people, the part which appealed to envy and hatred, two very powerful levers indeed, but of which Rousseau might not have chosen to make use had he been able to choose. His insistence on the distinction between the will of all and the general will tells eloquently of the intuition he had of transcendental self and of the ethic essence of the state; but all this comes to nought on account of his lacking a theoretical ground for such a notion, and he is obliged to fall back on the intellectual stock of his time; in spite of his genius, in spite of all sentimental intuition of a universal will, he is thrown back on a will which is merely the sum, the numerical sum, of the single wills. Thus it is that he gave us the system which enthrones quantity while it aims at quality.

His first principle that men are made all alike by Nature, happy and good, is, as most of the philosophy against which he was the first to react with the power of genius, perfectly anti-historical and, therefore, abstract. When it had received at the hands of Kant and Hegel a systematic and speculative treatment this principle was bound to have as necessary consequences Socialism and Communism. If the nature of man, thus hypothetically accepted, is as abstract and as unreal as an algebraical axiom, it was bound to lead to political and economic hypothesis just as abstract and as unreal. Since history shows us in the class struggles and individual competitions the main spring of progress, the condition _sine qua non_ of all social life, it is impossible even to dream of the elimination of such class and individual differences. Life would cease to be dynamic, cease to be a moving process, it would be static, everything being brought to a standstill, which is death.

To look at real life, to turn away from atomistic individualism towards a subjectivism capable of comprehending all the objective world in order to realise finally what should be the Christian world which must be _Liberty and Law_, another century and a half was needed. Now we can look back to Rousseau and detect in him the obscure foreshadowing of the school of thought which was to redeem in the face of reason the irrational activities of Mind, not as the handmaids of reason but in their full autonomy and necessity. Mind is no longer pure reason, and philosophy does not exclude but imply religion and art, the two moments of law and liberty, although such distinction of activities does not destroy the vital unity of man’s conscience. Mankind is no longer the arithmetical sum of X beings reduced to the same type and value, it transcends the individual and can be realised as well in the smaller cell of society which is the family as in the greater cell which is the country. Consequently, for the abstract man of Rousseau a Man can be now substituted who never is Man as Man, but Man in his full reality as son, as brother, as husband, as father, as worker, as citizen, as believer, as artist.

To make this possible, however, a long process was required, the first stage being Rousseau and the application of his theories even in their negativity. For to reach Fascism, which really puts men on the same level, it was necessary to break through class distinctions as they existed then, that is to say as static partitions meant to stay as they were. It was necessary so that power should slip from the hands of people, who considered it as their natural birthright, into the hands of those who are actually fit to hold it. Again such a revolution was necessary so that a day should come in which neither the aristocracy nor the proletariat could think of eliminating politically each other.

And, as the philosophy of Italy proclaims, ethical reality is neither of the subject in itself, nor of the object, but of their actual relation; so Fascism does not allow class elimination but protects class competition as the best means of raising the spiritual and economical standard of the nation.