The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  The controversy which was afoot concerning the souls of animals had been going on since the days of Descartes, and still showed no signs of reaching a conclusion. That dialectical tilting-ground, where champions of every shade of opinion cantered up to try a fall with somebody—what was it in reality but a thing that told, often obscurely enough, in favour of instinct?

  In singing the praises of a favourite horse or a faithful dog, there was no implication that animals had souls like the souls of men and women; a modicum of the reasoning faculty, that was all that was claimed for them. But anyone could see that they loved and suffered, that they were not mere machines, for machines don’t have feelings. Said La Fontaine, in his Address to Mme. de la Sablière, I ascribe to animals:

  Non point une raison suivant notre manière,

  Mais beaucoup plus aussi qu’un aveugle ressort:

  Je subtiliserais un morceau de matière

  Que l’on ne pourrait plus concevoir sans effort,

  Quintessence d’atome, extrait de la lumière,

  Je ne sais quoi plus vif et plus mobile encor

  Que la flamme. . . ..

  Je rendrais mon ouvrage

  Capable de sentir, juger, rien davantage,

  Et juger imparfaitement. . . .[6]

  Magalotti, the Florentine naturalist, the moving spirit of the Academy of the Cimento, took a bolder line, instancing, in opposition to Descartes, our love of animals, and referring to “the very great, very tender, and, often enough, very stupid and absurd affection we show for a dog, or a cat, or a horse, or a parrot, or a sparrow”.

  Dante said:

  Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona. . . .

  And Tasso, too:

  amiamo or quando

  Esser si puote riamati amando;

  — “we only love when we can be loved in return”. Therefore, if we love animals, the reason is that they love us; and therefore they are not devoid of feeling. In these scattered utterances, pronounced in such a variety of circumstances, we detect that part of the consciousness which inclines towards the feelings, the emotions, making itself audible: bubbles, if you like, rising from the bottom of a pond, and breaking, as often as not, as soon as they reach the air.

  Happy nymphs and happy shepherds, what blissful days were yours, beside the murmuring brook or in lonely forest glade, and how folk envied you in those hard and arid days! Oh, happy denizens of Betica, Oh, happy simple-hearted folk, able to dispense with all the complex apparatus of civilization, how men sang the praises of your happy happy lot, a happiness unknown to those who have ceased to live in accordance with the laws of Nature! “Oh, how far removed are those ways of life from the vain ambitions of those who are deemed to be gifted with superior wisdom! So warped are our notions that we can hardly bring ourselves to believe in the reality of such simplicity. We look on what we hear about their life as just a pretty fairytale; they must look on ours as a sort of nightmare.” Happy Wild Man of the Woods, what a revolutionary zeal rings in the cry that proclaims you the model of the perfect life, exhorting every son of Europe to turn himself into a Huron!

  The wittiest and most gifted minds of the day proclaimed the bankruptcy of the intellect:

  Source intarissable d’erreurs

  Poison qui corromps la droiture

  Des sentiments de la nature,

  Et la vérité de nos coeurs;

  Feu follet, qui brilles pour nuire,

  Charme des mortels insensés,

  Esprit, je viens ici détruire

  Les autels que l’on t’a dressés. . . .

  Esprit! tu séduis, on t’admire,

  Mais rarement on t’aimera;

  Ce qui sûrement touchera

  C’est ce que le coeur nous fait dire;

  C’est ce langage de nos coeurs

  Qui saisit l’âme et qui l’agite;

  Et de faire couler nos pleurs

  Tu n’auras jamais le mérite. . . .[7]

  People who were anything but soft-hearted or sentimental, but who sensed which way the wind was veering, had some hard words to say about the thinking apparatus:

  C’est elle qui nous fait accroire

  Que tout cède à notre pouvoir;

  Qui nourrit notre folle gloire

  De l’ivresse d’un faux savoir;

  Qui par cent nouveaux stratagèmes

  Nous masquant sans cesse à nous-mêmes

  Parmi les vices nous endort:

  Du Furieux fait un Achille,

  Du Fourbe un Politique habile,

  Et de l’athée un Esprit fort.

  Mais vous, mortels, qui dans le monde

  Croyant tenir les premiers rangs

  Plaignez l’ignorance profonde

  De tant de peuples différents,

  Qui confondez avec la brute

  Ce Huron caché sous sa hutte

  Au seul instinct presque réduit:

  Parlez: quel est le moins barbare

  D’une raison qui vous égare

  Ou d’un instinct qui le conduit?[8]

  A little later, we encounter an arresting expression of that same sentiment, that is to say of the longing to get rid of all the artificialities, of the age-old burden under which we bow, and particularly of that kind of hypocrisy which, without in the least believing in it, we call morality. Once upon a time, there was an Englishman named Thomas Inkle, the third son of a well-to-do London citizen, who set sail for foreign parts in order to improve his fortune by trade and merchandise. At one place where they went ashore the greater number of the party he was with were captured and put to death by Indians. He, however, escaped and hid himself. An Indian maid discovered him. She was young and beautiful, and her name was Yarico. She fell in love with the stranger and was moved to pity by his hapless plight. She gave herself to him, body and soul, fed and protected him. He vowed that he would take her back to England, if he ever got the chance. One day they caught sight of a sail, and made signals. The ship drew near; some of her crew came ashore and in the end took them on board. Here, then, was safety at last. But as they voyaged on, Thomas Inkle began to think. What was he going to do with this woman? He had wasted his time, and all his money was gone. He decided he would sell her as a slave at the next port they touched at. The Indian woman wept and wailed and vainly entreated him to have pity on her. She told him she was with child by him, but he only made use of that information to raise his price. Such are the ways of civilized folk.[9]

  One fine day Fontenelle came up against Instinct. He was taken aback, and, indeed, annoyed at the apparition. “This word ‘instinct’ is supposed to stand for something over and above my reasoning faculty, something which works in such a manner as to assist the preservation of my being, something that tells me to do this or that without my knowing why, but which nevertheless is highly beneficial; and that is the wonderful part about instinct.” As he could not admit anything so derogatory to his reason, and as he considered that the marvellous had no business to exist, he went through the most complicated mental acrobatics, performed the most intricate feats of argumentation, in order to show that what is called “instinct” is nothing more nor less than reason in a hesitant mood, reason, which, confronted by a number of possible courses of action, has not yet consciously decided which one it will adopt. Having come to that conclusion, he is quite easy in his mind again. We are, it would appear, a long way from that “divine instinct” of which Rousseau will one day be singing the praises. Yet, perhaps, it will not seem so long after all, if we leave those who find it impossible to exist without the refinements of modern life, and turn our attention to less sophisticated circles, to a certain Switzer, one Béat de Muralt, for example, who presents us with a sort of foreshadowing of the famous apostrophe of Jean Jacques:

  Man having lost his proper occupation and his dignity, the sense of what concerns him has likewise disappeared in the disorder in which we now find ourselves, and we no longer recognize those things wherein our dignity and our business consist. Since order alon
e is capable of giving us this knowledge, I believe there is but one way of abiding therein and that is by obeying the instinct within us, that divine instinct which is perhaps all that remains to us of man’s primeval state, and which has been left with us as the means of restoring us thereto. All the living creatures we know of have their own particular instinct, and it never misleads them. How then should man, the noblest of all creatures, be lacking in the instinct proper to himself, an instinct which should permeate his whole being, an instinct, as sure as it is all-embracing? Doubtless, he does have it, and in him, instinct is the voice of conscience by which God speaks and makes Himself known to us.[10]

  “Divine instinct which is perhaps all that is left to us of man in his primeval state, and which has been left to us as the means of restoring us thereto”: could the return to Nature be sounded in clearer or more peremptory tones than those?

  [1]With regard to this matter, we refer the reader to some penetrating remarks by Louis Cazamian, in the Histoire de la littérature anglaise, by E. Legouis and L. Cazamian, 1924, p. 694.

  [2]William Temple, Upon Poetry, 1692.

  [3]W. Temple, Essay upon Heroic Virtue. Miscellanea, Part II.

  [4]Spectator, Nos. 366 and 406.

  [5]Spectator, Nos. 70, 74, 85.

  [6]Not reason after our manner of thinking, but, nevertheless, much more than a mere blind impulse. Suppose I were to take a piece of matter and divide it up into fragments so small you could hardly conceive them, the quintessence of an atom, of light something livelier and more mobile than a flame . . . and then made it capable of feeling and judging, no more, and judging imperfectly.

  [7]Inexhaustible source of errors, poison that corrupts the natural feelings, and the true promptings of the heart. Will o’ the wisp which shines but to betray, charm of witless mortals, spirit, I come to destroy the altars which have been raised to thee.

  Spirit that leadest astray, people admire but seldom love thee. What is really touching is what the heart bids us say. ’Tis the language of our hearts which takes hold of the soul and moves it; and to awaken our tears will never be yours.

  Chaulieu, Ode contre l’esprit, 1708.

  [8]She it is that makes us think that all things yield to our power; which feeds our mad pride with the intoxication of false knowledge, which by a hundred new stratagems, continually masking us from ourselves, makes us sleep in the midst of vice; calls the madman an Achilles, and the cheat an able politician, and the Atheist a clever fellow.

  But you, ye mortals, who thinking you hold the first place in the world pity the profound ignorance of so many different people, who regard as a brute beast this Huron in his hut, with nothing to guide him but his instinct, say, which is the least barbarous, reason which leads you astray, or instinct which guides him truly?

  Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Ode IX, à M. le marquis de la Fare.

  [9] Spectator, No. 11.

  [10]Lettre sur les voyages, written between 1698 and 1700. Vide Ch. Gould’s edition, 1933, p. 288.

  V

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF UNEASINESS, THE AESTHETICS OF SENTIMENT, THE METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE AND THE NEW SCIENCE

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF UNEASINESS

  JOHN LOCKE, as we have said, indulged in no soaring flights. Content with more modest aims, he made no attempt to scale the mountain tops of truth, satisfied with such relative verities as our puny hands can grasp. If you expect high imaginative flights from him, you have come to the wrong address. The prudent Locke will do no more than put you on a quiet road leading to the foothills of certitude, a smooth and level road, without any sudden twists or turns.

  All the same, what a profound effect the principle he laid down was to have on generations to come; the principle, namely, that the primum mobile of the soul is sensation. Such a theory, when one comes to think of it, involves a complete revolution in the hitherto universally accepted hierarchy of values. The noblest, the fairest, the purest of ideas; moral teaching; the promptings of the spirit— all derived from the senses! Our mind, which functions at the call of sensation, is merely a servant, a labourer. So there is no rational life without an emotional life to give it its orders! The handmaid is now the mistress; she has settled herself in; she has the rights and privileges of seniority; the patent of nobility; her titles are inscribed in the ‘pages of the Essay concerning Human Understanding.

  Sensation is not the soul’s essence; not the soul itself, for the soul cannot be taken and isolated. Nevertheless, this much is certain, namely, that on no conceivable hypothesis can the mind be regarded as its seat. If the soul were essentially intelligence, we should not see it swing (as we do) by degrees which vary between the most vigorous and determined activity and quiescence hardly distinguishable from self-effacement. The understanding is in complete abeyance when we are asleep; even when we are awake it has phases of ineffectiveness and obscurity which reduce it to something like nullity. Now, such vicissitudes, such waxing and waning, are not the normal manifestations of an essence, but rather of a function, for a function can be interrupted, or brought to a complete standstill.

  Further than that: the psychology of desire and uneasiness follows directly from this re-assessment of values.

  What is this? Are we to understand that Locke paved the way for the coming of the Yearning Spirit—for Saint-Preux? for Werther? and for René? They are not all his immediate lineal descendants but, in the multifarious causes which were to transform the mentality of the succeeding generations, and in the evolution of a psychology which was to lead men to demand of the heart the satisfaction which the intellect denied them, we must certainly include Locke and his philosophy. Listen to what he was saying before the seventeenth century had come to an end:

  “The uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it, is what we call desire; which is greater or less as that uneasiness is more or less vehement. Where, by the by, it may be of some use to remark, that the chief, if not the only spur to human industry and action is uneasiness.”[1]

  Uneasiness: such is the word in the English original, and Pierre Coste, Locke’s translator, was not a little perplexed by this word, for which he could find no exact French equivalent. Inquiètude is as near as he can get, and he prints it in italics to indicate that he is using the word in a special and unfamiliar sense. This he does several times, for Locke returns to his theme again and again:

  “That desire is a state of uneasiness, every one who reflects on himself will quickly find. Who is there who has not felt in desire what the wise man says of hope (which is not so much different from it), that it being deferred makes the heart sick (Proverbs XIII, 12); and that still proportionable to the greatness of the desire, which sometimes raises the uneasiness to that pitch, that it makes people cry out, ‘Give me children’, give me the thing desired, ‘or I die’.”[2]

  It is not what we have got that prompts us to act; it is what we lack. What we do depends on the will, and the spur of the will is uneasiness. If it were not for this uneasiness we should continue in a state of listlessness and apathy. From it come our hopes, our fears, our fits of depression; from it are born our passions; it is the mainspring of our lives. Locke’s disciples were in due time to take up this theme and to push it to its ultimate conclusion. Condillac, paying due tribute to his master (Condillac maintained that between Aristotle and Locke there were no philosophers worth mentioning), said that it now remained to show that uneasiness is the exciting cause of our habits of touching, seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, comparing, judging, reflecting, as well as of desiring, loving, hating, fearing, hoping and resolving; in a word, that all our habitual activities, whether of mind or body, proceeded from uneasiness. He magnified the part played by desire, and defined ennui as a malady of the soul. Helvetius went farther than Condillac, laying emphasis on the power of the passions and the distress that comes of ennui, declaring that people of a passionate nature are of a higher order than those of equable and pl
acid disposition, and that when our passions decline, we grow dull of understanding. Many attempts were made to account for the spread of romanticism, without its ever occurring to anyone to cast a glance in Locke’s direction. Locke led straight to the Encyclopaedia; Locke was the father of the ideologists. Well and good, and that is not a little. But it is not all; Locke was also the man who noted, and drew attention to, the uneasiness which goads us on, the uneasiness which accounts, alike for what we do and for what we desire to do, for our actions and for our aspirations.

  And when he takes up the question of education; when, combining his experiences as a teacher with his philosophic theories, he sets to work to mould the human creature, what is it he seeks above all to elicit and develop if not the spontaneity of Nature? He is for revolutionizing existing methods, and inveighs against the manner in which the children about him are brought up. To start with, children are not shadows; they have arms and legs, a chest and a stomach; a body which must be hardened by all sorts of exercises to make it healthy and strong. As to their mind, that should be governed by reason but not by routine; still less by an authority applied from without, indiscriminately to all alike, which would only obtain a superficial obedience. For there is in every child a natural genius which must be duly considered. “Everyone’s natural Genius should be carry’d as far as it could; but to attempt the putting another upon him, will be but Labour in vain; and what is so plaistered on, will at best sit but untowardly, and have always hanging to it the Ungracefulness of Constraint and Affectation.” “Plain and rough Nature, left to itself, is much better than an artificial Ungracefulness, and such study’d Ways of being Illfashion’d.” Virtue must come before learning, for the important thing in life is not to know a lot of things, but to be upright and good. Further, in order to inculcate into the child the necessary minimum of knowledge, we must bear in mind the spontaneity of which Locke is so constantly thinking. The time and the place, the disposition of the moment, a passing curiosity, these should be watched for and taken advantage of. Lessons represented as a piece of task-work, as a burden that has to be shouldered, are wearisome and repugnant. Take advantage of the humour, the disposition, of the moment, and you will see how much more pleasant the task becomes. Nature must be aided, corrected, guided, but without her being aware of it. A little play-acting may not come amiss to make things seem more natural.