You know what intelligence is; you know it by knowing yourself. Is

there, or is there not, intelligence in the universe? Allow me to

reproduce some old questions: If a machine implies intelligence, does

the universe imply none? If a telescope implies intelligence in the

optician, does the eye imply none in its author? The production of a

variety of the camelia, or of a new breed of swine, demands of the

gardener and the breeder the patient and prolonged employment of the

understanding; and are our entire flora and fauna to be explained

without any intervention of mind? And if there is intelligence in the

universe, is this intelligence a chemical result of the combination of

molecules? is it a physical result of caloric or of electricity? It is

in vain that you give to material agents an unlimited time; what has

time to do here? Whether the world as it now exists arose out of

nothing, or whether it was slowly formed during thousands of ages, the

question remains the same. With matter and time, you will not succeed in

creating intelligence; this were an operation of transcendent alchemy

utterly beyond our power. In the theory of _slow causes_, the adjective

ends by devouring the substantive; it seems that by dint of becoming

slow the causes become superfluous. A breath of reason upsets, like a

house of cards, the structures of this erring and misnamed science. Time

has a relative meaning and value. We reckon duration as long or short,

by taking human life as our measure. But they tell of insects which are

born in the morning, arrive at mature age at mid-day, and only reach the

evening if they are patriarchs of their race. Is it not easy to conceive

of beings organized for an existence such that our centuries would be

moments with them, and centuries heaped together one of our hours?

Suppose one of these beings to be contemplating our geological periods,

and slow causes will to him appear rapid causes, and the question of

intelligence will be the same for him as for us.

It is manifest that the attempt is being made to restore the worship of

the old _Chronos_, to whom the ancients had erected temples. Let us

look the idol in the face. Time appears at first to our imagination as

the great destroyer. He is armed with a scythe, and passes gaunt and

bald over the ruins of all that has lived. When he lifts up his great

voice and cries--

Mighty nations famed in story

Into darkness I have hurled,--

Gone their myriads and their glory

(Lo! ye follow) from the world:

My dark shade for ever covers

Stars I quenched as on they rolled:--

the beautiful, and frightened girl in the song is not singular as she

exclaims in her terror:

Ah! we're young, and we are lovers,

Spare us, Reaper gaunt and old![128]

Such is the first impression which time makes upon us. But birth

succeeds to death. From an inexhaustible spring, nature sends gushing

forth new products and new developments. Youth full of hope trips

lightly over the ground, without a thought that the ground it treads on

is the vast cemetery of all past generations. If we fix our thoughts on

the permanence of life and the manifestations of progress, time appears

to us as the great producer. Destroyer of all that is, producer of all

that is to be, time has thus a double form. It is a mysterious tide,

ever rising and ever receding; it is the power of death, and it is the

power of life. All this, Gentlemen, is for the imagination. In the view

of a calm reason, time is the simply negative condition of all

development, as space is the negative condition of all motion. Just as

without bodies and forces infinite space could not produce any motion;

so, without the action of causes, ages heaped on ages could neither

produce nor destroy a single atom of matter, or a single element of

intelligence. Time is the scene of life and of death; it neither causes

to be born, nor to die.

The struggle which we are now maintaining against the philosophers of

matter is as ancient as science, and was going on, nearly in the same

terms, more than two thousand three hundred years ago. About five

hundred years before the Christian era was born at Clazomenæ, a city of

Ionia, the son of Eubulus, who was to become famous by the name of

Anaxagoras. He fixed his abode at Athens, and the Athenian people gave

him a glorious surname,--they called him _Intelligence_. On what

account? There were taught at that time doctrines which explained the

world by the transformations of matter rising progressively to life and

thought, without the intervention of a mind. The philosopher Anaximander

gave out that the first animals had their origin in the watery element,

and became modified by living in drier regions, so that man was only a

fish slowly transformed. "I am quite willing to grant it," replied

Anaxagoras; "but for your transformations there must be a transforming

principle. Matter is the material of the world, no doubt; but it could

not produce universal order except as ruled by intelligence." The

Athenians admired this discovery. For us, Gentlemen, the discovery has

been made a long while. Let us not then be talking in this discussion

about modern science and the lights of the age. Our natural history is

much advanced as compared with that of the Greeks; but the vital

question has not varied. Does nature manifest the intervention of a

directing mind, or do we see in it only a fortuitous aggregation of

atoms?

Intelligence radiates from the face of nature, and it is in vain that

men endeavor to veil its splendor. Nevertheless I consent to forget all

that has just been said, in order to intrench myself in an argument,

which of itself is sufficient for the object we have in view to-day. Our

object is to prove that material science does not contain the

explanation of all the realities of the universe. Even though they had

succeeded in persuading us that there is no intelligence in nature, it

would still be necessary to explain the origin of that intelligence

which is in us, and the existence of which cannot be disputed. Whence

proceeds the mind which is in ourselves?

Let us first of all give our attention to a strange contradiction. Those

savants who make of the human soul a simple manifestation of matter, are

the same who wish to explain nature without the intervention of the

Divine intelligence. In order to keep out of view the design which is

displayed in the organization of the world, they take a pleasure in

finding nature at fault, and in pointing out its imperfections. Still,

they do not pretend to be able to do better than nature; they would not

undertake the responsibility of correcting the laws of life, and

regulating the course of the seasons. They do not say, "We could make a

better world," but "We can imagine a world more perfect than our own."

Now what is our answer? Simply this: "You are right." Nature is not the

supreme perfection, and therefore we will not worship it. How admirable

soever be the visible universe, we have the faculty of conceiving more

and better. We understand that the atmosphere might be purified, so that

the tempest should not engulf the ships, nor the thunderbolt produce the

conflagration. We dream of mountain-heights more majestic than the

loftiest summits of our Alps, of waters more transparent than the pure

crystal of our lakes, of valleys fresher and more peaceful than the

loveliest which hide among our hills. The spectacle of nature awakens in

us the powers of thought, and the sentiment of beauty draws us on to the

pursuit of an ideal which surpasses all realities. Nature is not

perfect: let us be forward to acknowledge it, and let us draw from the

fact its legitimate consequence. The stream cannot rise higher than its

source. If man conceives an ideal superior to nature, he is not himself

the mere product of nature. By what strange contradiction is it affirmed

at once that our spirit overpasses the bounds of all the realities

which encompass it, and that it has not a source more elevated than

those realities? Listen to a thought of that weighty writer

Montesquieu:[129] "Those who have said that a blind fatality has

produced all the effects which we see in the world, have said a great

absurdity; for what greater absurdity than a blind fatality which should

have produced intelligent beings?" Without restricting ourselves to this

simple and solid argument, let us see how they will explain man by

nature. For this end, we must examine the theory of the perfected

monkey, which, introduced to us by the lectures of Professor Vogt and

the spirited rejoinders of M. de Rougemont, made a great noise as it

descended a short time ago from the mountains of Neuchâtel.[130] A

celebrated orator said one day to an assembly of Frenchmen: "I am long,

Gentlemen; but it is your own fault: it is your glory that I am

recounting." Have not I the right to say to you: "I am long, Gentlemen,

but it is worth while to be so; it is our own dignity which is in

question."

Man is a perfected monkey! I have three preliminary observations to make

before I proceed to the direct examination of this theory.

In the first place, this definition transgresses the first and most

essential rules of logic. We must always define what is unknown by what

is known. This is an elementary principle. What a man is, I know. To

think, to will, to enjoy, to hope, to fear, are functions of the mental

life. These words answer to clear ideas, because those ideas result

directly from our personal consciousness. But what is the soul of a

monkey? The nature of animals is a mystery, one which is perhaps

incapable of solution, and which, in all cases is wrapped in profound

darkness, because the animal appears to us an intermediate link between

the mechanism of nature and the functions of the spiritual life, which

are the only two conceptions we have that are really clear and distinct.

In taking the monkey therefore as our point of departure for the

definition of man, we are defining what is clear by what is obscure.

My second remark is this: If it is affirmed that there is but one

species, including all the animals and man, so that man is only a monkey

modified, and the monkey, in its turn, an inferior animal modified;

when once we have established the reality of man we arrive at this

result: all animals whatsoever are only inferior developments of

humanity, living foetuses which, without having come to their full

term, have nevertheless the faculty of living and reproducing

themselves. The animal then is an incomplete man; a theory which raises

great difficulties, but which is more serious and more easy to

understand than the doctrine which would have man to be a consummation

of the monkey.

In fact,--and this is my third observation,--when the theory which I am

examining is adopted, it must be carried out to its consequences, and

the bearing of it clearly seen. Man, it is said, is the consummation of

the monkey. The monkey is an improvement upon some quadruped or other,

and this quadruped is an improvement upon another, and so on. We must

descend, in an inevitable logical series, to the most elementary

manifestations of life, and thence, finally, to matter. If it is not

admitted that pure matter is a man in a state of torpor, it must be

admitted that man is a _mélange_ of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, azote,

phosphorus--a _mélange_ which has been brought little by little to

perfection. Such is the final inference from the doctrine which we are

examining; and there are theorists who deduce it clearly. Now what is it

that goes on in the minds of these savants? When the object is to banish

God from nature, the creative Intelligence is resolved into thousands of

ages. When it is desired to get rid in man of the reality of mind, they

seek to resolve the human intelligence into a long series of

modifications which have caused life to spring from matter, superior

animals from simpler organisms, and man from the animal. Do not allow

yourselves to be caught in this trap. Maintain firmly, that, whatever

the degree of intelligence, of will, of spiritual essence, which may

exist in animals, if that element is really found in them, it demands a

cause, and cannot, without an enormous confusion of ideas, be regarded

as a mere perfecting of matter. In fact, a thing in perfecting itself,

realizes continually more fully its own proper idea, and does not become

another thing. A perfect monkey would be of all monkeys the one which is

most a monkey, and would not be a man. But let us leave the animals in

the darkness in which they abide for our minds, and let us speak of what

for us is less obscure.

Our spiritual existence is a fact; it is of all facts the one which is

best known to us; it is the fact without which no other fact would exist

for us. And whence proceeds our spirit? To this question, natural

history has no answer. It is easy to see this, though we grant once

again to natural history, when made the most of by our adversaries, all

that it can pretend to claim. Suppose it proved, that in the historical

development of nature, man has a monkey for his mother. I will grant it,

and grant it quite seriously in order to ascertain what will be the

influence of this hypothesis upon the problem on which we are engaged.

If all monkeys were fossils, and if we had a natural history, also

fossil, setting forth to us the customs and habits of these animals; if

the savages that are said to be the nearest neighbors to monkeys were

all fossils; we should find ourselves in presence of a progressive and

continued development of beings, and, for an inattentive mind, all would

be easily explained by the slow and continued action of time. But this

is not the case. All the elements of nature are before our eyes, from

inorganic matter up to man. We do not see that time suffices for savages

to become civilized, and still less for monkeys to become men. I was,

in the spring of this year, in the _Jardin des plantes_ at Paris, musing

on the question which we are discussing, and I took a good look at the

monkeys. Come now, I said to myself, canst thou recognize them as thine

ancestors? The question was badly put. The monkeys are not our

ancestors, inasmuch as they are living at the same time with us; they

can only be our cousins, and it would seem that they are the eldest

branch, as they have best preserved the primitive type. But let us speak

more seriously. The races of monkeys have lived as long or longer than

we: it is neither time nor climate which has made men of them.

Recollect, I pray you, that the words 'time' and 'progress' explain

nothing. There must have occurred favorable circumstances to transform

the earth's substance into living cellules, and the living cellules into

plants clearly marked, and into animals properly so called; and in the

same way there must have been a propitious circumstance to transform the

monkey into man. I think so, in fact; and this propitious circumstance

well deserves to be studied with attention.

Man presents characteristics which distinguish him profoundly from the

animal races: no one disputes it. He possesses speech; he is capable of

religion; he exhibits the varied phenomena of civilization, while the

animals succeed one another generations after generations in the

unrecorded obscurity of a life for ever the same. Suppose we admit that

human phenomena presented themselves at first in a very elementary form;

in rudiments of language and rudiments of religion,--although the

historical sciences do not quite give this result:--still suppose the

case that at a given moment a branch of the monkey species presented the

germ, as little developed as you please, but real, of new phenomena. One

variety of the monkey species has been endowed with speech, has become

religious, capable of civilization, and the other varieties of the

species have not offered the same characteristics, although they have

had the same number of ages in which to develop themselves. Observe well

now my process of reasoning. Remark attentively whether I oppose

theories to facts, whether I substitute oratorical declamations for

arguments. I grant the hypotheses best calculated, as commonly thought,

to contradict my theses. I assume that natural history demonstrates by

solid proofs that the first man was carried in the bosom of a monkey;

and I ask: What is the circumstance which set apart in the animal

species a branch which presented new phenomena? What is the cause? That

monkey-author of our race which one day began to speak in the midst of

his brother-monkeys, amongst whom thenceforward he had no fellow; that

monkey, that stood erect in the sense of his dignity; that, looking up

to heaven, said, My God! and that, retiring into himself, said: I!--that

monkey which, while the female monkeys continued to give birth to their

young, had sons by the partner of his life and pressed them to his

heart; that monkey--what shall we say of it? What climate, what soil,

what regimen, what food, what heat, what moisture, what drought, what

light, what combination of phosphorus, what disengagement of

electricity, separated from the animal races, not only man, but human

society? humanity with its combats, its falls, its risings again, its

sorrows and its joys, its tears and its smiles; humanity with its arts,

its sciences, its religion, its history in short, its history and its

hopes of immortality? That monkey, what shall we say of it? Do you not

see that the breath of the Spirit passed over it, and that God said unto

it: Behold, thou art made in mine image: remember now thy Father who is

in heaven? Do you not see that though we grant everything to the extreme

pretensions of naturalists, the question comes up again whole and

entire? When by dint of confusions and sophisms such theorists imagine

that they have extinguished the intelligence which radiates from nature,

that intelligence again confronts them in man, and there, as in an

impregnable fortress, sets all attacks at defiance. Mark then where lies

the real problem. Whether the eternal God formed the body of the first

man directly from the dust of the earth; or whether, in the slow series

of ages, He formed the body of the first man of the dust of the earth,

by making it pass through the long series of animality--the question is

a grave one, but it is of secondary importance. The first question is to

know whether we are merely the ephemeral product of the encounter of

atoms, or whether there is in us an essence, a nature, a soul, a reality

in short, with which may connect itself another future than the

dissolution of the sepulchre; whether there remains another hope than

annihilation as the term of our latest sorrows, or, for the aspirants

after fame, only that evanescent memory which time bears away with

everything beside.

This is the question. Do not allow it to be put out of sight beneath

details of physiology and researches of natural history, which can

neither settle, nor so much as touch the problem. If therefore you fall

in with any one of these philosophers of matter, bid him take this for

all your answer: "There is one fact which stands out against your theory

and suffices to overthrow it: that fact is--myself!" And since, to have

the better of materialism, it is sufficient to understand well what is

one thought of the mind, one throb of the spiritual heart, one utterance

of the conscience,--add boldly with Corneille's Medea:

I,--I say,--and it is enough.

In fact, nature does not explain man, and to this conclusion has tended

all that I have said to you to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[97] _Harmonices mundi, libri quinque._

[98] _Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica._

[99]

The whole universe is full of His magnificence.

May this God be adored and invoked for ever!

[100] _Le Rationalisme_, page 19.

[101] _Force et Matière_, page 262.

[102] _Les Mondes Causeries astronomiques_ by Guillemin; see p. 122 (3rd

edition), where Kepler is described as an intelligence "penetrated by a

profound faith in nature and exalted by a noble pride." See also pages

327 and 336.

[103] The question discussed in these pages must not be confounded with

that of the relations between the science of nature and the documents of

revelation. Whether nature can be explained without God is one question.

Whether geology is in accordance with the language of the book of

Genesis is another question, as regards both its nature and its

importance. This latter subject does not come within the scope of these

lectures. I will merely call attention to the fact, that if nature and

the sacred text are fixed elements, this is not the case with the

interpretations of theologians, and the results of geology. It is

difficult to pronounce upon the exact relation of two quantities more or

less indeterminate.

[104] In the writings of M. de Rougemont, if I am not mistaken.

[105] _Systema naturæ._

[106] Ps. civ. 24.

[107] _Biographie universelle._

[108] _A. P. de Candolle_, by A. de la Rive, pp. 12 and 13.

[109] M. Vaucher's principal title to scientific distinction is his

_Histoire des conferves d'eau douce_, Genève, an XI (1803), 4°.

[110] _Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences_ of 20 April, 1863,

page 738.

[111] Exeter Hall Lectures--_The Power of God in His Animal Creation_,

pamphlet in 12mo. This remarkable lecture contains a twofold

protest--against the blindness of those savants who fail to recognize

the presence of God in nature; and against the pretensions of those

theologians who attack the certain results of the study of nature,

relying upon texts more or less accurately interpreted.

[112] _Chemistry applied to Agriculture and to Physiology_ (in German).

Seventh edition. Introd. page 69.

[113] Since these words were spoken, M. de la Rive has been named an

associated member of the Institute of France (Academy of Sciences), and

thus elevated to the first of scientific dignities. It might be shown, I

believe, that the greater number of the eight associates of the Academy

of Sciences to be found in the world, make profession of their faith in

God the Creator, the Almighty and Holy One. The silence which others may

have preserved on the subject would, moreover, be no authority for

concluding that they do not share in beliefs and sentiments which they

have not had the occasion perhaps of publicly expressing.

[114] _On the Origin of Species_, page 81. Fifth edition.

[115] _On the Origin of Species_. The text is--"the _necessary_ series

of facts;" but it would be to do the writer wrong to impute to him the

idea that observation reveals to us what is _necessary_, in the

philosophical import of the word.

[116] _On the Origin of Species._

[117] Caro, _L'Idée de Dieu_, page 47.

[118] _Force et Matière_, page 181.

[119] The Büchner proceeding is found again pretty exactly in _Les

Mondes_ of M. Amédée Guillemin. This writer affirms (page 60 of the

third edition) that science does not approach metaphysical questions;

and asserts in the same page, ten lines further on, that astronomical

experience leads our reason to the idea of _the eternity of the

universe_. After that, he may laugh, if he will, at _lovers of the

absolute_.

[120] See in particular the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, passim.

[121] S'enivrait en marchant du plaisir de la voir.

[122] See the lecture above mentioned.

[123] _Lettres sur les Etats-Unis d'Amérique_, by Lieutenant-Colonel

Ferri Pisani, page 400.--Letter of 25 Sept. 1861.

[124] On the origin of species, in the _Archives des sciences de la

Bibliothèque universelle_, March, 1860.

[125] Vous coulez des moucherons.

[126] In his _Principes de philosophie zoologique_, a collection of

answers made by Geoffroy, in the discussions of the _Académie des

Sciences_, in 1830.

[127] Voyons, Messieurs, le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire.

[128]

Sur cent premiers peuples célèbres,

J'ai plongé cent peuples fameux,

Dans un abîme de ténèbres

Où vous disparaîtrez comme eux.

J'ai couvert d'une ombre éternelle

Des astres éteints dans leur cours.

--Ah! par pitié, lui dit ma belle,

Vieillard, épargnez nos amours!

[129] _Esprit des Lois_, Bk. I. chap. 1.

[130] _Leçons sur l'homme_, by Carl Vogt (lectures delivered during the

winter of 1862-1863, at Neuchâtel and at Chaux-de-Fonds), 1 vol. 8vo.

Paris, 1865.--_L'Homme et le Singe_, by Frédéric de Rougemont, pamphlet,

12mo. Neuchâtel, 1863.

LECTURE V.

_HUMANITY._

(At Geneva, 1st. Dec., 1863.)

GENTLEMEN,

Man has need of God. If he be not fallen into the most abject

degradation, he does not succeed in extinguishing the instinct which

leads him to inquire after his Creator. A false wisdom labors to still

the cravings which the truth alone can satisfy; but false wisdom remains

powerless, and betrays itself continually by some outrageous

contradiction. Here is a curious example of this:

In a book which was famous in the last century, and which was called the

gospel of atheism,[131] the Baron d'Holbach explains as follows the

existence of the universe: "The universe, that vast assemblage of all

that exists, everywhere presents to our view only matter and

motion.--Nature is the grand whole which results from the assemblage of

different material substances, from their different combinations, and

from the different motions which we see in the universe."[132] Here is a

clear doctrine: all that exists, the soul included, is nothing but

matter in motion. I pass from the beginning to the end of the work, and

I arrive at this conclusion: "O nature! sovereign of all beings! and ye,

her adorable daughters, virtue, reason, truth! be ye for ever our sole

divinities; to you it is that the incense and the homage of the earth

are due."[133] If we try to translate this sort of hymn in accordance

with the express definitions of the author, we shall obtain the

following result: "O matter in motion! sovereign of all material

substances in motion! and ye, virtue, reason, truth, who are various

names of matter which moves, be ye the only divinities of that moving

matter which is ourselves." Yet this author was no blockhead. What then

passed in his mind? He laid down the thesis of materialism: bodies in

motion are the only reality. But he is all the while a man. The need

for adoration is not destroyed in his soul, and he deceives himself. He

defines nature as consisting wholly of matter, and when he sets himself

to worship it, he entirely forgets his definition. This is not on his

part a piece of philosophical jugglery, but the manifestation of the

real condition of our nature, which is always giving the lie, in one

direction or another, to erroneous systems. The power of wholly

maintaining himself in error has not been granted to man. He who denies

God is always deifying something; and all worship which is not that of

the Eternal and Infinite Mind is stultified by glaring contradictions.

Here is a recent example of this: We were not a little surprised a short

time since to see M. Ernest Renan deny clearly enough the immortality of

our persons, and, in the opening of the very book in which this negation

appears, to find him invoking the soul of his sister at rest with

God.[134] Elsewhere, the same writer says that the Infinite Being does

not exist, that absolute reason and absolute justice exist only in

humanity, and he concludes his exposition of these views by an

invocation of the Heavenly Father.[135] The Baron d'Holbach had put

eight hundred and thirty-nine pages between his materialistic definition

of the universe and his invocation of nature. Now-a-days everything goes

faster; and M. Renan places but a few pages of the _Revue des Deux

Mondes_ between his denial of God and his prayer to the Heavenly Father.

With this difference, which is to the advantage of the writer of the

eighteenth century, the process is absolutely the same. The philosopher

declares God to be an imaginary being, and the future life an illusion;

but the man protests, and, by a touching illusion of the heart, the man

who in his system of doctrine has neither God nor hope, finds that he

has a sister in the realms eternal, and a Father in the heavens. It is

impossible not to see, especially in literary works destined to a

success of fashion, the seductive influence of art, the precautions of

prudence, the concessions made to public opinion; but we cannot wholly

explain the incredible contradictions of the Holbachs and Renans,

without allowing full weight to that need for God which shows itself

even in the farthest wanderings of human thought by sudden and abrupt

returns.

The illusion which deifies matter in motion is gross enough. It belongs

only to minds which Cicero called, in the aristocratic pride of a Roman

gentleman, the plebeians of philosophy.[136] It requires, in fact, no

great reflection to understand that truth, beauty, and goodness are

neither atoms nor a certain movement of atoms. The attempt, which is to

form the subject of our study to-day, that of deifying man, is a far

more subtle one. Let us first of all inquire into the origin of the

strange worship which humanity accords to itself.

Nature, considered separately from the beings which receive sensible

impressions from it, has neither heat nor light. In a world peopled by

the blind, light would have no name. If all men were entirely paralyzed

as to their sensations, the idea of heat would not exist. Light and

heat, regarded as existing in matter itself, without reference to

sensitive organizations, are, in the opinion of our natural

philosophers, only determinate movements. In the same way, if nature

were without any spectator whatever, beauty would not exist; if there

were nowhere any intelligence, truth would no longer be. In the same way

again, if there were no wills, goodness, which is nothing else than the

law of the will, would be a word deprived of all meaning. Beauty

expresses the object of the perceptions of the soul. Truth denotes the

quality of the judgments of intelligences. Goodness (I speak of moral

goodness) expresses a certain direction of the free will. There exists

no means of causing to proceed from nature, or from matter, the

attributes of the spiritual being. This is only done by imaginary

transformations, by a course of arrant juggling. The flame does not feel

its own heat, light does not see itself, the planets know nothing of the

laws of Kepler. Materialism is the result of a modesty wholly misplaced

which leads man to forget himself, in order to attribute gratuitously to

nature realities which exist only in spiritual beings connected with

nature by a marvellous harmony. In order therefore to account for the

universe, we must raise ourselves above the atom in motion, and

penetrate into a higher world where truth, beauty, goodness become the

objects of thought. Truth, beauty, goodness conduct the mind to God,

their eternal source. But there is a philosophy which endeavors to stop

midway in the ascent of the Divine ladder, and thinks to satisfy itself

in the contemplation of the true, the beautiful, the good, without

connecting them with their cause. This philosophy considers the true,

the beautiful, the good, as ideas which exist by themselves, without a

supreme Spirit of which they are the manifestation. It has received, in

consequence, the name of idealism.

To conceive of ideas without a mind, ideas having an existence by

themselves, is a thing impossible; such a conception is expressed by

words which give back a hollow sound, because they contain nothing. We

have already stated this thesis; let us now confirm it by an example. A

literary Frenchman, M. Taine, would make us understand in what manner

the universe may be explained without reference to God, and by means of

a pure idea. Listen well, not to understand, but to make sure that you

do not understand: "The universe forms a unique being, indivisible, of

which all the beings are members. At the supreme summit of things, at

the highest point of the luminous and inaccessible ether, pronounces

itself the eternal axiom; and the prolonged resounding of this creative

formula composes, by its inexhaustible undulations, the immensity of the

universe. Every form, every change, every movement, every idea is one of

its acts."[137]

M. Taine is a man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his

philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you

he seems to have intended seriously to expound the system which replaces

God by an idea. Try now to form a definite conception of this universe

composed of the undulations of an axiom. Do you understand how an axiom

undulates, and how the heavens and the earth are only the undulations of

an axiom? Making all allowance for rhetoric and figures, do you

understand what can be the acts of an axiom, and how an axiom

_pronounces itself_ without being pronounced? You do not understand it,

as neither do I. Such doctrines, then, as we have said, can only be the

portion of a small number of thinkers who have lost, by dint of

abstraction, the sentiment of reality. The ideas--truth, beauty,

good--will only exist for the common order of men, under such a system,

in the human mind, where we have cognizance of them; and thenceforward,

the ideal, or God, is nothing else than the image of humanity which

contemplates itself in a sort of mirage. Thus it is that the adoration

of man by man is disengaged from the high theories of idealism. Let us

proceed to the examination of this worship, which is cried up

now-a-days in divers parts of the intellectual globe.

I open the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, of the 15th February, 1861. As the

author of the article I refer to[138] appears to admit "that one

assertion is not more true than another opposed to it,"[139] we will not

be so simple as to ask whether he adopts the opinions which he

propounds. He presents to us, in a rapid sketch, the principal

tendencies of the modern mind. The modern mind is here characterized by

one of its declared partisans; you will not take therefore for a wicked

caricature the picture which he puts before us. Here then are the

thoughts of the modern mind: "There is only one infinite, that of our

desires and our aspirations, that of our needs and our efforts.[140] The

true, the beautiful, the just are perpetually occurring; they are for

ever in course of self-formation, because they are nothing else than the

human mind, which, in unfolding itself, finds and knows itself

again."[141] This is only the French translation of a saying celebrated

in Germany: "God is not: He becomes." What we call God is the human

mind. What was there at the beginning of things? The human mind, which

did not know itself. What will there be in the end? The human mind,

which, in unfolding itself, will have come to know itself, and will

adore itself as the supreme God. If this be indeed the final object of

the universe, it appears that, in the opinion of these philosophers, the

consummation of all things must be near. Once that humanity, faithful to

their doctrine, shall have pronounced the lofty utterance, "I am God,

and there is none else," the world will no longer have any reason for

existing.

Such is the system of which we have to follow out the consequences. Let

us take as our point of comparison the old ideas which we are urged to

abandon.

We usually explain human destinies by the concurrence of two causes,

infinitely distinct, since the one is creative and the other created,

but both of which we hold for real: man, and God. Humanity has received

from its Author the free power which we call will, and the law of that

will which we name conscience. The law proceeds from God, the liberty

proceeds from God; but the acts of the created will, when it violates

its law and revolts against its Author, are the creation of the

creature. God is the eternal source of good, and liberty is a good; but

God is not the source of evil, which is distinctly a revolt against Him,

the abuse of the first of His gifts. Together with will, man has

received understanding, and gives himself to the search after truth.

Truth is the object of the understanding, its Divine law. Error is a

deviation from the law of the understanding, as evil is a deviation from

the law of the will. Lastly, with will and understanding, man has

received the faculty of feeling. This faculty applies itself to the

world of bodies, from which we receive pain or pleasure. But our faculty

of feeling does not stop there. Above the animal life, the mind has

enjoyments which are proper to it, and the object of which is beauty.

Beauty is not only in nature and in works of art, it is everywhere, in

whatever attracts our love. The sciences are beautiful, and the harmony

of the truths which are discovered in their order and mutual dependence

causes us to experience a feeling similar to that produced by the most

delightful music. Virtue is beautiful; it shines in the view of the

conscience with the purest brightness, and, as was said by one of the

ancients, if it could reveal itself to our eyes in a sensible form, it

would excite in our souls feelings of inexpressible love. Vice is ugly

when once stripped of the delusive fascination of the passions; the

vicious excesses of the lower nature are ugly and repulsive as soon as

the intoxication is over. Error is ugly too; there are no beautiful

errors but those which contain a larger portion of truth than the

prosaic verities, which are nothing else than falsehoods put in a

specious way. Beauty therefore is the law of our feelings, as truth is

the law of our thought, and good the law of our will. We will not

inquire now what secret relations shall one day bring together in an

indissoluble unity of light, the good, the true, and the beautiful, and

in a unity of darkness, evil, deformity, and falsehood. Let it suffice

to have pointed out how a threefold aspiration leads man to God, under

the guidance of the conscience, the understanding, and the feelings; and

that a threefold rebellion estranges him from God, by sinking him into

the dark regions of deformity, error, and evil. Humanity has therefore a

law; it has been endowed with liberty, but that a liberty of which the

legitimate end is determined. It advances towards this end, or it

swerves from it. There is a rule above its acts. The thing as it is may

not be the thing as it ought to be; rebellion is not obedience, and

good is not evil.

All these consequences are included in the idea of creation. The

struggle between two opposite principles, a struggle which sums up human

destiny, is a fact of which each one of us can easily assure himself in

his own person. What will happen when man, sensible of the law of his

nature, and conscious of this struggle, proceeds to encounter humanity?

Each one of us carries humanity in his own bosom. But humanity, the

character of man which is common to us, and which makes the spiritual

unity of our species, is found to be altered by the influence of places,

times, and circumstances. Our reason is encumbered by prejudices of

birth and education, and by such as we have ourselves created in our

minds in the exercise of our will. Our sense of beauty is vitiated and

narrowed by local influences and habits. Our conscience is likewise

subjected to influences which impair its free manifestation. Every one

needs to enlarge his horizon. By seeking occasions of intercourse with

our fellows, we shall learn to discriminate true and eternal beauty in

the diversity of its manifestations; we shall distinguish the truth from

the individual prepossessions of our own minds; good and evil,

disengaged from the narrownesses of habit, will appear to us in their

real and enduring nature. Our taste will be formed, our conscience

purified, our mind enlarged; we shall more and more become men, in the

high and full acceptation of the term. In order that the meeting

together of the individual and of humanity may produce such fruits, God

must dwell continually in the sanctuary of the conscience. The inner

light is kindled in the intercourse of the soul with its Creator; it is

afterwards brightened and nurtured by the soul's intercourse with the

traces of God which humanity reveals. But this light makes manifest

within us, and without us, great darkness. We have no right to abandon

ourselves to every spectacle which strikes our view. If, in presence of

what is passing in the world, we are tempted to regard the prosperity of

the wicked with cowardly envy; if we would fill up, for the satisfaction

of our evil desires, the abyss which separates the holy from the impure,

the inner voice lifts itself up and cries to us: "Woe! woe to them who

call evil good, and good evil."[142] God is our Master, even as He is

our good and our hope. The fact of the revolts of humanity can have no

effect against His sovereign will. Soldiers in the service of the

Almighty, life is for us a conflict, and duty imposes on us a combat.

Such, Sirs, is the explanation of our destinies, an old, and, if you

like, a vulgar one. Let us now give our attention to the doctrine which

deifies humanity, and follow out its consequences. Humanity carries

within its bosom the idea of truth, the love of beauty, the sense of

good. What does it need more? These noble aspirations mark for it the

end of its efforts. What will be wanting to a life regulated by duty,

enlightened by truth, ennobled by art? What will be wanting to such a

life? Nothing, or everything. Nothing, if the search after good, truth,

and beauty leads to God. Everything, if it be sought to carry it on

without any reference to God, because from the moment that man desires

to be the source of light to himself, the light will be changed into

darkness, as we said at the beginning of this lecture. Put God out of

view, and good, beauty, and truth will disappear; while you will see

produced the decline of art, the dissolution of thought in scepticism,

the absolute negation of morality. Let us consider with the attention

it deserves, and in contemporary examples, this sad and curious

spectacle.

I open a treatise by M. Taine. The English historian Macaulay speaks of

literary men who "have taken pains to strip vice of its odiousness, to

render virtue ridiculous, to rank adultery among the elegant fashions

and obligatory achievements of a man of taste." The honest Englishman

takes the liberty to judge and to condemn men who have made so

pernicious a use of their talents. This pretension to make the

conscience speak is in the eyes of the French man of letters a gothic

prejudice. Listen how he expresses himself on the subject: "Criticism in

France has freer methods.--When we try to give an account of the life,

or to describe the character, of a man, we are quite willing to consider

him simply as an object of painting or of science.... We do not judge

him, we only wish to represent him to the eyes and to set him

intelligibly before the reason. We are curious inquirers and nothing

more. That Peter or Paul was a knave matters little to us, that was the

business of his contemporaries, who suffered from his vices--At this day

we are out of his reach, and hatred has disappeared with the danger--I

experience neither aversion nor disgust; I have left these feelings at

the gate of history, and I taste the very deep and very pure pleasure of

seeing a soul act according to a definite law--."[143] You understand,

Gentlemen: the distinction between good and evil, as that between error

and truth; these are old sandals which must be put off before entering

into the temple of history; and the man of the nineteenth century, if he

has taste and information, is merely an historian, and nothing more. The

sacred emotion which generous actions produce in us, the indignation

stirred in us by baseness and cruelty, are childish emotions which are

to disappear in order that we may be free to contemplate vice and virtue

with a pleasure always equal, very deep, and very pure. We have not here

the aberration of a young and ill-regulated mind, but the doctrine of a

school. I open again the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and there I encounter

the theory of which M. Taine has made the application: "We no longer

know anything of morals, but of manners; of principles, but of facts. We

explain everything, and, as has been said, the mind ends _by approving

of all that it explains_. Modern virtue is summed up in

toleration.[144]--Immense novelty! That which is, has for us the right

to be.[145]--In the eyes of the modern savant, all is true, all is right

in its own place. The place of each thing constitutes its truth."[146]

I cut short the enumeration of these enormities. All rule has

disappeared, all morality is destroyed; there is no longer any

difference between right and fact, between what is and what ought to be.

And what is the real account to give of all this? It is as follows:

Humanity is the highest point of the universe; above it there is

nothing; humanity is God, if we consent to take that sacred name in a

new sense. How then is it to be judged? In the name of what rule? since

there is no rule: in the name of what law? since there is no law. All

judgment is a personal prejudice, the act of a narrow mind. We do not

judge God, we simply recount His dealings; we accept all His acts, and

record them with equal veneration. All science is only a history, and

the first requisite in a historian is to reduce to silence his

conscience and his reason, as sorry and deceitful exhibitions of his

petty personality, in order to accept all the acts of the

humanity-deity, and establish their mutual connection. The deification

of the human mind is the justification of all its acts, and, by a direct

consequence, the annihilation of all morality. Let us look more in

detail at the origin and development of these notions.

The individual placing himself before humanity is to accept everything:

this is the disposition recommended to us, in the name of the modern

mind. Good and evil are narrow measures which minds behind the age

persist, ridiculously enough, in wishing to apply to things. "We no

longer transform the world to our image by bringing it to our standard;

_on the contrary, we allow ourselves to be modified and fashioned by

it_."[147] The individual goes therefore to meet humanity without any

inner rule: he gives himself up, he abandons himself to the spectacle of

facts. But the world is large, and history is long. Even those who spend

their whole life in nothing else than in satisfying their curiosity,

cannot see and know everything. To what then shall be directed that

vague look, equally attracted to all points for want of any fixed rule?

At what shall it stop? It will rest on that which shines most

brilliantly, like a moth attracted by light. Now, nothing shines more

brightly than success; nothing more solicits the attention. The

glorification of success is the first and most infallible consequence of

moral indifference. In leaving ourselves to be fashioned by the world

instead of bringing it to our standard, we shall begin by according our

esteem to victory. This philosophy is come to us from Germany. It was

set forth on one occasion, in France, with great _éclat_, by the

brilliant eloquence of a man who has rendered signal services to

philosophy, and whose entire works must not be judged of by the single

particular which I am about to mention. In the year 1829, M. Cousin was

developing at the Sorbonne the meaning of these verses of La Fontaine,

which introduce the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb:

La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure:

Je vais le montrer tout à l'heure.

He had written as the programme of one of his lectures: _Morality of

Victory_. Now see how he justified this surprising title: "I have

absolved victory as necessary and useful; I now undertake to absolve it

as just in the strictest sense of the word. Men do not usually see in

success anything else than the triumph of strength, and an honorable

sympathy draws us to the side of the vanquished; I hope I have shown

that since there must always be a vanquished side, and since the

vanquished side is always that which ought to be so, to accuse the

conqueror is to take part against humanity, and to complain of the

progress of civilization. We must go farther; we must prove that the

vanquished deserved to be so, that the conqueror not only serves the

interests of civilization, but that he is better, more moral than the

vanquished, and that it is on that account he is the conqueror.... It is

time that the philosophy of history should place at its feet the

declamations of philanthropy."[148]

These words are worth considering. When Brennus the Gaul was having the

gold weighed which he exacted from the vanquished Romans, he threw his

heavy sword into the balance, exclaiming, _Væ Victis!_ Woe to the

conquered! He simply meant to say that he was the stronger, and did not

foresee that a Gaul of the nineteenth century, availing himself of the

labors of learned Germany, would demonstrate that being the stronger he

was on that very account the more just. But we must not wander too far

from our subject.

When the spectacle of the world is freely indulged in without any

application to it of the measure of the conscience, what first strikes

the view is success. It is necessary therefore to begin with rendering

glory to success by declaring victory good. Now, mark well here the

conflict of the old notions with the so-called modern mind. From the old

point of view, victory in the issue belongs to good, because while man

is tossed in strife and tumult, God is leading him on; but the success

of good is realized by conflict, and the victory is often reached only

after a long series of defeats. There are bad triumphs and impious

successes. What is proposed to us is, to put aside the rule of our own

judgments, and to declare that victory is good in itself. The old point

of view, that of the conscience, does not surrender without an energetic

resistance; and that resistance shows itself in the very words of M.

Cousin. His thesis is, that all victory is just. His intention is

therefore to _approve_ victory. Why does he say _absolve_? it is the

term which he employs. Since the matter in question is to absolve

victory, it is placed on trial. It is accused of being, like fortune

and fame, at one time on the side of good and justice, at another on the

side of injustice and evil. Which then is the party accused? Victory.

Who is the advocate? An eloquent professor. Who finally is the accuser?

Do you not see? It is the human conscience; the conscience which

protests in the soul of the orator against the theory of which he is

enamoured, and which forces him to say _absolve_ when he should say

_glorify_. And in fact the choice must be made: either to glorify

victory, by treading under foot that narrow conscience which sometimes

ranks itself with Cato on the side of the vanquished; or to glorify

conscience by impeaching the victories which outrage it.

It is not sufficient, however, to sacrifice the conscience in order to

rescue from embarrassment the philosophy of success. It strikes on other

rocks also. The same causes are by turns victorious and vanquished, and

it is hard to make men understand that, in conflicts in which their

dearest affections are engaged, they must beforehand, and in all cases,

take part with the strongest. It will be in vain for the philosopher to

say that the Swiss of Morgarten were right, for that they beat the

Austrians; but that the heroes of Rotenthurm were greatly in the wrong,

because, crushed without being vanquished, they were obliged to yield to

numbers, and leave at last their country's soil to be trodden by the

stranger;--the children of old Switzerland will find it hard to admit

this doctrine. Even in France, in that nation so accustomed to encircle

its soldiers' brows with laurel, this difficulty has risen up in the way

of M. Cousin. Béranger, when asked for a souvenir of Waterloo,

Replied, with drooping eyelid, tear-bedewed:

Never that name shall sadden verse of mine.[149]

But philosophy would be worth little if it had not at its disposal more

extensive resources than those of a song-writer. M. Cousin therefore

looked the difficulty in the face. Victory is always good. But how shall

young Frenchmen be made to hear this with regard to that signal defeat

of the armies of France? Listen: "It is not populations which appear on

battle-fields, but ideas and causes. So at Leipzig and at Waterloo two

causes came to the encounter, the cause of paternal monarchy and that of

military democracy. Which of them carried the day, Gentlemen? Neither

the one nor the other. Who was the conqueror and who the conquered at

Waterloo? Gentlemen, there were none conquered. (_Applause._) No, I

protest that there were none: the only conquerors were European

civilization and the map. (_Unanimous and prolonged applause._)"[150]

To make the youth of Paris applaud at the remembrance of Waterloo is

perhaps one of the most brilliant triumphs of eloquence which the annals

of history record. But this rhetorical success is not a triumph of

truth. There were those who were conquered at Waterloo; and, to judge by

what has been going on for some time past in Europe, it would seem that

those who were conquered are bent on taking their revenge. We may infer

from these facts that all triumphs are not good, since truth may be for

a moment overcome by a false philosophy tricked out in the deceitful

adornments of eloquence.

But let us admit, whatever our opinion on the subject, that the Waterloo

rock has been passed successfully; we have not yet pointed out the main

difficulty which rises up in the way of this system. If victory is

good, it seems at first sight that defeat is bad. But defeat is the

necessary condition of victory; and being the condition of good, it

seems therefore that it also is good; and the mind comes logically to

this conclusion: "Victory is good;--defeat is good, since it is the

condition of victory;--all is good." We set out with the glorification

of victory, and, lo! we are arrived at the glorification of fact. All

that is, has the right to be; in the eyes of the modern savant whatever

is, is right. M. Cousin laid down the principle; he laid it down in a

general manner in his philosophical eclecticism, of which it was easy to

make use, as has in fact been done, in a sense contrary to his real

intentions. Our young critics, wasting an inheritance of which they do

not appear always to recognize the origin, are doing nothing else, very

often, than catching as they die away the last vibrations of that

surpassing eloquence.

In the eyes of the modern savant, everything is right and good: such is

the axiom for which the labors of more than one modern historian had

prepared us. We are to seek for the relation of facts one to another,

that is to explain; and all that we explain, we must approve. Let us

follow out this thought in a few examples.

It was necessary that Louis XVI should be beheaded and the guillotine

permanently set up, in order to manifest the result of the disorders of

Louis XIV, of the shameful excesses of Louis XV, and of the licentious

immorality of French society. It was necessary for Louis XIV to be an

adulterer, Louis XV a debauchee, the clergy corrupt, and the nobility

depraved, to bring about the shocks of the revolution. The facts

mutually correspond; I explain, and I approve. In the eyes of the modern

savant everything is right.

It was necessary that Buonaparte should throw the _Corps législatif_ out

of the window, that he should let loose his armies upon Europe, and

leave thousands of dead bodies in the snows of Russia, in order to end

the revolution, and extinguish the restless ardor of the French. It

needed the massacres of September, the gloomy days of the Terror, the

anarchy of the period of the Directory, to throw dismayed France into

the arms of the crowned soldier who was to carry to so high a pitch her

glory and her influence. The facts correspond; I explain, and I approve.

In the eyes of the modern savant, everything is right.

I consider the character of Nero. I take him at the commencement of his

reign, when, being forced to sign the death-warrant of a criminal, he

exclaimed--"Would I were unable to write!" And then again I regard him

after he has perpetrated acts such that to apply his name in future ages

to the cruellest of tyrants shall appear to them a cruel injury. What

has taken place in the interval? The development of his natural

character, Agrippina, Narcissus ... I understand the play of all the

springs which have made a monster. As I am out of his clutches, my

detestation vanishes with the danger. "I taste the very deep and very

pure pleasure of seeing a mind act according to a definite law." I

understand, I explain, I approve. In the eyes of the modern savant,

everything is right.

It would be impossible, Gentlemen, to pursue this reasoning to its

extreme limits without offending against the commonest decency. We

should have to descend into blood and mire, continuing to declare the

while that everything is right. I pause therefore, and leave the rest to

your imaginations. Open the most dismal pages of history. Choose out the

acts which inspire the most vivid horror and disgust, the blackest

examples of ingratitude, the meanest instances of cowardice, the cases

of most refined cruelty, and the most hideous debaucheries: thence let

your thoughts pass to facts which bedew the eyelid with the tear of

tenderest emotion, to the cases of most heroic self-devotion, to

sacrifices the most humble in their greatness; and then try to apply the

rule of the modern savant, and to say that all this is equally right and

good, and that whatever is has the right to be. Open the book of your

own heart. Think of one of those base temptations which assault the best

of us, one of those thoughts which raise a blush in solitude; then think

of the best, the purest, the most disinterested of the feelings which

have ever been given to your soul; and try again to apply the rule of

the modern savant, and to affirm that all this is equally good, and that

all that is has the right to be. I know very well that in general these

doctrines are applied to things looked at in the mass, and to the

far-off past of history; but this is a poor subterfuge for the defenders

of these monstrous theses. Things viewed in the mass are only the

assemblage of things viewed in detail. If the distinction of good and

evil do not exist for general facts, how should it exist for particular

facts? And how can we apply to the past a rule which we refuse to apply

to the present, seeing that the present is nothing else than the past

of the future, and that the facts of our own time are matter for history

to our posterity? These, I repeat, are but vain subterfuges. If humanity

is always adorable, it is so in the faults of the meanest of men as in

the splendid sins of the magnates of the earth; it is so to-day as it

was thirty centuries ago; the god in growing old does not cease to be

the same.

When the mind is engaged in these pernicious ways, the spring of the

moral life is broken, and the practical consequence is not long in

appearing. The philosophers of success, having become the philosophers

of the _fait accompli_, accept all and endure all; but in another sense

than that in which charity accepts all, that it may transform all by the

power of love. It is the morality of Philinte:

I take men quietly, and as they are:

And what they do I train my soul to bear.[151]

These instructions are not very necessary. There will always be people

enough found ready to applaud victory, and to fall in with the _fait

accompli_. But is it not sad to see men of mind, men of heart too,

perhaps, making themselves the theorists of baseness, and the

philosophers of cowardice?

There is still more to be said. From the glorification of success the

mind passes necessarily, as we have just seen, to the glorification

alike of all that is. It would appear at first sight that the adept in

the doctrine must find himself in a condition of indifference with

regard to what prejudiced men continue to call good and evil. This

indifference however is only apparent. When it is granted that nothing

is evil, the part of good disappears in the end. There had been formed

in ancient Rome, under pretence of religion, a secret society, which had

as its fundamental dogma the aphorism that _nothing is evil_.[152] The

members of the society did not practise good and evil, it appears, with

equal indifference, for the magistrates of the republic took alarm, and

smothered, by a free employment of death and imprisonment, a focus of

murders, violations, false witness, and forged signatures. This fact

reveals, with ominous clearness, a movement of thought on the nature of

which it is easy to speculate.

When man casts a vague glance over the world, extinguishing the while

the inner light of conscience; when he resigns himself to the things he

contemplates without applying to them any standard, what first strikes

his attention, as we have said before, is success. And what next?

Scandal. Nothing comes more into view than scandal. In a vast city,

thousands of young men gain their livelihood laboriously, and devote

themselves to the good of their families: no one speaks of them. A

libertine loses other men's money at play, and blows out his brains: all

the city knows it. Honest women live in retirement; the king's

mistresses form the subject of general conversation. Crime and baseness

hide themselves; but up to the limits of what the world calls infamy,

evil delights in putting itself forward, because _éclat_ and noise

supply the means of deadening the conscience; while, as regards the

grand instincts of charity, it has been well said that--"the obscure

acts of devotedness are the most magnificent." The poor and wretched

shed tears in obscurity over benefits done secretly, while folly loves

to display its glittering spangles, and shakes its bells in the public

squares. There is in each one of us more evil than we think; but there

is in the world more good than is commonly known. There are concealed

virtues which only show themselves to the eye of the faith which looks

for them, and of the attention which discovers them. Bethink you,

especially, how the laws of morality set at defiance appear again

triumphant in the sorrows of repentance; those laws have their hour, and

that hour is usually a silent one. Let a poet of genius defile his works

by the impure traces of a life spent in dissipation, and his brow shall

shine in the sight of all with the twofold splendor of success and of

scandal. But if, stretched on a bed of pain, he renders a tardy but

sincere homage to the law which he has violated, to the truth which he

has ignored, his voice will often be confined to the sick chamber; his

companions in debauchery and infidelity will mount guard perhaps around

his dwelling, in order to prevent the public from learning that their

friend is a _defaulter_. The ball and the theatre make a noise and

attract observation; but men turn their eyes from hospitals, those

abodes in which, in the silence of sickness, or amidst the dull cries of

pain, there germinate so many seeds of immortality. Yes, Sirs, evil is

more apparent than good. The violations of the divine law have more

_éclat_ than penitence. And what is the consequence? The man who

abandons himself to the spectacle of the world, and who takes that

spectacle for the rule of his thoughts, will see the world under a false

aspect, and, in his estimation, evil will have more advantage over good

than it has in reality. It will appear to him altogether dominant, and

will thenceforward become his rule. From the glorification of success,

we passed to the glorification of fact; from the glorification of fact,

we arrive at last at the glorification of evil. We have seen how is

illustrated the morality of victory. In the same current of ideas, a

book famous now-a-days, and quite full of outrages to the conscience,

supplies us with illustrations of the morality of falsehood. M. Ernest

Renan, in his explanation of Christianity, has applied, point after

point, the theory which I have just set forth to you. In order to

estimate the grand movements of the human mind, he frees himself from

the vulgar prejudices which make up the ordinary morals, and abandons

himself to the impression of the spectacle which he contemplates. Jesus

had a success without parallel. This success was based on charlatanism;

and it is habitually so. To lead the nations by deceiving them is the

lesson of history, and the good rule to follow. We find falsehood

fortunate as matter of fact, we explain it, we approve it.

Whither then are we bound, under the guidance of modern science? An

irresistible current is drawing us on, and causing us to leave the

morals of Philinthe in our rear. We are coming to those which Racine has

engraven in immortal traits in the person of Mathan. When once

conscience is put aside, all means are good in order to succeed; and the

experience of the world teaches us that, to succeed, the worst means are

often the best.

It is not only at the theatre that such lessons are received; they come

out but too commonly from the ordinary dealings of life. Set a young man

face to face with the world as it exhibits itself, and tell him to give

himself up to what he sees, to let himself be fashioned by life. He will

soon come to know that strict probity is a virtue of the olden times,

chastity a fantastic excellence, and conscientious scruples an honorable

simplicity. Evil will become in his eyes the ordinary rule of life. When

the socialist Proudhon wrote that celebrated sentence, "Property is

robbery," there arose an immense outcry. Ought there not to arise a

louder outcry around a theory which arrives by a fatal necessity at this

consequence: "Evil is good"?

But do these doctrines exercise any influence for the perversion of

public morals? Much; their influence is disastrous. And do the men who

profess them believe them, taking the word 'believe' in its real and

deep meaning? No; they often do mischief which they do not mean to do,

and do not see that they do. They are intoxicated with a bad philosophy,

and intoxication renders blind. It is easy to prove that these

optimists, who in theory find that everything is right, are perpetually

contradicting themselves in practice. Address yourselves to one of them,

and say to him: "Your doctrine is big with immorality. You do not

yourself believe it; and when you pretend to believe it, you lie." This

man who tolerates everything will not tolerate your freedom of speech.

He will get angry, and, according to the old doctrines, he will have the

right to be so, for insult is an evil. Then say to him: "Here you are,

it seems to me, in contradiction with your system. Everything is right;

the vivacity of my speech therefore is good. All that is has the right

to be; my indignation is therefore a legitimate fact, and it appears to

me that yours cannot be so unless you allow (an admission which would be

contrary to your system) that mine is not so." If you have to do with a

sensible man, he will begin to laugh. If you have met with a blockhead,

he will be more angry than ever. This contradiction comes out in every

page, and in a more serious manner, in the writings of our optimists.

One cannot read them with attention, without meeting incessantly with

the protest of their moral nature against the despotism of a false mode

of reasoning. The man is at every moment making himself heard, the man

who has a heart, a conscience, a reason, and who contradicts the

philosopher without being aware of it. Contradictions these, honorable

to the writer, but dangerous for the reader, because they serve to

invest with brilliant colors doctrines which in themselves are hideous.

No, Gentlemen, it is impossible to succeed in adoring humanity,

preserving the while the least consistency of reasoning. In vain men

wish to accept everything, to tolerate everything; in vain they wish to

impose silence on the inner voice: that voice rebels against the

outrage, and its revolt declares itself in the most manifest

contradictions. The Humanity-God is divided, and the affirmation--

"Everything is right"--will continue false as long as there shall be

upon the earth a single conscience unsilenced, as long as there shall be

in a single heart

. . . . . that mighty hate

Which in pure souls vice ever must create;[153]

that hatred which is nothing else than the indirect manifestation of the

sacred love of goodness.

The doctrine that all is equally good, equally divine, in the

development of humanity, explains nothing, because humanity, torn by a

profound struggle, condemns its own acts, and protests against its

degradations. It cries aloud to itself that there are principles above

facts, a moral law superior to the acts of the will; and all the petty

clamors of a deceitful and deceived philosophy cannot stifle that clear

voice. Not only do these doctrines explain nothing, they do not even

succeed in expressing themselves; language fails them. "Everything is

right and good." What will these words mean, from the time there is no

longer any rule of right? How is it possible to approve, when we have

no power to blame? The idea of good implies the idea of evil; the

opposition of good and evil supposes a standard applied to things, a law

superior to fact. He who approves of everything may just as well despise

everything. But contempt itself has no longer any meaning, if esteem is

a word void of signification. We must say simply that all is as it is,

and abandon those terms of speech which conscience has stamped with its

own superscription. We must purify the dictionary, and consign to the

history of obsolete expressions such terms as good, evil, esteem,

contempt, vice, virtue, honor, infamy, and the like. The doctrine which,

to be consistent with itself, ought to reduce us to a kind of stupid

indifference, does such violence to human nature that its advocates are

incapable of enunciating it without contradicting themselves by the very

words they make use of.

All these extravagances are the inevitable consequence of the adoration

of humanity. The Humanity-God has no rule superior to itself. Whatever

it does must be put on record merely, and not judged: it is the

immolation of the conscience. But on what altar shall we stretch this

great victim? Shall we sacrifice it to pure reason, to reason

disengaged from all prejudice? Allow me to claim your attention yet a

few minutes longer.

The Humanity-God in all its acts escapes the judgment of the conscience.

What measure shall we be able to apply to its thoughts? None. The God

which cannot do evil, cannot be mistaken either. For the modern savant

all is true, for exactly the same reason that all is right. The human

mind unfolds itself in all directions; all these unfoldings are

legitimate; all are to be accepted equally by a mind truly emancipated.

Furnished with this rule, I make progress in the history of philosophy.

The Greek Democritus affirms that the universe is only an infinite

number of atoms moving as chance directs in the immensity of space: I

record with veneration this unfolding of the human mind. The Greek Plato

affirms that truth, beauty, good, like three eternal rays, penetrate the

universe and constitute the only veritable realities: I record with

equal veneration this other unfolding of the human mind. I pass to

modern times. Descartes tells me that thought is the essence of man, and

that reason alone is the organ of truth. Helvetius tells me that man is

a mass of organized matter which receives its ideas only from the

senses. These two theses are equally legitimate, and I admit them both.

I quit now philosophers by profession to address myself to those

literary journalists who deal out philosophy in crumbs for the use of

_feuilletons_ and reviews. There I find all possible notions in the most

astounding of jumbles. "The villain has his apologist; the good man his

calumniator.... Marriage is honorable, so is adultery. Order is preached

up, so is riot, so is assassination, provided it be politic."[154] I

contemplate with a calm satisfaction, with a very deep and very pure

pleasure, these various unfoldings of the human mind; I place them all,

with the same feelings of devotion, in the pantheon of the intelligence.

I cannot do otherwise, inasmuch as there is no rule of truth superior to

the thoughts of men, and because the human mind is the supreme,

universal, and infallible intelligence.

But will our mind be able to entertain together two directly opposite

assertions? Will contradiction no longer be the sign of error? We must

come to this; we must acknowledge that the modern mind, breaking with

superannuated traditions, has proclaimed the principle "that one

assertion is not more true than an opposite assertion." We must proclaim

that the thinker has not to disquiet himself "about the _real_

contradictions into which he may fall; and that a true philosopher has

absolutely nothing to do with consistency."[155] The fear of

self-contradiction may be excused in Aristotle and Plato, in St. Anselm

and St. Thomas, in Descartes and Leibnitz. These writers were still

wrapped in the swaddling clothes of old errors; the light of the

nineteenth century had not shone upon their cradles; but the epoch of

enfranchisement is come. These things, Gentlemen, are printed

now-a-days; they are printed at Paris, one of the metropolises of

thought!

Mark well whereabouts we are. We must admit--what? that all is true.

But, if all is true, there is nothing true, just as if all is good,

there is nothing good. There are thoughts in men's heads; to make

history of them is an agreeable pastime; but there is no truth. We must

not say that two contradictory propositions are equally true; that

would be to make use of the old notion of truth; we must say that they

are, and that is all about it. The night is approaching, the sun of

intelligence is sinking towards the horizon, and thick vapors are

obscuring its setting. But wait!

If the Humanity-God is always right, it must be that two contradictory

propositions can be true at the same time, since contradictions abound

in the history of human thoughts. If two contradictory propositions can

be true, there is no more truth. What then is our reason, of which truth

is the object? We are seized with giddiness. Might not everything in the

world be illusion? and myself--? Listen to a voice which reaches us,

across the ages, from the countries crowned by the Himalayas. "Nothing

exists.... By the study of first principles, one acquires this

knowledge, absolute, incontestable, comprehensible to the intelligence

alone: I neither am, nor does anything which is mine, nor do I myself,

exist."[156] What is there beneath these strange lines? The feeling of

giddiness, which seeks to steady itself by language. Here is now the

modern echo of these ancient words. One of those writers who accept all,

in the hope of understanding all, describes himself as having come at

last to be aware that he is "only one of the most fugitive illusions in

the bosom of the infinite illusion." One of his colleagues expresses

himself on this subject as follows: "Is this the last word of all?--And

why not?--The illusion which knows itself--is it in fact an illusion?

Does it not in some sort triumph over itself? Does it not attain to _the

sovereign reality_, that of the thought which thinks itself, that of the

dream which knows itself a dream, that _of nothingness which ceases to

be so_, in order to recognize itself and to assert itself?"[157] We are

gone back to ancient India. You will remark here three stages of

thought. The fugitive illusion is man. The infinite illusion is the

universe. The universal principle of the appearances which compose the

universe is nothingness. Here is the explanation of the universe!

Nothingness takes life; nothingness takes life only to know itself to be

nothingness; and the nothingness which says to itself, "I am

nothingness," is the reason of existence of all that is. I said just now

that the sun was declining to the horizon. Now the last glimmer of

twilight has disappeared; night has closed in--a dark and starless

night. Yes, Sirs, but there is never on the earth a night so dark as to

warrant us in despairing of the return of the dawn. If the modern mind

is such as it is described to us, it has lost all the rays of light; but

the sun is not dead.

The doctrine of non-existence and of illusion is entirely

incomprehensible, in the sense in which to comprehend signifies to have

a clear idea, and one capable of being directly apprehended. But, if one

follows the chain of ideas as logically unrolled, in the way that a

mathematician follows the transformations of an algebraical formula,

without considering its real contents, it is easy to account for the

origin of this theory. If the human mind has no rule superior to itself,

if it is the absolute mind, God, all its thoughts are equally true,

since we cannot point out error without having recourse to a rule of

truth. If all doctrines are equally true, propositions directly and

absolutely contradictory are equally true. If all is true, there is no

truth; for truth is not conceived except in opposition to at least

possible error. If there is no truth, the human reason, which seeks

truth by a natural impulse belonging to its very essence, as the

magnetized needle seeks the pole,--reason, I say, is a chimera. The

truth which reason seeks is an exact relation of human thought to the

reality of the world. If the search for this relation is chimerical, the

two terms, mind, and the world, may be illusions. A fugitive illusion in

presence of an infinite illusion: there is all. You see that these

thoughts hang together with rigorous precision. The darkness is becoming

visible to us, or, in other words, we are acquiring a perfect

understanding of the origin and developments of the absurdity. Put God

aside, the law of our will, the warrant of our thought; deify human

nature; and a fatal current will run you aground twice over--on the

shores of moral absurdity, and on those of intellectual absurdity. These

sad shipwrecks are set before our eyes in striking examples; it has been

easy to indicate their cause.

The consideration of the beautiful would give occasion to analogous

observations. The human mind becoming the object of our adoration, we

must give up judging it in every particular, and suppress the rules of

the ideal in art, as those of morals in the conduct, and truth in the

intellect. We must form a system of æsthetics which accepts all, and

finds equally legitimate whatever affords recreation to the

Humanity-God, in the great variety of its tastes. Then high aspirations

are extinguished, the beautiful gives place to the agreeable; and since

the ugly and misshapen please a vicious taste, room must be made for the

ugly in the Pantheon of beauty. Art despoiled of its crown becomes the

sad, and often the ignoble slave of the tastes and caprices of the

public. I do not insist further. The pretension of the worshippers of

humanity is to make their conscience wide enough to accept all, and to

have their intellect broad enough to understand all. They explain all,

except these three small particulars--the conscience, the heart, and the

reason. Goodness and truth avenge themselves in the end for the long

contempt cast upon them; and the first punishment those suffer who

accept all, in the hope of understanding all, is no longer to understand

what constitutes the life of humanity.

Let us not, Sirs, be setting up altars to the human mind; for an

adulterous incense stupefies it, and ends by destroying it. Man is

great, he is sublime, with immortal hope in his heart, and the divine

aureole around his brow; but that he may preserve his greatness, let us

leave him in his proper place. Let us leave to him the struggles which

make his glory, that condemnation of his own miseries which does him

honor, the tears shed over his faults which are the most unexceptionable

testimony to his dignity. Let us leave him tears, repentance, conflict,

and hope; but let us not deify him; for, no sooner shall he have said,

"I am God," than, deprived that instant of all his blessings, he shall

find himself naked and spoiled.

Before they deified man, the pagans at least transfigured him by placing

him in Olympus. At this day, it is humanity as it is upon earth that is

proposed to our adoration, humanity with its profound miseries and its

fearful defilements. They seek to throw a veil over the mad audacity of

this attempt, by telling us of the progress which is to bring about, by

little and little, the realization of our divinity. But, alas! our

history is long already, and no reasonable induction justifies the vague

hopes of heated imaginations. Great progress is being effected, but none

which gives any promise that the profound needs of our nature can ever

be satisfied in this life. Charity has appeared on the earth; but there

are still poor amongst us, and it seems that there always will be. A

breath of justice and humanity has penetrated social institutions; still

politics have not become the domain of perfect truth and of absolute

justice, and there seems small likelihood that they ever will. Industry

has given birth to marvels; we devour space in these days, but we shall

never go so fast that suffering and death will not succeed in overtaking

us. The great sources of grief are not dried up; the song of our poets

causes still the chords of sorrow to vibrate as in the days of yore.

Progress is being accomplished, sure witness of a beneficent Hand which

is guiding humanity in its destinies; but everything tells us that the

soil of our planet will be always steeped in tears, that the atmosphere

which envelops us will always resound with the vibrations of sorrow. Far

as our view can stretch itself, we foresee a suffering humanity, which

will not be able to find peace, joy, and hope, except in the expectation

of new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

If there be no God above humanity, no eternity above time, no divine

world higher than our present place of sojourn; if our profoundest

desires are to be for ever deceived; if the cries we raise to heaven are

never to be heard; if all our hope is a future in which we shall be no

more; if humanity as we know it is the perfection of the universe; if

all this is so, then indeed the answer to the universal enigma is

illusion and falsehood. Then, before the monster of destiny which brings

us into being only to destroy us, which creates in our breast the desire

of happiness only to deride our miseries; in view of that starry vault

which speaks to us of the infinite, while yet there is no infinite; in

presence of that lying nature which adorns itself with a thousand

symbols of immortality, while yet there is no immortality; in presence

of all these deceptions, man may be allowed to curse the day of his

birth, or to abandon himself to the intoxication of thoughtless

pleasure. But, a secret instinct tells us that wretchedness is a

disorder, and thoughtless pleasure a degradation. Let us have confidence

in this deep utterance of our nature. Good, truth, beauty descend as

rays of streaming light into the shadows of our existence; let us follow

them with the eye of faith to the divine focus from whence they

proceed. All is fleeting, all is disappearing incessantly beneath our

steps; but our soul is not staggered at this swift lapse of all things,

only because she carries in herself the pledges of a changeless

eternity. "The ephemeral spectator of an eternal spectacle, man raises

for a moment his eyes to heaven, and closes them again for ever; but

during the fleeting instant which is granted to him, from all points of

the sky and from the bounds of the universe, sets forth from every world

a consoling ray and strikes his upward gaze, announcing to him that

between that measureless space and himself there exists a close

relation, and that he is allied to eternity."[158]

And are these sublime _pressentiments_ only dreams after all? Dreams!

Know you not that our dreams create nothing, and that they are never

anything else than confused reminiscences and fantastic combinations of

the realities of our waking consciousness? What then is that mysterious

waking during which we have seen the eternal, the infinite, the

perfection of goodness, the fulness of joy, all those sublime images

which come to haunt our spirit during the dream of life? Recollections

of our origin! foreshadowings of our destinies! While then all below is

transitory, and is escaping from us in a ceaseless flight, let us

abandon ourselves without fear to these instincts of the soul--

As a bird, if it light on a sprig too slight

The feathery freight to bear,

Yet, conscious of wings, tosses fearless, and sings,

Then drops--on the buoyant air.[159]

FOOTNOTES:

[131] _Système de la Nature_, published under the pseudonyme of

Mirabaud.

[132] _Système de la Nature_, Part I. chap. 1.

[133] _Ibid._ Part II. chap. 14.

[134] _Vie de Jésus._ Dedication.

[135] _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of 15 January, 1860.

[136] Plebeii philosophi qui a Platone et Socrate et ab eâ familiâ

dissident.

[137] _Les philosophes français du XIXe siècle_, chap. XIV.

[138] _Hégel et l'Hégélianisme_ par M. Ed. Schérer.

[139] Page 854.

[140] Page 852.

[141] Page 856.

[142] Isa. xx. 20.

[143] _Essais de critique et d'histoire_, pp. 8 and 9.

[144] _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 15 Feb. 1861, page 855.

[145] Page 853.

[146] Page 854.

[147] _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of the 15th Feb. 1861, page 854.

[148] _Introduction à l'histoire de la philosophie_. Neuvième leçon.

[149]

Il répondit, baissant un oeil humide:

Jamais ce nom n'attristera mes vers.

[150] _Introduction à l'histoire de la philosophie._ Treizième leçon.

[151]

Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont,

J'accoutume mon âme à souffrir ce qu'ils font.

[152] _Nihil nefas ducere, hanc summam inter eos religionem esse._ (Tit.

Liv. lib. xxxix. c. 13.)

[153]

. . . . . . Ces haines vigoureuses

Que doit donner le vice aux âmes vertueuses.

[154] _Mélanges de Töpffer._ De la mauvaise presse considerée comme

excellente.

[155] _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of 15 Feb. 1861, page 854.--_Etudes

critiques sur la littérature contemporaine_, par Edmond Scherer, page x.

et xi.

[156] Sa'nkya--ka'rika', 61 and 64. The text 61 in which occur the words

"Nothing exists" is hard to understand, but there appears to be no doubt

of the meaning of No. 64. _Non sum, non est meum, nec sum ego._

[157] _Etudes critiques sur la littérature contemporaine_, par Edmond

Scherer.--M. Sainte-Beuve, p. 354.

[158] Xavier de Maistre.

[159]

Soyons comme l'oiseau posé pour un instant

Sur des rameaux trop frêles,

Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant,

Sachant qu'il a des ailes.--VICTOR HUGO.

LECTURE VI.

_THE CREATOR._

(At Geneva, 4th Dec. 1863.--At Lausanne, 27th Jan. 1864.)

GENTLEMEN,

Man is not a simple product of nature; in vain does he labor to degrade

himself by desiring to find the explanation of his spiritual being in

matter brought gradually to perfection. Man is not the summit and

principle of the universe; in vain does he labor to deify himself. He is

great only by reason of the divine rays which inform his heart, his

conscience, and his reason. From the moment that he believes himself to

be the source of light, he passes into night. When thought has risen

from nature up to man, it must needs fall again, if its impetus be not

strong enough to carry it on to God. These assertions do but translate

the great facts of man's intellectual history. "There is no nation so

barbarous," said Cicero,[160] "there are no men so savage as not to

have some tincture of religion. Many there are who form false notions of

the gods; ... but all admit the existence of a divine power and

nature.... Now, in any matter whatever, the consent of all nations is to

be reckoned a law of nature." No discovery has diminished the value of

these words of the Roman orator. In the most degraded portions of human

society, there remains always some vestige of the religious sentiment.

The knowledge of the Creator comes to us from the Christian tradition;

but the idea, more or less vague, of a divine world is found wherever

there are men.

Cicero brings forward this universal consent as a very strong proof of

the existence of the gods. The supporters of atheism dispute the value

of this argument. They say: "General opinion proves nothing. How many

fabulous legends have been set up by the common belief into historic

verities! All mankind believed for a long time that the sun revolved

about the earth. Truth makes way in the world only by contradicting

opinions generally received. The faith of the greater number is rather a

mark of error than a sign of truth." This objection rests upon a

confusion of ideas. Humanity has no testimony to render upon scientific

questions, the solution of which is reserved for patient study; but

humanity bears witness to its own nature. The universality of religion

proves that the search after the divine is, as said the Roman orator, a

law of nature. When therefore we rise from matter to man, and from man

to God, we are not going in an arbitrary road, but are advancing

according to the law of nature ascertained by the testimony of humanity.

It needs a mind at once very daring and very frivolous not to feel the

importance of this consideration.

In our days atheism is being revived. In going over in your memory the

symptoms of this revival, as we have pointed them out to you, you will

perceive that the direct and primitive negation of God is comparatively

rare; but that what is frequently attempted is, if I may venture so to

speak, to effect the subtraction of God. Any religious theory whatever

is put aside as inadmissible, and with some such remarks as these: "How

is it that real sciences are formed? By observation on the one hand, and

by reasoning on the other. By observation, and reasoning applied to

observation, we obtain the science of nature and the science of

humanity. But do we wish to rise above nature and humanity? We fail of

all basis of observation; and reason works in a vacuum. There is

therefore no possible way of reaching to God. Is God an object of

experience? No. Can God be demonstrated _à priori_ by syllogisms? No.

The idea of God therefore cannot be established, as answering to a

reality, either by the way of experience or by the way of reasoning; it

is a mere hypothesis. We do not, however, it is added, in our view of

the matter, pretend (Heaven forbid!) to exclude the sentiment of the

Divine from the soul, nor the word _God_ from fine poetry. We accept

religious thoughts as dreams full of charm. But is it a question of

reality? then God is an hypothesis, and hypothesis has no admission into

the science of realities."