regarded as the root of all virtues and the first source of
instruction,[286] the exercise of the duties which it imposes admits
of no exception. As the legislator teaches there that the greatest
crime is to lack in filial piety, he infers that he who has been a
good son will be a good father and that thus nothing will break the
social tie[287]; for he first establishes this virtue which embraces
all, from the emperor to the lowliest of his subjects, and that it is
for the peoples what the regularity of the celestial movements is for
the ethereal space: but in Italy and in Greece where Pythagoras
established his dogmas, it would have been dangerous for him to give
the same extension, since this virtue not being that of the State,
would necessarily involve abuses in the paternal authority, already
excessive among certain peoples. That is the reason the disciples of
this philosopher, in distinguishing between forced and voluntary
actions, judged wisely that it would be necessary to apply here the
distinction: therefore they urged to honour one’s father and mother
and to obey them in all that concerns the body and mundane things, but
without abandoning one’s soul to them[288]; for the divine law
declares free what has not been received from them and delivers it
from their power. Pythagoras furthermore had favoured this opinion by
saying, that after having chosen a friend from among the men most
commended for their virtues, it was necessary to learn by his actions
and to be guided by his discourse: which testified to the lofty idea
that he had of friendship. “Friends,” he said, “are like companions of
travel who reciprocally assist each other to persevere in the path of
the noblest life.[289]” It is to him that we owe that beautiful
expression, so often quoted, so little felt by the generality of men,
and which a victorious king, Alexander the Great, felt so keenly and
expressed so felicitously by the following: “My friend is another
myself.”[290] It is also from him that Aristotle had borrowed that
beautiful definition: “The real friend is one soul that lives in two
bodies.”[291] The founder of the Lyceum, in giving such a definition
of friendship, spoke rather by theory than by practice, he who
reasoning one day upon friendship, cried ingenuously: “Oh, my friends!
there are no friends.”[292]
Yet Pythagoras did not conceive friendship as a simple individual
affection, but as an universal benevolence which should be extended to
all men in general, and to all good people.[293] At that time he gave
to this virtue the name of philanthropy. It is the virtue which, under
the name of charity, serves as foundation for the Christian religion.
Jesus offers it to his disciples immediately after divine love, and as
equal to piety.[294] Zoroaster places it after sincerity[295]; he
wished that man might be pure in thought, speech, and action; that he
might speak the truth, and that he might do good to all men. Kong-Tse
as well as Pythagoras commended it after filial piety.[296] “All
morals,” he said, “can be reduced to the observation of three
fundamental laws, of the relations between sovereigns and subjects,
between parents and children, between husbands and wives; and to the
strict practice of the five capital virtues, of which the first is
humanity, that is to say, that universal charity, that expansion of
the soul which binds man to man without distinction.”
6. _If thou canst at least: for a most rigid law
Binds Power to Necessity._
Here is the proof of what I said just now, that Pythagoras recognized
two motives of human actions, the first, issuing from a constrained
nature, called Necessity; the second emanating from a free nature,
called Power, and both dependent upon an implied primordial law. This
doctrine was that of the ancient Egyptians, among whom Pythagoras had
imbibed it. “Man is mortal with reference to the body,” they said,
“but he is immortal with reference to the soul which constitutes
essential man. As immortal he has authority over all things; but
relative to the material and mortal part of himself, he is subject to
destiny.”[297]
One can see by these few words that the ancient sages did not give to
Destiny the universal influence that certain philosophers and
particularly the Stoics gave to it later on; but they considered it
only as exercising its empire over matter. It is necessary to believe
that since the followers of the Porch had defined it as a chain of
causes, by virtue of which the past has taken place, the present
exists, and the future is to be realized[298]; or still better, as the
rule of the law by which the Universe is governed[299]; one must
believe, I say, that these philosophers confounded Destiny with
Providence, and did not distinguish the effect from its cause, since
these definitions conform only with the fundamental law of which
destiny is but an emanation. This confusion of words had to produce
and in fact did produce, among the Stoics, an inversion of ideas which
was the most unfortunate result[300]; for, as they established,
according to their system, a chain of good and evil that nothing could
either alter or break, one easily inferred that the Universe being
subject to the attraction of a blind fatality, all actions are here
necessarily determined in advance, forced, and thereafter indifferent
in themselves; so that good and evil, virtue and vice, are vain words,
things whose existence is purely ideal and relative.
The Stoics would have evaded these calamitous results if, like
Pythagoras, they had admitted the two motives of which I have spoken,
Necessity and Power; and if, far from instituting Necessity alone as
absolute master of the Universe, under the name of Destiny or
Fatality, they had seen it balanced by the Power of the Will, and
subject to the Providential Cause whence all emanates. The disciples
of Plato would also have evaded many errors, if they had clearly
understood this concatenation of the two opposed principles, from
which results universal equilibrium; but following certain false
interpretations of the doctrine of their master regarding the soul of
matter, they had imagined that this soul was no other than Necessity
by which it is ruled[301]; so that, according to them, this soul being
inherent in matter, and bad in itself, gave to Evil a necessary
existence: a dogma quite formidable, since it makes the world to be
considered as the theatre of a struggle without beginning or end,
between Providence, principle of Good, and the soul of matter,
principle of Evil. The greatest mistake of the Platonists, exactly
contrary to that of the Stoics, was in having confused the free power
of the Will with the divine Providence, in having instituted it for
the principle of good and thus being put in position of maintaining
that there are two souls in the world, a beneficent one, God, and a
malefic one, Matter. This system, approved of by many celebrated men
of antiquity and which Beausobre assures was the most widely
received,[302] offers, as I have observed, the very great disadvantage
of giving to Evil a necessary existence, that is to say, an
independent and eternal existence. Now, Bayle has very well proved, by
attacking this system through that of Manes, that two opposed
Principles cannot exist equally eternal and independent of one
another, because the clearest ideas of order teach us that a Being
which exists by itself, which is necessary, which is eternal, must be
unique, infinite, all-powerful, and endowed with all manner of
perfections.[303]
But it is not at all certain that Plato may have had the idea that his
disciples have attributed to him, since far from considering matter as
an independent and necessary being, animated by a soul essentially
bad, he seems even to doubt its existence, going so far as to regard
it as pure nothingness, and calls the bodies which are formed of it,
equivocal beings holding the medium between what is always existing
and what does not exist at all[304]; he affirms sometimes that matter
has been created and sometimes that it has not been[305]; and thus
falls into contradictions of which his enemies have taken advantage.
Plutarch, who has clearly seen it, excuses them by saying that this
great philosopher has fallen into these contradictions designedly, in
order to conceal some mystery; a mind constructed like his not being
made to affirm two opposites in the same sense.[306] The mystery that
Plato wished to conceal, as he makes it sufficiently understood,[307]
was the origin of Evil. He himself declares that he has never revealed
and that he never will reveal, in writing, his real sentiments in this
respect. Thus what Chalcidius and after him André Dacier have given
concerning the doctrine of Plato are only conjectures or very remote
inferences drawn from certain of his dogmas. One has often made use of
this means, with regard to celebrated men whose writings one comments
upon and particularly when one has certain reasons for presenting
one’s ideas _sous un côté_ which outlines or which favours an opinion
either favourable or unfavourable. It is this which happened more to
Manes than to any other; his doctrine concerning the two Principles
has been greatly calumniated, and without knowing just what he meant
by them, one hastened to condemn him without investigating what he had
said; adopting as axioms that he had laid down, inferences the most
bizarre and most ridiculous that his enemies had drawn from certain
equivocal phrases.[308] What persuades me to make this observation, is
because it has been proved that Manes had indeed admitted two opposed
Principles of Good and Evil, eternal independents, and holding of
themselves their proper and absolute existence, since it is easy to
see that Zoroaster, whose doctrine he had principally imitated, had
not admitted them as such, but as equally issued from a superior
Cause, concerning the essence of which he was silent.[309] I am very
much inclined to believe that the Christian doctors who have
transmitted to us the ideas of this mighty heresiarch, blinded by
their hatred or by their ignorance, have travestied them as I find
that the Platonist philosophers, bewildered by their own opinions,
have entirely disfigured those of the illustrious founder of the
Academy. The errors of both have been, taking for absolute beings,
what Zoroaster and Pythagoras, Plato or Manes, had put down as
emanations, results, forces, or even the simple abstractions of the
understanding. Thus Ormuzd and Ahriman, Power and Necessity, the Same
and the Other, Light and Darkness, are, in reality, only the same
things diversely expressed, diversely sensed, but always drawn from
the same origin and subject to the same fundamental Cause of the
Universe.
It is not true therefore, as Chalcidius has stated, that Pythagoras
may have demonstrated that evil exists necessarily,[310] because
matter is evil in itself. Pythagoras never said that matter might be
an absolute being whose essence might be composed of evil. Hierocles,
who had studied the doctrine of this great man and that of Plato, has
denied that either the one or the other had ever declared matter as a
being existing by itself. He has proved, on the contrary, that Plato
taught, following the steps of Pythagoras, that the World was produced
from Nothing, and that his followers were mistaken when they thought
that he admitted an uncreated matter.[311] Power and Necessity
(mentioned in the lines at the head of this Examination) are not, as
has been believed, the absolute source of good and evil. Necessity is
not more evil in itself than Power is not good; it is from the usage
that man is called to make of them, and from their employment which is
indicated by wisdom or ignorance, virtue or vice, that results Good or
Evil. This has been felt by Homer who has expressed it in an admirable
allegory, by representing the god of gods himself, Jupiter, opening
indifferently the sources of good and evil upon the universe.
Beside Jove’s threshold stand two casks of gifts for man.
One cask contains the evil, one the good,...[312]
Those who have rejected this thought of Homer have not reflected
enough upon the prerogatives of poetry, which are to particularize
what is universal and to represent as done what is to be done. Good
and Evil do not emanate from Jupiter in action, but in potentiality,
that is to say, that the same thing represented by Jupiter or the
Universal Principle of the Will and the Intelligence, becomes good or
evil, according as it is determined by the particular operation of
each individual principle of the Will and the Intelligence.[313] Now,
man is to the Being called Jupiter by Homer, as the particular is to
the Universal.[314]
7. _Still it is given thee to fight and overcome
Thy foolish passions: learn thou to subdue them._
It seems that Lysis, foreseeing the wrong inductions that would be
drawn from what he had said, and as if he had a presentiment that one
would not fail to generalize the influence of Necessity upon the
actions of men, may have wished beforehand to oppose himself to the
destructive dogma of fatality, by establishing the empire of the Will
over the passions. This is in the doctrine of Pythagoras the real
foundation of the liberty of man: for, according to this philosopher,
no one is free, only he who knows how to master himself,[315] and the
yoke of the passions is much heavier and more difficult to throw off
than that of the most cruel tyrants. Pythagoras, however, did not,
according to Hierocles, prescribe destroying the passions, as the
Stoics taught in late times; but only to watch over them and repress
excess in them, because all excess is vicious.[316] He regarded the
passions as useful to man, and although produced in principle by
Necessity, and given by an irresistible destiny, as nevertheless
submissive in their use to the free power of the Will. Plato had well
realized this truth and had forcibly indicated it in many passages of
his works: one finds it chiefly in the second dialogue of Hippias,
where this philosopher shows, evidently without seeming to have the
design, that man good or bad, virtuous or criminal, truthful or false,
is only such by the power of his will, and that the passion which
carries him to virtue or to vice, to truth or falsehood, is nothing in
itself; so that no man is bad, only by the faculty which he has of
being good; nor good, only by the faculty which he has of being bad.
But has man the faculty of being good or bad at his pleasure, and is
he not irresistibly drawn toward vice or virtue? This is a question
which has tried all the great thinkers of the earth, and which
according to circumstances has caused storms of more or less violence.
It is necessary, however, to give close attention to one thing, which
is, that before the establishment of Christianity and the admission of
original sin as fundamental dogma of religion, no founder of sect, no
celebrated philosopher had positively denied the free will, nor had
taught ostensibly that man may be necessarily determined to Evil or to
Good and predestined from all time to vice or virtue, to wickedness or
eternal happiness. It is indeed true that this cruel fatality seemed
often to follow from their principles as an inevitable consequence,
and that their adversaries reproached them with it; but nearly all
rejected it as an insult, or a false interpretation of their system.
The first who gave place to this accusation, in ancient times, was a
certain Moschus, a Phœnician philosopher, who, according to Strabo,
lived before the epoch in which the war of Troy is said to have taken
place, that is to say, about twelve or thirteen centuries before our
era.[317] This philosopher detaching himself from the theosophical
doctrine, the only one known at that time, and having sought the
reason of things in the things themselves, can be considered as the
real founder of Natural Philosophy: he was the first who made
abstraction from the Divinity, and from the intelligence, and assumed
that the Universe existing by itself was composed of indivisible
particles, which, endowed with figures and diverse movements, produced
by their fortuitous combinations an infinite series of beings,
generating, destroying, and renewing themselves unceasingly. These
particles, which the Greeks named _atoms_,[318] on account of their
indivisibility, constituted the particular system which still bears
this name. Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus adopted it, adding to
it their own ideas; and Lucretius having naturalized it among the
Romans, favoured its passage down to these modern times, when the
greater part of our philosophers have done nothing but renovate it
under other forms.[319] Assuredly there is no system whence the fatal
necessity of all things issues more inevitably than from that of
atoms; also it is certain that Democritus was accused of admitting a
compulsory destiny,[320] although, like Leibnitz, he admitted to each
atom an animated and sentient nature.[321] It is not known if he
replied to this accusation; but there are certain proofs that
Epicurus, who had less right than he to reject it, since he regarded
atoms as absolutely inanimate,[322] rejected it nevertheless, and not
wishing to admit a dogma subversive of all morals, he declared himself
against it, and taught the liberty of man.[323]
A singular thing is, that this fatality which appears attached to the
system of atoms, whence the materialist promoters, true to their
principle, banished the influence of Divine Providence,[324] followed
still more naturally from the opposed system, wherein the spiritualist
philosophers admitted this Providence to the full extent of its power.
According to this last system, a sole and same spiritual substance
filled the Universe, and by its diverse modifications produced there
all the phenomena by which the senses are affected. Parmenides,
Melissus, and Zeno of Elea, who adopted it, sustained it with great
success: they asserted that matter was only pure illusion, that there
is nothing in things, that bodies and all their variations are only
pure appearances, and that therefore nothing really exists outside of
spirit.[325] Zeno of Elea particularly, who denied the existence of
movement, brought against this existence some objections very
difficult to remove.[326] The Stoic philosophers became more or less
strongly attached to this opinion. Chrysippus, one of the firmest
pillars of the Porch, taught that God is the soul of the world, and
the world, the universal extension of that soul. He said that by
Jupiter, should be understood, the eternal law, the fatal necessity,
the immutable truth of all future things.[327] Now, it is evident that
if, in accordance with the energetic expression of Seneca, this unique
principle of the Universe has ordained once to obey always its own
command,[328] the Stoics were not able to escape from the reproach
that was directed toward them, of admitting the most absolute
fatality, since the soul of man being, according to them, only a
portion of the Divinity, its actions could have no other cause than
God Himself who had willed them.[329] Nevertheless Chrysippus rejected
the reproach in the same manner as did Epicurus; he always sustained
the liberty of man, notwithstanding the irresistible force that he
admitted in the unique Cause[330]; and what seemed a manifest
contradiction, he taught that the soul sins only by the impulse of its
own will, and therefore that the blame of its errors should not be put
upon destiny.[331]
But it suffices to reflect a moment upon the nature of the principles
set down by Epicurus, by Chrysippus, and by all those who have
preceded them or followed them in their divergent opinions, to see
that the inferences drawn by their adversaries were just, and that
they could not refute them without contradicting themselves.[332]
Every time that one has claimed to found the Universe upon the
existence of a sole material or spiritual nature, and to make proceed
from this sole nature the explanation of all phenomena, one has become
exposed and always will be, to insurmountable difficulties. It is
always in asking what the origin of Good and Evil is, that all the
systems of this sort have been irresistibly overthrown, from Moschus,
Leucippus, and Epicurus, down to Spinoza and Leibnitz; from
Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, and Chrysippus, down to Berkeley and Kant.
For, let there be no misunderstanding, the solution of the problem
concerning free will depends upon preliminary knowledge of the origin
of evil, so that one cannot reply plainly to this question: Whence
comes Evil? Neither can one reply to this one: Is man free? And that
one be not still further deceived here, the knowledge of the origin of
evil, if it has been acquired, has never been openly divulged: it has
been profoundly buried with that of the Unity of God in the ancient
mysteries and has never emerged except enveloped in a triple veil. The
initiates imposed upon themselves a rigid silence concerning what they
called the _sufferings of God_[333]: his death, his descent into the
infernal regions, and his resurrection.[334] They knew that the
serpent was, in general, the symbol of evil, and that it was under
this form that the Python had fought with and been slain by
Apollo.[335] The theosophists have not made a public dogma of the
Unity of God, precisely on account of the explanation that it would be
necessary to give to the origin of good and evil; for without this
explanation, the dogma in itself would have been incomprehensible.
Moses realized it perfectly, and in the plan which he had conceived of
striking the people whose legislator he was, with a character as
extraordinary as indelible, by founding his cult upon the publicity of
a dogma hidden, until that time in the depths of the sanctuaries and
reserved for the initiates alone, he did not hesitate to divulge what
he knew pertaining to the creation of the world and the origin of
evil. It is true that the manner in which he gave it, under a
simplicity and apparent clarity, concealed a profundity and obscurity
almost unfathomable; but the form which he gave to this formidable
mystery sufficed to support, in the opinion of the vulgar, the Unity
of God and this was all that he wished to do.