If I should call myself Lamennais or Cormenin, and some journal, speaking of me, should burst forth with these hyperboles, incomparable genius, superior mind, consummate virtue, noble character, I should not like it, and should complain—first, because such eulogies are never deserved; and, second, because they furnish a bad example. But I wish, in order to reconcile you to equality, to measure for you the greatest literary personage of our century. Do not accuse me of envy, proletaires, if I, a defender of equality, estimate at their proper value talents which are universally admired, and which I, better than anyone, know how to recognize. A dwarf can always measure a giant: all that he needs is a yardstick.
You have seen the pretentious announcements of L’Esquisse d’une Philosophie, and you have admired the work on trust; for either you have not read it, or, if you have, you are incapable of judging it. Acquaint yourselves, then, with this speculation more brilliant than sound; and, while admiring the enthusiasm of the author, cease to pity those useful labors which only habit and the great number of the persons engaged in them render contemptible. I shall be brief; for, notwithstanding the importance of the subject and the genius of the author, what I have to say is of but little moment.
M. Lamennais starts with the existence of God. How does he demonstrate it? By Cicero’s argument—that is, by the consent of the human race. There is nothing new in that. We have still to find out whether the belief of the human race is legitimate; or, as Kant says, whether our subjective certainty of the existence of God corresponds with the objective truth. This, however, does not trouble M. Lamennais. He says that, if the human race believes, it is because it has a reason for believing. Then, having pronounced the name of God, M. Lamennais sings a hymn; and that is his demonstration!
This first hypothesis admitted, M. Lamennais follows it with a second; namely, that there are three persons in God. But, while Christianity teaches the dogma of the Trinity only on the authority of revelation, M. Lamennais pretends to arrive at it by the sole force of argument; and he does not perceive that his pretended demonstration is, from beginning to end, anthropomorphism—that is, an ascription of the faculties of the human mind and the powers of nature to the Divine substance. New songs, new hymns!
God and the Trinity thus demonstrated, the philosopher passes to the creation—a third hypothesis, in which M. Lamennais, always eloquent, varied, and sublime, demonstrates that God made the world neither of nothing, nor of something, nor of himself; that he was free in creating, but that nevertheless he could not but create; that there is in matter a matter which is not matter; that the archetypal ideas of the world are separated from each other, in the Divine mind, by a division which is obscure and unintelligible, and yet substantial and real, which involves intelligibility, etc. We meet with like contradictions concerning the origin of evil. To explain this problem—one of the profoundest in philosophy—M. Lamennais at one time denies evil, at another makes God the author of evil, and at still another seeks outside of God a first cause which is not God—an amalgam of entités more or less incoherent, borrowed from Plato, Proclus, Spinoza, I might say even from all philosophers.
Having thus established his trinity of hypotheses, M. Lamennais deduces therefrom, by a badly connected chain of analogies, his whole philosophy. And it is here especially that we notice the syncretism which is peculiar to him. The theory of M. Lamennais embraces all systems, and supports all opinions. Are you a materialist? Suppress, as useless entités, the three persons in God; then, starting directly from heat, light, and electromagnetism—which, according to the author, are the three original fluids, the three primary external manifestations of Will, Intelligence, and Love—you have a materialistic and atheistic cosmogony. On the contrary, are you wedded to spiritualism? With the theory of the immateriality of the body, you are able to see everywhere nothing but spirits. Finally, if you incline to pantheism, you will be satisfied by M. Lamennais, who formally teaches that the world is not an emanation from Divinity—which is pure pantheism—but a flow of Divinity.
I do not pretend, however, to deny that L’Esquisse contains some excellent things; but, by the author’s declaration, these things are not original with him; it is the system which is his. That is undoubtedly the reason why M. Lamennais speaks so contemptuously of his predecessors in philosophy, and disdains to quote his originals. He thinks that, since L’Esquisse contains all true philosophy, the world will lose nothing when the names and works of the old philosophers perish. M. Lamennais, who renders glory to God in beautiful songs, does not know how as well to render justice to his fellows. His fatal fault is this appropriation of knowledge, which the theologians call the philosophical sin, or the sin against the Holy Ghost—a sin which will not damn you, proletaires, nor me either.
In short, L’Esquisse, judged as a system, and divested of all which its author borrows from previous systems, is a commonplace work, whose method consists in constantly explaining the known by the unknown, and in giving entités for abstractions, and tautologies for proofs. Its whole theodicy is a work not of genius but of imagination,
