IV.

We cannot do better than introduce the concluding section of our article by the following extract from M. Naville's 'Vie de M. de Biran.'

In

'M. de Biran was led to ignore the received distinction between religion and philosophy, and to conceive the plan of a single science which would give facts of a religious order their place. He was then led to form the project of a Christian philosophy, from a psychological point of view. He must accordingly modify very profoundly the former exposition of his doctrines. The essay upon the foundations of Psychology had remained in his portfolio since 1813. this essay he had carefully distinguished two of the constitutive principles of our nature, viz., an unconscious life with its special laws, which was removed from any intervention of the will, and a life distinctively human, whose characteristic is consciousness, and whose agent is the will. The proper destiny of man appeared then to accomplish itself in the triumph of the will over the laws of an inferior existence. Now, without laying aside the bases of that analysis, he found it insufficient. In fact, a new element, the relation of man with the Spirit of God, had appeared to him, and that element required such a position as necessarily modified the entire economy of the preceding philosophical construction. The assistance of Divine grace being accepted as a fact, two consequences of equal importance resulted from it-first, that the will does not triumph alone in the struggle against the passions, but needs to be sustained by a superior force; second, that the last end of the will is not to possess itself and to rejoice complacently in its triumph, but to yield itself wholly to God. Indeed, God, since he is the support of the soul and the force of its feebleness, becomes, consequently, its only legitimate end; as the will only sustains itself by grace, it owes itself to God from whom the grace proceeds. At the time of the preparation of the Essay upon Psychology, M. de Biran said with Fenelon, "We have nothing of our own save our will. Nothing besides is ours. Maladies destroy health and life. Riches are snatched from us by violence. The gifts of the spirit depend on the state of the body. The only thing which is ours is the will." From this time forth he adds, with the same author, "Hence it is the will of which God is jealous, for He has given it to us, not that we may keep it and become the proprietors of it, but that we should restore it in its integrity to Himself as we have received it, and without holding any of it back." The triumph of the will over sensible nature, which was formerly the term and the aim of human development, appeared now to be only a means; the abandonment of the will to God became the final aim. The essay accordingly had passed over in silence the capital truth in which the legitimate destiny of the human creature is resumed.

This new consideration presided over the plan of the "Nouveaux Essais d'Anthropologie." Such is the title of the last work in which M. de Biran undertook to develop his thought. This work, divided

Nouveaux Essais d'Anthropologie.

341

into three different lives, the sum of the facts which our nature, when regarded in the successive degrees of its complete development, presents. The first life, or animal life, is ruled by the impressions of pain or pleasure of which the organized body is the occasion. This life is the seat of the blind passions, of all that is unconscious and involuntary in us. It is the state of the young infant, before the first awakening of consciousness. It is the state into which we relapse, whenever we abdicate the government of our destinies, and accept the yoke of those instinctive tendencies which constitute our temperament. The states of sleep, of mental alienation, and others analogous to them, find their place here. The second life, or human life, commences at the appearance of will and of intelligence, whose condition is the exercise of the will. Ideas and language are added to instincts; personal force enters into combination with those instincts, struggles against them, or abandons itself more or less to their impulse. There is conflict between two powers of a different order. The inferior desires subsist, and make their dominion always felt, whilst the reason catches the glimpse of a more elevated sphere, and a better existence. The third life is the spiritual life. The will, instead of seeking a point d'appui in itself, yields itself to the superior influence of the Divine Spirit. Conflict ceases then. When man identifies himself, as far as possible, with the eternal source of all force and light, he finds joy and peace in the consciousness of his intimate union with his God. The animal nature is vanquished, the triumphs of the Divine life assured. Effort is the distinctive character of the second life. It is love that is required to raise man to the third. "True love consists," says M. de Biran, "in the entire sacrifice of ourselves to the Being that is loved. When we are disposed to sacrifice to Him invariably our own will, so that we wish henceforth nothing save in Him and for Him, then our soul is in repose and love is the good of life."

We have already shown, how M. de Biran was led to acknowledge the existence of God, as the source of those rational notions and laws which constitute and illumine the human reason. But before his intellect thus haply found God, his heart had anticipated, and probably induced its conclusion. In the agony of the Cent-jours,' when Napoleon's meteor-rush from Elba to Waterloo shot conflagration and terror over Europe, M. de Biran thus writes: To keep myself from despair I will 'think of God, I will take refuge in His bosom.'

During the political struggles that ensued upon the settlement of Louis XVIII. on the throne of France, this sentiment recurs with growing intensity, in the journal of M. de Biran. He chafed with ennui amid the excitement of public controversy, and the frivolity of gay society. In the retreat of his country home, he felt still more the need of some fixed purpose to

concentrate and elevate his soul; some immoveable centre on which his will might rest, and around which his spirit might tranquilly revolve; some source of reviving spiritual life from which his weary soul might drink and be satisfied. The distractions of the capital were awanting here. He felt that he might wander in his library as in the streets of a city, and dissipate himself with books as well as with friends. It was the want of a firm foundation, of a single aim, of the succour of Divine grace, which he bitterly bemoans. 'I have no root,' he writes, "no 'support, no constant motive. I suffer.' This suffering, then, of the orphan soul, thirsting after God-the keen anguish of want, as with the prodigal, led him to think of his Father, and to seek His love. Very strikingly has he portrayed to us, in language which breathes the inspiration of a profound personal experience, the insufficiency and the dangers of that conception of the absolute Being which is gained by the intellect alone. 'When,' he says, 'our feeble intelligence undertakes alone to 'raise itself even to God, and seeks to comprehend Him in His 'proper nature, it falls back upon itself discouraged, over'whelmed, and dizzied as at the view of the most profound 'abyss. God can manifest himself to the mind only by the 'intervention of the heart. It is feeling which is the mediator 'between the thought of man and the infinite, the absolute, 'which is its object.'

We may readily infer from these confessions of M. de Biran that such religious sentiments could not long endure the frigid selfishness of stoicism. Yet it was a long and wavering conflict which vanquished M. de Biran, and brought him from the school of Marcus Antoninus to that of Jesus Christ. There are, in fact, but two moral doctrines which compete for the adhesion and government of men-Stoicism and Christianity. Epicurianism, the doctrine of the sty, however purified and lavendered by the modern disinfectants of utilitarianism, has never yet enthralled a noble soul. Never since the first three centuries of our era have the two moral systems which claim to represent and to fashion the sovereign nature of man,* confronted each other in more open

6

* In the review of a work written by the most eminent of the younger French philosophers, M. Paul Janet, on the Philosophy of Happiness, which appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes,' 15th December, 1864, M. Emile Montegert describes Stoicism and Christianity as the two grand doctrines which have founded, once for all, morality in the world.' The happiness they describe and offer is distinguished from that of all other systems by its universality. It is not the happiness of a caste, of a condition. It is equally that of the rich and of the poor. It is, indeed, a happiness which may be the possession of the whole human race, and whoever desires it, emperor or slave, can attain it, and repose there in

Stoicism and Christianity.

343

rivalry than to-day. They are represented as akin to each other, as the two phases of our moral nature, as suiting severally different natures, and as having an equal claim upon the homage and faith of those that please to accept them. In harmony, too, with this view, Christianity is described as only a more humanised and gentle stoicism. A disintegration and softening of the rigid autocracy of the Porch, produced by the amelioration of manners, the fusion of peoples and ideas, the practical and juridical temper of the Roman nation, the decadence of national virtue in the Augustan age, just as the laxer and more diffusive κown diaλEKTOS, took the place of the severer typical dialects of Athens and Ionia.*

the peace of the unchangeable and absolute. The work of P, Janet itself deserves especial notice, as illustrating and almost describing the history and end of M. de Biran's experiences. It shows, by the strictest philosophical analysis, that the testimony of religion is true, that there is no happiness for man save in God. See the range of his argument. Describing the soul as dilating in all finite pleasure, he says, if by

an exceptional favour it is given to it to possess to the utmost all the blessings to which men attach the idea of happiness, yet the soul will 'not be happy, for there will come an hour when it will reach the extremity of itself or encounter its own limits. It will then suffer more than before its first expansion, for then it will suffer, not as formerly, 'at such and such a point of its being, but over its whole extent, and it will have exhausted in itself all its capacity of happiness, without having extinguished the desire for it. If the end of the individual is in himself, this misery is irremediable, for during that long pursuit of happiness he has found that none of the blessings which he successively 'possessed sufficed him; and now, at the end of the pursuit, he feels that his soul does not suffice for itself. He has accomplished that mar'vellons journey of which St. Augustine speaks, in which man, hunting after the true object of his being, after having traversed by thought all 'the worlds of space, arrives at last at his own soul, and finds himself then 'tête-à-tête with himself at the moment when he believed himself to be the 'farthest removed from himself. Nevertheless, even in this state of 'extreme destitution his invincible hope does not abandon him. He says 'justly to himself that since he does not find his "end" in himself, he must have another destination than himself, that the desire for happiness remaining in its entirety after it has been so often deceived by the ' objects which promised to give it, the true "good" remains yet to be found, and then he adds new worlds to the world he inhabits, and new 'existences to his own'existence to continue the search of that supreme object in which he must discover that happiness he vainly pursues here below.'

See especially Histoire des Theories et des Idées Morales, dans l'Antiquite,' par J. Denis. Paris, Aug. Durand, 1856. A work which Mr. Merivale has freely used in his Boyle Lectures on the Conversion of the Roman Empire, Also, Essai Historique sur la Société Civile dans le Monde Romaine,' par C. Schmidt. Strasbourg, C. F. Schmidt, 1853; and 'Histoire de la Philosophie Morale et Politique dans l'Antiquité et les temps Modernes,' par P. Janet. Libraire Ladrange; and especially 'The Critical History of Ethical Philosophy,' by J. S, Fichte.

We are glad that this comparison of the two great moral doctrines which are confessedly destined to rule humanity should be thus rashly ventured. The hypothesis which derives Christianity from the old doctrine recoils by the contrast of the two doctrines upon those who publish it, and reveals the benign character and incontestable originality, the Divine glory of the Gospel morality. No history could bring this contrast more clearly to light than M. de Biran's, as he wandered and wavered long between the two systems. His own philosophical speculations attached him to stoicism. But though resisting the necessity which the sentiment of his own insufficiency laid upon him, to seek the aim of life and the grace for life, in the God whom Christianity reveals, he was vanquished at length.

It was not belief in the existence of God which decided this debate. For though Stoicism consorts best with the Pantheism in which it found its origin, the ground of its doctrine is not altered if there be a God who promises and vouchsafes no merciful help to His creatures. With such a God the sufficiency of the human will must be of itself. It is here, then-but not only here that Christianity opposes Stoicism. The one proclaims the force, the aim, the foundation of man's soul to be in himself; the other proclaims they are not in himself, but are to be only and wholly found in God. The one asserts that pain and pleasure are to be ignored as unreal, and are neither to be endured nor enjoyed; the other teaches that pain is real, and is to be embraced and joyously borne, from loving confidence in the purpose of Him who sends it; and that pleasure is to be welcomed as a precious gift, made infinitely costlier as the token of the Giver's love. The one, finally, severs man from all human relationships, resents their claims, and closes the soul in a disdainful isolation from our fellow-men. The other opens the flood-gates of the heart, and sends us into the world, as Jesus Christ was sent into the world, with love and blessing for all men. Taken point by point, the Christian doctrine rises in absolute antagonism to the stoical. The spring and aim of life, the value and truth of life, the work and results of life in each are not different, but contradictory. Which is the doctrine for humanity, which doctrine comes from God? Let each man prove and judge for himself.

To know the good, The question, then,

M. de Biran did thus judge, and decide. he seems to argue, is not to accomplish it. is not to aver what man could or ought to be, but to furnish man, being such as he is, with the succour which is needful for him. But stoicism does not offer this help. It gives no support, for it denies our feebleness. It is good,' De Biran says, 'for the