It would be a fine thing to see one's soul. "Know thyself" is an
excellent precept; but it belongs only to God to put it in practice. Who
but He can know His own essence?
We call "soul" that which animates. Owing to our limited intelligence we
know scarcely anything more of the matter. Three-fourths of mankind go
no further, and give themselves no concern about the thinking being; the
other fourth seek it; no one has found it, or ever will find it.
Poor pedant! thou seest a plant which vegetates, and thou sayest,
"vegetation," or perhaps "vegetative soul." Thou remarkest that bodies
have and communicate motion, and thou sayest, "force"; thou seest thy
dog learn his craft under thee, and thou exclaimest, "instinct,"
"sensitive soul"! Thou hast combined ideas, and thou exclaimest,
"spirit!"
But pray, what dost thou understand by these words? This flower
vegetates; but is there any real being called vegetation? This body
pushes along another, but does it possess within itself a distinct being
called force? Thy dog brings thee a partridge, but is there any being
called instinct? Wouldst thou not laugh, if a reasoner--though he had
been preceptor to Alexander--were to say to thee: All animals live;
therefore there is in them a being, a substantial form, which is life?
If a tulip could speak and were to tell thee: I and my vegetation are
two beings evidently joined together; wouldst thou not laugh at the
tulip?
Let us at first see what thou knowest, of what thou art certain; that
thou walkest with thy feet; that thou digestest with thy stomach; that
thou feelest with thy whole body; and that thou thinkest with thy head.
Let us see if thy reason alone can have given thee light enough by which
to conclude, without supernatural aid, that thou hast a soul.
The first philosophers, whether Chaldæans or Egyptians, said: There must
be something within us which produces our thoughts; that something must
be very subtile; it is a breath; it is fire; it is ether; it is a
quintessence; it is a slender likeness; it is an antelechia; it is a
number; it is a harmony. Lastly, according to the divine Plato, it is a
compound of the _same_ and the _other_. "It is atoms which think in us,"
said Epicurus, after Democrites. But, my friend, how does an atom think?
Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing of the matter.
The opinion which one ought to adopt is, doubtless, that the soul is an
immaterial being; but certainly we cannot conceive what an immaterial
being is. No, answer the learned; but we know that its nature is to
think. And whence do you know this? We know, because it does think. Oh,
ye learned! I am much afraid that you are as ignorant as Epicurus! The
nature of a stone is to fall, because it does fall; but I ask you, what
makes it fall?
We know, continue they, that a stone has no soul. Granted; I believe it
as well as you. We know that an affirmative and a negative are not
divisible, are not parts of matter. I am of your opinion. But matter,
otherwise unknown to us, possesses qualities which are not material,
which are not divisible; it has gravitation towards a centre, which God
has given it; and this gravitation has no parts; it is not divisible.
The moving force of bodies is not a being composed of parts. In like
manner the vegetation of organized bodies, their life, their instinct,
are not beings apart, divisible beings; you can no more cut in two the
vegetation of a rose, the life of a horse, the instinct of a dog, than
you can cut in two a sensation, an affirmation, a negation. Therefore
your fine argument, drawn from the indivisibility of thought, proves
nothing at all.
What, then, do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot
of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of
anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.
Now tell me honestly, is this power of feeling and thinking the same as
that which causes you to digest and to walk? You own that it is not; for
in vain might your understanding say to your stomach--Digest; it will
not, if it be sick. In vain might your immaterial being order your feet
to walk; they will not stir, if they have the gout.
The Greeks clearly perceived that thought has frequently nothing to do
with the play of our organs; they admitted the existence of an animal
soul for these organs, and for the thoughts a soul finer, more
subtile--a _nous_.
But we find that this soul of thought has, on a thousand occasions, the
ascendency over the animal soul. The thinking soul commands the hands to
take, and they obey. It does not tell the heart to beat, the blood to
flow, the chyle to form; all this is done without it. Here then are two
souls much involved, and neither of them having the mastery.
Now, this first animal soul certainly does not exist; it is nothing more
than the movement of our organs. Take heed, O man! lest thou have no
more proofs but thy weak reason that the other soul exists. Thou canst
not know it but by faith; thou art born, thou eatest, thou thinkest,
thou wakest, thou sleepest, without knowing how. God has given thee the
faculty of thinking, as He has given thee all the rest; and if He had
not come at the time appointed by His providence, to teach thee that
thou hast an immaterial and an immortal soul, thou wouldst have no
proof whatever of it.
Let us examine the fine systems on the soul, which thy philosophy has
fabricated.
One says that the soul of man is part of the substance of God Himself;
another that it is part of the great whole; a third that it is created
from all eternity; a fourth that it is made, and not created. Others
assure us that God makes souls according as they are wanted, and that
they arrive at the moment of copulation. They are lodged in the seminal
animalcules, cries one. No, says another, they take up their abode in
the Fallopian tubes. A third comes and says: You are all wrong; the soul
waits for six weeks, until the fœtus is formed, and then it takes
possession of the pineal gland; but if it finds a false conception, it
returns and waits for a better opportunity. The last opinion is that its
dwelling is in the callous body; this is the post assigned to it by La
Peyronie. A man should be first surgeon to the king of France to dispose
in this way of the lodging of the soul. Yet the callous body was not so
successful in the world as the surgeon was.
St. Thomas in his question 75 and following, says that the soul is a
form subsisting _per se_, that it is all in all, that its essence
differs from its power; that there are three vegetative souls, viz., the
nutritive, the argumentative, and the generative; that the memory of
spiritual things is spiritual, and the memory of corporeal things is
corporeal; that the rational soul is a form "immaterial as to its
operations, and material as to its being." St. Thomas wrote two thousand
pages, of like force and clearness; and he is the angel of the schools.
Nor have there been fewer systems contrived on the way in which this
soul will feel, when it shall have laid aside the body with which it
felt; how it will hear without ears, smell without a nose, and touch
without hands; what body it will afterwards resume, whether that which
it had at two years old, or at eighty; how the _I_--the identity of the
same person will subsist; how the soul of a man become imbecile at the
age of fifteen, and dying imbecile at the age of seventy, will resume
the thread of the ideas which he had at the age of puberty; by what
contrivance a soul, the leg of whose body shall be cut off in Europe,
and one of its arms lost in America, will recover this leg and arm,
which, having been transformed into vegetables, will have passed into
the blood of some other animal. We should never finish, if we were to
seek to give an account of all the extravagances which this poor human
soul has imagined about itself.
It is very singular that, in the laws of God's people, not a word is
said of the spirituality and immortality of the soul; nothing in the
Decalogue, nothing in Leviticus, or in Deuteronomy.
It is quite certain, it is indubitable, that Moses nowhere proposes to
the Jews pains and rewards in another life; that he never mentions to
them the immortality of their souls; that he never gives them hopes of
heaven, nor threatens them with hell; all is temporal.
Many illustrious commentators have thought that Moses was perfectly
acquainted with these two great dogmas; and they prove it by the words
of Jacob, who, believing that his son had been devoured by wild beasts,
said in his grief: "I will go down into the grave--_in infernum_--unto
my son"; that is, I will die, since my son is dead.
They further prove it by the passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel; but the
Hebrews, to whom Moses spoke, could not have read either Ezekiel or
Isaiah, who did not come until several centuries after.
It is quite useless to dispute about the private opinions of Moses. The
fact is that in his public laws he never spoke of a life to come; that
he limited all rewards and punishments to the time present. If he knew
of a future life, why did he not expressly set forth that dogma? And if
he did not know of it, what were the object and extent of his mission?
This question is asked by many great persons. The answer is, that the
Master of Moses, and of all men, reserved to Himself the right of
expounding to the Jews, at His own time, a doctrine which they were not
in a condition to understand when they were in the desert.
If Moses had announced the immortality of the soul, a great school among
the Jews would not have constantly combated it. This great retreat of
the Sadducees would not have been authorized in the State; the Sadducees
would not have filled the highest offices, nor would pontiffs have been
chosen from their body.
It appears that it was not until after the founding of Alexandria that
the Jews were divided into three sects--the Pharisees, the Sadducees,
and the Essenes. The historian Josephus, who was a Pharisee, informs us
in the thirteenth book of his "Antiquities" that the Pharisees believed
in the metempsychosis; the Sadducees believed that the soul perished
with the body; the Essenes, says Josephus, held that souls were
immortal; according to them souls descended in an aerial form into the
body, from the highest region of the air, whither they were carried back
again by a violent attraction; and after death, those which had belonged
to the good dwelt beyond the ocean in a country where there was neither
heat nor cold, nor wind, nor rain. The souls of the wicked went into a
climate of an opposite description. Such was the theology of the Jews.
He who alone was to instruct all men came and condemned these three
sects; but without Him we could never have known anything of our soul;
for the philosophers never had any determinate idea of it; and
Moses--the only true lawgiver in the world before our own--Moses, who
talked with God face to face, left men in the most profound ignorance on
this great point. It is, then, only for seventeen hundred years that
there has been any certainty of the soul's existence and its
immortality.
Cicero had only doubts; his grandson and granddaughter might learn the
truth from the first Galileans who came to Rome.
But before that time, and since then, in all the rest of the earth where
the apostles did not penetrate, each one must have said to his soul:
What art thou? whence comest thou? what dost thou? whither goest thou?
Thou art I know not what, thinking and feeling: and wert thou to feel
and think for a hundred thousand millions of years, thou wouldst never
know any more by thine own light without the assistance of God.
O man! God has given thee understanding for thy own good conduct, and
not to penetrate into the essence of the things which He has created.
So thought Locke; and before Locke, Gassendi; and before Gassendi, a
multitude of sages; but we have bachelors who know all of which those
great men were ignorant.
Some cruel enemies of reason have dared to rise up against these truths,
acknowledged by all the wise. They have carried their dishonesty and
impudence so far as to charge the authors of this work with having
affirmed that the soul is matter. You well know, persecutors of
innocence, that we have said quite the contrary. You must have read
these very words against Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius: "My
friend, how does an atom think? Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing
of the matter." It is then evident, ye are calumniators.
No one knows what that material being is, which is called "spirit," to
which--be it observed--you give this material name, signifying "wind."
All the first fathers of the Church believed the soul to be corporeal.
It is impossible for us limited beings to know whether our intelligence
is substance or faculty: we cannot thoroughly know either the extended
being, or the thinking beings, or the mechanism of thought.
We exclaim to you, with the ever to be revered Gassendi and Locke, that
we know nothing by ourselves of the secrets of the Creator. And are you
gods, who know everything? We repeat to you, that you cannot know the
nature and distinction of the soul but by revelation. And is not this
revelation sufficient for you? You must surely be enemies of this
revelation which we claim, since you persecute those who expect
everything from it, and believe only in it.
Yes, we tell you, we defer wholly to the word of God; and you, enemies
of reason and of God, treat the humble doubt and humble submission of
the philosopher as the wolf in the fable treated the lamb; you say to
him: You said ill of me last year; I must suck your blood. Philosophy
takes no revenge; she smiles in peace at your vain endeavors; she mildly
enlightens mankind, whom you would brutalize, to make them like
yourselves.
SPACE.
What is space? "There is no space in void," exclaimed Leibnitz, after
having admitted a void; but when he admitted a void, he had not
embroiled himself with Newton, nor disputed with him on the calculus of
fluxions, of which Newton was the inventor. This dispute breaking out,
there was no longer space or a void for Leibnitz.
Fortunately, whatever may be said by philosophers on these insolvable
questions, whether it be for Epicurus, for Gassendi, for Newton, for
Descartes, or Rohaut, the laws of motion will be always the same.
_Que Rohaut vainement sèche pour concevoir_
_Comment tout étant plein, tout a pu se mouvoir_.
--BOILEAU, Ep. v, 31-32.
That Rohaut exhausts himself by vainly endeavoring to understand how
motion can exist in a plenum will not prevent our vessels from sailing
to the Indies, and all motion proceeding with regularity. Pure space,
you say, can neither be matter, nor spirit; and as there is nothing in
this world but matter and spirit, there can therefore be no space.
So, gentlemen, you assert that there is only matter and spirit, to us
who know so little either of the one or the other--a pleasant decision,
truly! "There are only two things in nature, and these we know not."
Montezuma reasons more justly in the English tragedy of Dryden: "Why
come you here to tell me of the emperor Charles the Fifth? There are
but two emperors in the world; he of Peru and myself." Montezuma spoke
of two things with which he was acquainted, but we speak of two things
of which we have no precise idea.
We are very pleasant atoms. We make God a spirit in a mode of our own;
and because we denominate that faculty spirit, which the supreme,
universal, eternal, and all-powerful Being has given us, of combining a
few ideas in our little brain, of the extent of six inches more or less,
we suppose God to be a spirit in the same sense. God always in _our_
image--honest souls!
But how, if there be millions of beings of another nature from our
matter, of which we know only a few qualities, and from our spirit, our
ideal breath of which we accurately know nothing at all? and who can
assert that these millions of beings exist not; or suspects not that
God, demonstrated to exist by His works, is eminently different from all
these beings, and that space may not be one of them?
We are far from asserting with Lucretius--
_Ergo, præter inane et corpora, tertia per se_
_Nulla potest rerum in numero natura referri._
--LIB., i, v. 446, 447.
That all consists of body and of space.--CREECH.
But may we venture to believe with him, that space is infinite?
Has any one been ever able to answer his question: Speed an arrow from
the limits of the world--will it fall into nothing, into nihility?
Clarke, who spoke in the name of Newton, pretends that "space has
properties, for since it is extended, it is measurable, and therefore
exists." But if we answer, that something may be put where there is
nothing, what answer will be made by Newton and Clarke?
Newton regards space as the sensorium of God. I thought that I
understood this grand saying formerly, because I was young; at present,
I understand it no more than his explanation of the Apocalypse. Space,
the sensorium, the internal organ of God! I lose both Newton and myself
there.
Newton thought, according to Locke, that the creation might be explained
by supposing that God, by an act of His will and His power, had rendered
space impenetrable. It is melancholy that a genius so profound as that
possessed by Newton should suggest such unintelligible things.
STAGE (POLICE OF THE).
Kings of France were formerly excommunicated; all from Philip I. to
Louis VIII. were solemnly so; as also the emperors from Henry IV. to
Louis of Bavaria inclusively. The kings of England had likewise a very
decent part of these favors from the court of Rome. It was the rage of
the times, and this rage cost six or seven hundred thousand men their
lives. They actually excommunicated the representatives of monarchs; I
do not mean ambassadors, but players, who are kings and emperors three
or four times a week, and who govern the universe to procure a
livelihood.
I scarcely know of any but this profession, and that of magicians, to
which this honor could now be paid; but as sorcerers have ceased for the
eighty years that sound philosophy has been known to men, there are no
longer any victims but Alexander, Cæsar, Athalie, Polyeucte, Andromache,
Brutus, Zaïre, and Harlequin.
The principal reason given is, that these gentlemen and ladies represent
the passions; but if depicting the human heart merits so horrible a
disgrace, a greater rigor should be used with painters and sculptors.
There are many licentious pictures which are publicly sold, while we do
not represent a single dramatic poem which maintains not the strictest
decorum. The Venus of Titian and that of Correggio are quite naked, and
are at all times dangerous for our modest youth; but comedians only
recite the admirable lines of "Cinna" for about two hours, and with the
approbation of the magistracy under the royal authority. Why, therefore,
are these living personages on the stage more condemned than these mute
comedians on canvas? "_Ut pictura poesis erit_." What would Sophocles
and Euripides have said, if they could have foreseen that a people, who
only ceased to be barbarous by imitating them, would one day inflict
this disgrace upon the stage, which in their time received such high
glory?
Esopus and Roscius were not Roman senators, it is true; but the Flamen
did not declare them infamous; and the art of Terence was not doubted.
The great pope and prince, Leo X., to whom we owe the renewal of good
tragedy and comedy in Europe, and who caused dramatic pieces to be
represented in his palace with so much magnificence, foresaw not that
one day, in a part of Gaul, the descendants of the Celts and the Goths
would believe they had a right to disgrace that which he honored. If
Cardinal Richelieu had lived--he who caused the Palais Royal to be
built, and to whom France owes the stage--he would no longer have
suffered them to have dared to cover with ignominy those whom he
employed to recite his own works.
It must be confessed that they were heretics who began to outrage the
finest of all the arts. Leo X., having revived the tragic scene, the
pretended reformers required nothing more to convince them that it was
the work of Satan. Thus the town of Geneva, and several illustrious
places of Switzerland, have been a hundred and fifty years without
suffering a violin amongst them. The Jansenists, who now dance on the
tomb of St. Paris, to the great edification of the neighborhood, in the
last century forbade a princess of Conti, whom they governed, to allow
her son to learn dancing, saying that dancing was too profane. However,
as it was necessary he should be graceful, he was taught the minuet, but
they would not allow a violin, and the director was a long time before
he would suffer the prince of Conti to be taught with castanets. A few
Catholic Visigoths on this side the Alps, therefore, fearing the
reproaches of the reformers, cried as loudly as they did. Thus, by
degrees, the fashion of defaming Cæsar and Pompey, and of refusing
certain ceremonies to certain persons paid by the king, and laboring
under the eyes of the magistracy, was established in France. We do not
declaim against this abuse; for who would embroil himself with powerful
men of the present time, for hedra and heroes of past ages?
We are content with finding this rigor absurd, and with always paying
our full tribute of admiration to the masterpieces of our stage.
Rome, from whom we have learned our catechism, does not use it as we do;
she has always known how to temper her laws according to times and
occasions; she has known how to distinguish impudent mountebanks, who
were formerly rightly censured, from the dramatic pieces of Trissin, and
of several bishops and cardinals who have assisted to revive tragedy.
Even at present, comedies are publicly represented at Rome in religious
houses. Ladies go to them without scandal; they think not that
dialogues, recited on boards, are a diabolical infamy. We have even seen
the piece of "George Dandin" executed at Rome by nuns, in the presence
of a crowd of ecclesiastics and ladies. The wise Romans are above all
careful how they excommunicate the gentlemen who sing the trebles in the
Italian operas; for, in truth, it is enough to be castrated in this
world, without being damned in the other.
In the good time of Louis XIV., there was always a bench at the
spectacles, which was called the bench of bishops. I have been a
witness, that in the minority of Louis XV., Cardinal Fleury, then bishop
of Fréjus, was very anxious to revive this custom. With other times and
other manners, we are apparently much wiser than in the times in which
the whole of Europe came to admire our shows, when Richelieu revived the
stage in France, when Leo X. renewed the age of Augustus in Italy: but a
time will come in which our children, seeing the impertinent work of
Father Le Brun against the art of Sophocles, and the works of our great
men printed at the same time, will exclaim: Is it possible that the
French could thus contradict themselves, and that the most absurd
barbarity has so proudly raised its head against some of the finest
productions of the human mind?
St. Thomas of Aquinas, whose morals were equal to those of Calvin and
Father Quesnel--St. Thomas, who had never seen good comedy, and who knew
only miserable players, thinks however that the theatre might be useful.
He had sufficient good sense and justice to feel the merit of this art,
unfinished as it was, and permitted and approved of it. St. Charles
Borromeo personally examined the pieces which were played at Milan, and
gave them his approbation and signature. Who after that will be
Visigoths enough to treat Roderigo and Chimene as soul-corrupters?
Would to God that these barbarians, the enemies of the finest of arts,
had the piety of Polyeucte, the clemency of Augustus, the virtue of
Burrhus, and would die like the husband of Al-zira!
STATES--GOVERNMENTS.
Which is the best? I have not hitherto known any person who has not
governed some state. I speak not of messieurs the ministers, who really
govern; some two or three years, others six months, and others six
weeks; I speak of all other men, who, at supper or in their closet,
unfold their systems of government, and reform armies, the Church, the
gown, and finances.
The Abbé de Bourzeis began to govern France towards the year 1645, under
the name of Cardinal Richelieu, and made the "Political Testament," in
which he would enlist the nobility into the cavalry for three years,
make chambers of accounts and parliaments pay the poll-tax, and deprive
the king of the produce of the excise. He asserts, above all, that to
enter a country with fifty thousand men, it is essential to economy that
a hundred thousand should be raised. He affirms that "Provence alone has
more fine seaports than Spain and Italy together."
The Abbé de Bourzeis had not travelled. As to the rest, his work abounds
with anachronisms and errors; and as he makes Cardinal Richelieu sign
in a manner in which he never signed, so he makes him speak as he had
never spoken. Moreover, he fills a whole chapter with saying that reason
should guide a state, and in endeavoring to prove this discovery. This
work of obscurities, this bastard of the Abbé de Bourzeis, has long
passed for the legitimate offspring of the Cardinal Richelieu; and all
academicians, in their speeches of reception, fail not to praise
extravagantly this political masterpiece.
The Sieur Gatien de Courtilz, seeing the success of the "_Testament
Politique_" of Richelieu, published at The Hague the "_Testament de
Colbert_" with a fine letter of M. Colbert to the king. It is clear that
if this minister made such a testament, it must have been suppressed;
yet this book has been quoted by several authors.
Another ignoramus, of whose name we are ignorant, failed not to produce
the "_Testament de Louis_" still worse, if possible, than that of
Colbert. An abbé of Chevremont also made Charles, duke of Lorraine, form
a testament. We have had the political testaments of Cardinal Alberoni,
Marshal Belle-Isle, and finally that of Mandrin.
M. de Boisguillebert, author of the "Détail de la France" published in
1695, produced the impracticable project of the royal tithe, under the
name of the marshal de Vauban.
A madman, named La Jonchere, wanting bread, wrote, in 1720, a "Project
of Finance," in four volumes; and some fools have quoted this
production as a work of La Jonchere, the treasurer-general, imagining
that a treasurer could not write a bad book on finance.
But it must be confessed that very wise men, perhaps very worthy to
govern, have written on the administration of states in France, Spain,
and England. Their books have done much good; not that they have
corrected ministers who were in place when these books appeared, for a
minister does not and cannot correct himself. He has attained his
growth, and more instruction, more counsel, he has not time to listen
to. The current of affairs carries him away; but good books form, young
people, destined for their places; and princes and statesmen of a
succeeding generation are instructed.
The strength and weakness of all governments has been narrowly examined
in latter times. Tell me, then, you who have travelled, who have read
and have seen, in what state, under what sort of government, would you
be born? I conceive that a great landed lord in France would have no
objection to be born in Germany: he would be a sovereign instead of a
subject. A peer of France would be very glad to have the privileges of
the English peerage: he would be a legislator. The gownsman and
financier would find himself better off in France than elsewhere. But
what country would a wise freeman choose--a man of small fortune,
without prejudices?
A rather learned member of the council of Pondicherry came into Europe,
by land, with a brahmin, more learned than the generality of them. "How
do you find the government of the Great Mogul?" said the counsellor.
"Abominable," answered the brahmin; "how can you expect a state to be
happily governed by Tartars? Our rajahs, our omras, and our nabobs are
very contented, but the citizens are by no means so; and millions of
citizens are something."
The counsellor and the brahmin traversed all Upper Asia, reasoning on
their way. "I reflect," said the brahmin, "that there is not a republic
in all this vast part of the world." "There was formerly that of Tyre,"
said the counsellor, "but it lasted not long; there was another towards
Arabia Petræa, in a little nook called Palestine--if we can honor with
the name of republic a horde of thieves and usurers, sometimes governed
by judges, sometimes by a sort of kings, sometimes by high priests; who
became slaves seven or eight times, and were finally driven from the
country which they had usurped."
"I fancy," said the brahmin, "that we should find very few republics on
earth. Men are seldom worthy to govern themselves. This happiness should
only belong to little people, who conceal themselves in islands, or
between mountains, like rabbits who steal away from carnivorous animals,
but at length are discovered and devoured."
When the travellers arrived in Asia Minor, the counsellor said to the
brahmin, "Would you believe that there was a republic formed in a corner
of Italy, which lasted more than five hundred years, and which
possessed this Asia Minor, Asia, Africa, Greece, the Gauls, Spain, and
the whole of Italy?" "It was therefore soon turned into a monarchy?"
said the brahmin. "You have guessed it," said the other; "but this
monarchy has fallen, and every day we make fine dissertations to
discover the causes of its decay and fall." "You take much useless
pains," said the Indian: "this empire has fallen because it existed. All
must fall. I hope that the same will happen to the empire of the Great
Mogul." "Apropos," said the European, "do you believe that more honor is
required in a despotic state, and more virtue in a republic?" The term
"honor" being first explained to the Indian, he replied, that honor was
more necessary in a republic, and that there is more need of virtue in a
monarchical state. "For," said he, "a man who pretends to be elected by
the people, will not be so, if he is dishonored; while at court he can
easily obtain a place, according to the maxim of a great prince, that to
succeed, a courtier should have neither honor nor a will of his own.
With respect to virtue, it is prodigiously required in a court, in order
to dare to tell the truth. The virtuous man is much more at his ease in
a republic, having nobody to flatter."
"Do you believe," said the European, "that laws and religions can be
formed for climates, the same as furs are required at Moscow, and gauze
stuffs at Delhi?" "Yes, doubtless," said the brahmin; "all laws which
concern physics are calculated for the meridian which we inhabit; a
German requires only one wife, and a Persian must have two or three.
"Rites of religion are of the same nature. If I were a Christian, how
would you have me say mass in my province, where there is neither bread
nor wine? With regard to dogmas, it is another thing; climate has
nothing to do with them. Did not your religion commence in Asia, from
whence it was driven? does it not exist towards the Baltic Sea, where it
was unknown?"
"In what state, under what dominion, would you like to live?" said the
counsellor. "Under any but my own," said his companion, "and I have
found many Siamese, Tonquinese, Persians, and Turks who have said the
same." "But, once more," said the European, "what state would you
choose?" The brahmin answered, "That in which the laws alone are
obeyed." "That is an odd answer," said the counsellor. "It is not the
worse for that," said the brahmin. "Where is this country?" said the
counsellor. The brahmin: "We must seek it."
STATES-GENERAL.
There have been always such in Europe, and probably in all the earth, so
natural is it to assemble the family, to know its interests, and to
provide for its wants! The Tartars had their _cour-ilté_. The Germans,
according to Tacitus, assembled to consult. The Saxons and people of the
North had their _witenagemot_. The people at large formed
states-general in the Greek and Roman republics.
We see none among the Egyptians, Persians, or Chinese, because we have
but very imperfect fragments of their histories: we scarcely know
anything of them until since the time in which their kings were
absolute, or at least since the time in which they had only priests to
balance their authority.
When the comitia were abolished at Rome, the Prætorian guards took their
place: insolent, greedy, barbarous, and idle soldiers were the republic.
Septimius Severus conquered and disbanded them.
The states-general of the Ottoman Empire are the janissaries and
cavalry; in Algiers and Tunis, it is the militia. The greatest and most
singular example of these states-general is the Diet of Ratisbon, which
has lasted a hundred years, where the representatives of the empire, the
ministers of electors, princes, counts, prelates and imperial cities, to
the number of thirty-seven, continually sit.
The second states-general of Europe are those of Great Britain. They are
not always assembled, like the Diet of Ratisbon; but they are become so
necessary that the king convokes them every year.
The House of Commons answers precisely to the deputies of cities
received in the diet of the empire; but it is much larger in number, and
enjoys a superior power. It is properly the nation. Peers and bishops
are in parliament only for themselves, and the House of Commons for all
the country.
This parliament of England is only a perfected imitation of certain
states-general of France. In 1355, under King John, the three states
were assembled at Paris, to aid him against the English. They granted
him a considerable sum, at five livres five sous the mark, for fear the
king should change the numerary value. They regulated the tax necessary
to gather in this money, and they established nine commissioners to
preside at the receipt. The king promised for himself and his
successors, not to make any change in the coin in future.
What is promising for himself and his heirs? Either it is promising
nothing, or it is saying: Neither myself nor my heirs have the right of
altering the money; we have not the power of doing ill.
With this money, which was soon raised, an army was quickly formed,
which prevented not King John from being made prisoner at the battle of
Poitiers.
Account should be rendered at the end of the year, of the employment of
the granted sum. This is now the custom in England, with the House of
Commons. The English nation has preserved all that the French nation has
lost.
The states-general of Sweden have a custom still more honorable to
humanity, which is not found among any other people. They admit into
their assemblies two hundred peasants, who form a body separated from
the three others, and who maintain the liberty of those who labor for
the subsistence of man.
The states-general of Denmark took quite a contrary resolution in 1660;
they deprived themselves of all their rights, in favor of the king. They
gave him an absolute and unlimited power; but what is more strange is,
that they have not hitherto repented it.
The states-general in France have not been assembled since 1613, and the
cortes of Spain lasted a hundred years after. The latter were assembled
in 1712, to confirm the renunciation of Philip V., of the crown of
France. These states-general have not been convoked since that
time.