Fundamental Philosophy, Vol. I (of 2). Balmes Jaime Luciano
affects universal truths.
Consciousness is an anchor, not a beacon: it saves the understanding from shipwreck, but does not light it on its way; in the assaults of universal doubt, consciousness is at hand to shield it from destruction; but if asked to direct us, it gives us only particular facts.
These facts have no scientific value, except when made objective, or rather, when the mind, reflecting upon them, bathes them in the light of necessary truths.
We think, we feel, we are free; these are facts; but of themselves they are barren. If we would fecundate them, we must take them as a kind of material of universal truths. Thought becomes immovable, it congeals, if deprived of the impulse of these ideas; sensation is common to us and the brutes; and liberty, without combination of motives presented by reason, has no object, no life.
71. Here we discover the cause of the obscurity and sterility of German philosophy since Fichte. Kant fixed himself upon the subject, without, however, destroying objectivity in the internal world; and therefore his philosophy, although containing many errors, offers to the mind some luminous points: but Fichte went farther, planted himself upon the me, and made no use of objectivity, save when it was necessary to the more solid establishment of a fact of consciousness; and so he found only realms of darkness and contradiction.
Men of gifted minds have labored in vain to make some ray of light emanate from a point condemned to obscurity. The soul sees itself in its own acts; and that it presents immediately to itself facts conducing to its own cognition is the only title it has, more than other beings distinct from it, to be conceived by itself. What would it know were it not to perceive its own thought, its will, and the exercise of all its faculties? How is it to discuss its own nature, if not from data furnished by the testimony of its own acts? The me then does not see itself intuitively; is offered to itself only mediately, by its acts; that is, so far as it is known, it is in the same category as all other external beings, which are all known by their effects upon us.
The me in itself considered, is not a luminous point; it supports the fabric of reason, but is not the rule according to which it is to be constructed. The true light is found in objectivity, for it is properly the object of knowledge. The me can neither be known nor thought, save inasmuch as it makes itself its own object, and consequently places itself on a level with other beings subject to intellectual activity, which operates only by virtue of objective truths.
72. Intelligence cannot be conceived without at least internal objects; but if the understanding do not conceive relations and consequently truths in them, they will be sterile. These truths will have no connection, will be isolated facts, if they involve no necessity; and even those relations which refer to particular facts furnished by experience will not be susceptible of any combination if they do not, at least conditionally, involve some necessity. The brilliancy of the light in the room where I now write is in itself a particular, contingent fact, and science, as such, cannot make it its object except by subjecting the movement of the light to geometrical laws, that is, to necessary truths.
Science then may find a resting-point in the me itself as subject, but no point of departure. The individual is of no service to the universal, nor the contingent to the necessary. Assuredly there would be no such thing as the individual A's science, if the individual A himself did not exist; but the science which stands in need of the individual subject is not science properly so called, but the collection of individual acts by which the individual perceives science. This collection of acts is not the science perceived, which is something common to all intellects, and does not need this or that individual: the fund of truths constituting science does not spring from this collection of individual acts, particular facts, which are lost like minutest drops in the ocean of intelligence.
How then can science be based solely upon the subjective me? How can the object be made to spring from this subject? Consciousness has no connection with science, except in so far as it furnishes facts to which we may apply objective, universal, and necessary principles, independent of all finite individuality, constituting the patrimony of human reason, but not requiring the existence of any man.
73. No analysis of the facts of consciousness will produce the origin of the lights of science. Such an act would be either direct or reflex. If direct, its value is objective not subjective, the act does not found science, but the truth perceived, not the subject but the object, not the me, but that which is seen by the me. If reflex, it supposes another previous act, to wit, the object of reflection, which is primitive, and not the act.
Neither is the combination of the direct with the reflex act of any service to science, except as connected with necessary and objective truths, which are independent of the subject. An act individually considered, is an internal phenomenon, which, apart from objective truths, teaches us nothing. It has, indeed, a scientific value, if considered under the general ideas of being, cause, effect, principle or product of activity, modification, or its relations with its subject, which is the substratum of other similar acts; that is, if it be considered as a particular case, comprised in the general ideas as a contingent phenomenon, to be appreciated by the help of necessary truths, as an experimental fact to which a theory may be applied.
The reflex act is only a cognition of a cognition, feeling, or some other internal phenomenon; and therefore all reflection upon consciousness presupposes a prior direct act. The object of this direct act is not the me; the fundamental principle of the cognition therefore is not the me, as the object known, but only as the necessary condition, since there cannot be thought without a thinking subject.
74. These considerations destroy the very foundations of the system of Fichte, and that of all who take the human me as their point of departure on the voyage of science. The me, in itself, is not presented to us; we know it only by its acts; and herein it participates of a quality of other objects, the essence of which is not immediately offered to us, but only what emanates from it by the exercise of their activity upon us.
Thus guided by objective and necessary truths, which are the laws of our understanding, the type of the relations of beings, and consequently a sure standard of them, we ascend by reasoning to the cognition of things themselves. We know that our mind is simple, because it thinks, whereas the composite, the multiplex cannot think. It is thus we know the me. We are conscious of its thinking activity, and this is the material furnished by the fact, but then comes the principle, the objective truth to illumine the fact, and show the repugnance between thought and composition, and the necessary connection between simplicity and consciousness.
Upon examination, this reasoning will be found to apply not only to the me, but to every thinking being; and this is why we can extend our demonstration to all such beings: the me, therefore, which applies this truth, does not create, it only knows it, and knows itself to be a particular case comprised in the general rule.
75. To pretend that truth has its source in the subjective me, is to begin by supposing the me to be an absolute, infinite being, the origin of all truths, and the reason of all beings; which is equivalent to making philosophy commence by deifying the human understanding. But as one individual has no more right to this deification than another, to admit it is to establish a rational pantheism, which, as we shall hereafter see, is nearly, if not quite, identical with absolute pantheism.
If we suppose individual reason to be only a phenomenon of the one absolute reason, and consequently what we call spirits not to be true substances, but modifications of a single spirit, and each particular consciousness to be only a manifestation of the universal consciousness, we can then conceive why the source of all truth is sought in the me, and why we interrogate our own consciousness as a kind of oracle through which the universal consciousness speaks. But the difficulty is that such a supposition is gratuitous, and that they who thus seek the reason of all truths, begin by establishing the most incomprehensible and absurd of propositions. Who will persuade us that our consciousness is only the modification of another? Who will make us believe that what we call the me is common to all men, to all intelligent beings, and that the only difference between them is the difference of the modifications of one absolute being? Why, then, is not this absolute being conscious of every consciousness which it comprises? Why does it not know that which it contains, and by which it is modified? Why does it believe itself