see 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture on Hobbes, p. 261: "Hobbes is not the
only one who took the question of the origin of societies as the
starting-point of political science. Nearly all the publicists of the
eighteenth century, Montesquieu excepted, proceed in the same manner.
Rousseau imagines at first a primitive state in which man being no
longer savage without being yet civilized, lived happy and free under
the dominion of the laws of nature. This golden age of humanity
disappearing carries with it all the rights of the individual, who
enters naked and disarmed into what we call the social state. But order
cannot reign in a state without laws, and since natural laws perished in
the shipwreck of primitive manners, new ones must be created. Society is
formed by aid of a contract whose principle is the abandonment by each
and all of their individual force and rights to the profit of the
community, of the state, the instrument of all forces, the depository of
all rights. The state, for Hobbes, will be a man, a monarch, a king; for
Rousseau, the state is the collection itself of citizens, who by turns
are considered as subjects and governors, so that instead of the
despotism of one over all, we have the despotism of all over each. Law
is not the more or less happy, more or less faithful expression of
natural justice; it is the expression of the general will. This general
will is alone free; particular wills are not free. The general will has
all rights, and particular wills have only the rights that it confers on
them, or rather lends them. Force, in _The Citizen_ is the foundation of
society, of order, of laws, of the rights and duties which laws alone
institute. In the _Contrat Social_, the general will plays the same
part, fulfils the same function. Moreover, the general will scarcely
differs in itself from force. In fact, the general will is number, that
is to say, force still. Thus, on both sides, tyranny under different
forms. One may here observe the power of method. If Hobbes, if Rousseau
especially had at first studied the idea of right in itself, with the
certain characters without which we are not able to conceive it, they
would have infallibly recognized that if there are rights derived from
positive laws, and particularly from conventions and contracts, there
are rights derived from no contract, since contracts take them for
principles and rules; from no convention, since they serve as the
foundation to all conventions in order that these conventions may be
reputed just;--rights that society consecrates and develops, but does
not make,--rights not subject to the caprices of general or particular
will, belonging essentially to human nature, and like it, inviolable and
sacred."
[238] 1st Series, vol. iii., p. 265: "What!" somewhere says Montesquieu,
"man is everywhere in society, and it is asked whether man was born for
society! What is this fact that is reproduced in all the vicissitudes of
the life of humanity, except a law of humanity? The universal and
permanent fact of society attests the principle of sociability. This
principle shines forth in all our inclinations, in our sentiments, in
our beliefs. It is true that we love society for the advantages that it
brings; but it is none the less true, that we also love it for its own
sake, that we seek it independently of all calculation. Solitude saddens
us; it is not less deadly to the life of the moral being, than a perfect
vacuum is to the life of the physical being. Without society what would
become of sympathy, which is one of the most powerful principles of our
soul, which establishes between men a community of sentiments, by which
each lives in all and all live in each? Who would be blind enough not to
see in that an energetic call of human nature for society? And the
attraction of the sexes, their union, the love of parents for
children,--do they not found a sort of natural society, that is
increased and developed by the power of the same causes which produced
it? Divided by interest, united by sentiment, men respect each other in
the name of justice. Let us add that they love each other in virtue of
natural charity. In the sight of justice, equal in right, charity
inspires us to consider ourselves as brethren, and to give each other
succor and consolation. Wonderful thing! God has not left to our wisdom,
nor even to experience, the care of forming and preserving society,--he
has willed that sociability should be a law of our nature, and a law so
imperative that no tendency to isolation, no egoism, no distaste even,
can prevail against it. All the power of the spirit of system was
necessary in order to make Hobbes say that society is an accident, as an
incredible degree of melancholy to wring from Rousseau the extravagant
expression that society is an evil."
[239] 1st Series, vol. iii., p. 283: "We do not hold from a compact our
quality as man, and the dignity and rights attached to it; or, rather,
there is an immortal compact which is nowhere written, which makes
itself felt by every uncorrupted conscience, that compact which binds
together all beings intelligent, free, and subject to misfortune, by the
sacred ties of a common respect and a common charity.... Laws promulgate
duties, but do not give birth to them; they could not violate duties
without being unjust, and ceasing to merit the beautiful name of
laws--that is to say, decisions of the public authority worthy of
appearing obligatory to the conscience of all. Nevertheless, although
laws have no other virtue than that of declaring what exists before
them, we often found on them right and justice, to the great detriment
of justice itself, and the sentiment of right. Time and habit despoil
reason of its natural rights in order to transfer it to law. What then
happens? We either obey it, even when it is unjust, which is not a very
great evil, but we do not think of reforming it little by little, having
no superior principle that enables us to judge it,--or we continually
change it, in an invincible impotence of founding any thing, by not
knowing the immutable basis on which written law must rest. In either
case, all progress is impossible, because the laws are not related to
their true principle, which is reason, conscience, sovereign and
absolute justice."
[240] Lecture 12.
[241] See 4th Series, vol. i., p. 40.
[242] See our pamphlet entitled _Justice and Charity_, composed in 1848,
in the midst of the excesses of socialism, in order to remind of the
dignity of liberty, the character, bearing, and the impassable limits of
true charity, private and civil.
[243] See on the theory of penalty, the _Gorgias_, vol. iii. of the
translation of Plato, and our argument, p. 367: "The first law of order
is to be faithful to virtue, and to that part of virtue which is related
to society, to wit, justice; but if one is wanting in that, the second
law of order is to expiate one's fault, and it is expiated by
punishment. Publicists are still seeking the foundation of penalty.
Some, who think themselves great politicians, find it in the utility of
the punishment for those who witness it, and are turned aside from crime
by fear of its menace, by its preventive virtue. And that it is true, is
one of the effects of penalty, but it is not its foundation; for
punishment falling upon the innocent, would produce as much, and still
more terror, and would be quite as preventive. Others, in their
pretensions to humanity, do not wish to see the legitimacy of punishment
except in its utility for him who undergoes it, in its corrective
virtue,--and that, too, is one of the possible effects of punishment,
but not its foundation; for that punishment may be corrective, it must
be accepted as just. It is, then, always necessary to recur to justice.
Justice is the true foundation of punishment,--personal and social
utility are only consequences. It is an incontestable fact, that after
every unjust act, man thinks, and cannot but think that he has incurred
demerit, that is to say, has merited a punishment. In intelligence, to
the idea of injustice corresponds that of penalty; and when injustice
has taken place in the social sphere, merited punishment ought to be
inflicted by society. Society can inflict it only because it ought.
Right here has no other source than duty, the strictest, most evident,
and most sacred duty, without which this pretended right would be only
that of force, that is to say, an atrocious injustice, should it even
result in the moral profit of him who undergoes it, and in a salutary
spectacle for the people,--what it would not then be; for then the
punishment would find no sympathy, no echo, either in the public
conscience or in that of the condemned. The punishment is not just,
because it is preventively or correctively useful; but it is in both
ways useful, because it is just." This theory of penalty, in
demonstrating the falsity, the incomplete and exclusive character of two
theories that divide publicists, completes and explains them, and gives
them both a legitimate centre and base. It is doubtless only indicated
in Plato, but is met in several passages, briefly but positively
expressed, and on it rests the sublime theory of expiation.
[244] As it is perceived, we have confined ourselves to the most general
principles. The following year, in 1819, in our lectures on Hobbes, 1st
Series, vol. iii., we gave a more extended theory of rights, and the
civil and political guaranties which they demand; we even touched the
question of the different forms of government, and established the truth
and beauty of the constitutional monarchy. In 1828, 2d Series, vol. i.,
lecture 13, we explained and defended the Charter in its fundamental
parts. Under the government of July, the part of defender of both
liberty and royalty was easy. We continued it in 1848; and when, at the
unexpected inundation of democracy, soon followed by a passionate
reaction in favor of an absolute authority, many minds, and the best,
asked themselves whether the young American republic was not called to
serve as a model for old Europe, we did not hesitate to maintain the
principle of the monarchy in the interest of liberty; we believe that we
demonstrated that the development of the principles of 1789, and in
particular the progress of the lower classes, so necessary, can be
obtained only by the aid of the constitutional monarchy,--6th Series,
POLITICAL DISCOURSES, _with an introduction on the principles of the
French Revolution and representative government_.
LECTURE XVI.
GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD.
Principle on which true theodicea rests. God the last foundation
of moral truth, of the good, and of the moral person.--Liberty
of God.--The divine justice and charity.--God the sanction of
the moral law. Immortality of the soul; argument from merit and
demerit; argument from the simplicity of the soul; argument from
final causes.--Religious sentiment.--Adoration.--Worship.--Moral
beauty of Christianity.
The moral order has been confirmed,--we are in possession of moral
truth, of the idea of the good, and the obligation that is attached to
it. Now, the same principle that has not permitted us to stop at
absolute truth,[245] and has forced us to seek its supreme reason in a
real and substantial being, forces us here again to refer the idea of
the good to the being who is its first and last foundation.
Moral truth, like every other universal and necessary truth, cannot
remain in a state of abstraction. In us it is only conceived. There must
somewhere be a being who not only conceives it, but constituted it.
As all beautiful things and all true things are related--these to a
unity that is absolute truth, and those to another unity that is
absolute beauty, so all moral principles participate in the same
principle, which is the good. We thus elevate ourselves to the
conception of the good in itself, of absolute good, superior to all
particular duties, and determined in these duties. Now, can the absolute
good be any thing else than an attribute of him who, properly speaking,
is alone absolute being?
Would it be possible that there might be several absolute beings, and
that the being in whom are realized absolute truth and absolute beauty
might not also be the one who is the principle of absolute good? The
very idea of the absolute implies absolute unity. The true, the
beautiful, and the good, are not three distinct essences; they are one
and the same essence considered in its fundamental attributes. Our mind
distinguishes them, because it can comprehend them only by division;
but, in the being in whom they reside, they are indivisibly united; and
this being at once triple and one, who sums up in himself perfect
beauty, perfect truth, and the supreme good, is nothing else than God.
So God is necessarily the principle of moral truth and the good. He is
also the type of the moral person that we carry in us.
Man is a moral person, that is to say, he is endowed with reason and
liberty. He is capable of virtue, and virtue has in him two principal
forms, respect of others, and love of others, justice and charity.
Can there be among the attributes possessed by the creature something
essential not possessed by the Creator? Whence does the effect draw its
reality and its being, except from its cause? What it possesses, it
borrows and receives. The cause at least contains all that is essential
in the effect. What particularly belongs to the effect, is inferiority,
is a lack, is imperfection: from the fact alone that it is dependent and
derived, it bears in itself the signs and the conditions of dependence.
If, then, we cannot legitimately conclude from the imperfection of the
effect in that of the cause, we can and must conclude from the
excellence of the effect in the perfection of the cause, otherwise there
would be something prominent in the effect which would be without cause.
Such is the principle of our theodicea. It is neither new nor subtle;
but it has not yet been thoroughly disengaged and elucidated, and it is,
to our eyes, firm against every test. It is by the aid of this
principle that we can, up to a certain point, penetrate into the true
nature of God.
God is not a being of logic, whose nature can be explained by way of
deduction, and by means of algebraic equations. When, setting out from a
first attribute, we have deduced the attributes of God from each other,
after the manner of geometricians and the schoolmen, what do we
possess,[246] I pray you, but abstractions? It is necessary to leave
these vain dialectics in order to arrive at a real and living God.
The first notion that we have of God, to wit, the notion of an infinite
being, is itself given to us independently of all experience. It is the
consciousness of ourselves, as being at once, and as being limited, that
elevates us directly to the conception of a being who is the principle
of our being, and is himself without bounds. This solid and single
argument, which is at bottom that of Descartes,[247] opens to us a way
that must be followed, in which Descartes too quickly stopped. If the
being that we possess forces us to recur to a cause which possesses
being in an infinite degree, all that we have of being, that is to say,
of substantial attributes, equally requires an infinite cause. Then, God
will no longer be merely the infinite, abstract, or at least
indeterminate being in which reason and the heart know not where to
betake themselves,[248] he will be a real and determined being, a moral
person like ours and psychology conducts us without hypothesis to a
theodicea at once sublime and related to us.[249]
Before all, if man is free, can it be that God is not free? No one
contends that he who is cause of all causes, who has no cause but
himself, can be dependent on any thing whatever. But in freeing God from
all external constraint, Spinoza subjects him to an internal and
mathematical necessity, wherein he finds the perfection of being. Yes,
of being which is not a person; but the essential character of personal
being is precisely liberty. If, then, God were not free, God would be
beneath man. Would it not be strange that the creature should have the
marvellous power of disposing of himself, and of freely willing, and
that the being who has made him should be subjected to a necessary
development, whose cause is only in himself, without doubt, but, in
fine, is a sort of abstract power, mechanical or metaphysical, but very
inferior to the personal and voluntary cause that we are, and of which
we have the clearest consciousness? God is therefore free, since we are
free. But he is not free as we are free; for God is at once all that we
are, and nothing that we are. He possesses the same attributes that we
possess, but elevated to infinity. He possesses an infinite liberty,
joined to an infinite intelligence; and, as his intelligence is
infallible, excepted from the uncertainties of deliberation, and
perceiving at a glance where the good is, so his liberty spontaneously,
and without effort, fulfils it.[250]
In the same manner as we transfer to God the liberty that is the
foundation of our being, we also transfer to him justice and charity. In
man, justice and charity are virtues; in God, they are attributes. What
is in us the laborious conquest of liberty, is in him his very nature.
If respect of rights is in us the very essence of justice and the sign
of the dignity of our being, it is impossible that the perfect being
should not know and respect the rights of the lowest beings, since it is
he, moreover, who has imparted to them those rights. In God resides a
sovereign justice, which renders to each one his due, not according to
deceptive appearances, but according to the truth of things. Finally, if
man, that limited being, has the power of going out of himself, of
forgetting his person, of loving another than himself, of devoting
himself to another's happiness, or, what is better, to the perfecting of
another, should not the perfect being have, in an infinite degree, this
disinterested tenderness, this charity, the supreme virtue of the human
person? Yes, there is in God an infinite tenderness for his creatures:
he at first manifested it in giving us the being that he might have
withheld, and at all times it appears in the innumerable signs of his
divine providence. Plato knew this love of God well, and expressed it in
those great words, "Let us say that the cause which led the supreme
ordainer to produce and compose this universe is, that he was good; and
he who is good has no species of envy. Exempt from envy, he willed that
all things should be, as much as possible, like himself."[251]
Christianity went farther: according to the divine doctrine, God so
loved men that he gave them his only Son. God is inexhaustible in his
charity, as he is inexhaustible in his essence. It is impossible to give
more to the creature; he gives him every thing that he can receive
without ceasing to be a creature; he gives him every thing, even
himself, so far as the creature is in him and he in the creature. At the
same time nothing can be lost; for being absolute being, he eternally
expands and gives himself without being diminished. Infinite in power,
infinite in charity, he bestows his love in exhaustless abundance upon
the world, to teach us that the more we give the more we possess. It is
egoism, whose root is at the bottom of every heart, even by the side of
the sincerest charity, that inculcates in us the error that we lose by
self-devotion: it is egoism that makes us call devotion a sacrifice.
If God is wholly just and wholly good, he can will nothing but what is
good and just; and, as he is all-powerful, every thing that he wills he
can do, and consequently does do. The world is the work of God; it is
therefore perfectly made, perfectly adapted to its end.
And nevertheless, there is in the world a disorder that seems to accuse
the justice and goodness of God.
A principle that is attached to the very idea of the good, says to us
that every moral agent deserves a reward when he does good, and a
punishment when he does evil. This principle is universal and necessary:
it is absolute. If this principle has not its application in this world,
it must either be a lie, or this world is ordered ill.
Now, it is a fact that the good is not always followed by happiness, nor
evil always by unhappiness.
Let us, in the first place, remark that if the fact exists, it is rare
enough, and seems to present the character of an exception.
Virtue is a struggle against passion; this struggle, full of dignity, is
also full of pain; but, on one side, crime is condemned to much harder
pains; on the other, those of virtue are of short duration; they are a
necessary and almost always beneficent trial.
Virtue has its pains, but the greatest happiness is still with it, as
the greatest unhappiness is with crime; and such is the case in small
and great, in the secret of the soul, and on the theatre of life, in the
obscurest conditions and in the most conspicuous situations.
Good and bad health are, after all, the greatest part of happiness or
unhappiness. In this regard, compare temperance and its opposite, order
and disorder, virtue and vice; I mean a temperance truly temperate, and
not an atrabilarious asceticism, a rational virtue, and not a fierce
virtue.
The great physician Hufeland[252] remarks that the benevolent sentiments
are favorable to health, and that the malevolent sentiments are opposed
to it. Violent and sinful passions irritate, inflame, and carry trouble
into the organization as well as the soul; the benevolent affections
preserve the measured and harmonious play of all the functions.
Hufeland again remarks that the greatest longevities pertain to wise and
well-regulated lives.
Thus, for health, strength, and life, virtue is better than vice: it is
already much, it seems to me.
I surely mean to speak of conscience only after health; but, in fine,
with the body, our most constant host is conscience. Peace or trouble of
conscience decides internal happiness or unhappiness. At this point of
view, compare again order and disorder, virtue and vice.
And without us, in society, to whom come esteem and contempt,
consideration and infamy? Certainly opinion has its mistakes, but they
are not long. In general, if charlatans, intriguers, impostors of every
kind, for some time surreptitiously get suffrages, it must be that a
sustained honesty is the surest and the almost infallible means of
reaching a good renown.
I regret that upon this point time does not allow of any development. It
would have afforded me delight, after having distinguished virtue from
happiness, to show them to you almost always united by the admirable law
of merit and demerit. I should have been pleased to show you this
beneficent law already governing human destiny, and called to preside
over it more exactly from day to day by the ever-increasing progress of
lights in governments and peoples, by the perfecting of civil and
judicial institutions. It would have been my wish to make pass into your
minds and hearts the consoling conviction that, after all, justice is
already in this world, and that the surest road to happiness is still
that of virtue.
This was the opinion of Socrates and Plato; and it is also that of
Franklin, and I gather it from my personal experience and an attentive
examination of human life. But I admit that there are exceptions; and
were there but one exception, it would be necessary to explain it.
Suppose a man, young, beautiful, rich, amiable, and loved, who, placed
between the scaffold and the betrayal of a sacred cause, voluntarily
mounts the scaffold at twenty years of age. What do you make of this
noble victim? The law of merit and demerit seems here suspended. Do you
dare blame virtue, or how in this world do you accord to it the
recompense that it has not sought, but is its due?
By careful search you will find more than one case analogous to that.
The laws of this world are general; they turn aside to suit no one: they
pursue their course without regard to the merit or demerit of any. If a
man is born with a bad temperament, it is in virtue of certain obscure
but undeviating physical laws, to which he is subject, like the animal
and the plant, and he suffers during his whole life, although personally
innocent. He is brought up in the midst of flames, epidemics, calamities
that strike at hazard the good as well as the bad.
Human justice condemns many that are innocent, it is true, but it
absolves, in fault of proof, more than one who is culpable. Besides, it
knows only certain derelictions. What faults, what basenesses occur in
the dark, which do not receive merited chastisement! In like manner,
what obscure devotions of which God is the sole witness and judge!
Without doubt nothing escapes the eye of conscience, and the culpable
soul cannot escape remorse. But remorse is not always in exact relation
with the fault committed; its vivacity may depend on a nature more or
less delicate, on education and habit. In a word, if it is in general
very true that the law of merit and demerit is fulfilled in this world,
it is not fulfilled with mathematical rigor.