Man Is Essentially Subject In Everything To The Eternal Laws Of The First Principle

VIII MAN IS ESSENTIALLY SUBJECT IN EVERYTHING TO THE ETERNAL LAWS OF THE FIRST PRINCIPLE

Let us regard, with the eyes of reason, this animal man which the great being has produced.

What is his first sensation? A sensation of pain; then the pleasure of feeding. That is the whole of our life: pain and pleasure. Whence have we these two springs which keep us in action until our last moment, if not from this first principle of action, this Demiourgos? Assuredly we do not give pain to ourselves; and how could we be the cause of our few pleasures? We have said elsewhere that it is impossible for us to invent a new kind of pleasure—that is to say, a new sense. Let us now say that it is equally impossible for us to invent a new kind of pain. The most execrable of tyrants cannot do it. The Jews, whose tortures have been described by the Benedictine monk Calmet in his dictionary, could only cut, tear, mutilate, draw, burn, strangle, and crush; all torments may thus be summarised. We can therefore do nothing of ourselves, either for good or evil; we are but the blind instruments of nature.

But I wish to think and I think, most men will recklessly assert. Let us consider it. What was our first idea after the feeling of pain? The idea of the breast that we sucked; then the face of the nurse; then a few other objects and needs made their faint impressions. Would any one up to this point venture to say that he was more than a sentient automaton, a wretched abandoned animal destitute of knowledge or power, an outcast of nature? Will he venture to say that in this condition he is a thinking being, the author of his own ideas, the possessor of a soul? What is the son of a king when he leaves the womb? He would excite the disgust of his father, if he were not his father. A[219] flower of the field that one treads underfoot is an infinitely superior thing.

IX THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION IN SENTIENT BEINGS

There comes at length a time when a greater or smaller number of perceptions, received in our mechanism, seem to present themselves to our will. We think that we are forming ideas. It is as if, when we turn the tap of a fountain, we were to think that we cause the water which streams out. We create ideas, poor creatures that we are! It is evident that we had no share in the former, yet we would regard ourselves as the authors of the latter. If we reflect well on this vain boast of forming ideas, we shall see that it is insolent and absurd.

Let us remember that there is nothing in external objects with the least analogy, the least relation, to a feeling, an idea, a thought. Let an eye or an ear be made by the best artisan in the world; the eye will see nothing, the ear will hear nothing. It is the same with our living body. The universal principle of action does everything in us. He has not made us an exception to the rest of nature.

Two experiences which are constantly repeated during the course of our life, and of which I have spoken elsewhere, will convince every thoughtful man that our ideas, our wills, and our actions do not belong to us.

The first is that no one knows, or can know, what[220] idea he will have at any minute, what desire he will have, what word he will speak, what movement his body will perform.

The second is that during sleep it is clear that we have not the least share in what takes place in our dreams. We grant that we are then mere automata, on which an invisible power acts with a force that is as real and powerful as it is incomprehensible. This power fills the mind with ideas, inspires desires, passions, reflections. It sets in motion all the organs of the body. It has happened at times that a mother has smothered, in a restless dream, the new-born child that lay by her side; that a man has killed his friend. How many musicians have composed music during sleep? How many young preachers have composed sermons during their sleep?

If our life were equally divided between waking and sleeping, instead of our usually spending a third of our short career in sleep, and if we always dreamed during sleep, it would then be evident that half of our life did not depend on us. In any case, assuming that we spend eight out of the twenty-four hours in sleep, it is plain that a third of our existence is beyond our control. Add to this infancy, add all the time that is occupied in purely animal functions, and see how much is left. You will admit with surprise that at least half our life does not belong to us at all. Then reflect how inconsistent it would be if one half depended on us and the other half did not.

Conclude, therefore, that the universal principle of action does everything in us.

Here the Jansenist interrupts me and says: “You are a plagiarist; you have taken your doctrine from the famous book, The Action of God on Created Things, or Physical Premotion, by our great patriarch Boursier.” I have said somewhere of Boursier that he had dipped his pen in the inkpot of the Deity. No, my friend; I have never received anything from the Jansenists or the Molinists except a strong aversion for sects, and some indifference to their opinions. Boursier, taking God as his model, knows precisely what was the nature of Adam’s dream when God took a rib from his side wherewith to make woman; he knows the nature of his concupiscence, habitual grace, and actual grace. He knows, with St. Augustine, that men and women would have engendered children dispassionately in the earthly paradise, just as one sows a field, without any feeling of carnal pleasure. He is convinced that Adam sinned only by distraction in the earthly paradise. I know nothing about these things, and am content to admire those who have so splendid and profound a knowledge.

X THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION CALLED THE SOUL

But, some centuries later in the history of man, it came to be imagined that we have a soul which acts of itself; and the idea has become so familiar that we take it for a reality.

We talk incessantly of “the soul,” though we have not the least idea of the meaning of it.

To some the soul means the life; to others it is a small, frail image of ourselves, which goes, when we die, to drink the waters of Acheron; to others it is a harmony, a memory, an entelechy. In the end it has been converted into a little being that is not body, a breath that is not air; and of this word “breath,” which corresponds to “spirit” in many tongues, a kind of thing has been made which is nothing at all.

Who can fail to see that men uttered, and still utter, the word “soul” vaguely and without understanding, as we utter the words “movement,” “understanding,” “imagination,” “memory,” “desire,” and “will”? There is no real being which we call will, desire, memory, imagination, understanding, or movement; but the real being called man understands, imagines, remembers, desires, wills, and moves. They are abstract terms, invented for convenience of speech. I run, I sleep, I awake; but there is no such physical reality as running, sleep, or awakening. Neither sight, nor hearing, nor touch, nor smell, nor taste, is a real being; I hear, I see, I smell, I taste, I touch. And how could I do this if the great being had not so disposed all things; if the principle of action, the universal cause—in one word, God—had not given us these faculties?

We may be quite sure that there would be just as much reason to grant the snail a hidden being called a “free soul” as to grant it to man. The snail has a will, desires, tastes, sensations, ideas, and memory. It wishes to move towards the material of its food or the object of its love. It[223] remembers it, has an idea of it, advances towards it as quickly as it can; it knows pleasure and pain. Yet you are not terrified when you are told that the animal has not a spiritual soul; that God has bestowed on it these gifts for a little time; that he who moves the stars moves also the insect. But when it comes to man you change your mind. This poor animal seems to you so worthy of your respect—that is to say, you are so proud—that you venture to place in its frail body something that seems to share the nature of God himself, yet something that seems to you at times diabolical in the perversity of its thoughts; something wise and foolish, good and execrable, heavenly and infernal, invisible, immortal, incomprehensible. And you have familiarised yourself with this idea, as you have grown accustomed to speak of movement, though there is no such being as movement; as you use abstract words, though there are no abstract beings.

XI EXAMINATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION CALLED THE SOUL

There is, nevertheless, a principle of action in man. Yes, there is one everywhere. But can this principle be anything else than a spring, a secret first mover which is developed by the ever-active first principle—a principle that is as powerful as it is secret, as demonstrable as it is invisible, which we have recognised as the essential cause in the whole of nature?

If you create movement or ideas because you will it, you are God for the time being; for you have all the attributes of God—will, power, and creation. Consider the absurdity into which you fall in making yourself God.

You have to choose between these two alternatives: either to be God whenever you will, or to depend continually on God. The first is extravagant; the second alone is reasonable.

If there were in our body a little god called “the free soul,” which becomes so frequently a little devil, this little god would have to be regarded either as having been created from all eternity, or as created at the moment of your conception, or during your embryonic life, or at birth, or when you begin to feel. All these positions are equally ridiculous.

A little subordinate god, existing uselessly during a past eternity and descending into a body that often dies at birth, is the height of absurdity.

If this little god-soul is supposed to be created at the moment of conception, we must consider the master of nature, the being of beings, continually occupied in watching assignations, attentive to every intercourse of man and woman, ever ready to despatch a sentient and thinking soul into a recess between the entrails. A fine lodging for a little god! When the mother brings forth a still-born child, what becomes of the god-soul that had been lodged in the abdomen? Whither has it returned?

The same difficulties and absurdities, equally ridiculous and revolting, and found in connection with each of the other suppositions. The idea of a soul,[225] as it is usually and thoughtlessly conceived by people, is one of the most foolish things that has ever been devised.

How much more reasonable, more decent, more respectful to the supreme being, more in harmony with our nature, and therefore truer, is it not to say:

“We are machines made successively by the eternal geometrician; machines made like all the other animals, having the same organs, the same needs, the same pleasures, the same pains; far superior to all of them in many things, inferior to them in others; having received from the great being a principle of action which we cannot penetrate; receiving everything, giving ourselves nothing; and a million times more subject to him than the clay is to the potter who moulds it”?

Once more, either man is a god or he is precisely as I have described him.

XII WHETHER THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION IN ANIMALS IS FREE

There is a principle of action in man and in every animal, just as there is in every machine; and this first mover, this ultimate spring, is necessarily eternally arranged by the master, otherwise all would be chaos, and there would be no world.

Every animal, like every machine, necessarily and irresistibly obeys the power that directs it. That is evident, and sufficiently familiar. Every animal is possessed of will, and one must be a fool to[226] think that a dog following its master has not the will to follow him. No doubt, it follows him irresistibly; but it follows voluntarily. Does it follow freely? Yes, if nothing prevents it; that is to say, it can follow, it wills to follow, and it follows. The freedom to follow is not in its will, but in the power to walk that is given to it. A nightingale wills to make its nest, and makes it when it has found some moss. It had the freedom to construct this cradle, just as it had freedom to sing when it desires, and has not a chill. But was it free to have the desire? Did it will to will to make its nest? Had it that absurd “liberty of indifference” which theologians would describe as follows: “I neither will to make my nest nor the contrary; it is a matter of complete indifference to me; but I am going to will to make my nest solely for the sake of willing, and without being determined to do it in any way, merely to prove that I am free”? Such is the absurdity we find taught in the schools. If the nightingale could speak, it would say to these doctors: “I am irresistibly determined to nest, I will to nest, and I nest; you are irresistibly determined to reason badly, and you fulfil your destiny as I do mine.”

We will now see if man is free in any other sense.