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SCIENCE AND MORALS

M

M. PAUL BOURGET

I

PAUL BOURGET possesses quality of mind extremely rare in writers who devote themselves to works of imagination. He has the philosophic mind. He knows how to link ideas together, and keep his thoughts in abstract channels. The quality is noticeable not only in his critical studies, but also in his novels and lyrics. By his method and general bent of mind he belongs to the school of M. Taine, for whom he professes a legitimate admiration, and he is not without intellectual affinity with M. Sully Prudhomme, his senior as a poet.

But he is very far from despising the world of appearances, like the poet of Bonheur. On the contrary, he has given proof of curiosity concerning all the forms and changing colours which life assumes in the eyes of the spectator. So embedded in his nature is this taste for combining the concrete and the abstract that it could be detected in his conversation before he revealed it in his books.

There are five or six of us who still retain, amid the recollections of our youth, those evening talks under the great trees in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, those long conversations in the Luxembourg, *Le disciple, I vol. in 18.

to which Paul Bourget, still almost a boy, used to bring his acute analyses and his refined curiosities. Already divided between the study of metaphysics and the love of worldly elegance, he would pass easily in his conversation from the theory of the freedom of the will to the charm of women's dress, foreshadowing the novels which he has since produced. He was the best philosopher of us all, and he usually had the advantage in the tremendous arguments which we frequently prolonged far into the night.

How often we reconstructed the world in the silence of the deserted avenues, under the assembled stars! And now these same stars hear the arguments of a new generation, which is reconstructing the universe in its turn. Through the ages the succeeding generations renew the same sublime and barren dreams. I have already said in these pages that eighteen years ago we were enthusiastic determinists.

Among us were one or two neo-Catholics. But they felt very uneasy. The fatalists, on the other hand, displayed a serene confidence, which, alas, they have not retained. To-day we know well that this romance of the universe is as full of disappointments as the rest, but in those days Darwin's books were our Bible; the magnificent praise with which Lucretius extolled the divine Epicurus appeared to us inadequate to glorify the English naturalist. With burning faith we used to say: "A man has come who has freed mankind from vain terrors." I cannot resist once more recalling the fertile visits which we used to pay, with Darwin under our arms, to the old Jardin des Plantes, where M. Paul Bourget complaisantly parades the hero of his

new novel, Adrien Sixte. Personally I used to enter the halls of the Museum as a sanctuary: halls filled with every species of organic form, from the fossil crinoids and the long jaws of the great primitive saurians to the wrinkled skin of the elephant and the gorilla's hand. In the middle of the farthest hall there stood a marble Venus, placed there as a symbol of the sweet invincible power by which all animate races are multiplied. Who will restore to me the artless and sublime emotion which I felt before this delicious type of human beauty? I used to contemplate it with that intellectual satisfaction which we experience on encountering something that we have foreseen. I had been led unconsciously by the whole gamut of organic forms toward her, who is their flower. I imagined that I understood love and life, and sincerely believed that I had hit upon the divine scheme of things!

M. Paul Bourget in his precocious maturity suffered from none of these illusions. He was all for Spinoza. If I allow myself to return to the charm of these recollections, to boast of the splendours of that life, impecunious but free, and turn back along the steep slope of eighteen years, you must forgive me, for there I see already the germs and the seed of the ideas which, ripening slowly, form M. Paul Bourget's new work.

M. Adrien Sixte's peaceful existence, described in the first chapter, recalls in more ways than one the life of Spinoza related by Jean Colerus, from whose pages M. Bourget, in days gone by, used to love to quote:

"He hired a room from the Sieur Henri Van de Spyck, in the Pavilioengrogt. He furnished it himself with the necessary articles,

and lived, as pleased him, in a very quiet way. It is almost unbelievable how sober and thrifty he was in those days . . . he was careful to balance his accounts quarterly, in order that he should spend neither more nor less than his yearly income.

"His conversation was placid and agreeable. He was perfectly able to control his passions. No one ever saw him very sad or very joyful. He could restrain himself when angered, and if displeased he never allowed himself to show it: at least, if it were necessary to display his displeasure by words or gesture he would immediately withdraw, in order not to offend against decorum. He was, moreover, very affable and good company, often talking with his hostess, particularly during her periods of confinement. While lodging there, he never disturbed anyone: the greater part of his time he passed quietly in his room. He amused himself occasionally with a pipe of tobacco. When he required longer relaxation he would search for spiders, which he set to fight one another.”

These are interesting traits, for they show the simplicity of a great man. M. Paul Bourget draws us M. Adrien Sixe as a French Spinoza of our own time :

"Fourteen years before, at the close of the war, M. Sixte had established himself in a house in the Rue Guy-de-la-Brosse. He lived in an apartment on the fourth floor, at a rent of seven hundred francs per annum. When he arrived he simply asked the concierge for a woman to clean his rooms, and for a restaurant whence he could order his meals. . . . Summer and winter, M. Sixte sat down to work at 6.30 a.m. At ten o'clock he had breakfast, a rapid operation which enabled him to cross the threshold of the Jardin des Plantes at 10.30 a.m. . . . One of his favourite pleasures consisted of protracted visits to the monkeys' cage and the elephant's stable" (Le Disciple, pp. 7, 11, 16, etc.).

This worthy soul was one of the great thinkers of the century. He demonstrated the doctrine of determinism with a power of logic and wealth of argument unattained even by Taine and

Ribot.

M. Bourget gives us a list of the works in which he develops his system. They are: The Anatomy of

the Will, The Theory of the Passions, and The Psychology of God. It must be understood that the last title, in its almost ironic conciseness, means "Studies of the various conditions of the Mind, in which the idea of God has been elaborated."

M. Sixte does not for one moment assume the objective reality of God. The absolute appears to him nonsense, and he does not even admit it to the category of the unknowable. This is one of the characteristics of his philosophy. His strongest claim to be a psychologist "consists in a perfectly

and ingenious explanation of the animal origin of human sensibility." This leads us back to the halls of comparative zoology, to which I conducted you a little while back, as to a temple, to Venus, the supreme metamorphosis of the innumerable series of the forces of love. M. Sixte subjects us to Necessity with inexorable severity. He regards free will as a pure illusion. "Every act," he says, "is merely an addition. To say that we are free is to say that the total is greater than the elements added together to make it. This is as absurd in psychology as in arithmetic."

Further on:

"If we knew correctly the relative position of all the phenomena which constitute the actual universe, we could now calculate, with a certainty equal to that of the astronomers, the minute when England, for instance, would evacuate India, or when Europe would have burnt its last morsel of coal, or when the criminal as yet unborn would murder his father, or when some poem not yet thought of should be composed. The future is contained in the present, just as the properties of a triangle are involved in its definition.'