Materialism and law.

— Displaying itself as it had never done in any other era, and presenting itself as the supreme regulator of the moral destinies of Humanity, materialism had the effect of terrifying the masses through the inevitable consequences of its doctrines for the social order. For this very reason it provoked, in favor of spiritualist ideas, an energetic reaction, which must prove to it that it is far from having sympathies as general as it supposes, and that it deludes itself singularly if it expects one day to impose its laws upon the world.

Assuredly the spiritualist beliefs of times past are insufficient for this century; they are not at the intellectual level of our generation; on many points they are in contradiction with the positive data of Science; they leave in the spirit a void incompatible with the need for the positive that prevails in modern society; moreover, they commit the immense error of imposing themselves through blind faith and of proscribing free examination. Hence, without the least doubt, the development of incredulity in the greater number; it is quite evident that if men were nourished, from infancy, only on ideas susceptible of being later confirmed by reason, there would be no unbelievers. How many persons, brought back to belief by Spiritism, have told us: If they had always presented God, the soul, and the future life to us in a rational manner, we would never have doubted! From the fact that a principle receives a bad or false application, does it follow that it must be rejected? This happens with spiritual things, as with the legislation of all social institutions: it is necessary to adapt them to the times, under penalty of succumbing. But instead of presenting something better than the old classical spiritualism, materialism preferred to suppress everything, which dispensed it from searching, and seemed more comfortable to those whom the idea of God and of the future importunes. What would one think of a physician who, finding that a convalescent's regimen is not substantial enough for his temperament, prescribed for him to eat absolutely nothing?

What is to be wondered at is to find in the majority of the materialists of the modern school that spirit of intolerance carried to the utmost limits, they who without cease lay claim to the right of freedom of conscience. Their own political coreligionists find themselves treated ungraciously before them, as soon as they make profession of spiritualism, like Mr. Jules Favre, apropos of his speech at the Academy (Figaro of May 8, 1868), and like Mr. Camille Flammarion, outrageously ridiculed and disparaged, in another newspaper whose name we have forgotten, because he dared to prove God through Science. According to the author of that diatribe, one cannot be a scholar except on the condition of not believing in God; Chateaubriand is nothing but a wretched writer and a doddering old man. If men of such incontestable merit are treated with so little respect, Spiritists must not lament being mocked regarding their beliefs. There is at this moment, on the part of a certain party, a furious opposition to spiritualist ideas in general, in which Spiritism is naturally included. What it seeks is not a better and more just God, it is the God-matter, less constraining, because one has no accounts to render to it. No one contests this party's right to have its opinion, to discuss contrary opinions, but what could not be conceded to it is the pretension, singular to say the least for men who present themselves as apostles of liberty, of preventing others from believing in their own way and from discussing the doctrines they do not share. Intolerance for intolerance, one is worth no more than the other.

One of the best protests we have read against materialist tendencies was published in the newspaper Droit, under the title: Materialism and law. The question is there treated with notable profundity and perfect logic, from the double point of view of the social order and of jurisprudence. The cause of spiritualism being that of Spiritism, we applaud the energetic defense of the former, even when the latter is set aside therein. This is why we think that the readers of the Review will see with pleasure the reproduction of this article.

(Extracted from the newspaper Droit, of May 14, 1868).

The present generation is going through an intellectual crisis, about which one should not be alarmed beyond measure, but it would be imprudence to leave its outcome to chance. Ever since Humanity thinks, one has believed in the soul, an immaterial principle, distinct from the organs that serve it; it was even held to be immortal. One believed in a Providence, creator and mistress of beings and things, in the good, in the just, in the liberty of human free will, in a future life which, in order to be worth more than the world in which we are, needs only, as the poet says, to exist. Modern doctors, who are beginning to grow clamorous, have changed all this. Man is by them brought back to the dignity of the animal, and the latter reduced to a material aggregate. Matter and the properties of matter, such would be the only possible objects of human science; thought would be only a product of the organ that is its seat, and man, when the organic molecules that constitute his person disaggregate and return to the elements, would perish entirely. If the materialist doctrines should ever have their hour of triumph, the philosophical jurisconsults — it must be said for their honor — would be the first vanquished. What would their rules and their laws have to do in a world in which the law of matter were the whole law? Human actions can be nothing but automatic facts, if man is wholly matter. But then, where will liberty be? And if liberty does not exist, where is morality? On what grounds could any authority whatever claim to dominate the fatal expansion of a force wholly physical and necessarily legitimate, since it is fatal? Materialism ruins the moral law and, with the moral law, law, the civil order in its entirety, that is, the conditions of the existence of Humanity. Such immediate, inevitable consequences certainly deserve to be thought about. Let us see, then, how this old materialist doctrine is reproduced, which has not been seen to appear, up to the present, except in the worst days. There have almost always been materialists, theoretical or practical, whether through a deviation from common sense, or to justify base habits of living. The first reason for being of materialism lies in the imperfection of human intelligence. Cicero said in very harsh terms, that: “There is no folly that has not found some philosopher to defend it” n Nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum. The second reason for being lies in the bad inclinations of the human heart. Practical materialism, which is reduced to a few shameful maxims, has always appeared in epochs of moral or social decomposition, such as those of the Regency and the Directory. n In most cases, when there have been more elevated pretensions, philosophical materialism has been a reaction against the exaggerated demands of ultra-spiritualist or religious doctrines. But in our days it produces itself with a new character; it calls itself scientific. Natural history would be the whole science of man; nothing would exist that it does not have as its object and, since it does not have spirit as its object, spirit does not exist. For whoever wishes to think upon the matter, materialism is indeed a danger, not of true science, but of incomplete and presumptuous science; it is a bad plant that grows in its soil. Whence come the materialist tendencies, more or less marked, of so many scholars? From their constant occupation in studying and manipulating matter? Perhaps a little. But they come above all from their habits of mind, from the exclusive practice of their experimental merit. The scientific method may be reduced to these terms: To gather only facts, to induce very prudently the law of these facts, to banish absolutely all research into causes. It is not to be wondered at, after this, that intelligences of short vision, feeble in some sense, deformed, as we all become, by one same too continuous intellectual or physical labor, fail to recognize the existence of moral facts, to which the application of their logical instrument is unsuited and, by an imperceptible transmission, pass from methodical ignorance to negation. Meanwhile, if this exclusively experimental method can find itself in error, it is indeed in the study of man, a double being, spirit and matter, whose very organism can be only the product and the instrument of the hidden force, but essentially one, that animates it. One wishes to see in the human organism nothing more than a material aggregate! Why split man and not wish, methodically, to consider in him only one principle, if there are two? Can one boast, at least, of thus explaining all the phenomena of life? Physiological materialism, which prepares philosophical materialism, but which does not necessarily lead to it, at every step is stricken with impotence. Life, say what one will, is a movement, the movement of the soul informing the body; and the soul is thus the spring that moves and transports, by an unknown and unconscious action, the elements of living bodies. By systematically bringing the study of physical man down to the conditions of the study of organized bodies; by seeing in the living forces of each part of the organism only properties of matter; by localizing those forces in each of those parts; by considering life only as a physical manifestation, a result, when it is perhaps a principle; by setting aside the unity of the principle of life as a hypothesis, when it may be a reality, one falls, without doubt, into physiological materialism, in order then to slip rapidly into philosophical materialism; but one concludes by an enunciation and an incomplete examination of the facts; one believed oneself to be marching supported only on observation, and one set aside the capital fact that dominates and determines all the particular facts. The materialism of the new school is not, then, a demonstrated result of study; it is a preconceived opinion. The physiologist does not admit spirit; but what is there to be wondered at? it is a cause, and he set himself to study with a method that forbids him precisely the research into causes. We do not wish to submit the cause of spiritualism to a question of controverted physiology, and on which they could refuse us with good right. The intimate sense reveals to me the existence of the soul with a quite different authority. Even were physiological materialism as true as it is debatable, our spiritualist convictions would for all that remain no less entire. Strengthened by the testimony of the intimate sense, confirmed by the assent of a thousand generations that have succeeded one another on Earth, we would repeat the old adage: “Truth does not destroy truth”, and we would hope that the reconciliation would come about with time. But of what weight do we not feel ourselves relieved when we see that, in order to deny the soul and to give this declaration as a result of Science, the scholar, by his own confession, set out methodically from this idea that the soul does not exist! We have read many books of physiology, in general very badly written; what struck us was the constant vice in the reasonings of the organicist physiologist, when he leaves his subject to make himself a philosopher. One sees him constantly take an effect for a cause, a faculty for a substance, an attribute for a being, confuse existences and forces, etc., and reason in consequence. One would say it is a wager. Sometimes he crosses incredible distances without suspecting the path he travels. What exact and clear mind, for example, has ever been able to understand that thought so well known of Cabanis and Broussais, that “the brain produces, secretes thought?” At other times, the positive man, the man of science, the man of observation and facts, will tell us seriously that the brain “stores up ideas.” A little more, and he will draw them. Is it metaphor or gibberish? Natural science will never be asked to take sides for or against the human soul; but why does it not resolve to be ignorant of what is not the object of its investigations? With what right does it dare to swear that there is nothing beyond it, after having decreed that it does not wish to see it? Why does it not keep a little of that reserve, which becomes us all so well, above all those who have the pretension of advancing only with certainty? With what authority can the anatomist declare that the soul does not exist, because he has not found it under his scalpel? Has he at least begun to demonstrate rigorously, scientifically, by experiments and by facts, according to the method he advocates, that his scalpel can reach everything, even an immaterial principle?

Be it as it may with all these questions, materialism, calling itself scientific, without thereby being worth any more, spreads in broad daylight and lets us see what materialist law would be. Alas! the materialist social state would offer us a very sad and shameful spectacle. First of all, one thing is certain: if man exists only by his organism, that material and automatic mass, into which henceforth every man, provided with an encephalon to secrete ideas, will become, will be irresponsible for all the movements he produces. n With it, it will not be necessary for the encephalon of another material mass to decide to secrete ideas of justice or injustice; because those ideas of justice or injustice are only applicable to a free force, existing by itself, capable of willing and of abstaining. One does not contest the torrent or the avalanche. Then liberty, that is, the will to act or not to act, will not exist here, nor will law either. In this state, all forces will have a full and absolute power of expansion. Everything will be legitimate, licit, permitted, even ordained, let us say; because it is clear that everything that is not the act of a free will, that does not produce itself as an act morally obligatory or morally forbidden, is a constrained fact, which may well come to collide with a contrary fact of the same character but which falls, like all physical facts, under the ineluctable empire of natural laws.

It suffices to set forth such ideas to do them justice. It is the system of Spinoza, who very resolutely established the principle of the right of force. The strong, says Spinoza, are made to subjugate the weak, as the fishes to swim and the larger to eat the smaller. In the materialist system, what would be called law could not have a different principle. But what man endowed with sense would dare to confess such a system which, by itself alone, would suffice to refute materialism, since it follows necessarily from it? Do they wish, however, that this principle of force should find itself, in fact, limited by itself? Nothing will be gained, or almost nothing, by this flagrant disavowal of the principle. Let us admit, if they wish, that the thinking substance (we continue to speak the language of the materialists) combines in individuals to regularize this expansion of force; to what will it come? At most to a set of rules that will have interest for their basis and, even so, as there are no other laws than the laws of matter, this legislation will have no obligatory character; each one will be able to infringe it if his thinking matter advises him to and if his force permits him. Thus, in this singular doctrine, one would not have even a social state built upon the plan of the sad society of Hobbes. We have spoken so far only of the first conditions of every social state. But, in every civil society, individual property is consecrated; one contracts, sells, leases, associates, etc. Marriage founds the family; thence is born a whole new order of relations. Through education in the home and through public education, traditions are perpetuated. Thus the national spirit is formed and civilization develops. Will our materialist society have its civil law? Impossible to suppose it, since civil law, in its entirety, has justice for its principle, and justice can be only a word, or a contradiction, in a doctrine that knows only matter and the properties of matter. One thus arrives, inevitably, at concluding (unless one is delirious about it) that the civil state of materialist society is the state of bestiality. We say nothing in excess when we advance that materialism is destructive, not of such-and-such a morality, but of all morality; not of such-and-such a civil state, but of every civil state, of all society. One must recede with it beyond the regions of barbarism, beyond savagery. Should it be proscribed for this? May God not permit it. Its character being recognized, we would not ask, nevertheless, that its teaching be interdicted; we would defend it, if necessary, against all restriction by force, provided the professor spoke only in his own name. Liberty is so dear to us (the readers of this newspaper know it); it brings with it such benefits; we have such confidence in public good sense, that we would conceive no disquiet at seeing every chair, every tribune open to all ideas.

But the question would no longer present itself in the same terms if it happened that the professor spoke from a chair of the State, remunerated by the budget. With or without reason, the State teaches. Can it teach doctrines whose most immediate consequences are destructive of the State? Will it be left to the discretion of the professor to make the State endorse all the doctrines he can conceive? The question is not simple. The professors of the State are public functionaries; their teaching cannot be and is not anything but an official teaching. The State is responsible for what they say; it answers before the youth and the families. If with the grand words of independence of the professoriate we refused its control, we would make ourselves oppressors of the State, by the most hypocritical of oppressions, because we would charge to its account doctrines that it disapproves. Without doubt the superior authority owes to its professors, often grown old through study, care, considerations, and a great confidence, as it owes to its generals, to its administrators, and to its magistrates; but it does not owe them the sacrifice of its mandate, when it is to be presumed that it commands the country. The professor is no more independent of the State than the general who claimed to command an insurrection.

H. Thiercelin.

[1] As the liver is not responsible for the bile that it secretes.

[2] [Of the Regency: A regency period is one during which someone governs in the name of the monarch, or in the name of the Crown while the throne is without a reigning monarch. — and of the Directory: The Directory was the form of government approved by the First French Republic from October 26, 1795 (4 Brumaire Year IV) to November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire Year VIII). Five directors were appointed in command of the executive power. It was marked by the restoration of suffrage.]

[3] [The translation of the Latin phrase was placed in quotation marks to highlight it]