Materialism, by displaying itself as it had never done in any other period, by posing as the supreme regulator of the moral destinies of humanity, has had the effect of frightening the masses, by the inevitable consequences of its doctrines for the social order; by this very fact, it provoked, in favor of spiritualist ideas, an energetic reaction that must prove that it is far from having sympathies as general as it supposes, and that it is strangely deluded if it hopes one day to impose its laws on the world.
Certainly, the spiritualistic beliefs of the past are insufficient for this century; they are not at the intellectual level of our generation; they are, on many points, in contradiction with the positive data of science; they leave in the mind a void that is incompatible with the need for the positive that dominates in modern society; besides, they make the big mistake of imposing themselves by blind faith and by proscribing free examination; it is certainly followed by the development of skepticism among the majority; it is quite evident that if men were nourished, from their childhood, only with ideas capable of being later confirmed by reason, there would be no nonbelievers. How many people brought back to belief by Spiritism have told us: If we had always been presented with God, the soul, and the future life in a rational way, we would have never doubted!
From the fact that a principle receives a bad or a false application, does it follow that it should be rejected? It is with spiritual things as with legislation and with all social institutions: they must be tailored to the times or pay the price of succumbing. But instead of presenting something better than old classical spiritualism, materialism preferred to do away with everything, sparing it from searching, and seemed more convenient to those bothered by the idea of God and the future. What would one think of a doctor who, finding that the diet of a patient is not substantial enough for his temperament, would prescribe him with eating nothing at all?
What one is astonished to find in most of the materialists of the modern school is the spirit of intolerance, pushed to its limits, they who constantly claim the right to freedom of conscience. Their very political comrades do not find favor with them, as soon as they profess spiritualism, as Mr. Jules Favre witnesses after his speech at the Academy (
Le Figaro, May 8
th, 1868); Mr. Camille Flammarion, outrageously ridiculed and denigrated, in another newspaper whose name we have forgotten, because he dared to prove God by science. According to the author of that diatribe, one can only be a wise man on the condition of not believing in God; Chateaubriand is then only a poor and senseless writer. If men of such unquestionable merit are treated with so little consideration, the Spiritists should not complain of being somewhat mocked about their beliefs.
There is at this moment, on the part of a certain party, an outcry against spiritualist ideas in general, in which Spiritism is naturally included. What it is looking for is not a better and more just God, it is the less troublesome God-matter, because there is nothing to be accountable for with him. No one disputes that party's right to have their own opinion, to discuss opposing opinions, but what we cannot concede to is the claim, amazing to say the least for men who pose as apostles of liberty, to prevent others from believing in their own way and discussing doctrines they do not share. Intolerance for intolerance, one is no better than the other.
One of the best protests we have read against materialist tendencies was published in the journal
Le Droit, with the title:
Materialism and the Law. The question is treated with remarkable depth and perfect logic from the double point of view of social order and jurisprudence. Since the cause of spiritualism is that of Spiritism, we applaud any energetic defense of the first, even though the second is ignored; that is why we believe that the readers of the Spiritist Review will be pleased with the reproduction of this article.
Extracted from the journal Le Droit, May 14
th, 1868
“The present generation is going through an intellectual crisis of which there is nothing to worry about too much, but it would be imprudence to leave its outcome to chance. Ever since humanity has thought, men have believed in the soul, an immaterial principle, distinct from the organs that serve it; it was even made immortal. They believed in a Providence, creator and Lord of beings and things, in the good, just, in the freedom of the human arbiter, in a future life that, to be better than the world in which we are, does not need, as the poet says, but exist. Modern doctors, who are starting to get loud, have changed all that. Man is reduced by them to the dignity of the brute, and the brute reduced to a material aggregate. Matter and the properties of matter, such would be the only possible objects of human science; thought would only be a product of the organ that is its seat, and man, when the organic molecules that constitute the person disintegrate and return to the elements, would perish entirely.If the materialist doctrines were ever to have their hour of triumph, the jurisconsult philosophers, it must be said to their credit, would be the first to be vanquished. What would their rules and their laws have to do in a world where the law of matter is the whole law? Human actions can only be automatic facts if man is all matter. But then where will freedom be? And if there is no such thing as freedom, where will the moral law be? How could any authority claim to control the fatal expansion of a force that is entirely physical, and necessarily legitimate if it is fatal? Materialism destroys the moral law, and with the moral law the right, the whole civil order, that is the conditions of existence of humanity. Such immediate, inevitable consequences are certainly worth considering. So. let's see how this old materialist doctrine reproduces itself, that we have only seen emerging in the worst days, until now. There have almost always been materialists, theorists, or practical, either by deviation from common sense, or to justify low habits of life. The first reason for materialism is in the imperfection of human intelligence. Cicero said in very crude terms that there is no foolishness that has not found some philosopher to defend it: Nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum. Its second reason is in the evil inclinations of the human heart. Practical materialism, that is reduced to a few shameful maxims, has always appeared in times of moral or social decomposition, such as those of the Regency and the Directory. More often than not, when it has had higher aims, philosophical materialism has been a reaction against the exaggerated demands of ultra-spiritualist or religious doctrines. But, nowadays, it appears with a new character; it's called 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 the spirit as its object, the spirit does not exist. For whoever wants to think about it, materialism is indeed a peril, not of true science, but of incomplete and presumptuous science; it is a bad plant that grows on its soil. Where do the materialist tendencies come from, somewhat markedly of so many scientists? From their constant occupation studying and manipulating matter? Maybe a little bit. But they mainly come from their habits of mind, from the exclusive practice of their experimental method. The scientific method can be reduced to these terms: collect only facts, very cautiously induce the law of these facts, absolutely ban all research for causes. It is not surprising, after that, that short-sighted intelligences, weak in some sense, deformed, as we all become by the same and too continuous intellectual or physical work, ignore the existence of moral facts to which it is not appropriate the application of their logical instrument, and by an insensible transmission, pass from methodical ignorance to denial. However, if this exclusively experimental method may be at fault, it is indeed in the study of man, to be double, spirit and matter, of which the organism itself can only be the product and the instrument of a hidden force, but essentially unique that animates it. One only wants to see in the human organism a material aggregate! Why split the man and want methodically to consider in him only one principle if there are two of them? Can we at least flatter ourselves in explaining all the phenomena of life in such a way? Physiological materialism, that prepares for philosophical materialism, but that does not necessarily lead to it, is helplessly struck at every step. Life, whatever one says, is 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 the living bodies. By systematically reducing the study of physical man to the conditions of the study of inorganized bodies; by seeing in the living forces of each part of the organism only properties of matter; by locating these forces in each of these 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 can be a reality, one certainly fall into physiological materialism, only to slide rapidly into philosophical materialism; but one concludes with an incomplete enumeration and examination of the facts; one thought to be going only on the basis of observation, setting aside the fundamental fact that dominates and determines all particular facts. The materialism of the new school, therefore, is not a demonstrated result of the study; it is a preconceived opinion. The physiologist does not admit the mind; but how surprising is that? It is a cause, and he has set himself to study with a method that precisely precludes him from searching the causes. We do not want to submit the cause of spiritualism to a question of controversial physiology, and to which we could rightly be challenged. The intimate sense reveals to me the existence of the soul with a very different authority. When physiological materialism is as true as it is debatable, our spiritualist convictions would not remain less intact. Strengthened by the testimony of intimate sense, confirmed by the assent of a thousand successive generations on Earth, we would repeat the old adage: "Truth does not destroy truth," and we would wait until reconciliation takes place. But how much weight don’t feel off our shoulders when we see that, to deny the soul and give this statement, as a result of science, the scientist, by his own admission, methodically started from this idea that the soul does not exist! We have read many books on physiology, generally quite badly written; what struck us is the constant flaw in the reasoning of the organic physiologist when he leaves his field to become a philosopher. We constantly see him taking an effect for a cause, a faculty for a substance, an attribute for a being, confusing existences, and forces, etc., and reason accordingly. One would think it was a challenge. Sometimes he crosses incredible distances without realizing the path he is taking. What exact and clear mind, for example, has ever been able to understand this so well-known thought of Cabanis and Broussais that "the brain produces, secretes thought?" On other occasions, the positive man, the man of science, the man of observation and of facts, will seriously tell us that the brain "stores ideas." A little more, and he will draw them. Is it metaphor or gibberish? We will never ask natural science to take sides for or against the human soul; but why does it not resolve to ignore what is not the object of its investigations? By what right does it dare to swear that there is nothing afterwards, after having established a law for not seeing? What doesn’t it retain a little of this reservation that suits us all so well, especially those who pretend to only move forward with certainty? How come will the anatomist take it upon himself to declare that the soul does not exist, because he has not encountered it under his scalpel? Did he, at least, start by demonstrating rigorously, scientifically, by experiments and facts, according to the method he advocates, that his scalpel can reach anything, even an immaterial principle? Whatever happens to all these questions, materialism claiming to be scientific, without being better for that, is spreading in broad daylight, and we must see what materialist law would be. Alas! The materialist social state would present us with a very sad and shameful spectacle. To begin with, it is certain that, if man only exists through his organism, this material and automatic mass that will henceforth be the whole man, provided with an encephalon to secrete ideas, will not be responsible for all the movements that it produces.[1] With that, the brain of another material mass must not dare to secrete ideas of justice or injustice; for these ideas of justice or injustice are applicable only to a free force, existing by itself, capable of wanting and of abstaining. One does not reason with the torrent or the avalanche. So, freedom, that is the will to act or not to act, will not exist down here, and neither will right. In this state, all forces will have full and absolute power of expansion. Everything will be legitimate, lawful, permitted, let us say even ordered; because it is clear that any fact that is not the act of a free-will, that does not occur as a morally obligatory or morally forbidden act, is an obligatory fact, that may well come up against a contrary fact of the same character, but that like all physical facts, falls under the unavoidable influence of natural laws. It is enough to expose such ideas to do it justice. It was Spinoza's system, that very resolutely posited the principle of the law of force. The strong, says Spinoza, are made to enslave the weak, just as the fish are to swim, and the larger to eat the smaller. In the materialist system, what we would call law cannot have a different principle. But what sensible man would dare to admit such a system, that would suffice on its own for the refutation of materialism, since it necessarily follows from that? However, do they want this principle of force to be in fact limited by itself? Nothing, or almost nothing, will be gained from this blatant denial of the principle. Let us admit, if you will, that the thinking substance (we continue to speak the language of the materialists) combines in individuals, to regulate this expansion of force; what will it lead to? At most to a set of rules that will be based on interest, and again, since there are no other laws than the laws of matter, this legislation will have no binding character; each one will be able to infringe it, if his thinking material advises him to do so, and if his strength allows it. Thus, in this singular doctrine, we would not even have a social state built on the plane of the sad society of Hobbes. We are still speaking only of the first conditions of any social state. But, in all civil society, individual property is enshrined; we contract, we sell, we rent, we partner, etc. Marriage is the foundation of the family; a whole new order of relations is born from it. Through home education and public education, traditions are perpetuated. Thus, a national spirit is formed and civilization develops. Will our materialistic society have its civil law? Impossible to suppose it; for civil law has justice as its principle, and justice can only be a word, or a contradiction in a doctrine that only knows matter and the properties of matter. We thus inevitably conclude (unless we are wrong about it) that the civil status of materialist society is the state of bestiality. We do not say too much by arguing that materialism is destructive, not of such morality, but of all morality, not of such civil status, but of any civil status, to any society. We must retreat with that beyond the regions of barbarism, beyond savagery. Should it be banned for that? God would not allow it. Having acknowledged its character, we would not, however, ask that its teaching be prohibited; we would defend it, if necessary, against any compression by force, provided that the teacher spoke only in his own name. Freedom is so dear to us (the readers of this newspaper know this); it carries such blessings; we have such a confidence in the public good sense that we could not conceive any concern to see any pulpit, any platform open to any idea. But the question would no longer present itself in the same terms, if the teacher happened to speak in chair of State, paid by the budget. Rightly or wrongly, the State teaches; can he teach doctrines whose most immediate consequences are destructive to the state? Will it be at the discretion of any teacher to make the State endorse all the doctrines he can conceive? The question is not simple. State teachers are public officials; their teachings can only be an official teaching. The State guarantees what they say, and it is answerable to the youth and their families. If, for the great words of independence of the teachers, we challenged its control, we would be the oppressor of the State, by the most hypocritical of oppressions, because we would be blaming it for doctrines it disavows.There is no doubt that the superior authority owes to its professors, often whitewashed by study, respect, consideration, and great confidence, as to its generals, its administrators, and its magistrates; but it does not owe them the sacrifice of the mandate it is still presumed to hold from the country. The professor is not more independent from the state than the general who would take command of an insurrection.H. Thiercelin.”
[1] Like the liver is not responsible for the bile that it secrets
