whether, in this regard, we possess authentic dictionaries of the
language of savage tribes found by voyagers in the isles of the ocean?
No; but we have not made our philosophic religion out of the
superstitions and prejudices of a certain school. We absolutely deny
that it is necessary to study human nature in the famous savage of
Aveyron, or in the like of him of the isles of the ocean, or the
American continent. The savage state offers us humanity in
swaddling-clothes, thus to speak, the germ of humanity, but not humanity
entire. The true man is the perfect man of his kind; true human nature
is human nature arrived at its development, as true society is also
perfected society. We do not think it worth the while to ask a savage
his opinion on the Apollo Belvidere, neither will we ask him for the
principles that constitute the moral nature of man, because in him this
moral nature is only sketched and not completed. Our great philosophy of
the seventeenth century was sometimes a little too much pleased with
hypotheses in which God plays the principal part, and crushes human
liberty.[187] The philosophy of the eighteenth century threw itself
into the opposite extreme; it had recourse to hypotheses of a totally
different character, among others, to a pretended natural state, whence
it undertook, with infinite pains, to draw society and man as we now see
them. Rousseau plunged into the forests, in order to find there the
model of liberty and equality. That is the commencement of his politics.
But wait a little, and soon you will see the apostle of the natural
state, driven, by a necessary inconsequence, from one excess to an
opposite excess, instead of the sweets of savage liberty, proposing to
us the _Contrat Social and Lacedemone_. Condillac[188] studies the human
mind in a statue whose senses enter into exercise under the magic wand
of a systematic analysis, and are developed in the measure and progress
that are convenient to him. The statue successively acquires our five
senses, but there is one thing that it does not acquire, that is, a mind
like the human mind, and a soul like ours. And this was what was then
called the experimental method! Let us leave there all those hypotheses.
In order to understand reality, let us study it, and not imagine it. Let
us take humanity as it is incontestably shown to us in its actual
characters, and not as it may have been in a primitive, purely
hypothetical state, in those unformed lineaments or that degradation
which is called the savage state. In that, without doubt, may be found
signs or _souvenirs_ of humanity, and, if this were the plea, we might,
in our turn, examine the recitals of voyages, and find, even in that
darkness of infancy or decrepitude, admirable flashes of light, noble
instincts, which already appear, or still subsist, presaging or
recalling humanity. But, for the sake of exactness of method and true
analysis, we turn our eyes from infancy and the savage state, in order
to direct them towards the being who is the sole object of our studies,
the actual man, the real and completed man.
Do you know a language, a people, which does not possess the word
disinterested virtue? Who is especially called an honest man? Is it the
skilful calculator, devoting himself to making his own affairs the best
possible, or he who, under all circumstances, is disposed to observe
justice against his apparent or real interest? Take away the idea that
an honest man is capable, to a certain degree, of resisting the
attractions of personal interest, and of making some sacrifices for
opinion, for propriety, for that which is or appears honest, and you
take away the foundation of that title of honest man, even in the most
ordinary sense. That disposition to prefer what is good to our pleasure,
to our personal utility, in a word, to interest--that disposition more
or less strong, more or less constant, more or less tested, measures the
different degrees of virtue. A man who carries disinterestedness as far
as devotion, is called a hero, let him be concealed in the humblest
condition, or placed on a public stage. There is devotedness in obscure
as well as in exalted stations. There are heroes of probity, of honor,
of loyalty, in the relations of ordinary life, as well as heroes of
courage and patriotism in the counsels of peoples and at the head of
armies. All these names, with their meaning well recognized, are in all
languages, and constitute a certain and universal fact. We may explain
this fact, but on one imperative condition, that in explaining we do not
destroy it. Now, is the idea and the word disinterestedness explained to
us by reducing disinterestedness to interest? This is what common sense
invincibly repels.
Poets have no system,--they address themselves to men as they really
are, in order to produce in them certain effects. Is it skilful
selfishness or disinterested virtue that poets celebrate? Do they demand
our applause for the success of fortunate address, or for the voluntary
sacrifices of virtue? The poet knows that there is at the foundation of
the human soul I know not what marvellous power of disinterestedness and
devotedness. In addressing himself to this instinct of the heart, he is
sure of awakening a sublime echo, of opening every source of the
pathetic.
Consult the annals of the human race, and you will find in them man
everywhere, and more and more, claiming his liberty. This word liberty
is as old as man himself. What then! Men wish to be free, and man
himself should not be free! The word nevertheless exists with the most
determined signification. It signifies that man believes himself a free
being, not only animated and sensible, but endowed with will, a will
that belongs to him, that consequently cannot admit over itself the
tyranny of another will which would make, in regard to him, the office
of fatality, even were it that of the most beneficent fatality. Do you
suppose that the word liberty could ever have been formed, if the thing
itself did not exist? None but a free being could possess the idea of
liberty. Will it be said that the liberty of man is only an illusion?
The wishes of the human race are then the most inexplicable
extravagance. In denying the essential distinction between liberty and
fatality, we contradict all languages and all received notions; we have,
it is true, the advantage of absolving tyrants, but we degrade heroes.
They have, then, fought and died for a chimera!
All languages contain the words esteem and contempt. To esteem, to
despise,--these are universal expressions, certain phenomena, from which
an impartial analysis can draw the highest notions. Can we despise a
being who, in his acts, should not be free, a being who should not know
the good, and should not feel himself obligated to fulfil it? Suppose
that the good is not essentially different from the evil, suppose that
there is in the world only interest more or less well understood, that
there is no real duty, and that man is not essentially a free being,--it
is impossible to explain rationally the word contempt. It is the same
with the word esteem.
Esteem is a fact which, faithfully expressed, contains a complete
philosophy as solid as generous. Esteem has two certain characters: 1st,
It is a disinterested sentiment in the soul of him who feels it; 2d, It
is applied only to disinterested acts. We do not esteem at will, and
because it is our interest to esteem. Neither do we esteem an action or
a person because they have been successful. Success, fortunate
calculation, may make us envied; it does not bring esteem, which has
another price.
Esteem in a certain degree, and under certain circumstances, is
respect,--respect, a holy and sacred word which the most subtile or the
loosest analysis will never degrade to expressing a sentiment that is
related to ourselves, and is applied to actions crowned by fortune.
Take again these two words, these two facts analogous to the first two,
admiration and indignation. Esteem and contempt are rather judgments;
indignation and admiration are sentiments, but sentiments that pertain
to intelligence and envelop a judgment.[189]
Admiration is an essentially disinterested sentiment. See whether there
is any interest in the world that has the power to give you admiration
for any thing or any person. If you were interested, you might feign
admiration, but you would not feel it. A tyrant with death in his hand,
may constrain you to appear to admire, but not to admire in reality.
Even affection does not determine admiration; whilst a heroic trait,
even in an enemy, compels you to admire.
The phenomenon opposed to admiration is indignation. Indignation is no
more anger than admiration is desire. Anger is wholly personal.
Indignation is never directly related to us; it may have birth in the
midst of circumstances wherein we are engaged, but the foundation and
the dominant character of the phenomenon in itself is to be
disinterested. Indignation is in its nature generous. If I am a victim
of an injustice, I may feel at once anger and indignation, anger against
him that injures me, indignation towards him who is unjust to one of his
fellow-men. We may be indignant towards ourselves; we are indignant
towards every thing that wounds the sentiment of justice. Indignation
covers a judgment, the judgment that he who commits such or such an
action, whether against us, or even for us, does an action unworthy,
contrary to our dignity, to his own dignity, to human dignity. The
injury sustained is not the measure of indignation, as the advantage
received is not that of admiration. We felicitate ourselves on
possessing or having acquired a useful thing; but we never admire, on
that account, either ourselves or the thing that we have just acquired.
So we repel the stone that wounds us, we do not feel indignant towards
it.
Admiration elevates and ennobles the soul. The generous parts of human
nature are disengaged and exalted in presence of, and as it were in
contact with, the image of the good. This is the reason why admiration
is already by itself so beneficent, even should it be deceived in its
object. Indignation is the result of these same generous parts of the
soul, which, wounded by injustice, are highly roused and protest in the
name of offended human dignity.
Look at men in action, and you will see them imposing upon themselves
great sacrifices in order to conquer the suffrages of their fellows. The
empire of opinion is immense,--vanity alone does not explain it; it
doubtless also pertains to vanity, but it has deeper and better roots.
We judge that other men are, like us, sensible to good and evil, that
they distinguish between virtue and vice, that they are capable of being
indignant and admiring, of esteeming and respecting, as well as
despising. This power is in us, we have consciousness of it, we know
that other men possess it as well as we, and it is this power that
frightens us. Opinion is our own consciousness transferred to the
public, and there disengaged from all complaisance and armed with an
inflexible severity. To the remorse in our own hearts, responds the
shame in that second soul which we have made ourselves, and is called
public opinion. We must not be astonished at the sweets of popularity.
We are more sure of having done well, when to the testimony of our
consciousness we are able to join that of the consciousness of our
fellow-men. There is only one thing that can sustain us against opinion,
and even place us above it: it is the firm and sure testimony of our
consciousness, because, in fine, the public and the whole human race
are compelled to judge us according to appearance, whilst we judge
ourselves infallibly and by the most certain of all knowledge.
Ridicule is the fear of opinion in small things. The force of ridicule
is wholly in the supposition that there is a common taste, a common type
of what is proper, that directs men in their judgments, and even in
their pleasantries, which in their way are also judgments. Without this
supposition, ridicule falls of itself, and pleasantry loses its sting.
But it is immortal, as well as the distinction between good and evil,
between the beautiful and the ugly, between what is proper and what is
improper.
When we have not succeeded in any measure undertaken for our interest
and prosperity, we experience a sentiment of pain that is called regret.
But we do not confound regret with that other sentiment that rises in
the soul when we are conscious of having done something morally bad.
This sentiment is also a pain, but of quite a different nature,--it is
remorse, repentance. That we have lost in play, for example, is
disagreeable to us; but if, in gaining, we have the consciousness of
having deceived our adversary, we experience a very different sentiment.
We might prolong and vary these examples. We have said enough to be
entitled to conclude that human language and the sentiments that it
expresses are inexplicable, if we do not admit the essential distinction
between good and evil, between virtue and crime, crime founded on
interest, virtue founded on disinterestedness.
Disturb this distinction, and you disturb human life and entire society.
Permit me to take an extreme, tragic, and terrible example. Here is a
man that has just been judged. He has been condemned to death, and is
about to be executed--to be deprived of life. And why? Place yourself in
the system that does not admit the essential distinction between good
and evil, and ponder on what is stupidly atrocious in this act of human
justice. What has the condemned done? Evidently a thing indifferent in
itself. For if there is no other outward distinction than that of
pleasure and pain, I defy any one to qualify any human action, whatever
it may be, as criminal, without the most absurd inconsequence. But this
thing, indifferent in itself, a certain number of men, called
legislators, have declared to be a crime. This purely arbitrary
declaration has found no echo in the heart of this man. He has not been
able to feel the justice of it, since there is nothing in itself just.
He has therefore done, without remorse, what this declaration
arbitrarily interdicted. The court proceeds to prove to him that he has
not succeeded, but not that he has done contrary to justice, for there
is no justice. I maintain that every condemnation, be it to death, or to
any punishment whatever, imperatively supposes, in order to be any thing
else than a repression of violence by violence, the four following
points:--1st, That there is an essential distinction between good and
evil, justice and injustice, and that to this distinction is attached,
for every intelligent and free being, the obligation of conforming to
good and justice; 2d, That man is an intelligent and free being, capable
of comprehending this distinction, and the obligation that accompanies
it, and of adhering to it naturally, independently of all convention,
and every positive law; capable also of resisting the temptations that
bear him towards evil and injustice, and of fulfilling the sacred law of
natural justice; 3d, That every act contrary to justice deserves to be
repressed by force, and even punished in reparation of the fault
committed, and independently too of all law and all convention; 4th,
That man naturally recognizes the distinction between the merit and
demerit of actions, as he recognizes the distinction between the just
and the unjust, and knows that every penalty applied to an unjust act is
itself most strictly just.
Such are the foundations of that power of judging and punishing which is
entire society. Society has not made those principles for its own use;
they are much anterior to it, they are contemporaneous with thought and
the soul, and upon these rests society, with its laws and its
institutions. Laws are legitimate by their relation to these eternal
laws. The surest power of institutions resides in the respect that
these principles bear with them and extend to every thing that
participates in them. Education develops them, it does not create them.
They direct the legislator who makes the law, and the judge who applies
it. They are present to the accused brought before the tribunal, they
inspire every just sentence, they give it authority in the soul of the
condemned, and in that of the spectator, and they consecrate the
employment of force necessary for his execution. Take away a single one
of these principles, and all human justice is overthrown, no longer is
there any thing but a mass of arbitrary conventions which no one in
conscience is bound to respect, which may be violated without remorse,
which are sustained only by the display of extreme punishments. The
decisions of such a justice are not true judgments, but acts of force,
and civil society is only an arena where men contend with each other
without duties and rights, without any other object than that of
procuring for themselves the greatest possible amount of enjoyment, of
procuring it by conquest and preserving it by force or cunning, save
throwing over all that the cloak of hypocritical laws.
It is true, such is the aspect under which skepticism makes us consider
society and human justice, driving us through despair to revolt and
disorder, and bringing us back through despair again to quite another
yoke than that of reason and virtue, to that regulated disorder which is
called despotism. The spectacle of human things, viewed coolly, and
without the spirit of system, is, thank God, less sombre. Without doubt,
society and human justice have still many imperfections which time
discovers and corrects; but it may be said, that in general they rest on
truth and natural equity. The proof of it is, that society everywhere
subsists, and is even developed. Moreover, facts, were they such as the
melancholy pen of a Pascal or a Rousseau represent them to be, facts are
not all,--before facts is right; and this idea of right alone, if it is
real, suffices to overturn an abasing system, and save human dignity.
Now, is the idea of right a chimera? I again appeal to languages, to
individual consciousness, to the human race,--is it not true that fact
is everywhere distinguished from right, fact which too often, perhaps,
but not always, as it is said, is opposed to right; and right that
subdues and rules fact, or protests against it? What word is it that
restrains most in human societies? Is it not that of right? Look for a
language that does not contain it. On all sides, society is bristling
with rights. There is even a distinction made between natural right and
positive right, between what is legal and what is equitable. It is
proclaimed that force should be in the service of right, and not right
at the mercy of force. The triumphs of force, wherever we perceive them,
either under our eyes, or by the aid of history in bygone centuries, or
by favor of universal publicity beyond the ocean, and in foreign
continents, rouse indignation in the disinterested spectator or reader.
On the contrary, he who inscribes on his banner the name of right, by
that alone interests us; the cause of right, or what we suppose to be
the cause of right, is for us the cause of humanity. It is also a fact,
and an incontestable fact, that in the eyes of man fact is not every
thing, and that the idea of right is a universal idea, graven in shining
and ineffaceable characters, if not in the visible world, at least in
that of thought and the soul; concerning that is the question; it is
also that which in the long run reforms and governs the other.
Individual consciousness, conceived and transferred to the entire
species, is called common sense. It is common sense that has made, that
sustains, that develops languages, natural and permanent beliefs,
society and its fundamental institutions. Grammarians have not invented
languages, nor legislators societies, nor philosophers general beliefs.
All these things have not been personally done, but by the whole
world,--by the genius of humanity.
Common sense is deposited in its works. All languages, and all human
institutions contain the ideas and the sentiments that we have just
called to mind and described, and especially the distinction between
good and evil, between justice and injustice, between free will and
desire, between duty and interest, between virtue and happiness, with
the profoundly rooted belief that happiness is a recompense due to
virtue, and that crime in itself deserves to be punished, and calls for
the reparation of a just suffering.
These things are attested by the words and actions of men. Such are the
sincere and impartial, but somewhat confused, somewhat gross notions of
common sense.
Here begins the part of philosophy. It has before it two different
routes; it can do one of two things: either accept the notions of common
sense, elucidate them, thereby develop and increase them, and, by
faithfully expressing them, fortify the natural beliefs of humanity; or,
preoccupied with such or such a principle, impose it upon the natural
data of common sense, admit those that agree with this principle,
artificially bend the others to these, or openly deny them; this is what
is called making a system.
Philosophic systems are not philosophy; they try to realize the idea of
it, as civil institutions try to realize that of justice, as the arts
express in their way infinite beauty, as the sciences pursue universal
science. Philosophic systems are necessarily very imperfect, otherwise
there never would have been two systems in the world. Fortunate are
those that go on doing good, that expand in the minds and souls of men,
with some innocent errors, the sacred love of the true, the beautiful,
and the good! But philosophic systems follow their times much more than
they direct them; they receive their spirit from the hands of their age.
Transferred to France towards the close of the regency and under the
reign of Louis XV., the philosophy of Locke gave birth there to a
celebrated school, which for a long time governed and still subsists
among us, protected by ancient habits, but in radical opposition to our
new institutions and our new wants. Sprung from the bosom of tempests,
nourished in the cradle of a revolution, brought up under the bad
discipline of the genius of war, the nineteenth century cannot recognize
its image and find its instincts in a philosophy born under the
influence of the voluptuous refinements of Versailles, admirably fitted
for the decrepitude of an arbitrary monarchy, but not for the laborious
life of a young liberty surrounded with perils. As for us, after having
combated the philosophy of sensation in the metaphysics which it
substituted for Cartesianism, and in the deplorable aesthetics, now too
accredited, under which succumbed our great national art of the
seventeenth century, we do not hesitate to combat it again in the ethics
that were its necessary product, the ethics of interest.
The exposition and refutation of these pretended ethics will be the
subject of the next lecture.
FOOTNOTES:
[187] See 2d Series, vol. ii., lect. 11 and 12; 4th Series, vol. ii.,
last pages of _Jacqueline Pascal_, and the _Fragments of the Cartesian
Philosophy_, p. 469.
[188] 1st Series, vol. iii., lectures 2 and 3, _Condillac_.
[189] See the Theory of Sentiment, part i., lecture 5.
LECTURE XII.
THE ETHICS OF INTEREST.[190]
Exposition of the doctrine of interest.--What there is of truth
in this doctrine.--Its defects. 1st. It confounds liberty and
desire, and thereby abolishes liberty. 2d. It cannot explain the
fundamental distinction between good and evil. 3d. It cannot
explain obligation and duty. 4th. Nor right. 5th. Nor the
principle of merit and demerit.--Consequences of the ethics of
interest: that they cannot admit a providence, and lead to
despotism.
The philosophy of sensation, setting out from a single fact, agreeable
or painful sensation, necessarily arrives in ethics at a single
principle,--interest. The whole of the system may be explained as
follows: