IDEA
SECTION I
What is an idea?
It is an image painted upon my brain.
Are all your thoughts, then, images?
Certainly; for the most abstract thoughts are only the consequences of all the objects that I have perceived. I utter the word "being" in general, only because I have known particular beings; I utter the word "infinity," only because I have seen certain limits, and because I push back those limits in my mind to a greater and still greater distance, as far as I am able. I have ideas in my head only because I have images.
And who is the painter of this picture?
It is not myself; I cannot draw with sufficient skill; the being that made me, makes my ideas.
And how do you know that the ideas are not made by yourself?
Because they frequently come to me involuntarily when I am awake, and always without my consent when I dream.
You are persuaded, then, that your ideas belong to you only in the same manner as your hairs, which grow and become white, and fall off, without your having anything at all to do with the matter?
Nothing can possibly be clearer; all that I can do is to frizzle, cut, and powder them; but I have nothing to do with producing them.
You must, then, I imagine, be of Malebranche's opinion, that we see all in God?
I am at least certain of this, that if we do not see things in the Great Being, we see them in consequence of His powerful and immediate action.
And what was the nature or process of this action?
I have already told you repeatedly, in the course of our conversation, that I do not know a single syllable about the subject, and that God has not communicated His secret to any one. I am completely ignorant of that which makes my heart beat, and my blood flow through my veins; I am ignorant of the principle of all my movements, and yet you seem to expect how I should explain how I feel and how I think. Such an expectation is unreasonable.
But you at least know whether your faculty of having ideas is joined to extension?
Not in the least; It is true that Tatian, in his discourse to the Greeks, says the soul is evidently composed of a body. Irenæus, in the twenty-sixth chapter of his second book, says, "The Lord has taught that our souls preserve the figure of our body in order to retain the memory of it." Tertullian asserts, in his second book on the soul, that it is a body. Arnobius, Lactantius, Hilary, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ambrose, are precisely of the same opinion. It is pretended that other fathers of the Church assert that the soul is without extension, and that in this respect they adopt the opinion of Plato; this, however, may well be doubted. With respect to myself, I dare not venture to form an opinion; I see nothing but obscurity and incomprehensibility in either system; and, after a whole life's meditation on the subject, I am not advanced a single step beyond where I was on the first day.
The subject, then, was not worth thinking about?
That is true; the man who enjoys knows more of it, or at least knows it better, than he who reflects; he is more happy. But what is it that you would have? It depended not, I repeat, upon myself whether I should admit or reject all those ideas which have crowded into my brain in conflict with each other, and actually converted my medullary magazine into their field of battle. After a hard-fought contest between them, I have obtained nothing but uncertainty from the spoils.
It is a melancholy thing to possess so many ideas, and yet to have no precise knowledge of the nature of ideas?
It is, I admit; but it is much more melancholy, and inexpressibly more foolish, for a man to believe he knows what in fact he does not.
But, if you do not positively know what an idea is, if you are ignorant whence ideas come, you at least know by what they come?
Yes; just in the same way as the ancient Egyptians, who, without knowing the source of the Nile, knew perfectly well that its waters reached them by its bed. We know perfectly that ideas come to us by the senses; but we never know whence they come. The source of this Nile will never be discovered.
If it is certain that all ideas are given by means of the senses, why does the Sorbonne, which has so long adopted this doctrine from Aristotle, condemn it with so much virulence in Helvetius?
Because the Sorbonne is composed of theologians.
SECTION II
All in God
In God we live and move and have our being.
– ST. PAUL, Acts xvii, 28.
Aratus, who is thus quoted and approved by St. Paul, made this confession of faith, we perceive among the Greeks.
The virtuous Cato says the same thing: "Jupiter est quodcumque vides quocumque moveris." – Lucan's "Pharsalia" ix, 580. "Whate'er we see, whate'er we feel, is Jove."
Malebranche is the commentator on Aratus, St. Paul, and Cato. He succeeded, in the first instance, in showing the errors of the senses and imagination; but when he attempted to develop the grand system, that all is in God, all his readers declared the commentary to be more obscure than the text. In short, having plunged into this abyss, his head became bewildered; he held conversations with the Word; he was made acquainted with what the Word had done in other planets; he became, in truth, absolutely mad; a circumstance well calculated to excite apprehension in our own minds, apt as we some of us are to attempt soaring, upon our weak and puny opinions, very far beyond our reach.
In order to comprehend the notion of Malebranche, such as he held it while he retained his faculties, we must admit nothing that we do not clearly conceive, and reject what we do not understand. Attempting to explain an obscurity by obscurities, is to act like an idiot.
I feel decidedly that my first ideas and my sensations have come to me without any co-operation or volition on my part. I clearly see that I cannot give myself a single idea. I cannot give myself anything. I have received everything. The objects which surround me cannot, of themselves, give me either idea or sensation; for how is it possible for a little particle of matter to possess the faculty of producing a thought?
I am therefore irresistibly led to conclude that the Eternal Being, who bestows everything, gives me my ideas, in whatever manner this may be done. But what is an idea, what is a sensation, a volition, etc.? It is myself perceiving, myself feeling, myself willing.
We see, in short, that what is called an idea is no more a real being than there is a real being called motion, although there are bodies moved. In the same manner there is not any particular being called memory, imagination, judgment; but we ourselves remember, imagine, and judge.
The truth of all this, it must be allowed, is sufficiently plain and trite; but it is necessary to repeat and inculcate such truth, as the opposite errors are more trite still.
Laws of Nature.
How, let us now ask, would the Eternal Being, who formed all, produce all those various modes or qualities which we perceive in organized bodies?
Did He introduce two beings in a grain of wheat, one of which should produce germination in the other? Did He introduce two beings in the composition of a stag, one of which should produce swiftness in the other? Certainly not. All that we know on the subject is that the grain is endowed with the faculty of vegetating, and the stag with that of speed.
There is evidently a grand mathematical principle directing all nature, and affecting everything produced. The flying of birds, the swimming of fishes, the walking or running of quadrupeds, are visible effects of known laws of motion. "Mens agitat molem." Can the sensations and ideas of those animals, then, be anything more than the admirable effects or mathematical laws more refined and less obvious?
Organisation of the Senses and Ideas.
It is by these general and comprehensive laws that every animal is impelled to seek its appropriate food. We are naturally, therefore, led to conjecture that there is a law by which it has the idea of this food, and without which it would not go in search of it.
The eternal intelligence has made all the actions of an animal depend upon a certain principle; the eternal intelligence, therefore, has made the sensations which cause those actions depend on the same principle.
Would the author of nature have disposed and adjusted those admirable instruments, the senses, with so divine a skill; would he have exhibited such astonishing adaptation between the eyes and light; between the atmosphere and the ears, had it, after all, been necessary to call in the assistance of other agency to complete his work? Nature always acts by the shortest ways. Protracted processes indicate want of skill; multiplicity of springs, and complexity of co-operation are the result of weakness. We cannot but believe, therefore, that one main spring regulates the whole system.
The Great Being Does Everything.
Not merely are we unable to give ourselves sensations, we cannot even imagine any beyond those which we have actually experienced. Let all the academies of Europe propose a premium for him who shall imagine a new sense; no one will ever gain that premium. We can do nothing, then, of our mere selves, whether there be an invisible and intangible being enclosed in our brain or diffused throughout our body, or whether there be not; and it must be admitted, upon every system, that the author of nature has given us all that we possess – organs, sensations, and the ideas which proceed from them.
As we are thus secured under His forming hand, Malebranche, notwithstanding all his errors, had reason to say philosophically, that we are in God and that we see all in God; as St. Paul used the same language in a theological sense, and Aratus and Cato in a moral one.
What then are we to understand by the words seeing all in God? They are either words destitute of meaning, or they mean that God gives us all our ideas.
What is the meaning of receiving an idea? We do not create it when we receive it; it is not, therefore, so unphilosophical as has been thought, to say it is God who produces the ideas in my head, as it is He who produces motion in my whole body. Everything is an operation of God upon His creatures.
How is Everything an Action of God?
There is in nature only one universal, eternal, and active principle. There cannot be two such principles; for they would either be alike or different. If they are different, they destroy one another; if they are alike, it is the same as if they were only one. The unity of design, visible through the grand whole in all its infinite variety, announces one single principle, and that principle must act upon all being, or it ceases to be a universal opinion.
If it acts upon all being, it acts upon all the modes of all being. There is not, therefore, a single remnant, a single mode, a single idea, which is not the immediate effect of a universal cause perpetually present.
The matter of the universe, therefore, belongs to God, as much as the ideas and the ideas as much as the matter. To say that anything is out of Him would be saying that there is something out of the vast whole. God being the universal principle of all things, all, therefore, exists in Him, and by Him.
The system includes that of "physical premotion," but in the same manner as an immense wheel includes a small one that endeavors to fly off from it. The principle which we have just been unfolding is too vast to admit of any particular and detailed view.
Physical premotion occupies the great supreme with all the changing vagaries which take place in the head of an individual Jansenist or Molinist; we, on the contrary, occupy the Being of Beings only with the grand and general laws of the universe. Physical premotion makes five propositions a matter of attention and occupation to God, which interest only some lay-sister, the sweeper of a convent; while we attribute to Him employment of the most simple and important description – the arrangement of the whole system of the universe.
Physical premotion is founded upon that subtle and truly Grecian principle, that if a thinking being can give himself an idea, he would augment his existence; but we do not, for our parts, know what is meant by augmenting our being. We comprehend nothing about the matter. We say that a thinking being might give himself new modes without adding to his existence; just in the same manner as when we dance, our sliding steps and crossings and attitudes give us no new existence; and to suppose they do so would appear completely absurd. We agree only so far in the system of physical premotion, that we are convinced we give ourselves nothing.
Both the system of premotion and our own are abused, as depriving men of their liberty. God forbid we should advocate such deprivation. To do away with this imputation, it is only necessary to understand the meaning of the word liberty. We shall speak of it in its proper place; and in the meantime the world will go on as it has gone on hitherto, without the Thomists or their opponents, or all the disputants in the world, having any power to change it. In the same manner we shall always have ideas, without precisely knowing what an idea is.
IDENTITY
This scientific term signifies no more than "the same thing." It might be correctly translated by "sameness." This subject is of considerably more interest than may be imagined. All agree that the guilty person only ought to be punished – the individual perpetrator, and no other. But a man fifty years of age is not in reality the same individual as the man of twenty; he retains no longer any of the parts which then formed his body; and if he has lost the memory of past events, it is certain that there is nothing left to unite his actual existence to an existence which to him is lost.
I am the same person only by the consciousness of what I have been combined with that of what I am; I have no consciousness of my past being but through memory; memory alone, therefore, establishes the identity, the sameness of my person.
We may, in truth, be naturally and aptly resembled to a river, all whose waters pass away in perpetual change and flow. It is the same river as to its bed, its banks, its source, its mouth, everything, in short, that is not itself; but changing every moment its waters, which constitute its very being, it has no identity; there is no sameness belonging to the river.
Were there another Xerxes like him who lashed the Hellespont for disobedience, and ordered for it a pair of handcuffs; and were the son of this Xerxes to be drowned in the Euphrates, and the father desirous of punishing that river for the death of his son, the Euphrates might very reasonably say in its vindication: "Blame the waves that were rolling on at the time your son was bathing; those waves belong not to me, and form no part of me; they have passed on to the Persian Gulf; a part is mixed with the salt water of that sea, and another part, exhaled in vapor, has been impelled by a south-east wind to Gaul, and been incorporated with endives and lettuces, which the Gauls have since used in their salads; seize the culprit where you can find him."
It is the same with a tree, a branch of which broken by the wind might have fractured the skull of your great grandfather. It is no longer the same tree; all its parts have given way to others. The branch which killed your great grandfather is no part of this tree; it exists no longer.
It has been asked, then, how a man, who has totally lost his memory before his death, and whose members have been changed into other substances, can be punished for his faults or rewarded for his virtues when he is no longer himself? I have read in a well known book the following question and answer:
"Question. How can I be either rewarded or punished when I shall no longer exist; when there will be nothing remaining of that which constituted my person? It is only by means of memory that I am always myself; after my death, a miracle will be necessary to restore it to me – to enable me to reenter upon my lost existence.
"Answer. That is just as much as to say that if a prince had put to death his whole family, in order to reign himself, and if he had tyrannized over his subjects with the most wanton cruelty, he would be exempted from punishment on pleading before God, 'I am not the offender; I have lost my memory; you are under a mistake; I am no longer the same person.' Do you think this sophism would pass with God?"
This answer is a highly commendable one; but it does not completely solve the difficulty.
It would be necessary for this purpose, in the first place, to know whether understanding and sensation are a faculty given by God to man, or a created substance; a question which philosophy is too weak and uncertain to decide.
It is necessary in the next place to know whether, if the soul be a substance and has lost all knowledge of the evil it has committed, and be, moreover, as perfect a stranger to what it has done with its own body, as to all the other bodies of our universe – whether, in these circumstances, it can or should, according to our manner of reasoning, answer in another universe for actions of which it has not the slightest knowledge; whether, in fact, a miracle would not be necessary to impart to this soul the recollection it no longer possesses, to render it consciously present to the crimes which have become obliterated and annihilated in its mind, and make it the same person that it was on earth; or whether God will judge it nearly in the same way in which the presidents of human tribunals proceed, condemning a criminal, although he may have completely forgotten the crimes he has actually committed. He remembers them no longer; but they are remembered for him; he is punished for the sake of the example. But God cannot punish a man after his death with a view to his being an example to the living. No living man knows whether the deceased is condemned or absolved. God, therefore, can punish him only because he cherished and accomplished evil desires; but if, when after death he presents himself before the tribunal of God, he no longer entertains any such desire; if for a period of twenty years he has totally forgotten that he did entertain such; if he is no longer in any respect the same person; what is it that God will punish in him?
These are questions which appear beyond the compass of the human understanding, and there seems to exist a necessity, in these intricacies and labyrinths, of recurring to faith alone, which is always our last asylum.
Lucretius had partly felt these difficulties, when in his third book (verses 890-91) he describes a man trembling at the idea of what will happen to him when he will no longer be the same man:
Nec radicitus e vita se tollit et evit;
Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inscius ipse.
But Lucretius is not the oracle to be addressed, in order to obtain any discoveries of the future.
The celebrated Toland, who wrote his own epitaph, concluded it with these words: "Idem futurus Tolandus nunquam" – "He will never again be the same Toland."
However, it may be presumed that God would have well known how to find and restore him, had such been his good pleasure; and it is to be presumed, also, that the being who necessarily exists, is necessarily good.
IDOL – IDOLATER – IDOLATRY
SECTION I
Idol is derived from the Greek word "eidos," figure; "eidolos," the representation of a figure, and "latreuein," to serve, revere, or adore.
It does not appear that there was ever any people on earth who took the name of idolaters. This word is an offence, an insulting term, like that of "gavache," which the Spaniards formerly gave to the French; and that of "maranes," which the French gave to the Spaniards in return. If we had demanded of the senate of the Areopagus of Athens, or at the court of the kings of Persia: "Are you idolaters?" they would scarcely have understood the question. None would have answered: "We adore images and idols." This word, idolater, idolatry, is found neither in Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, nor any other author of the religion of the Gentiles. There was never any edict, any law, which commanded that idols should be adored; that they should be treated as gods and regarded as gods.
When the Roman and Carthaginian captains made a treaty, they called all their gods to witness. "It is in their presence," said they, "that we swear peace." Yet the statues of these gods, whose number was very great, were not in the tents of the generals. They regarded, or pretended to regard, the gods as present at the actions of men as witnesses and judges. And assuredly it was not the image which constituted the divinity.
In what view, therefore, did they see the statues of their false gods in the temples? With the same view, if we may so express ourselves, that the Catholics see the images, the object of their veneration. The error was not in adoring a piece of wood or marble, but in adoring a false divinity, represented by this wood and marble. The difference between them and the Catholics is, not that they had images, and the Catholics had none; the difference is, that their images represented the fantastic beings of a false religion, and that the Christian images represent real beings in a true religion. The Greeks had the statue of Hercules, and we have that of St. Christopher; they had Æsculapius and his goat, we have St. Roch and his dog; they had Mars and his lance, and we have St. Anthony of Padua and St. James of Compostella.
When the consul Pliny addresses prayers to the immortal gods in the exordium of the panegyric of Trajan, it is not to images that he addresses them. These images were not immortal.
Neither the latest nor the most remote times of paganism offer a single fact which can lead to the conclusion that they adored idols. Homer speaks only of the gods who inhabited the high Olympus. The palladium, although fallen from heaven, was only a sacred token of the protection of Pallas; it was herself that was venerated in the palladium. It was our ampoule, or holy oil.
But the Romans and Greeks knelt before their statues, gave them crowns, incense, and flowers, and carried them in triumph in the public places. The Catholics have sanctified these customs, and yet are not called idolaters.
The women in times of drouth carried the statues of the Gods after having fasted. They walked barefooted with dishevelled hair, and it quickly rained bucketfuls, says Pretonius: "Et statim urceatim pluebat." Has not this custom been consecrated; illegitimate indeed among the Gentiles, but legitimate among the Catholics? In how many towns are not images carried to obtain the blessings of heaven through their intercession? If a Turk, or a learned Chinese, were a witness of these ceremonies, he would, through ignorance, accuse the Italians of putting their trust in the figures which they thus promenade in possession.