V. The Rational Dissolution

DAVID HUME, the great master of rationalist phenomenalism, begins his essay “On the Immortality of the Soul,” with these decisive words: “By the mere light of reason it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul; the arguments for it are commonly derived either from metaphysical topics, or moral, or physical. But in reality it is the gospel, and the gospel alone, that has brought life and immortality to light. . . .” All of which is equivalent to denying any rationality to the belief that each one of our souls is immortal.

Kant, who used Hume as point of departure for his critique, attempted to establish the rationality of the longing for immortality and the belief that this longing is of consequence, and therein lies the real origin, the deep-seated origin, of his Critique of Practical Reason and of his categorical imperative and of his God. Still and all, Hume’s sceptical affirmation holds good, and there is no way of rationally proving the immortality of the soul. On the contrary, there are only ways of rationally proving its mortality.

It would be not merely useless but even ridiculous were we to expatiate here on the extent to which individual human consciousness is dependent on our bodily organism, or if we were to trace the manner in which consciousness slowly emerges in response to outside stimulus and how it is suspended during sleep, swooning, and other accidental interruptions, and how all the evidence points to the rational conclusion that death implies the loss of consciousness. For, just as we did not exist before our birth, nor do we have any personal recollection of that previous time, so shall we not exist after our death. Such is the rational conclusion.

The word “soul” is no more than a term we use to designate the individual consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and the fact that it changes, and that it disintegrates just as it integrates, is self-evident. Aristotle considered the soul the substantial form of the body: the entelechy, but not a substance. And more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon-—an absurd term. It is enough to call it a phenomenon.

Rationalism—and by this term I mean the doctrine which attends only to reason, to objective reality—is necessarily materialist. And let idealists not be scandalized.

In order to make everything clear, we must point out that what we call materialism means no more, in reality, than the doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul and the persistence of personal consciousness after death.

In another sense it could be stated that since we can no more say what matter is than we can say what spirit is, and that since matter is for us merely an idea, then materialism is idealism too. In fact, and as far as concerns our problem—the most vital, the only truly vital problem—it is all the same to say that everything is matter as it is to say that everything is idea, or that everything is energy, or is whatever you please. Every monist system will always seem materialist. Only dualist systems preserve the immortality of the soul, only those systems which teach that human consciousness is something substantially distinct and different from other manifestations of phenomena. Reason is, naturally, monist. For it is the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in order to understand and explain it there is no need whatsoever for the soul to be an imperishable substance. In order to explain and understand our psychic life, for the purposes of psychology, a hypothetical soul is unnecessary. What used to be called rational psychology, in opposition to empirical psychology, is neither psychology nor rational, but metaphysics, of a particularly obscure variety, and profoundly irrational or, rather, contra-rational.

The so-called rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality of the soul, along with all the apparatus accompanying it, is a doctrine born of man’s need to base upon reason his undeniable longing for immortality and his consequent belief in this immortality. All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is simple and incorruptible substance stem from this source. Further, the very concept of substance itself, as defined and fixed by Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.

William James, in the third of the lectures he devoted to pragmatism “at the Lowell Institute in Boston, in November and December, 1906, and in January, 1907, at Columbia University, in New York,” the weakest of all the writings by the distinguished American thinker—much too weak altogether—says:

Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer don’t change in the Lord’s supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties. But tho these don’t alter, a tremendous difference has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament, now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.

This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will be treated seriously by those who already believe in the ‘real presence’ on independent grounds.

Well now, leaving aside the question of whether or not it is sound theology—and I do not say sound reason, for all this lies outside the sphere of reason—to confound the substance of the body, the body and not the soul, of Christ with the very substance of divinity, that is to say, with God Himself, it would appear impossible that one so ardently desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose entire philosophy aims at establishing this essence on rational grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the concept of substance to the doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation is no more than a consequence of its anterior application to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As expounded in the preceding chapter, the sacrament of the Eucharist is no more than the reflection of a belief in immortality; for the believer it is a proof, through mystic experience, that the soul is immortal and will enjoy God in eternity. And the concept of substance was born, above all and before all, from the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and the latter was affirmed in order to buttress faith in the soul’s persistence after its separation from the body. Such was its first pragmatic application and its origin. And subsequently we have transferred this concept to external objects. It is because I feel myself to be substance, that is to say, permanent in the midst of my changes, that I attribute substantiality to those agents outside me which are permanent in the midst of their changes. It is much the same as when the concept of force—as distinct from movement—arises from my sensation of personal effort in putting something into motion.

Read carefully the first six articles of question LXXV in the First Part of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, where he discusses whether the human soul is body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether the soul of a beast is of the same nature, whether the soul is the man, whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is incorruptible, and then say whether or not all this is not subtly aimed at buttressing the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul allows it to receive immortality from God, for just as He created the soul when He infused it into the body, according to St. Thomas, He could annihilate it at its separation from the body. As the critique of these proofs has been a hundred times made, there is no sense in repeating it here.

What unprepared reason could conclude that our soul is a substance merely from the fact that consciousness of our identity, and this within very narrow and variable limits, persists throughout all the changes in our body? We might as well speak of the substantial spirit of a ship which sets out from port only to lose on one day a plank (later replaced by another plank of similar shape and size), and a second piece of material later, and thus one part after another, and say that it comes back to port the same ship, in the same shape, as seaworthy as before, and recognizable by all as the same vessel. What unprepared reason could conclude that the soul is simple merely from the fact that we must select and unify our thoughts? Thought is not one, but various, and the soul, as seen from the viewpoint of reason, is nothing but a succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness.

In books of spiritualist psychology it is customary in discussing the existence of the soul as a simple substance separable from the body to begin with a formula in the following manner: “There is in me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels. . . Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me any such principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will, and feel. And I, the I that thinks, wills, and feels, this I immediately constitutes my living body and the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? However it may be.

The next move in their argument is to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul, hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that this substance must be simple, that is, they place thought in opposition to extension, in the manner of Cartesian dualism. Inasmuch as Balmes was one of the spiritualist writers who provided the clearest and most concise form to the argument concerning the simplicity of the soul, I will take the burden of it from him, just as he expounds it in the second chapter of La Psicología of his Curso de filosofía elemental. “The human soul is simple,” he says, and adds:

Simplicity consists in the absence of parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it had three parts, A, B, C. Then I ask: wherein does thought reside? If in A alone, then B and C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A must be the soul. If thought resides in A and B and C, then thought is divided into parts, which is absurd. What kind of a perception would it be, or what kind of comparison, or judgement, or ratiocination that could be distributed among three subjects?

A more obvious begging of the question can not be imagined. From the outset Balmes takes it for granted that the whole, as a whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues:

The unity of consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think, there is a subject that knows everything that it thinks, and this is impossible if parts are attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, nothing will be known by B and C, and thus reciprocally. So that there can be no one consciousness of the whole thought: each part will have its special consciousness, and there will be within us as many thinking beings as there are parts.

And so the begging of the question continues: it is assumed without any proof that a whole, as a whole, cannot perceive as a unit. Balmes then goes on to ask if these parts A, B, and C are simple or compound, and he repeats his argument until he arrives at the conclusion that the thinking subject must be a part which is not a whole, that is, it must be simple. The argument is based, as can be seen, on the unity of apperception and judgement. Subsequently he endeavors to refute the hypothesis of a communication of the parts among themselves.

Along with all the other a priori spiritualists who seek to rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul, Balmes ignores the only rational explanation, which is that apperception and judgement are a resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which agree. They begin by supposing something external to and distinct from the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body which abides these states, something that is not I but is in me.

The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon itself as a complete whole. But no: the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor. Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act by which I think of it. To think only that one thinks, and nothing more, is not to think.

The soul is the principle of life, they say. Yes, and similarly the category of force or energy has been conceived as the principle of movement. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities. Does the principle of motion move? Only that which moves has external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when he said that he never encountered this idea of himself, but only observed himself desiring or performing or feeling something. The idea of something individual, of this inkstand in front of me, of that horse at my gate, of these two and not any other individual members of their class, constitutes the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of myself is myself.

All efforts to make consciousness a substance and make it independent of extension—Descartes, remember, placed thought in opposition to extension—are only sophistical subtleties aimed at establishing the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. The attempt is made to give the value of objective reality to what does not possess it, to that whose reality lies only in thought. And the immortality we crave is a phenomenal immortality, the continuation of this present life.

Scientific psychology—the only rational psychology—considers the unity of consciousness no more than a phenomenal unity. No one can say what constitutes a substantial unity. What is more, no one can say what constitutes a substance. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a noumenon, and it belongs, strictly speaking, to the realm of the unknowable. That is, it depends on its application. But its transcendent application is really inconceivable and, in point of fact, irrational. It is the very concept of substance which an unprepared reason reduces to a use far from the pragmatic application to which William James referred.

And this application is not saved by taking it in an idealistic sense, in accordance with the Berkeleyan principles that to be perceived is to be (esse est percipi). To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything spirit, and if, therefore this diamond is idea or spirit, just as my conscious ness is, it is not clear why the diamond should not endure forever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures forever.

George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and spiritual brother to the equally Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler, was as anxious as Butler to preserve the belief in the immortality of the soul. From the very first sentence of the Preface to his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, he tells us that he considers his treatise will be useful, “particularly to those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul.” In paragraph 140 he states that we have an idea or rather a notion of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own, from which follows, as he roundly asserts in the next paragraph, the natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of conclusions arising from the ambiguity with which he invests the term notion. And after having established the immortality of the soul, almost as if it were per saltum, on the ground that the soul is not passive like the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph 147 that “the existence of God is far more evidently perceived than the existence of men.” And still, with all this evidence, there are those who doubt!

The question was made more complicated because consciousness was taken to be a property of the soul, which was something more than consciousness, that is, a substantial form of the body, originator of all the organic functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but moves the body and prompts its vital functions; it is in the human soul that the vegetative, animal, and rational functions are united. Such is the doctrine. But separated from the body, the soul can have neither vegetative nor animal functions.

In short, doctrine presents reason with a tissue of confusions.

Following the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul was re-established through the newly unearthed writings of Alexander of Aphrodisias and in the works of Pietro Pomponazzi and others. And, in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what Pomponazzi wrote in his Tractatus de immortalitate animae. He is on the side of reason, and nothing is served by denying it.

There has been no dearth of attempts, nevertheless, to buttress empirically the belief in the immortality of the soul. Among these attempts there is the work of Frederic W. H. Myers on Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. No one has ever approached with more eagerness than myself the two thick volumes wherein the man who was the leading spirit of the Society for Psychical Research summarized the formidable mass of data concerning all sorts of psychic presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the other matter which makes up the spiritualist arsenal. I set about my reading not only without any of the scientific man’s prior reservations with respect to this kind of investigation but rather with a predisposition in its favor, like a man in search of confirmation for his most deepseated longings. And for that very reason my disillusion was all the greater. Despite the critical apparatus, all of it in no way differed from medieval miracle-mongering. It entails a fundamental defect of method, an error of logic.

And if the science of the immortality of the soul has been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied by pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, serves our longing not at all. For if such is the case, we were in God before we were born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is nought but the provider and, above all, the guarantor of our immortality, pantheism is said to be, quite rightly said to be, a disguised form of atheism. In my own opinion, it is an undisguised form. And it was right to call Spinoza an atheist, for his pantheism is the most logical and rational. Nor is the longing for immortality assuaged, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism or the doctrine of the unknowable, which, whenever it professed to be considerate of religious feelings, has always been animated by the most subtle hypocrisy. The entire first part of Spencer’s First Principles, especially the fifth chapter, entitled “Reconciliation” (reconciliation between reason and faith, between science and religion, it is understood), is a model of British cant, as well as of philosophic superficiality and religious insincerity. The unknowable, if it be something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. No human feeling can rise on such a foundation.

The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion taken as an individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul can live apart from the body, has destroyed the rationality of this belief. The religious man may repeat with Schleiermacher, “Science can teach you nothing. Let it learn from you,” but within himself he is bound to feel a reservation.

Whatever the view taken, it always appears that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts us. And the truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

Intelligence is a dreadful matter. It tends toward death in the way that memory tends toward stability. That which lives, that which is absolutely unstable, absolutely individual, is, strictly speaking, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to a state where each representation has no more than one single selfsame content in whatever place, time, or relation the representation may occur to us. But nothing is the same for two successive moments of its being. My idea of God is different each time I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is precisely what the intellect seeks. The mind seeks what is dead, for the living escapes it. It seeks to congeal the flowing stream into blocks of ice. It seeks to arrest the flow. In order to analyze a body it is first necessary to reduce it or to destroy it. In order to understand anything it must first be killed, laid out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though live ideas are born out of it. Worms, also, feed upon corpses. My own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the recesses of my mind, once torn up by their roots from my heart, poured out upon this paper and here fixed in unalterable form, are already the cadavers of thought. How, then, is reason to open up to the revelation of life? It is a tragic combat, the very essence of tragedy, this battle of life against reason. And truth? Is it something to be lived or something to be apprehended?

One need only read the appalling Parmenides of Plato to agree with his tragic conclusion: “It seems that, whether there is or is not a one, both that one and the others alike are and are not, and appear and do not appear to be.” Everything vital is irrational, and everything rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical.

The rational, in effect, is no more than the relational; reason limits itself to relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science insofar as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not real substantial things, insofar as it is the most formal of the sciences. Who is capable of extracting the cube root of that ash tree there?

Nevertheless, we need logic, that terrible power, to communicate thoughts and perceptions and even to think and perceive, for we think in words and perceive in forms. To think is to converse with oneself, and speech is social, and thought and logic are social. Still, do they not perhaps include an intransmissible and untranslatable individual matter or content? May not their power reside therein?

The fact is that man, the prisoner of logic—without which he cannot think—has always striven to place logic at the service of his desires, most especially of his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast to logic, especially during the Middle Ages, in the interests of theology and jurisprudence, both of which used established authority as their point of departure. It was not until much later that logic took up the problem of knowledge, the question of its own validity, the examination of meta-logical foundations.

“The Western theology,” Dean Stanley wrote, “is essentially logical in form, and based on law. The Eastern is rhetorical in form and based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate. The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist.”

And all the labored arguments, presuming to be rational or logical in support of our hunger for immortality, are no more than special and sophistical pleading.

The specific characteristic of special pleading, of advocacy, in effect is to put logic at the service of a thesis which is to be defended; the strictly scientific method, on the other hand, proceeds from the facts, from the data presented to us by reality, and then arrives, or does not arrive, at some conclusion. The important consideration is to formulate the problem clearly, whence it follows that progress consists, quite often, in undoing what has been done. Advocacy always involves a petitio principii, and its arguments are all ad probandum. And the theology which presumes to be rational is no more than advocacy.

Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, in its primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something like the Latin placitum, that which has seemed to legislative authority most meet to be law. This juridical concept is the starting point for theology. In the eyes of the theologian, as in the eyes of the attorney at law, dogma, the law, is something given, a point of departure not open to discussion except insofar as concerns its applicability and as regards its most exact interpretation. Hence it is that the theological or advocatory spirit is dogmatic on principle, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is sceptical, that is, investigative. It is investigative at least in origin, I should add, for scepticism in its other sense, the one most current today, as the term for a system of doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty, arose from the theological or advocatory misuse of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The attempt to apply the law, the placitum, the dogma, to distinct and sometimes contradictory practical needs has given rise to the scepticism of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology, which teaches a distrust of reason, and not true science which does so, not investigative science, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the term, science undirected toward any foreseen solution, but rather proceeding only to test a hypothesis.

Take the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the theology—that is, the advocacy—of Catholicism, and open it wherever you please. First comes the thesis: utrum . . . whether such and such be thus or otherwise; then come the objections: ad primum sic proceditur; next come the answers to these objections: sed contra est . . . or respondeo dicendum. All of it special pleading, pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed more scholastico by the following syllogism: “I do not understand this fact save by furnishing it with this explanation; thus it is I must understand it, and therefore that must be its explanation; the alternative would be that I not understand it at all.” True science teaches us, above all, to doubt and admit ignorance; advocacy neither doubts nor believes it does not know. Advocacy requires a solution.

The kind of mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must have a solution, also tends to believe in baneful consequences. Take any book of apologetics—that is to say, of theological advocacy—and you will repeatedly meet with the refrain: “The baneful consequences of this doctrine. . . .” Now the baneful consequences of a doctrine may prove, at best, that the doctrine is baneful, but not that it is false, for it has still to be proven that the true is necessarily the best for us. The identification of the true with the good is no more than a pious desire. In his Études sur Blaise Pascal, A. Vinet says: “Of the two needs that are continually at work influencing human nature, the need for happiness is not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced, it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only sensory, it is also intellectual. Happiness is essential not only for the soul, but for the spirit. Happiness forms part of the truth.” This last proposition—le bonheur fait partie de la vérité—is a clear case of special pleading, of advocacy, and has nothing to do either with science or with pure reason. It would be better to say that truth makes part of happiness in a Tertullian-like sense, in the sense of credo quia absurdum, which means, strictly speaking, credo quia consolans: I believe because it consoles me to do so.

In the eyes of reason, the only truth is that which can be shown to be, to exist, whether or not it offers us any consolation. And reason itself is certainly not a consolatory faculty. That terrifying Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent serenity and Epicurean ataraxia conceal so much despair, said that piety consists in the ability to contemplate all things with a serene soul: pacata posse mente omnia tueri. And the same Lucretius wrote that religion can lead us into many evils: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. And of course religion, the Christian religion especially, was, as the Apostle says, a scandal for the Jews and madness for the intellectuals (cf. 1 Cor. 1:23). And Tacitus called the Christian religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, a pernicious superstition, exitialis superstitio, and asserted that it implied a hatred of the human race, odium generis humani.

Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most authentically rationalist age of all, Flaubert addressed the following pregnant words to Madame Roger des Genettes:

You are right, one must speak respectfully of Lucretius; I cannot see his equal except for Byron, and Byron has not his seriousness nor his genuine sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me deeper than that of the moderns, who all, more or less, assume an immortality on the far side of the “black pit” For the ancients the black pit was infinity itself; their dreams take shape and pass against a background of unchanging ebony. The gods being dead and Christ not yet born, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius one unique moment in which there was nothing but man. I can find no reflection of that great time anywhere. What makes Lucretius intolerable, however, is his physics, which he states as final. He is weak because he did not doubt enough; he wanted to explain, to come to conclusions!

True enough, Lucretius strove to reach conclusions, solutions, and, what is worse, strove to find consolation in reason. For there is also an anti-theological advocacy and an odium antitheologicum.

And a great many men of science, the greater number of those who call themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it.

The rationalist acts rationally, that is, he acts within his role, as long as he confines himself to denying that reason satisfies our vital hunger for immortality. But then, possessed by the fury of not being able to believe, he soon becomes enraged by odium antitheologicum and cries out with the Pharisees: “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed.” There is a good deal of truth in the words of Soloviev: “I have a foreboding of the approach of a time when the Christians will gather again in the Catacombs, because the Faith is persecuted, perhaps in a manner less brutal than in Nero’s time, but with a severity no less refined, by lies, mockery, and all manner of hypocrisy.”

Anti-theological hate, scientificist (I do not say scientific) fury-—hate and fury against faith in another life—is manifest. Consider not the more detached scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of faith. Karl Vogt, for instance, was of the opinion that the cranial structure of the Apostles must have shown marked simian characteristics. There is no point in talking of the indecencies of Haeckel, that master of incomprehension; nor of those of Büchner, either. Even Virchow is not free of these blemishes. And then there are others who tread the same path, only more subtly. There are people who seem scarcely content simply with not believing in another life, or rather in believing that there is none, but who are positively hurt and irritated that others should believe in such a life or even should wish for such a life to exist. This rationalist attitude is despicable, while the position of the man who strives to believe in another life—because he needs another life—and finds he can not so believe is worthy of respect. But this latter attitude, the most noble, most profound, most human and most fruitful attitude and state of mind, which is that of despair, shall be discussed further on.

And even those rationalists who do not fall prey to anti-theological rage still will insist on convincing mankind that there actually are good reasons for living and a consolation for having been born—even though a time will come, in some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness will have disappeared. And these reasons for living and working, all that business known as humanism, are the mooncalf of the affective and emotional emptiness of rationalism and of its stupifying hypocrisy, a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to veracity, and on refusing to confess the fact that reason is a disheartening power committed to dissolution.

Is there any need to repeat all that has already been said about forging a culture, about progress, about attaining to the good, the true, and the beautiful, about establishing justice on earth, about making a better life for those who follow us, about serving some destiny or other, all without giving thought to our own ultimate end? Is there any point in speaking of the supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of art, of good, truth, beauty, justice . . . of all those lofty concepts, if, in the end, in four days’ time or four million centuries’—either length of time is the same—no human consciousness will exist to receive that culture, science, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?

Many and varied are the rationalist—more or less rational—devices by means of which, ever since the days of Epicureans and Stoics, consolation has been sought from rational truth, and the attempt has been made to convince men—though those who tried to do the convincing were not themselves convinced—that there are good reasons for working and inducements to go on living, even though human consciousness was destined one day to disappear.

The Epicurean attitude—the extreme and grossest expression of which is to be found in “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” or in the Horatian Carpe diem, which could be translated as “Live for the day”—does not differ fundamentally from the Stoic position, with its “Do what your conscience dictates, and let what follows follow.” Both positions share a common base; and pleasure for pleasure’s sake is the same as duty for duty’s sake.

Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists—I mean, of those who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite future time—and at the same time the most pious of atheists, devoted the Fifth, and last, Part of his Ethics to elucidating the path which leads to freedom and to delimiting the concept of blessedness. The concept! The concept, and not the sense. For Spinoza—who was an appalling intellectualizer—“blessedness,” beatitudo, is a concept, and the love of God an intellectual love. In Proposition XXI of this part he establishes that: “The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.” This is a denial of the immortality of the soul: for a soul which, separated from the body where it lived, no longer remembers its past is neither immortal nor is it a soul. And in Proposition XXIII, Spinoza then goes on to tell us that: “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal”; and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not be deceived: there is no eternity of the individual mind. Everything is sub aeternitatis specie, that is, a fraud. Nothing could be more dreary, more desolate, more anti-vital than this “blessedness,” this Spinozan beatitudo, which consists of “The intellectual love of the mind towards God . . . that very love of God whereby God loves himself . . .” (Proposition XXXVI). Our “blessedness,” that is, our “freedom,” consists in God’s constant and eternal love of mankind: so affirms the Note to this Proposition XXXVI. And all this in order to reach the conclusion, the final and crowning proposition of the entire Ethics: the statement that: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself” (Proposition XLII). The same as always! Or, to put it plainly: we come from God and to God we must return, which, translated into the concrete language of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness came out of nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and that to nothingness it will return.

And that most mournful and desolate voice of Spinoza is the very voice of reason. And the “freedom” of which he speaks is a terrible freedom. And against Spinoza and his doctrine of “blessedness” there exists only one incontrovertible argument, the argument ad hominem. Was the man Baruch Spinoza blessed as, by way of allaying his inner unhappiness, he discoursed on that very blessedness? Was he himself free?

In the Note to Proposition XLI of this same final and most tragic part of that tremendous tragedy of his Ethics, the poor desperate Jew of Amsterdam speaks to us of “the general belief of the multitude” regarding the eternal life. Let us attend to what he says:

They . . . believe that piety, religion, and, generally, all things attributable to firmness of mind, are burdens, which, after death, they hope to lay aside, and to receive the reward for their bondage, that is, for their piety and religion; it is not only by this hope, but also, and chiefly, by the fear of being horribly punished after death, that they are induced to live according to the divine commandments, so far as their feeble and infirm spirit will carry them.

If men had not this hope and this fear, but believed that the mind perishes with the body, and that no hope of prolonged life remains for the wretches who are broken down with the burden of piety, they would return to their own inclinations, controlling everything in accordance with their lusts, and desiring to obey fortune rather than themselves. Such a course appears to me not less absurd than if a man, because he does not believe that he can by wholesome food sustain his body for ever, should wish to cram himself with poisons and deadly fare; or if, because he sees that the mind is not eternal or immortal, he should prefer to be out of his mind altogether, and to live without the use of reason; these ideas are so absurd to be scarcely worth refuting.

When it is said of some assertion that it is “scarcely worth refuting,” one may be sure that the assertion is either a piece of egregious foolishness, in which case not even that need be said of it, or the assertion is somehow formidable, the very key to the problem. And so it is in this case. Yes! Poor Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland, yes! Whoever is convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, without the slightest ray of redeeming uncertainty, that his soul is not immortal, would surely prefer to have no soul at all, to be without soul, amens, irrational, an idiot, and he would surely prefer not to have been born. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, “absurd” about such an attitude. Was he, poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and of blessedness, was he blessed? For this, and nothing else, constitutes the problem. “What good is it to know how to define contrition, if you don’t feel it?” asks Thomas a Kempis. And what is the use of setting about a definition of blessedness, if you can not thereby achieve blessedness? Apposite in this connection is the terrible story told by Diderot about the eunuch who wished to receive lessons in aesthetics from a man from Marseille so that he might better select slave girls for the harem of his master the Sultan. At the end of the first lesson, a lesson in physiology—bare, carnal physiology—the eunuch exclaimed mournfully: “I can see that I shall never know aesthetics!” And so it is: eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of lovely women, and pure rationalists will never know ethics or be able to define blessedness, which is something lived and felt and not something thought out and defined.

Then we have that other rationalist—one not resigned and sad like Spinoza, but rebellious and feigning a hypocritical joyousness, though he was no less in despair—Nietzsche, who mathematically (!!!) invented that counterfeit of the immortality of the soul called “the eternal recurrence,” a most formidable tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. Since the number of atoms or irreducible primary elements is finite, he presumes that, in an eternal universe, a combination identical with the present one must occur, and that what happens now must be repeated an endless number of times. Of course! And so, just as I will again live the life I am now living, I have already lived it an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that stretches into the past, a parte ante, just as there will be one into the future, a parte post. But the sad fact is that I can not remember any of my previous existences, assuming that it would be possible for me to remember any such thing, inasmuch as two things that are absolutely and totally identical are no more than one and the same. Instead of supposing that we live in a finite universe composed of a finite number of irreducible primary elements, let us suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits in space—a concrete infinity is no less inconceivable than a concrete eternity in time—and then it would follow that this our system, with its Milky Way and all, is repeated an infinite number of times in the infinity of space, and that I am living an infinite number of lives, all of them exactly identical. It’s a joke, you see, and no less comic—that is, no less tragic—than Nietzsche’s jest, the one about the laughing lion. And what makes the lion laugh? Rage, I think, because he can not console himself with the thought that he has already been the same lion before and will be the same lion still again.

But if Spinoza as well as Nietzsche were both of them rationalists, each in his own way, they were neither of them spiritual eunuchs; they had hearts, feeling, and, above all, a hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need to reproduce carnally, in body, and the spiritual eunuch does not feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.

It is certainly true that there are people who assert that reason alone suffices for them and who advise us to desist from seeking to penetrate the impenetrable. But I do not know what to think of those others who claim they need no faith whatever in an eternal personal life by way of incentive to go on living and working. Someone blind from birth may assure us that he feels no great desire to enjoy the world of sight, nor great anguish at having missed it, and we must believe him, for there can be no desire felt for something totally unknown—nihil volitum quin praecognitum: it is not possible to care for anything except something already known. But I can not believe that anyone who has once, either in his youth or some other period, harbored a faith in the immortality of the soul will ever be able to rest easy without that faith. As regards congenital blindness, moreover, there are few instances of it among us, unless it be as the result of an exotic aberration. And the man who is merely and exclusively rational is also an aberration and nothing else.

More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: “We must not talk about all that, for it is a waste of time and leads to an enervation of the will. Let us do our duty here, and then let come what may.” And yet this sincerity masks a deeper insincerity. For is it possible by the mere repetition of the phrase “We must not talk about it,” to forget the matter? Our will is enervated, they say? . . . And what of it? We are rendered incapable of some human action? And what of that? It is too easy to tell someone condemned to an early death by a fatal disease, and who knows it, that he should not think about it.

Meglio oprando oblïar, senza indagarlo,

questo enorme mister de l'universo!

“Better to work and forget and not delve too deeply into the vast mystery of the universe!” says Carducci in his Idillio maremmano. And the same Carducci, in his ode Su Monte Mario, speaks to us of how the earth, mother of the fugitive soul, revolves its glory and sorrow round the sun:

until, withered at Equator

beneath the insistence of a terminal heat,

the faded lineages produce one last

man, one woman,

standing alone amid rent cliffs,

dead woods, ash-colored and their eyes

glazed, watching the sun go down

across the immense ice.

But is it possible to devote oneself to any serious and lasting work and forget about the vast mystery of the universe, refusing always to delve more deeply? Is it possible to contemplate the universe with a serene soul, in the spirit of Lucretian piety, conscious all the while that one day this universe will no longer be reflected in any human consciousness?

Cain, in Byron’s poem of the same name, asks Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals: “Are ye happy?” And Lucifer replies: “We are mighty.” Cain repeats: “Are ye happy?” And the Great Intellectual retorts: “No: art thou?” And further on, Lucifer tells Adah, Cain’s sister and wife: “Choose betwixt Love and Knowledge—since there is no other choice.” And in this same marvelous poem, when Cain says that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a lying tree, for “we know nothing. At least it promised knowledge at the price of death,” Lucifer answers him: “It may be death leads to the highest knowledge”—that is, to nothingness.

Byron’s “Knowledge”—Spanish ciencia, French science, German Wissenschaft—is often placed in opposition to wisdom—Spanish sabiduría, French sagesse, German Weisheit.

Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers,

and he bears a laden breast,

Full of sad experience, moving towards

the stillness of his rest,

says another Lord, Tennyson, in his Locksley Hall. And what is “wisdom,” that we must look for it in the poets mainly, leaving “knowledge” to one side? It is all very well to say with Matthew Arnold—in his Preface to Wordsworth’s poems—that “Poetry is the reality, philosophy the illusion”; but reason is always reason, and reality is always reality, that which can be proved to exist outside ourselves, whether it affords us any consolation or causes us to despair.

I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed, once again, the bankruptcy of science. For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for faith have always come to nought. Science may satisfy, and in point of fact does increasingly satisfy, our increasingly logical or intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our feeling or of our will, and far from satisfying our hunger for immortality, it contradicts it. Rational truth stands in opposition to life. And is there any other truth but rational truth?

It should be admitted, then, that reason, human reason, within its own limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is immortal or that the human consciousness will be indestructible through time to come, but rather proves, within its limits, I repeat, that individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, the limits within which human reason proves what I say above, are the limits of rationality, of what we know from proof. Outside these limits lies the irrational or the contra-rational; outside these limits is Tertullian’s absurdity, the impossibility of the certum est, quia impossibile est. And this absurdity can rest only upon the most absolute uncertainty.

The rational dissolution ends by dissolving reason itself into the most absolute scepticism, into the phenomenalism of Hume, or into the doctrine of absolute contingencies of men like John Stuart Mill, the most consistent and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, which is analytical, that is, destructive and dissolvent, is to cast doubt upon its own validity. A stomach ulcer ends by causing the stomach to digest itself, and reason ends by destroying the immediate and absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative: there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity. We call true that concept which agrees with the general system of all our concepts; and we call true that perception which does not contradict the system of our perceptions; truth, then, is coherence, connection. And as regards the system as a whole, an aggregate: inasmuch as there exists nothing outside it known to us, it is unacceptable to say it is true or otherwise. It is conceivable that the universe, in itself and outside ourselves, may be quite different from what it seems to us, though such a supposition is lacking in all rational meaning. And as regards necessity: is there an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean nothing more than what is and insofar as it is; for in another, more transcendent sense, what absolute necessity, what logical necessity independent of the fact that the universe exists, is there for a universe, or anything else, to exist at all?

Absolute relativism, which is nothing more or less than scepticism—in the most modern sense of that term-—is the supreme triumph of ratiocinating reason.

Sentiment cannot turn consolation into truth, and reason cannot turn truth into consolation. And yet reason, proceeding on the basis of truth itself, on the basis of the very concept of reality, plunges into the depths of scepticism. And in the abyss, rational scepticism comes face to face with sentiment’s despair, and the encounter gives us a basis—a terrible basis!—for consolation. Let us examine it.