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Letter XIII
Letter XIII of 24. Read it here for reference, or continue through the entire work without leaving the reader.
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sur m. locke
Jamais il ne fut peut-être un esprit plus sage, plus méthodique, un logicien plus exact que M. Locke; cependant il n’était pas grand mathématicien. Il n’avait jamais pu se soumettre à la fatigue des calculs ni à la sécheresse des vérités mathématiques, qui ne présente d’abord rien de sensible à l’esprit; et personne n’a mieux prouvé que lui qu’on pouvait avoir l’esprit géomètre sans le secours de la géométrie. Avant lui, de grands philosophes avaient décidé positivement ce que c’est que l’âme de l’homme; mais, puisqu’ils n’en savaient rien du tout, il est bien juste qu’ils aient tous été d’avis différents.
Dans la Grèce, berceau des arts et des erreurs, et où l’on poussa si loin la grandeur et la sottise de l’esprit humain, on raisonnait comme chez nous sur l’âme. Le divin Anaxagoras, à qui on dressa un autel pour avoir appris aux hommes que le Soleil était plus grand que le Péloponnèse, que la neige était noire et que les cieux étaient de pierre, affirma que l’âme était un esprit aérien, mais cependant immortel. Diogène, un autre que celui qui devint cynique après avoir été faux-monnayeur, assurait que l’âme était une portion de la substance même de Dieu; et cette idée au moins était brillante. Épicure la composait de parties comme le corps. Aristote, qu’on a expliqué de mille façons, parce qu’il était inintelligible, croyait, si l’on s’en rapporte à quelques-uns de ses disciples, que l’entendement de tous les hommes était une seule et même substance. Le divin Platon, maître du divin Aristote, et le divin Socrate, maître du divin Platon, disaient l’âme corporelle et éternelle. Le démon de Socrate lui avait appris sans doute ce qui en était. Il y a des gens, à la vérité, qui prétendent qu’un homme qui se vantait d’avoir un génie familier était indubitablement un peu fou ou un peu fripon; mais ces gens-là sont trop difficiles.
Quant à nos Pères de l’Église, plusieurs dans les premiers siècles ont cru l’âme humaine, les Anges et Dieu corporels.
Le monde se raffine toujours. Saint Bernard, selon l’aveu du père Mabillon, enseigna, à propos de l’âme, qu’après la mort elle ne voyait point Dieu dans le Ciel, mais qu’elle conversait seulement avec l’humanité de Jésus-Christ; on ne le crut pas cette fois sur sa parole. L’aventure de la Croisade avait un peu décrédité ses oracles. Mille scolastiques sont venus ensuite, comme le docteur irréfragable, le docteur subtil, le docteur angélique, le docteur séraphique, le docteur chérubique, qui tous ont été bien sûrs de connaître l’âme très clairement, mais qui n’ont pas laissé d’en parler comme s’ils avaient voulu que personne n’y entendît rien.
Notre Descartes, né pour découvrir les erreurs de l’antiquité, mais pour y substituer les siennes, et entraîné par cet esprit systématique qui aveugle les plus grands hommes, s’imagina avoir démontré que l’âme était la même chose que la pensée, comme la matière, selon lui, est la même chose que l’étendue; il assura bien que l’on pense toujours, et que l’âme arrive dans le corps pourvue de toutes les notions métaphysiques, connaissant Dieu, l’espace, l’infini, ayant toutes les idées abstraites, remplie enfin de belles connaissances, qu’elle oublie malheureusement en sortant du ventre de la mère.
Le P. Malebranche de l’Oratoire, dans ses illusions sublimes, non-seulement n’admet point les idées innées, mais il ne doutait pas que nous ne vissions tout en Dieu, et que Dieu, pour ainsi dire, ne fût notre âme.
Tant de raisonneurs ayant fait le roman de l’âme, un sage est venu, qui en a fait modestement l’histoire. Locke a développé à l’homme la raison humaine, comme un excellent anatomiste explique les ressorts du corps humain. Il s’aide partout du flambeau de la physique; il ose quelquefois parler affirmativement, mais il ose aussi douter; au lieu de définir tout d’un coup ce que nous ne connaissons pas, il examine par degrés ce que nous voulons connaître. Il prend un enfant au moment de sa naissance; il suit pas à pas les progrès de son entendement; il voit ce qu’il a de commun avec les bêtes et ce qu’il a au-dessus d’elles; il consulte surtout son propre témoignage, la conscience de sa pensée.
« Je laisse, dit-il, à discuter à ceux qui en savent plus que moi, si notre âme existe avant ou après l’organisation de notre corps; mais j’avoue qu’il m’est tombé en partage une de ces âmes grossières qui ne pensent pas toujours, et j’ai même le malheur de ne pas concevoir qu’il soit plus nécessaire à l’âme de penser toujours qu’au corps d’être toujours en mouvement. »
Pour moi, je me vante de l’honneur d’être en ce point aussi stupide que Locke. Personne ne me fera jamais croire que je pense toujours; et je ne me sens pas plus disposé que lui à imaginer que, quelques semaines après ma conception, j’étais une fort savante âme, sachant alors mille choses que j’ai oubliées en naissant, et ayant fort inutilement possédé dans l’utérus des connaissances qui m’ont échappé dès que j’ai pu en avoir besoin, et que je n’ai jamais bien pu rapprendre depuis.
Locke, après avoir ruiné les idées innées, après avoir bien renoncé à la vanité de croire qu’on pense toujours, ayant bien établi que toutes nos idées nous viennent par les sens, ayant examiné nos idées simples et celles qui sont composées, ayant suivi l’esprit de l’homme dans toutes ses opérations, ayant fait voir combien les langues que les hommes parlent sont imparfaites, etquel abus nous faisons des termes à tout moment; Locke, dis-je, considère enfin l’étendue, ou plutôt le néant des connaissances humaines. C’est dans ce chapitre qu’il ose avancer modestement ces paroles: Nous ne serons peut-être jamais capables de connaître si un être purement matériel pense ou non.
Ce discours sage parut à plus d’un théologien une déclarationscandaleuse que l’âme est matérielle et mortelle. Quelques Anglais,dévots à leur manière, sonnèrent l’alarme. Les superstitieux sontdans la société ce que les poltrons sont dans une armée: ils ontet donnent des terreurs paniques. On cria que Locke voulaitrenverser la religion: il ne s’agissait pourtant point de religiondans cette affaire; c’était une question purement philosophique,très-indépendante de la foi et de la révélation; il ne fallait qu’examinersans aigreur s’il y a de la contradiction à dire: La matièrepeut penser, et Dieu peut communiquer la pensée à la matière. Mais les théologiens commencent trop souvent par dire que Dieuest outragé quand on n’est pas de leur avis. C’est trop ressembleraux mauvais poètes, qui croyaient que Despréaux parlait mal duroi parce qu’il se moquait d’eux.
Le docteur Stillingfleet s’est fait une réputation de théologienmodéré pour n’avoir pas dit positivement des injures à Locke.Il entra en lice contre lui, mais il fut battu, car il raisonnait endocteur, et Locke en philosophe instruit de la force et de la faiblessede l’esprit humain, et qui se battait avec des armes dont ilconnaissait la trempe.
Si j’osais parler après M. Locke sur un sujet si délicat, je dirais:Les hommes disputent depuis longtemps sur la nature etsur l’immortalité de l’âme: à l’égard de son immortalité, il estimpossible de la démontrer, puisqu’on dispute encore sur sanature, et qu’assurément il faut connaître à fond un être créépour décider s’il est immortel ou non. La raison humaine est sipeu capable de démontrer par elle-même l’immortalité de l’âmeque la religion a été obligée de nous la révéler. Le bien communde tous les hommes demande qu’on croie l’âme immortelle: lafoi nous l’ordonne; il n’en faut pas davantage, et la chose estpresque décidée. Il n’en est pas de même de sa nature: il importe peu à la religion de quelle substance soit l’âme, pourvu qu’ellesoit vertueuse. C’est une horloge qu’on nous a donnée à gouverner;mais l’ouvrier ne nous a pas dit de quoi le ressort de cette horlogeest composé.
Je suis corps et je pense, je n’en sais pas davantage. Si je neconsulte que mes faibles lumières, irai-je attribuer à une causeinconnue ce que je puis si aisément attribuer à la seule causeseconde que je connais un peu? Ici tous les philosophes de l’écolem’arrêtent en argumentant, et disent: Il n’y a dans le corps que del’étendue et de la solidité, et il ne peut avoir que du mouvementet de la figure. Or, du mouvement, de la figure, de l’étendue etde la solidité, ne peuvent faire une pensée: donc l’âme ne peutpas être matière. Tout ce grand raisonnement répété tant de foisse réduit uniquement à ceci: Je ne connais que très-peu de chosede la matière, j’en devine imparfaitement quelques propriétés:or je ne sais point du tout si ces propriétés peuvent être jointesà la pensée; donc, parce que je ne sais rien du tout, j’assure positivementque la matière ne saurait penser. Voilà nettement lamanière de raisonner de l’école.
M. Locke dirait avec simplicité à ces messieurs: Confessez dumoins que vous êtes aussi ignorants que moi: votre imaginationni la mienne ne peuvent concevoir comment un corps a des idées;et comprenez-vous mieux comment une substance, telle qu’ellesoit, a des idées? Vous ne concevez ni la matière ni l’esprit, commentosez-vous assurer quelque chose? Que vous importe quel’âme soit un de ces êtres incompréhensibles qu’on appellematière, ou un de ces êtres incompréhensibles qu’on appelleesprit? Quoi! Dieu, le créateur de tout, ne peut-il pas éterniserou anéantir votre âme à son gré, quelle que soit sa substance?
Le superstitieux vient à son tour, et dit qu’il faut brûler pourle bien de leurs âmes ceux qui soupçonnent qu’on peut penseravec la seule aide du corps; mais que dirait-il si c’était lui-mêmequi fût coupable d’irréligion? En effet, quel est l’homme qui oseraassurer, sans une impiété absurde, qu’il est impossible au Créateurde donner à la matière la pensée et le sentiment? Voyez, jevous prie, à quel embarras vous êtes réduits, vous qui bornezainsi la puissance du Créateur. Les bêtes ont les mêmes organesque nous, les mêmes perceptions; elles ont de la mémoire, elles combinent quelques idées. Si Dieu n’a pas pu animer la matière,et lui donner le sentiment, il faut de deux choses l’une, ou queles bêtes soient de pures machines, ou qu'elles aient une âmespirituelle.
Il me paraît démontréque les bêtes ne peuvent être desimples machines; voici ma preuve. Dieu leur a fait précisémentles mêmes organes desentiment que les nôtres: donc si ellesne sentent point, Dieu a fait un ouvrage inutile; or Dieu, devotre aveu même, ne fait rien en vain: donc il n’a point fabriquétant d’organes de sentiment pour qu’il n’y eût point de sentiment;donc les bêtes ne sont point de pures machines. Les bêtes,selon vous, ne peuvent pas avoir une âme spirituelle: donc malgrévous il ne reste autre chose à dire sinon que Dieu a donnéaux organes des bêtes, qui sont matière, la faculté de sentir etd’apercevoir, que vous appelez instinct dans elles. Etqui peutempêcher Dieu de communiquer à nos organes plus déliés cettefaculté de sentir, d’apercevoir, et de penser, que nous appelonsraison humaine? De quelque côté que vous vous tourniez, vousêtes obligés d’avouer votre ignorance et la puissance immensedu Créateur. Ne vous révoltez donc plus contre la sage et modestephilosophie de Locke; loin d’être contraire à la religion, elle luiservirait de preuve, si la religion en avait besoin: car quellephilosophie plus religieuse que celle qui, n’affirmant que cequ’elle conçoit clairement, etsachant avouer sa faiblesse, vousdit qu’il faut recourir à Dieu, dès qu’on examine les premiersprincipes?
D’ailleurs, il ne faut jamais craindre qu’aucun sentimentphilosophique puisse nuire à la religion d’un pays. Nos mystèresont beau être contraires à nos démonstrations, ils n’en sont pasmoins révérés par nos philosophes chrétiens, qui savent que lesobjets de la raison et de la foi sont de différente nature. Jamaisles philosophes ne feront une secte de religion: pourquoi? c’estqu’ils n’écrivent point pour le peuple, et qu’ils sont sans enthousiasme.Divisez le genre humain en vingt parts, il y en a dix-neufcomposées de ceux qui travaillent de leurs mains, et qui ne sauront jamais s’il y a eu unM. Locke au monde; dans la vingtièmepartie qui reste, combien trouve-t-on peu d’hommes quilisent? et parmi ceux qui lisent, il y en a vingt qui lisent desromans contre un qui étudie en philosophie. Le nombre de ceuxqui pensent est excessivement petit, et ceux-là ne s’avisent pasde troubler le monde.
Ce n’est ni Montaigne, ni Locke, ni Bayle, ni Spinosa, niHobbes, ni milord Shaftesbury, ni M. Collins, ni M. Toland niFludd, ni Bekker, ni M. le comte de Boulainvilliers, etc., qui ontporté le flambeau de la discorde dans leur patrie: ce sont, pourla plupart, des théologiens qui, ayant eu d’abord l’ambition d’êtrechefs de sectes, ont eu bientôt celle d’être chefs de partis. Quedis-je? tous ces livres des philosophes modernes mis ensemblene feront jamais dans le monde autant de bruit seulement qu’en afait autrefois la dispute des cordeliers sur la forme de leurs mancheset de leur capuchon.
Musean translation
Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the French text of all twenty-four letters (Garnier edition, 1879, French Wikisource) for fidelity, the author’s force and cadence, and modern clarity.
On Mr. Locke
Perhaps there was never a wiser, more methodical mind, or a more exact logician, than Mr. Locke; yet he was no great mathematician. He could never submit to the labor of calculations or to the dryness of mathematical truths, which at first offer the mind nothing tangible; and no one has proved better than he that one can have a geometric mind without the aid of geometry. Before him, great philosophers had pronounced with certainty on what the human soul is; but since they knew nothing at all about it, it is only right that they should all have held different opinions.
In Greece, cradle of the arts and of errors, where the human mind carried both its greatness and its folly so far, people argued about the soul as we do. The divine Anaxagoras, for whom an altar was raised because he taught men that the Sun was larger than the Peloponnese, that snow was black, and that the heavens were made of stone, asserted that the soul was an airy spirit, yet immortal. Diogenes—not the one who became a Cynic after being a counterfeiter—maintained that the soul was a portion of God's own substance; and that idea, at least, had brilliance. Epicurus composed it of parts, like the body. Aristotle, who has been explained in a thousand ways because he was unintelligible, believed, if some of his disciples are to be trusted, that the intellect of all men was one and the same substance. The divine Plato, master of the divine Aristotle, and the divine Socrates, master of the divine Plato, said the soul was corporeal and eternal. Socrates' familiar spirit had doubtless taught him the truth of it. There are people, admittedly, who claim that a man who boasted of having a familiar spirit was unquestionably a little mad or a little dishonest; but such people are too exacting.
As for our Fathers of the Church, several of them in the earliest centuries believed that the human soul, the angels, and God were corporeal.
The world grows ever more refined. Saint Bernard, by Father Mabillon's own account, taught concerning the soul that after death it did not see God in Heaven, but merely conversed with the human nature of Jesus Christ; this time his word was not taken for it. The affair of the Crusade had somewhat discredited his oracles. Then came a thousand scholastics, such as the Irrefutable Doctor, the Subtle Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, the Cherubic Doctor, all quite certain that they knew the soul with perfect clarity, yet speaking of it as though they wanted no one to understand a thing.
Our Descartes, born to discover the errors of antiquity but to replace them with his own, and carried away by that passion for systems which blinds the greatest men, imagined he had demonstrated that the soul was the same thing as thought, just as matter, according to him, was the same thing as extension. He confidently declared that we always think, and that the soul arrives in the body furnished with every metaphysical notion, knowing God, space, infinity, possessing every abstract idea, filled, in short, with splendid knowledge that it unfortunately forgets on emerging from its mother's womb.
Father Malebranche of the Oratory, amid his sublime illusions, not only rejected innate ideas but had no doubt that we saw everything in God, and that God, so to speak, was our soul.
After so many reasoners had written romances about the soul, a wise man came and modestly wrote its history. Locke laid bare human reason for mankind as an excellent anatomist explains the workings of the human body. Everywhere he takes the torch of natural philosophy to guide him; he sometimes ventures to speak with certainty, but also ventures to doubt. Instead of defining at once what we do not know, he examines by degrees what we wish to know. He takes a child at the moment of birth; step by step he follows the progress of its understanding; he sees what it shares with animals and what raises it above them; above all he consults his own testimony, the consciousness of his thought.
“I leave it,” he says, “to those who know more than I do to discuss whether our soul exists before or after the organization of our body; but I confess that I have been allotted one of those coarse souls that do not think all the time, and I even have the misfortune not to understand why it should be any more necessary for the soul always to think than for the body always to be in motion.”
For my part, I boast of the honor of being as stupid as Locke on this point. No one will ever persuade me that I am always thinking; and I am no more inclined than he to imagine that, some weeks after my conception, I was a very learned soul, knowing then a thousand things I forgot at birth, and possessing, quite uselessly in the womb, knowledge that escaped me as soon as I had need of it and that I have never quite managed to learn again since.
Having demolished innate ideas, thoroughly renounced the vanity of believing that we always think, established that all our ideas come to us through the senses, examined our simple ideas and our compound ones, followed the human mind through all its operations, and shown how imperfect the languages men speak are, and how constantly we abuse words, Locke, I say, considers at last the extent—or rather the nothingness—of human knowledge. It is in this chapter that he modestly dares to offer these words: We may perhaps never be capable of knowing whether a purely material being thinks or not.
More than one theologian took this wise remark for a scandalous declaration that the soul is material and mortal. Some Englishmen, devout in their own fashion, sounded the alarm. The superstitious are to society what cowards are to an army: they suffer panics and spread them. People cried out that Locke wanted to overthrow religion; yet religion was not at issue in this matter. It was a purely philosophical question, quite independent of faith and revelation; one needed only to examine without rancor whether there is a contradiction in saying: Matter can think, and God can communicate thought to matter. But theologians too often begin by saying that God is insulted when one disagrees with them. They resemble too closely the bad poets who believed that Despréaux spoke ill of the king because he mocked them.
Dr. Stillingfleet gained a reputation as a moderate theologian for not positively insulting Locke. He entered the lists against him, but was beaten, for he argued like a doctor, while Locke argued like a philosopher who understood the strength and weakness of the human mind, and fought with weapons whose temper he knew.
If I dared speak after Mr. Locke on so delicate a subject, I would say: Men have long disputed the nature and immortality of the soul. As for its immortality, it is impossible to demonstrate it, since we still dispute its nature, and surely one must know a created being through and through to decide whether it is immortal or not. Human reason is so little able to demonstrate the soul's immortality by itself that religion has had to reveal it to us. The common good of all men requires belief that the soul is immortal; faith commands it; nothing more is needed, and the matter is almost settled. Its nature is another question: religion cares little what substance the soul is made of, provided it is virtuous. It is a clock entrusted to us to regulate; but the maker has not told us what its spring is made of.
I am a body, and I think; I know nothing beyond that. If I consult only my feeble lights, shall I ascribe to an unknown cause what I can so easily ascribe to the one secondary cause of which I know a little? Here all the philosophers of the schools stop me with an argument, saying: A body contains only extension and solidity, and can have only motion and shape. Now motion, shape, extension, and solidity cannot make a thought; therefore the soul cannot be matter. All this grand argument, repeated so often, amounts solely to this: I know very little about matter, and imperfectly guess some of its properties; now I have no idea at all whether these properties can be joined to thought; therefore, because I know nothing at all, I confidently assert that matter cannot think. There, plainly, is how the schools reason.
Mr. Locke would say to these gentlemen simply: Admit at least that you are as ignorant as I am. Neither your imagination nor mine can conceive how a body has ideas; but do you better understand how a substance, whatever it may be, has ideas? You conceive neither matter nor spirit; how do you dare make any assertion? What does it matter to you whether the soul is one of those incomprehensible beings called matter or one of those incomprehensible beings called spirit? What! Can God, the creator of all things, not make your soul eternal or annihilate it as he pleases, whatever its substance?
The superstitious man comes forward in his turn and says that, for the good of their souls, those who suspect one can think with the aid of the body alone must be burned; but what would he say if he himself were guilty of irreligion? Indeed, who will dare assert, without absurd impiety, that it is impossible for the Creator to give matter thought and feeling? Consider, I beg you, the predicament to which you reduce yourselves by thus limiting the Creator's power. Animals have the same organs as we do, the same perceptions; they have memory, and they combine some ideas. If God has not been able to animate matter and give it feeling, one of two things must follow: either animals are mere machines or they have a spiritual soul.
It seems to me demonstrated that animals cannot be mere machines; here is my proof. God gave them precisely the same organs of sensation as ours: therefore, if they feel nothing, God has made a useless work; but God, by your own admission, does nothing in vain: therefore he did not fashion so many organs of sensation for there to be no sensation; therefore animals are not mere machines. Animals, according to you, cannot have a spiritual soul: therefore, despite yourselves, nothing remains to be said except that God has given the organs of animals, which are matter, the faculty of feeling and perceiving, which in them you call instinct. And who can prevent God from communicating to our more delicate organs this faculty of feeling, perceiving, and thinking, which we call human reason? Whichever way you turn, you must acknowledge your ignorance and the Creator's immense power. No longer rebel, then, against Locke's wise and modest philosophy; far from being contrary to religion, it would furnish religion with a proof, if religion needed one: for what philosophy is more religious than one which, asserting only what it clearly understands, and knowing how to confess its weakness, tells you to turn to God whenever you examine first principles?
Besides, one should never fear that any philosophical opinion can harm the religion of a country. However contrary our mysteries may be to our demonstrations, they are no less revered by our Christian philosophers, who know that the objects of reason and faith are different in kind. Philosophers will never found a religious sect. Why? Because they do not write for the people and have no zealotry. Divide mankind into twenty parts: nineteen are made up of those who work with their hands and will never know whether a Mr. Locke ever existed; in the twentieth part that remains, how few men do we find who read? And among readers, twenty read novels for every one who studies philosophy. The number of those who think is exceedingly small, and they do not take it into their heads to disturb the world.
It is not Montaigne, or Locke, or Bayle, or Spinosa, or Hobbes, or Lord Shaftesbury, or Mr. Collins, or Mr. Toland, or Fludd, or Bekker, or Count Boulainvilliers, etc., who have carried the torch of discord through their native lands: for the most part it is theologians who, first ambitious to lead sects, soon became ambitious to lead factions. What am I saying? All the books of modern philosophers put together will never make as much noise in the world as the friars' dispute once made over the shape of their sleeves and hoods.
Plain English translation
Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the French text of all twenty-four letters (Garnier edition, 1879, French Wikisource).
On Mr. Locke
Perhaps there has never been a wiser, more systematic mind or a more precise logician than Mr. Locke. Yet he was no great mathematician. He could never put up with the hard work of calculation or the dry truths of mathematics, which at first offer the mind nothing it can grasp through the senses. And no one has shown better that a person can think like a geometer without studying geometry. Before him, great philosophers had declared with certainty what the human soul is. But since they knew nothing about it, it is only fair that they all held different opinions.
In Greece, the birthplace of both the arts and mistaken ideas, where the human mind went so far in both greatness and foolishness, people argued about the soul just as we do. The divine Anaxagoras, for whom an altar was built because he taught people that the Sun was larger than the Peloponnese, that snow was black, and that the heavens were made of stone, claimed that the soul was an airy spirit, yet immortal. Diogenes—not the one who became a Cynic after working as a counterfeiter—said the soul was a portion of God's own substance. At least that idea had some brilliance. Epicurus held that it was made of parts, like the body. Aristotle has been interpreted in a thousand ways because he was impossible to understand. According to some of his disciples, he thought that everyone's understanding was a single substance. The divine Plato, teacher of the divine Aristotle, and the divine Socrates, teacher of the divine Plato, said the soul was bodily and eternal. No doubt Socrates' spirit told him the truth about it. Of course, some people claim that a man who boasted of having a personal spirit was surely a little mad or a bit of a fraud. But those people are too hard to please.
As for our Church Fathers, several of them in the early centuries believed that the human soul, the angels, and God had bodies.
The world is always getting more refined. According to Father Mabillon himself, Saint Bernard taught that after death the soul does not see God in Heaven, but only speaks with the human nature of Jesus Christ. This time people did not take his word for it. The business of the Crusade had somewhat damaged his reputation as an oracle. Then came a thousand scholastics, including the Irrefutable Doctor, the Subtle Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, and the Cherubic Doctor. They were all quite sure they understood the soul very clearly. Even so, they spoke about it as though they wanted no one else to understand a thing.
Our Descartes was born to expose the mistakes of the ancients, but also to replace them with his own. Carried away by the urge to build a system, which blinds even the greatest men, he imagined he had proved that the soul was the same thing as thought, just as matter, in his view, was the same thing as extension. He insisted that we always think and that the soul enters the body already equipped with every metaphysical concept. It knows God, space, and infinity; it has every abstract idea. In short, it is full of fine knowledge, which it unfortunately forgets when it leaves its mother's womb.
Father Malebranche of the Oratory, in his lofty delusions, not only rejected innate ideas. He also had no doubt that we see everything in God, and that God, so to speak, is our soul.
So many thinkers had written a fiction about the soul that a wise man finally came along and modestly wrote its history. Locke showed people how human reason works, as an excellent anatomist explains the workings of the human body. He uses the light of physical science everywhere. Sometimes he dares to make firm claims, but he also dares to doubt. Instead of immediately defining something we do not know, he examines step by step what we want to know. He takes a child at birth and follows the development of its understanding, step by step. He observes what the child shares with animals and how it surpasses them. Above all, he consults his own evidence: his awareness of his thoughts.
“I leave it to those who know more than I do,” he says, “to discuss whether our soul exists before or after our body is formed. But I admit that I have been allotted one of those crude souls that do not always think. I even have the misfortune not to see why the soul must always think any more than the body must always move.”
For my part, I take pride in being as stupid as Locke on this point. No one will ever make me believe that I am always thinking. And I am no more inclined than he is to imagine that, a few weeks after my conception, I was a very learned soul. I supposedly knew a thousand things then that I forgot at birth, and possessed in the womb, to no purpose, knowledge that escaped me as soon as I needed it and that I have never quite managed to relearn.
Locke demolished innate ideas and gave up the vanity of believing we always think. He established that all our ideas come to us through the senses. He examined our simple ideas and our compound ones, followed the human mind through all its operations, and showed how imperfect human languages are and how constantly we misuse words. Finally, Locke considers the scope—or rather the lack—of human knowledge. In that chapter he modestly ventures these words: We may never be able to know whether a purely material being thinks or not.
More than one theologian took this sensible statement as a scandalous declaration that the soul is material and mortal. Some Englishmen, devout in their own way, sounded the alarm. Superstitious people play the same part in society that cowards play in an army: they panic and spread panic. People shouted that Locke wanted to bring down religion. Yet religion was not at issue here. It was a purely philosophical question, quite separate from faith and revelation. All that was needed was to consider calmly whether it is contradictory to say: Matter can think, and God can give matter the power to think. But theologians too often start by saying that God is insulted whenever someone disagrees with them. They are too much like the bad poets who thought Despréaux was speaking badly of the king because he made fun of them.
Dr. Stillingfleet earned a reputation as a moderate theologian because he did not directly hurl insults at Locke. He entered the contest against him but lost. Stillingfleet argued like a doctor of theology; Locke argued like a philosopher who knew the strengths and weaknesses of the human mind, and who fought with weapons whose quality he understood.
If I dared speak after Mr. Locke on such a delicate subject, I would say this: People have long argued about the nature and immortality of the soul. Its immortality cannot be demonstrated, because people still argue about its nature, and surely we must know a created being thoroughly before deciding whether it is immortal. Human reason is so unable to prove the soul's immortality on its own that religion has had to reveal it to us. It is in everyone's common interest to believe the soul immortal. Faith commands us to believe it; nothing more is needed, and the matter is almost settled. Its nature is another matter. Religion cares little what substance the soul is made of, provided it is virtuous. We have been given a clock to look after, but its maker has not told us what its spring is made of.
I am a body, and I think. That is all I know. If I rely only on my limited understanding, why should I credit an unknown cause with something I can so easily credit to the only secondary cause I know a little about? At this point all the scholastic philosophers stop me and argue as follows: A body has only extension and solidity, and can have only motion and shape. But motion, shape, extension, and solidity cannot produce thought. Therefore the soul cannot be matter. All this grand reasoning, repeated so often, amounts to this: I know very little about matter and can barely guess at some of its properties. I do not know at all whether these properties can go together with thought. Therefore, because I know nothing at all, I confidently insist that matter cannot think. That, in plain terms, is how the scholastics reason.
Mr. Locke would say simply to these gentlemen: “At least admit that you are as ignorant as I am. Neither your imagination nor mine can conceive how a body has ideas. But do you understand any better how a substance of any kind has ideas? You understand neither matter nor spirit, so how dare you assert anything? What difference does it make to you whether the soul is one of those incomprehensible things called matter, or one of those incomprehensible things called spirit? What! Can God, the creator of everything, not make your soul eternal or destroy it as he wishes, whatever its substance may be?”
Then the superstitious man takes his turn. He says that, for the good of their souls, we must burn people who suspect that we can think with the help of the body alone. But what would he say if he himself were the one guilty of irreligion? After all, who would dare claim, without absurd impiety, that the Creator cannot give matter thought and feeling? Just look at the difficulty you get into when you limit the Creator's power this way. Animals have the same organs as we do and the same perceptions. They remember things and combine some ideas. If God could not bring matter to life and give it feeling, then one of two things must be true: animals are mere machines, or they have spiritual souls.
It seems proven to me that animals cannot be mere machines. Here is my proof. God gave them exactly the same organs of sensation as ours. So if they feel nothing, God has made something useless. But even you admit that God does nothing in vain. So he did not make all those organs of sensation for there to be no sensation. Therefore animals are not mere machines. According to you, animals cannot have spiritual souls. So, despite yourselves, you can only say that God has given the organs of animals, which are matter, the ability to feel and perceive. You call that ability instinct in animals. And what could prevent God from giving our more finely made organs the ability to feel, perceive, and think, which we call human reason? Whichever way you turn, you must admit your ignorance and the Creator's immense power. So stop rebelling against Locke's wise and modest philosophy. Far from opposing religion, it could serve as evidence for religion, if religion needed any. What philosophy could be more religious than one that asserts only what it clearly understands, admits its own limits, and tells you to turn to God as soon as you examine first principles?
Besides, we should never fear that any philosophical opinion could harm a country's religion. Our mysteries may contradict our proofs, but our Christian philosophers respect them nonetheless. They know that reason and faith deal with different kinds of things. Philosophers will never form a religious sect. Why not? Because they do not write for the common people, and they have no zeal for it. Divide humanity into twenty parts. Nineteen parts consist of people who work with their hands and will never know that a Mr. Locke ever existed. Of the twentieth part that remains, how few people read? And among readers, twenty read novels for every one who studies philosophy. Very few people think, and those who do have no intention of disturbing the world.
It was not Montaigne, Locke, Bayle, Spinosa, Hobbes, Lord Shaftesbury, Mr. Collins, Mr. Toland, Fludd, Bekker, or the Count of Boulainvilliers, etc., who carried the torch of conflict into their own countries. For the most part, it was theologians. They first wanted to lead religious sects, then soon wanted to lead political parties. Indeed, put all the books of modern philosophers together, and they will never cause as much commotion in the world as the dispute the Franciscan friars once had about the shape of their sleeves and hoods.