I affirm, then, that God, if there is a God, does not resemble the effigies which philosophers and priests have made of him; that he neither thinks nor acts according to the law of analysis, foresight, and progress, which is the distinctive characteristic of man; that, on the contrary, he seems rather to follow an inverse and retrogressive course; that intelligence, liberty, personality in God are constituted not as in us; and that this originality of nature, perfectly accounted for, makes God an essentially anti-civilizing, anti-liberal, anti-human being.
I prove my proposition by going from the negative to the positive, --
that is, by deducing the truth of my thesis from the progress of the objections to it.
1.God, say the believers, can be conceived only as infinitely good, infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, etc., -- the whole litany of the infinites.Now, infinite perfection cannot be reconciled with the datum of a will holding an indifferent or even reactionary attitude toward progress:
therefore, either God does not exist, or the objection drawn from the development of the antinomies proves only our ignorance of the mysteries of infinity.
I answer these reasoners that, if, to give legitimacy to a wholly arbitrary opinion, it suffices to fall back on the unfathomability of mysteries, I am as well satisfied with the mystery of a God without providence as with that of a Providence without efficacy.But, in view of the facts, there is no occasion to invoke such a consideration of probability; we must confine ourselves to the positive declaration of experience.Now, experience and facts prove that humanity, in its development, obeys an inflexible necessity, whose laws are made clear and whose system is realized as fast as the collective reason reveals it, without anything in society to give evidence of an external instigation, either from a providential command or from any superhuman thought.The basis of the belief in Providence is this necessity itself, which is, as it were, the foundation and essence of collective humanity.But this necessity, thoroughly systematic and progressive as it may appear, does not on that account constitute providence either in humanity or in God; to become convinced thereof it is enough to recall the endless oscillations and painful gropings by which social order is made manifest.
2.Other arguers come unexpectedly across our path, and cry: What is the use of these abstruse researches? There is no more an infinite intelligence than a Providence; there is neither me nor will in the universe outside of man.All that happens, evil as well as good, happens necessarily.An irresistible ensemble of causes and effects embraces man and nature in the same fatality; and those faculties in ourselves which we call conscience, will, judgment, etc., are only particular accidents of the eternal, immutable, and inevitable whole.
This argument is the preceding one inverted.It consists in substituting for the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient author that of a necessary and eternal, but unconscious and blind, coordination.From this opposition we can already form a presentiment that the reasoning of the materialists is no firmer than that of the believers.
Whoever says necessity or fatality says absolute and inviolable order;
whoever, on the contrary, says disturbance and disorder affirms that which is most repugnant to fatality.Now, there is disorder in the world, disorder produced by the play of spontaneous forces which no power enchains: how can that be, if everything is the result of fate?
But who does not see that this old quarrel between theism and materialism proceeds from a false notion of liberty and fatality, two terms which have been considered contradictory, though really they are not.If man is free, says the one party, all the more surely is God free too, and fatality is but a word; if everything is enchained in nature, answers the other party, there is neither liberty nor Providence: and so each party argues in its own direction till out of sight, never able to understand that this pretended opposition of liberty and fatality is only the natural, but not antithetical, distinction between the facts of activity and those of intelligence.
Fatality is the absolute order, the law, the code, fatum, of the constitution of the universe.But this code, very far from being exclusive in itself of the idea of a sovereign legislator, supposes it so naturally that all antiquity has not hesitated to admit it; and today the whole question is to find out whether, as the founders of religions have believed, the legislator preceded the law in the universe, -- that is, whether intelligence is prior to fatality, -- or whether, as the moderns claim, the law preceded the legislator, -- in other words, whether mind is born of nature.BEFORE or AFTER, this alternative sums up all philosophy.To dispute over the posteriority or priority of mind is all very well, but to deny mind in the name of fatality is an exclusion which nothing justifies.To refute it, it is sufficient to recall the very fact on which it is based, -- the existence of evil.
Given matter and attraction, the system of the world is their product:
that is fatal.Given two correlative and contradictory ideas, a composition must follow: that also is fatal.Fatality clashes, not with liberty, whose destiny, on the contrary, is to secure the accomplishment of fatality within a certain sphere, but with disorder, with everything that acts as a barrier to the execution of the law.Is there disorder in the world, yes or no?
