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We know nothing about it; and Kant, speaking in the name of the "apriorists," who hold that the idea of time is innate in us, does not teach us much when he tells us that time, like space, is an a priori form of our sensibility, that is to say, an intuition preceding experience, even as Guyau, among the "empiricists," who consider that this idea is acquired only by experience, does not enlighten us any more by declaring that this same time is the abstract formula of the changes in the universe.
This is that which fixates us, arrests us, upon it, which can be only the elements that make for repose. Guyau, however, comes nearest to our point of view. But such general stimulation might accompany successful action of any kind, and thus the moral and the aesthetic would fall together.
Hartmann and Guyau have shown that the evolution of religious beliefs may be summarized thus: All religions include, with various other matters, the promise of happiness; but the primitive religions concede that this happiness will be realized during the life of the individual himself, and the later religions, through an excess of reaction, place its realization after death, outside the human world; in the final phase, this realization of happiness is once more placed within the field of human life, no longer in the ephemeral moment of the individual existence, but indeed in the continuous evolution of all mankind.
Whether space, as Leibnitz maintains, be an order of coexistence and time an order of sequences, whether it be by space that we succeed in representing time or whether time be an essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and to-day Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf, James Ward, William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillee, Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmes, Dunan and endless others have been unable to tame it; and that, however much their theories may contradict one another, they are all equally defensible and alike struggle vainly in the darkness against shadows that are not of our world.
According to a certain class of thinkers, among whom I find Guyau and other men of note, art is destined partially to replace religion in our lives. But with what are you going to replace religion itself in art? For the religious feeling, whenever it existed, gave art an element of thoroughness which the desire for pleasure and interest, even for æsthetic pleasure and interest, does not supply.
That M. Guyau is so successful in his analysis is due rather to the fact that just this diffused stimulation is likely to come from such exercise as is characterized by the mutual checking of antagonistic impulses producing an equilibrium. The diffusion of stimulation would be our formula for the aesthetic state only if interpreted as stimulation arresting action.
Or is that fool Guyau right when he speaks of the irreligiousness of future generations?" "There will be a synthesis," replied Trirodov. "You will accept it for the devil." "This contradictory mixture is worse than forty devils!" exclaimed Piotr. The visitors soon left. Kirsha came without being called confused and agitated by an indefinable something.
In the same way, John Stuart Mill never declared himself a Socialist, but that, nevertheless, in opinion he was one, is made evident by his autobiography and his posthumous fragments on Socialism. Humboldt Pub. Co., New York. ARDIGÒ, La Formazione naturale, Vol. II. of his Opere filologiche, and Vol. VI., La Ragione, Padone, 1894. Guyau, L'Irréligion de l'avenir. Paris. 1887.
Guyau, whose brief life ended in 1888 and whose posthumous work La Genese de I'Idee de Temps was reviewed by Bergson two years after the publication of his own Time and Free Will, laid great stress on the intensification and expansion of life. Boutroux, in his work, has insisted upon the fact of contingency.
The repetition of his creed in the first Aeneid ought to warn us that his enthusiasm for the study of Rerum natura did not die. Indeed the Aeneid is full of Epicurean phrases and notions. It is, however, in the interpretation of the word fatum and the role played by the gods that the test of Vergil's philosophy is usually applied. The modern equivalent of fatum is, as Guyau has said, determinism.
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