M. PASTEUR AND M. RENAN ON RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
MPASTEUR'S repudiation of the Positivism of M. LAW, • in the session of the French Academy on Thursday week, has been seized upon by religions men with more of eagerness,—one might almost say of greediness,—than is seemly. It is hardly consistent with a genuine and profound religious conviction, to catch at the rather meagre confession of faith made by even so distinguished a pathologist as M. Pasteur, with the sort of rapture with which a drowning man catches at the rope flung to him ; and yet that, or something like that, seems to express the passion with which the French audience of M. Pasteur greeted the words in which the great experimentalist on the germ theory condemned the negative creed of Auguste Comte and the scientific agnosticism of M. Littri. No doubt, French society is, for the time, surfeited with doubt, and regards a great spokesman of science who still avows his faith in God, very much as the crew of the Ark must have re- garded the first visible spot of dry ground, after the weeks of downpour. But on one who reads the two addresses carefully, the elaborate and artistic scepticism of M. Renan,—the scepti- cism which repudiates at once and in the same breath both belief and denial,—will probably make more literary impression than the more manly, but less dexterous theism of M. Pasteur. Of course, it is quite true that M. Renan has said all that he has to say on this subject a hundred times before,—that while M.
Pasteur's profession of faith, however meagre, was the new factor in the Academy, the sweet poppy and mandragora of M. Renan's scepticism had been quaffed pretty freely, at some time or other, by all those who listened to his honeyed Rage of in- difference and his eloquent playing off of the barren extasy of unrewarded faith against the barren stolidity of an equally unrewarded, even though undeserving, doubt. But still, it is somewhat difficult to understand why M. Pasteur's rather old argument for the reality of "the infinite,"—which it is not by any means necessary for the agnostic to deny,—should be appealed to with so much triumph, only because it emanates from the mouth of a great experimentalist, who had concerned himself to good purpose with the extraordinary forces inherent in infinitesimal germs. We do not mean to imply that the mere fact of a great pathologist's faith in God is, at the pre- sent day, a matter of no moment. Still less do we deny that there is in the special mode in which he presented that faith, that which has a certain significance and force. But it is a little pathetic, not to say humiliating, to observe the almost voracious fashion in which M. Pasteur's belief, and the argu- ment which he advanced for it, was seized upon ; whereas M. Renan's reply, which from the purely intellectual point of view was certainly the more wide-eyed of the two, is passed over as mere evidence that M. Renan is what he was, and probably always will be.
Let us look carefully at the speech and the reply. M. Pasteur's indictment against Positivism comes to this : the human mind is compelled, by its very structure, to entertain and accept the idea not only of the finite, but of the infinite. Man is compelled to ask himself what there is beyond this starry vault ; and he may reply, probably, more starry vaults, or he may reply, empty space ; but whatever he replies, he is compelled to deny a limit, to admit that however magnificent the worlds on which his suppositions may fix, they cannot bound the Universe, but mast simply mark off a stage in a literally endless recession. But, says M. Pasteur, " He who proclaims the existence of the infinite—and no one can escape it—accumulates in this affirma- tion more of the supernatural than there is in all the miracles of all the religions ; for the notion of the infinite has this double character, that it compels our belief, and is incompre- hensible." Positivism, says M. Pasteur, in ignoring this necessity of the human mind to believe in the infinite, ignores the aspect of things which brings us to our knees, and prostrates us in adoration. Moreover, " the conception of the ideal, is it not, again, the faculty,—a reflex of the infinite,—which, in presence of beauty, carries us on to conceive a higher beauty ? Science and the passion for investigation, are they any- thing but the effect of that goad of curiosity with which the mystery of the universe pricks on the soul ? Where are the true sources of human dignity, of liberty, and of the modern democracy, except in the notion of the infinite, before which all men are equal." And what does M. Renan reply ? "Yon say," he sweetly remarks, "that he who proclaims the existence of the infinite, accumulates in this affirmation more of the supernatural than there is in all the miracles of all the religions. There you go a little too far, I think ; you there give a kind of certificate of credibility to a number of strange things. Allow me a distinction. In the field of the ideal, oh how right you are ! There, one can follow evolution through all eternity, without coming to any stand-still. But the ideal is not an individual supernatural event which is supposed to have made its appearance at a particular point of time and space. This last affirmation falls Tinder the dominion Of criticism. The order of the possible, which is not very different from the order of dreamland, is not the order of facts. Reli- gions give themselves out as facts, and ought to be dis- cussed as facts,—that is to say, by historical criticism. But supernatural facts of the kind of those which fill up religions history, are just the facts which M. 'Lithe excels in showing never to have happened. And if they do not happen, is it not necessary to put the question of Cicero, Why have the secret forces disappeared ? Is it not because men have become less credulous ?' " That seems to us a pertinent reply to all that M. Pasteur had said, though not, of course, to all that he might easily have said in develop- ment of his own thesis. And it is obvious, from M. Renan's whole speech,—from his remarkable definition of Providence, as "the totality of the fundamental conditions which determine the march of the Universe,"—from his repeated warning to M. Pasteur not to ha too earnest in the search for moral truth,
since truth was a "great coquette" who was not easily found by those who displayed too much passion for her,—from his denunciation of death, which he regarded as odious and hateful, when it stretched out its " coldly blind " hand to snatch away virtue and genius,—and from his profession of his desire to believe whenever he heard a strong denial, and his desire to deny whenever he heard a strong belief,—it is obvious, we say, from the tenour of M. Renan's whole eloge of Littr6, and especially from his eloge of Littr6's negative criticism, that what he believes concerning the universe is something like this,— that it is a universe in which the ideal obtains gradually a certain amount of influence through the growth of the mind of man, but that the ideal does not direct or sustain the march of the universe, is not deeply rooted in that "totality of funda- mental conditions which determine the march of the universe," except, at least, so far as idealistic men can determine, and will determine, the direction of that march. M. Renan, in short, believes, as he has made one of the interlocutors of his dialogues believe, in a God who may gradually be created by the strenuous- ness of ideal human opinion, but not in an infinite mind who has foreseen everything, and determined everything human, except what he has deliberately left to man's own freedom to determine for himself.
The only adequate reply to M. Renan is a reply accepting his own ground. It is, in our opinion, simply not true that M. Littre and his school have succeeded in discrediting that individual supernaturalism which is so lavishly affirmed in the history of all religions. It is the reverse of true. The more carefully you look into the history of all times, the more certainly you dis- cover that facts of the kind which are called " supernatural" in all religions, have been recognised in all parts of the world and all ages of the world, and are freely identified as happening amongst us still. Just as M. Pasteur can show that the intro- duction of an infinitesimal germ into the blood can so alter the whole constitution of the blood, that the destiny of the being whose blood is thus permeated is—as regards life and death—wholly altered, so the history of our inward life can prove that the introduction of a spiritual germ at the proper time into the mind of man can alter the whole history of his life, both moral and physical, and make both his life and death totally different things from what otherwise they must have been. M. Pasteur's demonstration that belief in " the infinite " is imposed upon us, is valid, and is evidently in keeping with the belief in the government of an infinite God, but taken alone, is obviously not enough to combat M. Renan's idealistic agnosticism. Men want to see the evidence that God is not " a sigh of the human heart ;" that he is not a birth of the human imagination, but the strict ruler of the Universe long before man appeared in it,—nay, the strict ruler of our ideal passions themselves,—passions which are often as destructive as any other passions,—no less than of our physical organisation. For such a view as M. Renan's,—the most sceptical of all forms of belief, since it provides room for all the tendencies of human nature, though for nothing superior to the higher tendencies of human nature,—M. Pasteur's hints of his own faith, supply no adequate criticism. To a thinker who appears to believe that only man can " create " God,—a phrase with which M. Renan's own dialogues supply us,—and that it may, perhaps, be in man's power to create God, it takes more than a demonstration of our necessary belief in " the infinite," to carry the conviction that we are governed by " the infinite," and not " the infinite " by us.
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