I do not intend the pupil to suppose his master to be as ignorant,

or as liable to be led astray, as he is himself. This idea is

all very well for a child who can neither see nor compare things,

who thinks everything is within his reach, and only bestows his

confidence on those who know how to come down to his level. But a

youth of Emile's age and sense is no longer so foolish as to make

this mistake, and it would not be desirable that he should. The

confidence he ought to have in his tutor is of another kind; it

should rest on the authority of reason, and on superior knowledge,

advantages which the young man is capable of appreciating while

he perceives how useful they are to himself. Long experience has

convinced him that his tutor loves him, that he is a wise and good

man who desires his happiness and knows how to procure it. He ought

to know that it is to his own advantage to listen to his advice.

But if the master lets himself be taken in like the disciple, he

will lose his right to expect deference from him, and to give him

instruction. Still less should the pupil suppose that his master

is purposely letting him fall into snares or preparing pitfalls for

his inexperience. How can we avoid these two difficulties? Choose

the best and most natural means; be frank and straightforward like

himself; warn him of the dangers to which he is exposed, point them

out plainly and sensibly, without exaggeration, without temper,

without pedantic display, and above all without giving your opinions

in the form of orders, until they have become such, and until this

imperious tone is absolutely necessary. Should he still be obstinate as

he often will be, leave him free to follow his own choice, follow

him, copy his example, and that cheerfully and frankly; if possible

fling yourself into things, amuse yourself as much as he does. If

the consequences become too serious, you are at hand to prevent

them; and yet when this young man has beheld your foresight and your

kindliness, will he not be at once struck by the one and touched

by the other? All his faults are but so many hands with which

he himself provides you to restrain him at need. Now under these

circumstances the great art of the master consists in controlling

events and directing his exhortations so that he may know beforehand

when the youth will give in, and when he will refuse to do so,

so that all around him he may encompass him with the lessons of

experience, and yet never let him run too great a risk.

Warn him of his faults before he commits them; do not blame him

when once they are committed; you would only stir his self-love to

mutiny. We learn nothing from a lesson we detest. I know nothing

more foolish than the phrase, "I told you so." The best way to make

him remember what you told him is to seem to have forgotten it. Go

further than this, and when you find him ashamed of having refused

to believe you, gently smooth away the shame with kindly words. He

will indeed hold you dear when he sees how you forget yourself on

his account, and how you console him instead of reproaching him.

But if you increase his annoyance by your reproaches he will hate

you, and will make it a rule never to heed you, as if to show you

that he does not agree with you as to the value of your opinion.

The turn you give to your consolation may itself be a lesson

to him, and all the more because he does not suspect it. When you

tell him, for example, that many other people have made the same

mistakes, this is not what he was expecting; you are administering

correction under the guise of pity; for when one thinks oneself

better than other people it is a very mortifying excuse to console

oneself by their example; it means that we must realise that the

most we can say is that they are no better than we.

The time of faults is the time for fables. When we blame the guilty

under the cover of a story we instruct without offending him; and

he then understands that the story is not untrue by means of the

truth he finds in its application to himself. The child who has

never been deceived by flattery understands nothing of the fable I

recently examined; but the rash youth who has just become the dupe

of a flatterer perceives only too readily that the crow was a fool.

Thus he acquires a maxim from the fact, and the experience he would

soon have forgotten is engraved on his mind by means of the fable.

There is no knowledge of morals which cannot be acquired through our

own experience or that of others. When there is danger, instead of

letting him try the experiment himself, we have recourse to history.

When the risk is comparatively slight, it is just as well that

the youth should be exposed to it; then by means of the apologue

the special cases with which the young man is now acquainted are

transformed into maxims.

It is not, however, my intention that these maxims should be

explained, nor even formulated. Nothing is so foolish and unwise

as the moral at the end of most of the fables; as if the moral

was not, or ought not to be so clear in the fable itself that the

reader cannot fail to perceive it. Why then add the moral at the end,

and go deprive him of the pleasure of discovering it for himself.

The art of teaching consists in making the pupil wish to learn.

But if the pupil is to wish to learn, his mind must not remain in

such a passive state with regard to what you tell him that there

is really nothing for him to do but listen to you. The master's

vanity must always give way to the scholars; he must be able

to say, I understand, I see it, I am getting at it, I am learning

something. One of the things which makes the Pantaloon in the

Italian comedies so wearisome is the pains taken by him to explain

to the audience the platitudes they understand only too well already.

We must always be intelligible, but we need not say all there is

to be said. If you talk much you will say little, for at last no

one will listen to you. What is the sense of the four lines at the

end of La Fontaine's fable of the frog who puffed herself up. Is

he afraid we should not understand it? Does this great painter need

to write the names beneath the things he has painted? His morals,

far from generalising, restrict the lesson to some extent to the

examples given, and prevent our applying them to others. Before I

put the fables of this inimitable author into the hands of a youth,

I should like to cut out all the conclusions with which he strives

to explain what he has just said so clearly and pleasantly. If

your pupil does not understand the fable without the explanation,

he will not understand it with it.

Moreover, the fables would require to be arranged in a more didactic

order, one more in agreement with the feelings and knowledge of

the young adolescent. Can you imagine anything so foolish as to

follow the mere numerical order of the book without regard to our

requirements or our opportunities. First the grasshopper, then the

crow, then the frog, then the two mules, etc. I am sick of these

two mules; I remember seeing a child who was being educated for

finance; they never let him alone, but were always insisting on the

profession he was to follow; they made him read this fable, learn

it, say it, repeat it again and again without finding in it the

slightest argument against his future calling. Not only have I

never found children make any real use of the fables they learn,

but I have never found anybody who took the trouble to see that

they made such a use of them. The study claims to be instruction

in morals; but the real aim of mother and child is nothing but to

set a whole party watching the child while he recites his fables;

when he is too old to recite them and old enough to make use of

them, they are altogether forgotten. Only men, I repeat, can learn

from fables, and Emile is now old enough to begin.

I do not mean to tell you everything, so I only indicate the paths

which diverge from the right way, so that you may know how to avoid

them. If you follow the road I have marked out for you, I think

your pupil will buy his knowledge of mankind and his knowledge of

himself in the cheapest market; you will enable him to behold the

tricks of fortune without envying the lot of her favourites, and

to be content with himself without thinking himself better than

others. You have begun by making him an actor that he may learn to

be one of the audience; you must continue your task, for from the

theatre things are what they seem, from the stage they seem what

they are. For the general effect we must get a distant view, for

the details we must observe more closely. But how can a young man

take part in the business of life? What right has he to be initiated

into its dark secrets? His interests are confined within the limits

of his own pleasures, he has no power over others, it is much the

same as if he had no power at all. Man is the cheapest commodity

on the market, and among all our important rights of property, the

rights of the individual are always considered last of all.

When I see the studies of young men at the period of their greatest

activity confined to purely speculative matters, while later on

they are suddenly plunged, without any sort of experience, into

the world of men and affairs, it strikes me as contrary alike to

reason and to nature, and I cease to be surprised that so few men

know what to do. How strange a choice to teach us so many useless

things, while the art of doing is never touched upon! They profess

to fit us for society, and we are taught as if each of us were

to live a life of contemplation in a solitary cell, or to discuss

theories with persons whom they did not concern. You think you

are teaching your scholars how to live, and you teach them certain

bodily contortions and certain forms of words without meaning.

I, too, have taught Emile how to live; for I have taught him to

enjoy his own society and, more than that, to earn his own bread.

But this is not enough. To live in the world he must know how to

get on with other people, he must know what forces move them, he

must calculate the action and re-action of self-interest in civil

society, he must estimate the results so accurately that he will

rarely fail in his undertakings, or he will at least have tried

in the best possible way. The law does not allow young people to

manage their own affairs nor to dispose of their own property; but

what would be the use of these precautions if they never gained any

experience until they were of age. They would have gained nothing

by the delay, and would have no more experience at five-and-twenty

than at fifteen. No doubt we must take precautions, so that a youth,

blinded by ignorance or misled by passion, may not hurt himself;

but at any age there are opportunities when deeds of kindness and

of care for the weak may be performed under the direction of a wise

man, on behalf of the unfortunate who need help.

Mothers and nurses grow fond of children because of the care they

lavish on them; the practice of social virtues touches the very

heart with the love of humanity; by doing good we become good; and

I know no surer way to this end. Keep your pupil busy with the good

deeds that are within his power, let the cause of the poor be his

own, let him help them not merely with his money, but with his

service; let him work for them, protect them, let his person and

his time be at their disposal; let him be their agent; he will

never all his life long have a more honourable office. How many of

the oppressed, who have never got a hearing, will obtain justice

when he demands it for them with that courage and firmness which

the practice of virtue inspires; when he makes his way into the

presence of the rich and great, when he goes, if need be, to the

footstool of the king himself, to plead the cause of the wretched,

the cause of those who find all doors closed to them by their poverty,

those who are so afraid of being punished for their misfortunes

that they do not dare to complain?

But shall we make of Emile a knight-errant, a redresser of wrongs,

a paladin? Shall he thrust himself into public life, play the sage

and the defender of the laws before the great, before the magistrates,

before the king? Shall he lay petitions before the judges and plead

in the law courts? That I cannot say. The nature of things is not

changed by terms of mockery and scorn. He will do all that he knows

to be useful and good. He will do nothing more, and he knows that

nothing is useful and good for him which is unbefitting his age.

He knows that his first duty is to himself; that young men should

distrust themselves; that they should act circumspectly; that they

should show respect to those older than themselves, reticence and

discretion in talking without cause, modesty in things indifferent, but

courage in well doing, and boldness to speak the truth. Such were

those illustrious Romans who, having been admitted into public life,

spent their days in bringing criminals to justice and in protecting

the innocent, without any motives beyond those of learning, and of

the furtherance of justice and of the protection of right conduct.

Emile is not fond of noise or quarrelling, not only among men, but

among animals. [Footnote: "But what will he do if any one seeks a

quarrel with him?" My answer is that no one will ever quarrel with

him, he will never lend himself to such a thing. But, indeed, you

continue, who can be safe from a blow, or an insult from a bully,

a drunkard, a bravo, who for the joy of killing his man begins by

dishonouring him? That is another matter. The life and honour of

the citizens should not be at the mercy of a bully, a drunkard, or

a bravo, and one can no more insure oneself against such an accident

than against a falling tile. A blow given, or a lie in the teeth,

if he submit to them, have social consequences which no wisdom

can prevent and no tribunal can avenge. The weakness of the laws,

therefore, so far restores a man's independence; he is the sole

magistrate and judge between the offender and himself, the sole

interpreter and administrator of natural law. Justice is his due,

and he alone can obtain it, and in such a case there is no government

on earth so foolish as to punish him for so doing. I do not say he

must fight; that is absurd; I say justice is his due, and he alone

can dispense it. If I were king, I promise you that in my kingdom

no one would ever strike a man or call him a liar, and yet I would

do without all those useless laws against duels; the means are

simple and require no law courts. However that may be, Emile knows

what is due to himself in such a case, and the example due from

him to the safety of men of honour. The strongest of men cannot

prevent insult, but he can take good care that his adversary has

no opportunity to boast of that insult.] He will never set two dogs

to fight, he will never set a dog to chase a cat. This peaceful

spirit is one of the results of his education, which has never

stimulated self-love or a high opinion of himself, and so has

not encouraged him to seek his pleasure in domination and in the

sufferings of others. The sight of suffering makes him suffer too;

this is a natural feeling. It is one of the after effects of vanity

that hardens a young man and makes him take a delight in seeing the

torments of a living and feeling creature; it makes him consider

himself beyond the reach of similar sufferings through his superior

wisdom or virtue. He who is beyond the reach of vanity cannot fall

into the vice which results from vanity. So Emile loves peace.

He is delighted at the sight of happiness, and if he can help to

bring it about, this is an additional reason for sharing it. I do

not assume that when he sees the unhappy he will merely feel for

them that barren and cruel pity which is content to pity the ills

it can heal. His kindness is active and teaches him much he would

have learnt far more slowly, or he would never have learnt at all,

if his heart had been harder. If he finds his comrades at strife,

he tries to reconcile them; if he sees the afflicted, he inquires

as to the cause of their sufferings; if he meets two men who hate

each other, he wants to know the reason of their enmity; if he finds

one who is down-trodden groaning under the oppression of the rich

and powerful, he tries to discover by what means he can counteract

this oppression, and in the interest he takes with regard to all

these unhappy persons, the means of removing their sufferings are

never out of his sight. What use shall we make of this disposition

so that it may re-act in a way suited to his age? Let us direct

his efforts and his knowledge, and use his zeal to increase them.

I am never weary of repeating: let all the lessons of young people

take the form of doing rather than talking; let them learn nothing

from books which they can learn from experience. How absurd to

attempt to give them practice in speaking when they have nothing

to say, to expect to make them feel, at their school desks, the

vigour of the language of passion and all the force of the arts

of persuasion when they have nothing and nobody to persuade! All

the rules of rhetoric are mere waste of words to those who do not

know how to use them for their own purposes. How does it concern

a schoolboy to know how Hannibal encouraged his soldiers to cross

the Alps? If instead of these grand speeches you showed him how to

induce his prefect to give him a holiday, you may be sure he would

pay more attention to your rules.

If I wanted to teach rhetoric to a youth whose passions were as

yet undeveloped, I would draw his attention continually to things

that would stir his passions, and I would discuss with him how

he should talk to people so as to get them to regard his wishes

favourably. But Emile is not in a condition so favourable to the

art of oratory. Concerned mainly with his physical well-being,

he has less need of others than they of him; and having nothing to

ask of others on his own account, what he wants to persuade them

to do does not affect him sufficiently to awake any very strong

feeling. From this it follows that his language will be on the

whole simple and literal. He usually speaks to the point and only

to make himself understood. He is not sententious, for he has

not learnt to generalise; he does not speak in figures, for he is

rarely impassioned.

Yet this is not because he is altogether cold and phlegmatic,

neither his age, his character, nor his tastes permit of this. In

the fire of adolescence the life-giving spirits, retained in the

blood and distilled again and again, inspire his young heart with

a warmth which glows in his eye, a warmth which is felt in his

words and perceived in his actions. The lofty feeling with which

he is inspired gives him strength and nobility; imbued with tender

love for mankind his words betray the thoughts of his heart;

I know not how it is, but there is more charm in his open-hearted

generosity than in the artificial eloquence of others; or rather

this eloquence of his is the only true eloquence, for he has only

to show what he feels to make others share his feelings.

The more I think of it the more convinced I am that by thus

translating our kindly impulses into action, by drawing from our

good or ill success conclusions as to their cause, we shall find

that there is little useful knowledge that cannot be imparted to a

youth; and that together with such true learning as may be got at

college he will learn a science of more importance than all the rest

together, the application of what he has learned to the purposes

of life. Taking such an interest in his fellow-creatures, it is

impossible that he should fail to learn very quickly how to note

and weigh their actions, their tastes, their pleasures, and to

estimate generally at their true value what may increase or diminish

the happiness of men; he should do this better than those who care

for nobody and never do anything for any one. The feelings of those

who are always occupied with their own concerns are too keenly

affected for them to judge wisely of things. They consider everything

as it affects themselves, they form their ideas of good and ill

solely on their own experience, their minds are filled with all

sorts of absurd prejudices, and anything which affects their own

advantage ever so little, seems an upheaval of the universe.

Extend self-love to others and it is transformed into virtue,

a virtue which has its root in the heart of every one of us. The

less the object of our care is directly dependent on ourselves, the

less we have to fear from the illusion of self-interest; the more

general this interest becomes, the juster it is; and the love of

the human race is nothing but the love of justice within us. If

therefore we desire Emile to be a lover of truth, if we desire that

he should indeed perceive it, let us keep him far from self-interest

in all his business. The more care he bestows upon the happiness of

others the wiser and better he is, and the fewer mistakes he will

make between good and evil; but never allow him any blind preference

founded merely on personal predilection or unfair prejudice. Why

should he harm one person to serve another? What does it matter to

him who has the greater share of happiness, providing he promotes

the happiness of all? Apart from self-interest this care for the

general well-being is the first concern of the wise man, for each

of us forms part of the human race and not part of any individual

member of that race.

To prevent pity degenerating into weakness we must generalise it

and extend it to mankind. Then we only yield to it when it is in

accordance with justice, since justice is of all the virtues that

which contributes most to the common good. Reason and self-love

compel us to love mankind even more than our neighbour, and to pity

the wicked is to be very cruel to other men.

Moreover, you must bear in mind that all these means employed to

project my pupil beyond himself have also a distinct relation to

himself; since they not only cause him inward delight, but I am

also endeavouring to instruct him, while I am making him kindly

disposed towards others.

First I showed the means employed, now I will show the result. What

wide prospects do I perceive unfolding themselves before his mind!

What noble feelings stifle the lesser passions in his heart! What

clearness of judgment, what accuracy in reasoning, do I see developing

from the inclinations we have cultivated, from the experience which

concentrates the desires of a great heart within the narrow bounds

of possibility, so that a man superior to others can come down to

their level if he cannot raise them to his own! True principles

of justice, true types of beauty, all moral relations between man

and man, all ideas of order, these are engraved on his understanding;

he sees the right place for everything and the causes which drive

it from that place; he sees what may do good, and what hinders it.

Without having felt the passions of mankind, he knows the illusions

they produce and their mode of action.

I proceed along the path which the force of circumstances compels

me to tread, but I do not insist that my readers shall follow me.

Long ago they have made up their minds that I am wandering in the

land of chimeras, while for my part I think they are dwelling in

the country of prejudice. When I wander so far from popular beliefs

I do not cease to bear them in mind; I examine them, I consider

them, not that I may follow them or shun them, but that I may weigh

them in the balance of reason. Whenever reason compels me to abandon

these popular beliefs, I know by experience that my readers will

not follow my example; I know that they will persist in refusing

to go beyond what they can see, and that they will take the youth

I am describing for the creation of my fanciful imagination, merely

because he is unlike the youths with whom they compare him; they

forget that he must needs be different, because he has been brought

up in a totally different fashion; he has been influenced by wholly

different feelings, instructed in a wholly different manner, so

that it would be far stranger if he were like your pupils than if

he were what I have supposed. He is a man of nature's making, not

man's. No wonder men find him strange.

When I began this work I took for granted nothing but what could be

observed as readily by others as by myself; for our starting-point,

the birth of man, is the same for all; but the further we go, while

I am seeking to cultivate nature and you are seeking to deprave

it, the further apart we find ourselves. At six years old my pupil

was not so very unlike yours, whom you had not yet had time to

disfigure; now there is nothing in common between them; and when

they reach the age of manhood, which is now approaching, they will

show themselves utterly different from each other, unless all my pains

have been thrown away. There may not be so very great a difference

in the amount of knowledge they possess, but there is all the

difference in the world in the kind of knowledge. You are amazed

to find that the one has noble sentiments of which the others have

not the smallest germ, but remember that the latter are already

philosophers and theologians while Emile does not even know what

is meant by a philosopher and has scarcely heard the name of God.

But if you come and tell me, "There are no such young men, young

people are not made that way; they have this passion or that, they

do this or that," it is as if you denied that a pear tree could

ever be a tall tree because the pear trees in our gardens are all

dwarfs.

I beg these critics who are so ready with their blame to consider

that I am as well acquainted as they are with everything they say,

that I have probably given more thought to it, and that, as I have

no private end to serve in getting them to agree with me, I have

a right to demand that they should at least take time to find out

where I am mistaken. Let them thoroughly examine the nature of

man, let them follow the earliest growth of the heart in any given

circumstances, so as to see what a difference education may make in

the individual; then let them compare my method of education with

the results I ascribe to it; and let them tell me where my reasoning

is unsound, and I shall have no answer to give them.

It is this that makes me speak so strongly, and as I think with

good excuse: I have not pledged myself to any system, I depend as

little as possible on arguments, and I trust to what I myself have

observed. I do not base my ideas on what I have imagined, but on

what I have seen. It is true that I have not confined my observations

within the walls of any one town, nor to a single class of people;

but having compared men of every class and every nation which

I have been able to observe in the course of a life spent in this

pursuit, I have discarded as artificial what belonged to one nation

and not to another, to one rank and not to another; and I have

regarded as proper to mankind what was common to all, at any age,

in any station, and in any nation whatsoever.

Now if in accordance with this method you follow from infancy the

course of a youth who has not been shaped to any special mould, one

who depends as little as possible on authority and the opinions of

others, which will he most resemble, my pupil or yours? It seems

to me that this is the question you must answer if you would know

if I am mistaken.

It is not easy for a man to begin to think; but when once he has

begun he will never leave off. Once a thinker, always a thinker,

and the understanding once practised in reflection will never rest.

You may therefore think that I do too much or too little; that

the human mind is not by nature so quick to unfold; and that after

having given it opportunities it has not got, I keep it too long

confined within a circle of ideas which it ought to have outgrown.

But remember, in the first place, that when I want to train

a natural man, I do not want to make him a savage and to send him

back to the woods, but that living in the whirl of social life

it is enough that he should not let himself be carried away by

the passions and prejudices of men; let him see with his eyes and

feel with his heart, let him own no sway but that of reason. Under

these conditions it is plain that many things will strike him;

the oft-recurring feelings which affect him, the different ways of

satisfying his real needs, must give him many ideas he would not

otherwise have acquired or would only have acquired much later.

The natural progress of the mind is quickened but not reversed.

The same man who would remain stupid in the forests should become

wise and reasonable in towns, if he were merely a spectator in

them. Nothing is better fitted to make one wise than the sight of

follies we do not share, and even if we share them, we still learn,

provided we are not the dupe of our follies and provided we do not

bring to them the same mistakes as the others.

Consider also that while our faculties are confined to the things of

sense, we offer scarcely any hold to the abstractions of philosophy

or to purely intellectual ideas. To attain to these we require

either to free ourselves from the body to which we are so strongly

bound, or to proceed step by step in a slow and gradual course,

or else to leap across the intervening space with a gigantic bound

of which no child is capable, one for which grown men even require

many steps hewn on purpose for them; but I find it very difficult

to see how you propose to construct such steps.

The Incomprehensible embraces all, he gives its motion to the

earth, and shapes the system of all creatures, but our eyes cannot

see him nor can our hands search him out, he evades the efforts

of our senses; we behold the work, but the workman is hidden from

our eyes. It is no small matter to know that he exists, and when

we have got so far, and when we ask. What is he? Where is he? our

mind is overwhelmed, we lose ourselves, we know not what to think.

Locke would have us begin with the study of spirits and go on to

that of bodies. This is the method of superstition, prejudice, and

error; it is not the method of nature, nor even that of well-ordered

reason; it is to learn to see by shutting our eyes. We must have

studied bodies long enough before we can form any true idea of

spirits, or even suspect that there are such beings. The contrary

practice merely puts materialism on a firmer footing.

Since our senses are the first instruments to our learning, corporeal

and sensible bodies are the only bodies we directly apprehend. The

word "spirit" has no meaning for any one who has not philosophised.

To the unlearned and to the child a spirit is merely a body. Do

they not fancy that spirits groan, speak, fight, and make noises?

Now you must own that spirits with arms and voices are very like

bodies. This is why every nation on the face of the earth, not even

excepting the Jews, have made to themselves idols. We, ourselves,

with our words, Spirit, Trinity, Persons, are for the most part quite

anthropomorphic. I admit that we are taught that God is everywhere;

but we also believe that there is air everywhere, at least in our

atmosphere; and the word Spirit meant originally nothing more than

breath and wind. Once you teach people to say what they do not

understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

The perception of our action upon other bodies must have first

induced us to suppose that their action upon us was effected in

like manner. Thus man began by thinking that all things whose action

affected him were alive. He did not recognise the limits of their

powers, and he therefore supposed that they were boundless; as

soon as he had supplied them with bodies they became his gods. In

the earliest times men went in terror of everything and everything

in nature seemed alive. The idea of matter was developed as slowly

as that of spirit, for the former is itself an abstraction.

Thus the universe was peopled with gods like themselves. The stars,

the winds and the mountains, rivers, trees, and towns, their very

dwellings, each had its soul, its god, its life. The teraphim of

Laban, the manitos of savages, the fetishes of the negroes, every

work of nature and of man, were the first gods of mortals; polytheism

was their first religion and idolatry their earliest form of worship.

The idea of one God was beyond their grasp, till little by little

they formed general ideas, and they rose to the idea of a first

cause and gave meaning to the word "substance," which is at bottom

the greatest of abstractions. So every child who believes in God

is of necessity an idolater or at least he regards the Deity as a

man, and when once the imagination has perceived God, it is very

seldom that the understanding conceives him. Locke's order leads

us into this same mistake.

Having arrived, I know not how, at the idea of substance, it is

clear that to allow of a single substance it must be assumed that

this substance is endowed with incompatible and mutually exclusive

properties, such as thought and size, one of which is by its nature

divisible and the other wholly incapable of division. Moreover it

is assumed that thought or, if you prefer it, feeling is a primitive

quality inseparable from the substance to which it belongs, that

its relation to the substance is like the relation between substance

and size. Hence it is inferred that beings who lose one of these

attributes lose the substance to which it belongs, and that death

is, therefore, but a separation of substances, and that those

beings in whom the two attributes are found are composed of the

two substances to which those two qualities belong.

But consider what a gulf there still is between the idea of two

substances and that of the divine nature, between the incomprehensible

idea of the influence of our soul upon our body and the idea of the

influence of God upon every living creature. The ideas of creation,

destruction, ubiquity, eternity, almighty power, those of the divine

attributes--these are all ideas so confused and obscure that few

men succeed in grasping them; yet there is nothing obscure about

them to the common people, because they do not understand them in

the least; how then should they present themselves in full force,

that is to say in all their obscurity, to the young mind which is

still occupied with the first working of the senses, and fails to

realise anything but what it handles? In vain do the abysses of

the Infinite open around us, a child does not know the meaning of

fear; his weak eyes cannot gauge their depths. To children everything

is infinite, they cannot assign limits to anything; not that their

measure is so large, but because their understanding is so small.

I have even noticed that they place the infinite rather below than

above the dimensions known to them. They judge a distance to be

immense rather by their feet than by their eyes; infinity is bounded

for them, not so much by what they can see, but how far they can

go. If you talk to them of the power of God, they will think he

is nearly as strong as their father. As their own knowledge is in

everything the standard by which they judge of what is possible,

they always picture what is described to them as rather smaller

than what they know. Such are the natural reasonings of an ignorant

and feeble mind. Ajax was afraid to measure his strength against

Achilles, yet he challenged Jupiter to combat, for he knew Achilles

and did not know Jupiter. A Swiss peasant thought himself the

richest man alive; when they tried to explain to him what a king

was, he asked with pride, "Has the king got a hundred cows on the

high pastures?"

I am aware that many of my readers will be surprised to find me

tracing the course of my scholar through his early years without

speaking to him of religion. At fifteen he will not even know that

he has a soul, at eighteen even he may not be ready to learn about

it. For if he learns about it too soon, there is the risk of his

never really knowing anything about it.

If I had to depict the most heart-breaking stupidity, I would paint

a pedant teaching children the catechism; if I wanted to drive

a child crazy I would set him to explain what he learned in his

catechism. You will reply that as most of the Christian doctrines

are mysteries, you must wait, not merely till the child is a man,

but till the man is dead, before the human mind will understand

those doctrines. To that I reply, that there are mysteries which

the heart of man can neither conceive nor believe, and I see no

use in teaching them to children, unless you want to make liars of

them. Moreover, I assert that to admit that there are mysteries,

you must at least realise that they are incomprehensible, and

children are not even capable of this conception! At an age when

everything is mysterious, there are no mysteries properly so-called.

"We must believe in God if we would be saved." This doctrine wrongly

understood is the root of bloodthirsty intolerance and the cause of

all the futile teaching which strikes a deadly blow at human reason

by training it to cheat itself with mere words. No doubt there is

not a moment to be lost if we would deserve eternal salvation; but

if the repetition of certain words suffices to obtain it, I do not

see why we should not people heaven with starlings and magpies as

well as with children.

The obligation of faith assumes the possibility of belief.

The philosopher who does not believe is wrong, for he misuses the

reason he has cultivated, and he is able to understand the truths

he rejects. But the child who professes the Christian faith--what

does he believe? Just what he understands; and he understands so

little of what he is made to repeat that if you tell him to say

just the opposite he will be quite ready to do it. The faith of

children and the faith of many men is a matter of geography. Will

they be rewarded for having been born in Rome rather than in Mecca?

One is told that Mahomet is the prophet of God and he says, "Mahomet

is the prophet of God." The other is told that Mahomet is a rogue

and he says, "Mahomet is a rogue." Either of them would have said

just the opposite had he stood in the other's shoes. When they are

so much alike to begin with, can the one be consigned to Paradise

and the other to Hell? When a child says he believes in God, it is

not God he believes in, but Peter or James who told him that there

is something called God, and he believes it after the fashion of

Euripides--

"O Jupiter, of whom I know nothing but thy name."

[Footnote: Plutarch. It is thus that the tragedy of Menalippus

originally began, but the clamour of the Athenians compelled

Euripides to change these opening lines.]

We hold that no child who dies before the age of reason will be

deprived of everlasting happiness; the Catholics believe the same

of all children who have been baptised, even though they have never

heard of God. There are, therefore, circumstances in which one can

be saved without belief in God, and these circumstances occur in

the case of children or madmen when the human mind is incapable of

the operations necessary to perceive the Godhead. The only difference

I see between you and me is that you profess that children of seven

years old are able to do this and I do not think them ready for it

at fifteen. Whether I am right or wrong depends, not on an article

of the creed, but on a simple observation in natural history.

From the same principle it is plain that any man having reached

old age without faith in God will not, therefore, be deprived of

God's presence in another life if his blindness was not wilful;

and I maintain that it is not always wilful. You admit that it is

so in the case of lunatics deprived by disease of their spiritual

faculties, but not of their manhood, and therefore still entitled

to the goodness of their Creator. Why then should we not admit it

in the case of those brought up from infancy in seclusion, those

who have led the life of a savage and are without the knowledge that

comes from intercourse with other men. [Footnote: For the natural

condition of the human mind and its slow development, cf. the first

part of the Discours sur Inegalite.] For it is clearly impossible

that such a savage could ever raise his thoughts to the knowledge

of the true God. Reason tells that man should only be punished

for his wilful faults, and that invincible ignorance can never

be imputed to him as a crime. Hence it follows that in the sight

of the Eternal Justice every man who would believe if he had the

necessary knowledge is counted a believer, and that there will be

no unbelievers to be punished except those who have closed their

hearts against the truth.

Let us beware of proclaiming the truth to those who cannot as yet

comprehend it, for to do so is to try to inculcate error. It would

be better to have no idea at all of the Divinity than to have

mean, grotesque, harmful, and unworthy ideas; to fail to perceive

the Divine is a lesser evil than to insult it. The worthy Plutarch

says, "I would rather men said, 'There is no such person as Plutarch,'

than that they should say, 'Plutarch is unjust, envious, jealous,

and such a tyrant that he demands more than can be performed.'"

The chief harm which results from the monstrous ideas of God which

are instilled into the minds of children is that they last all their

life long, and as men they understand no more of God than they did

as children. In Switzerland I once saw a good and pious mother who

was so convinced of the truth of this maxim that she refused to

teach her son religion when he was a little child for fear lest he

should be satisfied with this crude teaching and neglect a better

teaching when he reached the age of reason. This child never heard

the name of God pronounced except with reverence and devotion,

and as soon as he attempted to say the word he was told to hold

his tongue, as if the subject were too sublime and great for him.

This reticence aroused his curiosity and his self-love; he looked

forward to the time when he would know this mystery so carefully

hidden from him. The less they spoke of God to him, the less he was

himself permitted to speak of God, the more he thought about Him;

this child beheld God everywhere. What I should most dread as the

result of this unwise affectation of mystery is this: by over-stimulating

the youth's imagination you may turn his head, and make him at the

best a fanatic rather than a believer.

But we need fear nothing of the sort for Emile, who always declines

to pay attention to what is beyond his reach, and listens with

profound indifference to things he does not understand. There are

so many things of which he is accustomed to say, "That is no concern

of mine," that one more or less makes little difference to him;

and when he does begin to perplex himself with these great matters,

it is because the natural growth of his knowledge is turning his

thoughts that way.

We have seen the road by which the cultivated human mind approaches

these mysteries, and I am ready to admit that it would not attain

to them naturally, even in the bosom of society, till a much later

age. But as there are in this same society inevitable causes which

hasten the development of the passions, if we did not also hasten

the development of the knowledge which controls these passions

we should indeed depart from the path of nature and disturb her

equilibrium. When we can no longer restrain a precocious development

in one direction we must promote a corresponding development in

another direction, so that the order of nature may not be inverted,

and so that things should progress together, not separately, so

that the man, complete at every moment of his life, may never find

himself at one stage in one of his faculties and at another stage

in another faculty.

What a difficulty do I see before me! A difficulty all the greater

because it depends less on actual facts than on the cowardice of

those who dare not look the difficulty in the face. Let us at least

venture to state our problem. A child should always be brought up

in his father's religion; he is always given plain proofs that this

religion, whatever it may be, is the only true religion, that all

others are ridiculous and absurd. The force of the argument depends

entirely on the country in which it is put forward. Let a Turk,

who thinks Christianity so absurd at Constantinople, come to Paris

and see what they think of Mahomet. It is in matters of religion

more than in anything else that prejudice is triumphant. But when

we who profess to shake off its yoke entirely, we who refuse to yield

any homage to authority, decline to teach Emile anything which he

could not learn for himself in any country, what religion shall

we give him, to what sect shall this child of nature belong? The

answer strikes me as quite easy. We will not attach him to any sect,

but we will give him the means to choose for himself according to

the right use of his own reason.

Incedo per ignes

Suppositos cineri doloso.--Horace, lib. ii. ode I.

No matter! Thus far zeal and prudence have taken the place of

caution. I hope that these guardians will not fail me now. Reader,

do not fear lest I should take precautions unworthy of a lover of

truth; I shall never forget my motto, but I distrust my own judgment

all too easily. Instead of telling you what I think myself, I will

tell you the thoughts of one whose opinions carry more weight than

mine. I guarantee the truth of the facts I am about to relate;

they actually happened to the author whose writings I am about to

transcribe; it is for you to judge whether we can draw from them

any considerations bearing on the matter in hand. I do not offer

you my own idea or another's as your rule; I merely present them

for your examination.

Thirty years ago there was a young man in an Italian town; he was

an exile from his native land and found himself reduced to the depths

of poverty. He had been born a Calvinist, but the consequences of

his own folly had made him a fugitive in a strange land; he had

no money and he changed his religion for a morsel of bread. There

was a hostel for proselytes in that town to which he gained admission.

The study of controversy inspired doubts he had never felt before,

and he made acquaintance with evil hitherto unsuspected by him; he

heard strange doctrines and he met with morals still stranger to

him; he beheld this evil conduct and nearly fell a victim to it.

He longed to escape, but he was locked up; he complained, but his

complaints were unheeded; at the mercy of his tyrants, he found

himself treated as a criminal because he would not share their

crimes. The anger kindled in a young and untried heart by the first

experience of violence and injustice may be realised by those who

have themselves experienced it. Tears of anger flowed from his

eyes, he was wild with rage; he prayed to heaven and to man, and

his prayers were unheard; he spoke to every one and no one listened

to him. He saw no one but the vilest servants under the control

of the wretch who insulted him, or accomplices in the same crime

who laughed at his resistance and encouraged him to follow their

example. He would have been ruined had not a worthy priest visited

the hostel on some matter of business. He found an opportunity

of consulting him secretly. The priest was poor and in need of

help himself, but the victim had more need of his assistance, and

he did not hesitate to help him to escape at the risk of making a

dangerous enemy.

Having escaped from vice to return to poverty, the young

man struggled vainly against fate: for a moment he thought he had

gained the victory. At the first gleam of good fortune his woes and

his protector were alike forgotten. He was soon punished for this

ingratitude; all his hopes vanished; youth indeed was on his side,

but his romantic ideas spoiled everything. He had neither talent

nor skill to make his way easily, he could neither be commonplace

nor wicked, he expected so much that he got nothing. When he had

sunk to his former poverty, when he was without food or shelter

and ready to die of hunger, he remembered his benefactor.

He went back to him, found him, and was kindly welcomed; the sight of

him reminded the priest of a good deed he had done; such a memory

always rejoices the heart. This man was by nature humane and

pitiful; he felt the sufferings of others through his own, and his

heart had not been hardened by prosperity; in a word, the lessons

of wisdom and an enlightened virtue had reinforced his natural

kindness of heart. He welcomed the young man, found him a lodging,

and recommended him; he shared with him his living which was barely

enough for two. He did more, he instructed him, consoled him, and

taught him the difficult art of bearing adversity in patience. You

prejudiced people, would you have expected to find all this in a

priest and in Italy?

This worthy priest was a poor Savoyard clergyman who had offended

his bishop by some youthful fault; he had crossed the Alps to find

a position which he could not obtain in his own country. He lacked

neither wit nor learning, and with his interesting countenance

he had met with patrons who found him a place in the household of

one of the ministers, as tutor to his son. He preferred poverty to

dependence, and he did not know how to get on with the great. He

did not stay long with this minister, and when he departed he took

with him his good opinion; and as he lived a good life and gained

the hearts of everybody, he was glad to be forgiven by his bishop

and to obtain from him a small parish among the mountains, where he

might pass the rest of his life. This was the limit of his ambition.

He was attracted by the young fugitive and he questioned him closely.

He saw that ill-fortune had already seared his heart, that scorn

and disgrace had overthrown his courage, and that his pride,

transformed into bitterness and spite, led him to see nothing in

the harshness and injustice of men but their evil disposition and

the vanity of all virtue. He had seen that religion was but a mask

for selfishness, and its holy services but a screen for hypocrisy;

he had found in the subtleties of empty disputations heaven and

hell awarded as prizes for mere words; he had seen the sublime and

primitive idea of Divinity disfigured by the vain fancies of men;

and when, as he thought, faith in God required him to renounce

the reason God himself had given him, he held in equal scorn our

foolish imaginings and the object with which they are concerned.

With no knowledge of things as they are, without any idea of their

origins, he was immersed in his stubborn ignorance and utterly

despised those who thought they knew more than himself.

The neglect of all religion soon leads to the neglect of a man's

duties. The heart of this young libertine was already far on this

road. Yet his was not a bad nature, though incredulity and misery

were gradually stifling his natural disposition and dragging him

down to ruin; they were leading him into the conduct of a rascal

and the morals of an atheist.

The almost inevitable evil was not actually consummated. The young

man was not ignorant, his education had not been neglected. He was

at that happy age when the pulse beats strongly and the heart is

warm, but is not yet enslaved by the madness of the senses. His heart

had not lost its elasticity. A native modesty, a timid disposition

restrained him, and prolonged for him that period during which

you watch your pupil so carefully. The hateful example of brutal

depravity, of vice without any charm, had not merely failed to

quicken his imagination, it had deadened it. For a long time disgust

rather than virtue preserved his innocence, which would only succumb

to more seductive charms.

The priest saw the danger and the way of escape. He was not discouraged

by difficulties, he took a pleasure in his task; he determined to

complete it and to restore to virtue the victim he had snatched

from vice. He set about it cautiously; the beauty of the motive

gave him courage and inspired him with means worthy of his zeal.

Whatever might be the result, his pains would not be wasted. We

are always successful when our sole aim is to do good.

He began to win the confidence of the proselyte by not asking any

price for his kindness, by not intruding himself upon him, by not

preaching at him, by always coming down to his level, and treating

him as an equal. It was, so I think, a touching sight to see a

serious person becoming the comrade of a young scamp, and virtue

putting up with the speech of licence in order to triumph over it

more completely. When the young fool came to him with his silly

confidences and opened his heart to him, the priest listened and

set him at his ease; without giving his approval to what was bad,

he took an interest in everything; no tactless reproof checked his

chatter or closed his heart; the pleasure which he thought was given

by his conversation increased his pleasure in telling everything;

thus he made his general confession without knowing he was confessing

anything.

After he had made a thorough study of his feelings and disposition,

the priest saw plainly that, although he was not ignorant for his

age, he had forgotten everything that he most needed to know, and

that the disgrace which fortune had brought upon him had stifled in

him all real sense of good and evil. There is a stage of degradation

which robs the soul of its life; and the inner voice cannot be

heard by one whose whole mind is bent on getting food. To protect

the unlucky youth from the moral death which threatened him, he

began to revive his self-love and his good opinion of himself. He

showed him a happier future in the right use of his talents; he

revived the generous warmth of his heart by stories of the noble

deeds of others; by rousing his admiration for the doers of these

deeds he revived his desire to do like deeds himself. To draw him

gradually from his idle and wandering life, he made him copy out

extracts from well-chosen books; he pretended to want these extracts,

and so nourished in him the noble feeling of gratitude. He taught

him indirectly through these books, and thus he made him sufficiently

regain his good opinion of himself so that he would no longer think

himself good for nothing, and would not make himself despicable in

his own eyes.

A trifling incident will show how this kindly man tried, unknown

to him, to raise the heart of his disciple out of its degradation,

without seeming to think of teaching. The priest was so well known

for his uprightness and his discretion, that many people preferred

to entrust their alms to him, rather than to the wealthy clergy of

the town. One day some one had given him some money to distribute

among the poor, and the young man was mean enough to ask for some

of it on the score of poverty. "No," said he, "we are brothers,

you belong to me and I must not touch the money entrusted to me."

Then he gave him the sum he had asked for out of his own pocket.

Lessons of this sort seldom fail to make an impression on the heart

of young people who are not wholly corrupt.

I am weary of speaking in the third person, and the precaution is

unnecessary; for you are well aware, my dear friend, that I myself

was this unhappy fugitive; I think I am so far removed from the

disorders of my youth that I may venture to confess them, and the

hand which rescued me well deserves that I should at least do honour

to its goodness at the cost of some slight shame.

What struck me most was to see in the private life of my worthy

master, virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech

always plain and straightforward, and conduct in accordance with

this speech. I never saw him trouble himself whether those whom he

assisted went to vespers or confession, whether they fasted at the

appointed seasons and went without meat; nor did he impose upon them

any other like conditions, without which you might die of hunger

before you could hope for any help from the devout.

Far from displaying before him the zeal of a new convert, I was

encouraged by these observations and I made no secret of my way of

thinking, nor did he seem to be shocked by it. Sometimes I would

say to myself, he overlooks my indifference to the religion I have

adopted because he sees I am equally indifferent to the religion

in which I was brought up; he knows that my scorn for religion is

not confined to one sect. But what could I think when I sometimes

heard him give his approval to doctrines contrary to those of the

Roman Catholic Church, and apparently having but a poor opinion of

its ceremonies. I should have thought him a Protestant in disguise

if I had not beheld him so faithful to those very customs which he

seemed to value so lightly; but I knew he fulfilled his priestly

duties as carefully in private as in public, and I knew not what

to think of these apparent contradictions. Except for the fault

which had formerly brought about his disgrace, a fault which he

had only partially overcome, his life was exemplary, his conduct

beyond reproach, his conversation honest and discreet. While I lived

on very friendly terms with him, I learnt day by day to respect

him more; and when he had completely won my heart by such great

kindness, I awaited with eager curiosity the time when I should

learn what was the principle on which the uniformity of this strange

life was based.

This opportunity was a long time coming. Before taking his disciple

into his confidence, he tried to get the seeds of reason and kindness

which he had sown in my heart to germinate. The most difficult

fault to overcome in me was a certain haughty misanthropy, a certain

bitterness against the rich and successful, as if their wealth

and happiness had been gained at my own expense, and as if their

supposed happiness had been unjustly taken from my own. The foolish

vanity of youth, which kicks against the pricks of humiliation,

made me only too much inclined to this angry temper; and the

self-respect, which my mentor strove to revive, led to pride, which

made men still more vile in my eyes, and only added scorn to my

hatred.

Without directly attacking this pride, he prevented it from

developing into hardness of heart; and without depriving me of my

self-esteem, he made me less scornful of my neighbours. By continually

drawing my attention from the empty show, and directing it to the

genuine sufferings concealed by it, he taught me to deplore the

faults of my fellows and feel for their sufferings, to pity rather

than envy them. Touched with compassion towards human weaknesses

through the profound conviction of his own failings, he viewed

all men as the victims of their own vices and those of others; he

beheld the poor groaning under the tyranny of the rich, and the

rich under the tyranny of their own prejudices. "Believe me," said

he, "our illusions, far from concealing our woes, only increase them

by giving value to what is in itself valueless, in making us aware

of all sorts of fancied privations which we should not otherwise

feel. Peace of heart consists in despising everything that might

disturb that peace; the man who clings most closely to life is the

man who can least enjoy it; and the man who most eagerly desires

happiness is always most miserable."

"What gloomy ideas!" I exclaimed bitterly. "If we must deny ourselves

everything, we might as well never have been born; and if we must

despise even happiness itself who can be happy?" "I am," replied

the priest one day, in a tone which made a great impression on me.

"You happy! So little favoured by fortune, so poor, an exile and

persecuted, you are happy! How have you contrived to be happy?"

"My child," he answered, "I will gladly tell you."

Thereupon he explained that, having heard my confessions, he would

confess to me. "I will open my whole heart to yours," he said,

embracing me. "You will see me, if not as I am, at least as I

seem to myself. When you have heard my whole confession of faith,

when you really know the condition of my heart, you will know why

I think myself happy, and if you think as I do, you will know how

to be happy too. But these explanations are not the affair of a

moment, it will take time to show you all my ideas about the lot

of man and the true value of life; let us choose a fitting time and

a place where we may continue this conversation without interruption."

I showed him how eager I was to hear him. The meeting was fixed

for the very next morning. It was summer time; we rose at daybreak.

He took me out of the town on to a high hill above the river Po,

whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks; in

the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of the

Alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains and

cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and houses,

and enriched with a thousand gleams of light the fairest picture

which the human eye can see. You would have thought that nature

was displaying all her splendour before our eyes to furnish a text

for our conversation. After contemplating this scene for a space

in silence, the man of peace spoke to me.

THE CREED OF A SAVOYARD PRIEST

My child, do not look to me for learned speeches or profound

arguments. I am no great philosopher, nor do I desire to be one.

I have, however, a certain amount of common-sense and a constant

devotion to truth. I have no wish to argue with you nor even to

convince you; it is enough for me to show you, in all simplicity of

heart, what I really think. Consult your own heart while I speak;

that is all I ask. If I am mistaken, I am honestly mistaken, and

therefore my error will not be counted to me as a crime; if you,

too, are honestly mistaken, there is no great harm done. If I am

right, we are both endowed with reason, we have both the same motive

for listening to the voice of reason. Why should not you think as

I do?

By birth I was a peasant and poor; to till the ground was my portion;

but my parents thought it a finer thing that I should learn to get

my living as a priest and they found means to send me to college.

I am quite sure that neither my parents nor I had any idea of

seeking after what was good, useful, or true; we only sought what

was wanted to get me ordained. I learned what was taught me, I

said what I was told to say, I promised all that was required, and

I became a priest. But I soon discovered that when I promised not

to be a man, I had promised more than I could perform.

Conscience, they tell us, is the creature of prejudice, but I know

from experience that conscience persists in following the order

of nature in spite of all the laws of man. In vain is this or that

forbidden; remorse makes her voice heard but feebly when what we

do is permitted by well-ordered nature, and still more when we are

doing her bidding. My good youth, nature has not yet appealed to

your senses; may you long remain in this happy state when her voice

is the voice of innocence. Remember that to anticipate her teaching

is to offend more deeply against her than to resist her teaching;

you must first learn to resist, that you may know when to yield

without wrong-doing.

From my youth up I had reverenced the married state as the first

and most sacred institution of nature. Having renounced the right

to marry, I was resolved not to profane the sanctity of marriage;

for in spite of my education and reading I had always led a simple

and regular life, and my mind had preserved the innocence of its

natural instincts; these instincts had not been obscured by worldly

wisdom, while my poverty kept me remote from the temptations dictated

by the sophistry of vice.

This very resolution proved my ruin. My respect for marriage led

to the discovery of my misconduct. The scandal must be expiated;

I was arrested, suspended, and dismissed; I was the victim of

my scruples rather than of my incontinence, and I had reason to

believe, from the reproaches which accompanied my disgrace, that

one can often escape punishment by being guilty of a worse fault.

A thoughtful mind soon learns from such experiences. I found my

former ideas of justice, honesty, and every duty of man overturned

by these painful events, and day by day I was losing my hold on

one or another of the opinions I had accepted. What was left was

not enough to form a body of ideas which could stand alone, and

I felt that the evidence on which my principles rested was being

weakened; at last I knew not what to think, and I came to the same

conclusion as yourself, but with this difference: My lack of faith

was the slow growth of manhood, attained with great difficulty,

and all the harder to uproot.

I was in that state of doubt and uncertainty which Descartes

considers essential to the search for truth. It is a state which

cannot continue, it is disquieting and painful; only vicious

tendencies and an idle heart can keep us in that state. My heart

was not so corrupt as to delight in it, and there is nothing which

so maintains the habit of thinking as being better pleased with

oneself than with one's lot.

I pondered, therefore, on the sad fate of mortals, adrift upon this

sea of human opinions, without compass or rudder, and abandoned

to their stormy passions with no guide but an inexperienced pilot

who does not know whence he comes or whither he is going. I said

to myself, "I love truth, I seek her, and cannot find her. Show

me truth and I will hold her fast; why does she hide her face from

the eager heart that would fain worship her?"

Although I have often experienced worse sufferings, I have never

led a life so uniformly distressing as this period of unrest and

anxiety, when I wandered incessantly from one doubt to another,

gaining nothing from my prolonged meditations but uncertainty,

darkness, and contradiction with regard to the source of my being

and the rule of my duties.

I cannot understand how any one can be a sceptic sincerely and on

principle. Either such philosophers do not exist or they are the

most miserable of men. Doubt with regard to what we ought to know

is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot long be

endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another,

and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.

My perplexity was increased by the fact that I had been brought

up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so

that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject

the rest; as I could not accept absurd decisions, I was deprived of

those which were not absurd. When I was told to believe everything,

I could believe nothing, and I knew not where to stop.

I consulted the philosophers, I searched their books and examined

their various theories; I found them all alike proud, assertive,

dogmatic, professing, even in their so-called scepticism, to know

everything, proving nothing, scoffing at each other. This last

trait, which was common to all of them, struck me as the only point

in which they were right. Braggarts in attack, they are weaklings

in defence. Weigh their arguments, they are all destructive; count

their voices, every one speaks for himself; they are only agreed in

arguing with each other. I could find no way out of my uncertainty

by listening to them.

I suppose this prodigious diversity of opinion is caused, in the

first place, by the weakness of the human intellect; and, in the

second, by pride. We have no means of measuring this vast machine,

we are unable to calculate its workings; we know neither its guiding

principles nor its final purpose; we do not know ourselves, we know

neither our nature nor the spirit that moves us; we scarcely know

whether man is one or many; we are surrounded by impenetrable

mysteries. These mysteries are beyond the region of sense, we think

we can penetrate them by the light of reason, but we fall back on

our imagination. Through this imagined world each forces a way for

himself which he holds to be right; none can tell whether his path

will lead him to the goal. Yet we long to know and understand it

all. The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable. We

prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather

than to own that not one of us can see what really is. A fragment

of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, a fragment

abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain

enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own

relations with regard to it.

If the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which

of them would care to do so? Every one of them knows that his own

system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he maintains

it because it is his own. There is not one of them who, if he chanced

to discover the difference between truth and falsehood, would not

prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered. Where

is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world for his

own glory? If he can rise above the crowd, if he can excel his

rivals, what more does he want? Among believers he is an atheist;

among atheists he would be a believer.

The first thing I learned from these considerations was to restrict

my inquiries to what directly concerned myself, to rest in profound

ignorance of everything else, and not even to trouble myself to

doubt anything beyond what I required to know.

I also realised that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my

vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed

to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, "Let

me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as

others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall

not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted

to their deceits."

I then went over in my mind the various opinions which I had held

in the course of my life, and I saw that although no one of them was

plain enough to gain immediate belief, some were more probable than

others, and my inward consent was given or withheld in proportion

to this improbability. Having discovered this, I made an unprejudiced

comparison of all these different ideas, and I perceived that the

first and most general of them was also the simplest and the most

reasonable, and that it would have been accepted by every one if only

it had been last instead of first. Imagine all your philosophers,

ancient and modern, having exhausted their strange systems of force,

chance, fate, necessity, atoms, a living world, animated matter,

and every variety of materialism. Then comes the illustrious Clarke

who gives light to the world and proclaims the Being of beings

and the Giver of things. What universal admiration, what unanimous

applause would have greeted this new system--a system so great, so

illuminating, and so simple. Other systems are full of absurdities;

this system seems to me to contain fewer things which are beyond

the understanding of the human mind. I said to myself, "Every

system has its insoluble problems, for the finite mind of man is

too small to deal with them; these difficulties are therefore no

final arguments, against any system. But what a difference there

is between the direct evidence on which these systems are based!

Should we not prefer that theory which alone explains all the facts,

when it is no more difficult than the rest?"

Bearing thus within my heart the love of truth as my only philosophy,

and as my only method a clear and simple rule which dispensed with

the need for vain and subtle arguments, I returned with the help

of this rule to the examination of such knowledge as concerned

myself; I was resolved to admit as self-evident all that I could

not honestly refuse to believe, and to admit as true all that seemed

to follow directly from this; all the rest I determined to leave

undecided, neither accepting nor rejecting it, nor yet troubling

myself to clear up difficulties which did not lead to any practical

ends.

But who am I? What right have I to decide? What is it that determines

my judgments? If they are inevitable, if they are the results of the

impressions I receive, I am wasting my strength in such inquiries;

they would be made or not without any interference of mine. I must

therefore first turn my eyes upon myself to acquaint myself with the

instrument I desire to use, and to discover how far it is reliable.

I exist, and I have senses through which I receive impressions.

This is the first truth that strikes me and I am forced to accept

it. Have I any independent knowledge of my existence, or am I only

aware of it through my sensations? This is my first difficulty, and

so far I cannot solve it. For I continually experience sensations,

either directly or indirectly through memory, so how can I know if

the feeling of self is something beyond these sensations or if it

can exist independently of them?

My sensations take place in myself, for they make me aware of my

own existence; but their cause is outside me, for they affect me

whether I have any reason for them or not, and they are produced

or destroyed independently of me. So I clearly perceive that my

sensation, which is within me, and its cause or its object, which

is outside me, are different things.

Thus, not only do I exist, but other entities exist also, that is

to say, the objects of my sensations; and even if these objects

are merely ideas, still these ideas are not me.

But everything outside myself, everything which acts upon my senses,

I call matter, and all the particles of matter which I suppose to be

united into separate entities I call bodies. Thus all the disputes

of the idealists and the realists have no meaning for me; their

distinctions between the appearance and the reality of bodies are

wholly fanciful.

I am now as convinced of the existence of the universe as of

my own. I next consider the objects of my sensations, and I find

that I have the power of comparing them, so I perceive that I am

endowed with an active force of which I was not previously aware.

To perceive is to feel; to compare is to judge; to judge and to feel

are not the same. Through sensation objects present themselves to

me separately and singly as they are in nature; by comparing them

I rearrange them, I shift them so to speak, I place one upon another

to decide whether they are alike or different, or more generally

to find out their relations. To my mind, the distinctive faculty of

an active or intelligent being is the power of understanding this

word "is." I seek in vain in the merely sensitive entity that

intelligent force which compares and judges; I can find no trace of

it in its nature. This passive entity will be aware of each object

separately, it will even be aware of the whole formed by the two

together, but having no power to place them side by side it can

never compare them, it can never form a judgment with regard to

them.

To see two things at once is not to see their relations nor to judge

of their differences; to perceive several objects, one beyond the

other, is not to relate them. I may have at the same moment an idea

of a big stick and a little stick without comparing them, without

judging that one is less than the other, just as I can see my whole

hand without counting my fingers. [Footnote: M. de le Cordamines'

narratives tell of a people who only know how to count up to three.

Yet the men of this nation, having hands, have often seen their

fingers without learning to count up to five.] These comparative

ideas, 'greater', 'smaller', together with number ideas of 'one',

'two', etc. are certainly not sensations, although my mind only

produces them when my sensations occur.

We are told that a sensitive being distinguishes sensations from each

other by the inherent differences in the sensations; this requires

explanation. When the sensations are different, the sensitive

being distinguishes them by their differences; when they are alike,

he distinguishes them because he is aware of them one beyond the

other. Otherwise, how could he distinguish between two equal objects

simultaneously experienced? He would necessarily confound the two

objects and take them for one object, especially under a system

which professed that the representative sensations of space have

no extension.

When we become aware of the two sensations to be compared, their

impression is made, each object is perceived, both are perceived,

but for all that their relation is not perceived. If the judgment

of this relation were merely a sensation, and came to me solely

from the object itself, my judgments would never be mistaken, for

it is never untrue that I feel what I feel.

Why then am I mistaken as to the relation between these two sticks,

especially when they are not parallel? Why, for example, do I say

the small stick is a third of the large, when it is only a quarter?

Why is the picture, which is the sensation, unlike its model which

is the object? It is because I am active when I judge, because

the operation of comparison is at fault; because my understanding,

which judges of relations, mingles its errors with the truth of

sensations, which only reveal to me things.

Add to this a consideration which will, I feel sure, appeal to

you when you have thought about it: it is this--If we were purely

passive in the use of our senses, there would be no communication

between them; it would be impossible to know that the body we are

touching and the thing we are looking at is the same. Either we

should never perceive anything outside ourselves, or there would

be for us five substances perceptible by the senses, whose identity

we should have no means of perceiving.

This power of my mind which brings my sensations together and

compares them may be called by any name; let it be called attention,

meditation, reflection, or what you will; it is still true that

it is in me and not in things, that it is I alone who produce it,

though I only produce it when I receive an impression from things.

Though I am compelled to feel or not to feel, I am free to examine

more or less what I feel.

Being now, so to speak, sure of myself, I begin to look at things

outside myself, and I behold myself with a sort of shudder flung

at random into this vast universe, plunged as it were into the vast

number of entities, knowing nothing of what they are in themselves

or in relation to me. I study them, I observe them; and the first

object which suggests itself for comparison with them is myself.

All that I perceive through the senses is matter, and I deduce

all the essential properties of matter from the sensible qualities

which make me perceive it, qualities which are inseparable from it.

I see it sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest, [Footnote: This

repose is, if you prefer it, merely relative; but as we perceive

more or less of motion, we may plainly conceive one of two extremes,

which is rest; and we conceive it so clearly that we are even

disposed to take for absolute rest what is only relative. But it

is not true that motion is of the essence of matter, if matter may

be conceived of as at rest.] hence I infer that neither motion nor

rest is essential to it, but motion, being an action, is the result

of a cause of which rest is only the absence. When, therefore,

there is nothing acting upon matter it does not move, and for the

very reason that rest and motion are indifferent to it, its natural

state is a state of rest.

I perceive two sorts of motions of bodies, acquired motion and

spontaneous or voluntary motion. In the first the cause is external

to the body moved, in the second it is within. I shall not conclude

from that that the motion, say of a watch, is spontaneous, for if no

external cause operated upon the spring it would run down and the

watch would cease to go. For the same reason I should not admit

that the movements of fluids are spontaneous, neither should I

attribute spontaneous motion to fire which causes their fluidity.

[Footnote: Chemists regard phlogiston or the element of fire as

diffused, motionless, and stagnant in the compounds of which it

forms part, until external forces set it free, collect it and set

it in motion, and change it into fire.]

You ask me if the movements of animals are spontaneous; my answer

is, "I cannot tell," but analogy points that way. You ask me again,

how do I know that there are spontaneous movements? I tell you, "I

know it because I feel them." I want to move my arm and I move it

without any other immediate cause of the movement but my own will.

In vain would any one try to argue me out of this feeling, it is

stronger than any proofs; you might as well try to convince me that

I do not exist.

If there were no spontaneity in men's actions, nor in anything

that happens on this earth, it would be all the more difficult to

imagine a first cause for all motion. For my own part, I feel myself

so thoroughly convinced that the natural state of matter is a state

of rest, and that it has no power of action in itself, that when

I see a body in motion I at once assume that it is either a living

body or that this motion has been imparted to it. My mind declines

to accept in any way the idea of inorganic matter moving of its

own accord, or giving rise to any action.

Yet this visible universe consists of matter, matter diffused and

dead, [Footnote: I have tried hard to grasp the idea of a living

molecule, but in vain. The idea of matter feeling without any senses

seems to me unintelligible and self-contradictory. To accept or

reject this idea one must first understand it, and I confess that

so far I have not succeeded.] matter which has none of the cohesion,

the organisation, the common feeling of the parts of a living body,

for it is certain that we who are parts have no consciousness of

the whole. This same universe is in motion, and in its movements,

ordered, uniform, and subject to fixed laws, it has none of that

freedom which appears in the spontaneous movements of men and

animals. So the world is not some huge animal which moves of its

own accord; its movements are therefore due to some external cause,

a cause which I cannot perceive, but the inner voice makes this

cause so apparent to me that I cannot watch the course of the

sun without imagining a force which drives it, and when the earth

revolves I think I see the hand that sets it in motion.

If I must accept general laws whose essential relation to matter

is unperceived by me, how much further have I got? These laws, not

being real things, not being substances, have therefore some other

basis unknown to me. Experiment and observation have acquainted us

with the laws of motion; these laws determine the results without

showing their causes; they are quite inadequate to explain the

system of the world and the course of the universe. With the help

of dice Descartes made heaven and earth; but he could not set his

dice in motion, nor start the action of his centrifugal force without

the help of rotation. Newton discovered the law of gravitation; but

gravitation alone would soon reduce the universe to a motionless

mass; he was compelled to add a projectile force to account for

the elliptical course of the celestial bodies; let Newton show us

the hand that launched the planets in the tangent of their orbits.

The first causes of motion are not to be found in matter; matter

receives and transmits motion, but does not produce it. The more

I observe the action and reaction of the forces of nature playing

on one another, the more I see that we must always go back from one

effect to another, till we arrive at a first cause in some will;

for to assume an infinite succession of causes is to assume that

there is no first cause. In a word, no motion which is not caused

by another motion can take place, except by a spontaneous, voluntary

action; inanimate bodies have no action but motion, and there is

no real action without will. This is my first principle. I believe,

therefore, that there is a will which sets the universe in motion

and gives life to nature. This is my first dogma, or the first

article of my creed.

How does a will produce a physical and corporeal action? I cannot

tell, but I perceive that it does so in myself; I will to do

something and I do it; I will to move my body and it moves, but

if an inanimate body, when at rest, should begin to move itself,

the thing is incomprehensible and without precedent. The will is

known to me in its action, not in its nature. I know this will as

a cause of motion, but to conceive of matter as producing motion

is clearly to conceive of an effect without a cause, which is not

to conceive at all.

It is no more possible for me to conceive how my will moves my body

than to conceive how my sensations affect my mind. I do not even

know why one of these mysteries has seemed less inexplicable than the

other. For my own part, whether I am active or passive, the means

of union of the two substances seem to me absolutely incomprehensible.

It is very strange that people make this very incomprehensibility a

step towards the compounding of the two substances, as if operations

so different in kind were more easily explained in one case than

in two.

The doctrine I have just laid down is indeed obscure; but at least

it suggests a meaning and there is nothing in it repugnant to reason

or experience; can we say as much of materialism? Is it not plain

that if motion is essential to matter it would be inseparable from

it, it would always be present in it in the same degree, always

present in every particle of matter, always the same in each

particle of matter, it would not be capable of transmission, it

could neither increase nor diminish, nor could we ever conceive of

matter at rest. When you tell me that motion is not essential to

matter but necessary to it, you try to cheat me with words which

would be easier to refute if there was a little more sense in them.

For either the motion of matter arises from the matter itself and

is therefore essential to it; or it arises from an external cause

and is not necessary to the matter, because the motive cause acts

upon it; we have got back to our original difficulty.

The chief source of human error is to be found in general and abstract

ideas; the jargon of metaphysics has never led to the discovery of

any single truth, and it has filled philosophy with absurdities of

which we are ashamed as soon as we strip them of their long words.

Tell me, my friend, when they talk to you of a blind force diffused

throughout nature, do they present any real idea to your mind? They

think they are saying something by these vague expressions--universal

force, essential motion--but they are saying nothing at all. The idea

of motion is nothing more than the idea of transference from place

to place; there is no motion without direction; for no individual

can move all ways at once. In what direction then does matter move

of necessity? Has the whole body of matter a uniform motion, or

has each atom its own motion? According to the first idea the whole

universe must form a solid and indivisible mass; according to the

second it can only form a diffused and incoherent fluid, which

would make the union of any two atoms impossible. What direction

shall be taken by this motion common to all matter? Shall it be

in a straight line, in a circle, or from above downwards, to the

right or to the left? If each molecule has its own direction, what

are the causes of all these directions and all these differences?

If every molecule or atom only revolved on its own axis, nothing

would ever leave its place and there would be no transmitted motion,

and even then this circular movement would require to follow some

direction. To set matter in motion by an abstraction is to utter

words without meaning, and to attribute to matter a given direction

is to assume a determining cause. The more examples I take, the

more causes I have to explain, without ever finding a common agent

which controls them. Far from being able to picture to myself an

entire absence of order in the fortuitous concurrence of elements,

I cannot even imagine such a strife, and the chaos of the universe

is less conceivable to me than its harmony. I can understand that

the mechanism of the universe may not be intelligible to the human

mind, but when a man sets to work to explain it, he must say what

men can understand.

If matter in motion points me to a will, matter in motion according

to fixed laws points me to an intelligence; that is the second article

of my creed. To act, to compare, to choose, are the operations of

an active, thinking being; so this being exists. Where do you find

him existing, you will say? Not merely in the revolving heavens,

nor in the sun which gives us light, not in myself alone, but in

the sheep that grazes, the bird that flies, the stone that falls,

and the leaf blown by the wind.

I judge of the order of the world, although I know nothing of its

purpose, for to judge of this order it is enough for me to compare

the parts one with another, to study their co-operation, their

relations, and to observe their united action. I know not why the

universe exists, but I see continually how it is changed; I never

fail to perceive the close connection by which the entities of

which it consists lend their aid one to another. I am like a man

who sees the works of a watch for the first time; he is never weary

of admiring the mechanism, though he does not know the use of the

instrument and has never seen its face. I do not know what this is

for, says he, but I see that each part of it is fitted to the rest,

I admire the workman in the details of his work, and I am quite

certain that all these wheels only work together in this fashion

for some common end which I cannot perceive.

Let us compare the special ends, the means, the ordered relations

of every kind, then let us listen to the inner voice of feeling;

what healthy mind can reject its evidence? Unless the eyes are

blinded by prejudices, can they fail to see that the visible order

of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence? What sophisms

must be brought together before we fail to understand the harmony

of existence and the wonderful co-operation of every part for the

maintenance of the rest? Say what you will of combinations and

probabilities; what do you gain by reducing me to silence if you

cannot gain my consent? And how can you rob me of the spontaneous

feeling which, in spite of myself, continually gives you the lie?

If organised bodies had come together fortuitously in all sorts of

ways before assuming settled forms, if stomachs are made without

mouths, feet without heads, hands without arms, imperfect organs of

every kind which died because they could not preserve their life,

why do none of these imperfect attempts now meet our eyes; why has

nature at length prescribed laws to herself which she did not at

first recognise? I must not be surprised if that which is possible

should happen, and if the improbability of the event is compensated

for by the number of the attempts. I grant this; yet if any one

told me that printed characters scattered broadcast had produced

the Aeneid all complete, I would not condescend to take a single

step to verify this falsehood. You will tell me I am forgetting the

multitude of attempts. But how many such attempts must I assume to

bring the combination within the bounds of probability? For my own

part the only possible assumption is that the chances are infinity

to one that the product is not the work of chance. In addition to

this, chance combinations yield nothing but products of the same

nature as the elements combined, so that life and organisation will

not be produced by a flow of atoms, and a chemist when making his

compounds will never give them thought and feeling in his crucible.

[Footnote: Could one believe, if one had not seen it, that human

absurdity could go so far? Amatus Lusitanus asserts that he saw a

little man an inch long enclosed in a glass, which Julius Camillus,

like a second Prometheus, had made by alchemy. Paracelsis (De

natura rerum) teaches the method of making these tiny men, and he

maintains that the pygmies, fauns, satyrs, and nymphs have been made

by chemistry. Indeed I cannot see that there is anything more to

be done, to establish the possibility of these facts, unless it

is to assert that organic matter resists the heat of fire and that

its molecules can preserve their life in the hottest furnace.]

I was surprised and almost shocked when I read Neuwentit. How

could this man desire to make a book out of the wonders of nature,

wonders which show the wisdom of the author of nature? His book would

have been as large as the world itself before he had exhausted his

subject, and as soon as we attempt to give details, that greatest

wonder of all, the concord and harmony of the whole, escapes us.

The mere generation of living organic bodies is the despair of the

human mind; the insurmountable barrier raised by nature between the

various species, so that they should not mix with one another, is

the clearest proof of her intention. She is not content to have

established order, she has taken adequate measures to prevent the

disturbance of that order.

There is not a being in the universe which may not be regarded as

in some respects the common centre of all, around which they are

grouped, so that they are all reciprocally end and means in relation

to each other. The mind is confused and lost amid these innumerable

relations, not one of which is itself confused or lost in the

crowd. What absurd assumptions are required to deduce all this

harmony from the blind mechanism of matter set in motion by chance!

In vain do those who deny the unity of intention manifested in the

relations of all the parts of this great whole, in vain do they

conceal their nonsense under abstractions, co-ordinations, general

principles, symbolic expressions; whatever they do I find it

impossible to conceive of a system of entities so firmly ordered

unless I believe in an intelligence that orders them. It is not in

my power to believe that passive and dead matter can have brought

forth living and feeling beings, that blind chance has brought

forth intelligent beings, that that which does not think has brought

forth thinking beings.

I believe, therefore, that the world is governed by a wise and

powerful will; I see it or rather I feel it, and it is a great

thing to know this. But has this same world always existed, or has

it been created? Is there one source of all things? Are there two

or many? What is their nature? I know not; and what concern is it

of mine? When these things become of importance to me I will try

to learn them; till then I abjure these idle speculations, which may

trouble my peace, but cannot affect my conduct nor be comprehended

by my reason.

Recollect that I am not preaching my own opinion but explaining

it. Whether matter is eternal or created, whether its origin is

passive or not, it is still certain that the whole is one, and that

it proclaims a single intelligence; for I see nothing that is not

part of the same ordered system, nothing which does not co-operate

to the same end, namely, the conservation of all within the

established order. This being who wills and can perform his will,

this being active through his own power, this being, whoever he may

be, who moves the universe and orders all things, is what I call

God. To this name I add the ideas of intelligence, power, will,

which I have brought together, and that of kindness which is their

necessary consequence; but for all this I know no more of the being

to which I ascribe them. He hides himself alike from my senses

and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more perplexed

I am; I know full well that he exists, and that he exists of himself

alone; I know that my existence depends on his, and that everything

I know depends upon him also. I see God everywhere in his works;

I feel him within myself; I behold him all around me; but if I try

to ponder him himself, if I try to find out where he is, what he

is, what is his substance, he escapes me and my troubled spirit

finds nothing.

Convinced of my unfitness, I shall never argue about the nature of

God unless I am driven to it by the feeling of his relations with

myself. Such reasonings are always rash; a wise man should venture

on them with trembling, he should be certain that he can never

sound their abysses; for the most insolent attitude towards God is

not to abstain from thinking of him, but to think evil of him.

After the discovery of such of his attributes as enable me to conceive

of his existence, I return to myself, and I try to discover what is

my place in the order of things which he governs, and I can myself

examine. At once, and beyond possibility of doubt, I discover my

species; for by my own will and the instruments I can control to

carry out my will, I have more power to act upon all bodies about

me, either to make use of or to avoid their action at my pleasure,

than any of them has power to act upon me against my will by mere

physical impulsion; and through my intelligence I am the only one

who can examine all the rest. What being here below, except man,

can observe others, measure, calculate, forecast their motions,

their effects, and unite, so to speak, the feeling of a common

existence with that of his individual existence? What is there so

absurd in the thought that all things are made for me, when I alone

can relate all things to myself?

It is true, therefore, that man is lord of the earth on which he

dwells; for not only does he tame all the beasts, not only does he

control its elements through his industry; but he alone knows how

to control it; by contemplation he takes possession of the stars

which he cannot approach. Show me any other creature on earth who

can make a fire and who can behold with admiration the sun. What!

can I observe and know all creatures and their relations; can

I feel what is meant by order, beauty, and virtue; can I consider

the universe and raise myself towards the hand that guides it; can

I love good and perform it; and should I then liken myself to the

beasts? Wretched soul, it is your gloomy philosophy which makes

you like the beasts; or rather in vain do you seek to degrade

yourself; your genius belies your principles, your kindly heart

belies your doctrines, and even the abuse of your powers proves

their excellence in your own despite.

For myself, I am not pledged to the support of any system. I am a

plain and honest man, one who is not carried away by party spirit,

one who has no ambition to be head of a sect; I am content with

the place where God has set me; I see nothing, next to God himself,

which is better than my species; and if I had to choose my place in

the order of creation, what more could I choose than to be a man!

I am not puffed up by this thought, I am deeply moved by it; for

this state was no choice of mine, it was not due to the deserts

of a creature who as yet did not exist. Can I behold myself thus

distinguished without congratulating myself on this post of honour,

without blessing the hand which bestowed it? The first return to

self has given birth to a feeling of gratitude and thankfulness

to the author of my species, and this feeling calls forth my first

homage to the beneficent Godhead. I worship his Almighty power and

my heart acknowledges his mercies. Is it not a natural consequence

of our self-love to honour our protector and to love our benefactor?

But when, in my desire to discover my own place within my species,

I consider its different ranks and the men who fill them, where am

I now? What a sight meets my eyes! Where is now the order I perceived?

Nature showed me a scene of harmony and proportion; the human race

shows me nothing but confusion and disorder. The elements agree

together; men are in a state of chaos. The beasts are happy; their

king alone is wretched. O Wisdom, where are thy laws? O Providence,

is this thy rule over the world? Merciful God, where is thy Power?

I behold the earth, and there is evil upon it.

Would you believe it, dear friend, from these gloomy thoughts and

apparent contradictions, there was shaped in my mind the sublime

idea of the soul, which all my seeking had hitherto failed to

discover? While I meditated upon man's nature, I seemed to discover

two distinct principles in it; one of them raised him to the study

of the eternal truths, to the love of justice, and of true morality,

to the regions of the world of thought, which the wise delight to

contemplate; the other led him downwards to himself, made him the

slave of his senses, of the passions which are their instruments,

and thus opposed everything suggested to him by the former principle.

When I felt myself carried away, distracted by these conflicting

motives, I said, No; man is not one; I will and I will not; I feel

myself at once a slave and a free man; I perceive what is right, I

love it, and I do what is wrong; I am active when I listen to the

voice of reason; I am passive when I am carried away by my passions;

and when I yield, my worst suffering is the knowledge that I might

have resisted.

Young man, hear me with confidence. I will always be honest with

you. If conscience is the creature of prejudice, I am certainly

wrong, and there is no such thing as a proof of morality; but if

to put oneself first is an inclination natural to man, and if the

first sentiment of justice is moreover inborn in the human heart,

let those who say man is a simple creature remove these contradictions

and I will grant that there is but one substance.

You will note that by this term 'substance' I understand generally

the being endowed with some primitive quality, apart from all special

and secondary modifications. If then all the primitive qualities

which are known to us can be united in one and the same being, we

should only acknowledge one substance; but if there are qualities

which are mutually exclusive, there are as many different substances

as there are such exclusions. You will think this over; for my

own part, whatever Locke may say, it is enough for me to recognise

matter as having merely extension and divisibility to convince

myself that it cannot think, and if a philosopher tells me that

trees feel and rocks think [Footnote: It seems to me that modern

philosophy, far from saying that rocks think, has discovered that

men do not think. It perceives nothing more in nature than sensitive

beings; and the only difference it finds between a man and a stone

is that a man is a sensitive being which experiences sensations, and

a stone is a sensitive being which does not experience sensations.

But if it is true that all matter feels, where shall I find the

sensitive unit, the individual ego? Shall it be in each molecule of

matter or in bodies as aggregates of molecules? Shall I place this

unity in fluids and solids alike, in compounds and in elements? You

tell me nature consists of individuals. But what are these individuals?

Is that stone an individual or an aggregate of individuals? Is

it a single sensitive being, or are there as many beings in it as

there are grains of sand? If every elementary atom is a sensitive

being, how shall I conceive of that intimate communication by which

one feels within the other, so that their two egos are blended in

one? Attraction may be a law of nature whose mystery is unknown to

us; but at least we conceive that there is nothing in attraction

acting in proportion to mass which is contrary to extension and

divisibility. Can you conceive of sensation in the same way? The

sensitive parts have extension, but the sensitive being is one and

indivisible; he cannot be cut in two, he is a whole or he is nothing;

therefore the sensitive being is not a material body. I know not

how our materialists understand it, but it seems to me that the

same difficulties which have led them to reject thought, should

have made them also reject feeling; and I see no reason why, when

the first step has been taken, they should not take the second

too; what more would it cost them? Since they are certain they do

not think, why do they dare to affirm that they feel?] in vain will

he perplex me with his cunning arguments; I merely regard him as

a dishonest sophist, who prefers to say that stones have feeling

rather than that men have souls.

Suppose a deaf man denies the existence of sounds because he has

never heard them. I put before his eyes a stringed instrument and

cause it to sound in unison by means of another instrument concealed

from him; the deaf man sees the chord vibrate. I tell him, "The

sound makes it do that." "Not at all," says he, "the string itself

is the cause of the vibration; to vibrate in that way is a quality

common to all bodies." "Then show me this vibration in other

bodies," I answer, "or at least show me its cause in this string."

"I cannot," replies the deaf man; "but because I do not understand

how that string vibrates why should I try to explain it by means of

your sounds, of which I have not the least idea? It is explaining

one obscure fact by means of a cause still more obscure. Make me

perceive your sounds; or I say there are no such things."

The more I consider thought and the nature of the human mind, the

more likeness I find between the arguments of the materialists and

those of the deaf man. Indeed, they are deaf to the inner voice

which cries aloud to them, in a tone which can hardly be mistaken.

A machine does not think, there is neither movement nor form which

can produce reflection; something within thee tries to break the

bands which confine it; space is not thy measure, the whole universe

does not suffice to contain thee; thy sentiments, thy desires, thy

anxiety, thy pride itself, have another origin than this small body

in which thou art imprisoned.

No material creature is in itself active, and I am active. In vain

do you argue this point with me; I feel it, and it is this feeling

which speaks to me more forcibly than the reason which disputes it.

I have a body which is acted upon by other bodies, and it acts in

turn upon them; there is no doubt about this reciprocal action;

but my will is independent of my senses; I consent or I resist;

I yield or I win the victory, and I know very well in myself when

I have done what I wanted and when I have merely given way to

my passions. I have always the power to will, but not always the

strength to do what I will. When I yield to temptation I surrender

myself to the action of external objects. When I blame myself for

this weakness, I listen to my own will alone; I am a slave in my

vices, a free man in my remorse; the feeling of freedom is never

effaced in me but when I myself do wrong, and when I at length

prevent the voice of the soul from protesting against the authority

of the body.

I am only aware of will through the consciousness of my own will,

and intelligence is no better known to me. When you ask me what

is the cause which determines my will, it is my turn to ask what

cause determines my judgment; for it is plain that these two causes

are but one; and if you understand clearly that man is active in

his judgments, that his intelligence is only the power to compare

and judge, you will see that his freedom is only a similar power

or one derived from this; he chooses between good and evil as he

judges between truth and falsehood; if his judgment is at fault, he

chooses amiss. What then is the cause that determines his will? It

is his judgment. And what is the cause that determines his judgment?

It is his intelligence, his power of judging; the determining cause

is in himself. Beyond that, I understand nothing.

No doubt I am not free not to desire my own welfare, I am not free

to desire my own hurt; but my freedom consists in this very thing,

that I can will what is for my own good, or what I esteem as such,

without any external compulsion. Does it follow that I am not my

own master because I cannot be other than myself?

The motive power of all action is in the will of a free creature; we

can go no farther. It is not the word freedom that is meaningless, but

the word necessity. To suppose some action which is not the effect

of an active motive power is indeed to suppose effects without

cause, to reason in a vicious circle. Either there is no original

impulse, or every original impulse has no antecedent cause, and

there is no will properly so-called without freedom. Man is therefore

free to act, and as such he is animated by an immaterial substance;

that is the third article of my creed. From these three you will

easily deduce the rest, so that I need not enumerate them.

If man is at once active and free, he acts of his own accord; what

he does freely is no part of the system marked out by Providence

and it cannot be imputed to Providence. Providence does not will

the evil that man does when he misuses the freedom given to him;

neither does Providence prevent him doing it, either because the

wrong done by so feeble a creature is as nothing in its eyes, or

because it could not prevent it without doing a greater wrong and

degrading his nature. Providence has made him free that he may

choose the good and refuse the evil. It has made him capable of this

choice if he uses rightly the faculties bestowed upon him, but it

has so strictly limited his powers that the misuse of his freedom

cannot disturb the general order. The evil that man does reacts

upon himself without affecting the system of the world, without

preventing the preservation of the human species in spite of

itself. To complain that God does not prevent us from doing wrong

is to complain because he has made man of so excellent a nature,

that he has endowed his actions with that morality by which they

are ennobled, that he has made virtue man's birthright. Supreme

happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content

we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom, we are

tempted by our passions and restrained by conscience. What more

could divine power itself have done on our behalf? Could it have made

our nature a contradiction, and have given the prize of well-doing

to one who was incapable of evil? To prevent a man from wickedness,

should Providence have restricted him to instinct and made him

a fool? Not so, O God of my soul, I will never reproach thee that

thou hast created me in thine own image, that I may be free and

good and happy like my Maker!

It is the abuse of our powers that makes us unhappy and wicked.

Our cares, our sorrows, our sufferings are of our own making. Moral

ills are undoubtedly the work of man, and physical ills would be

nothing but for our vices which have made us liable to them. Has

not nature made us feel our needs as a means to our preservation!

Is not bodily suffering a sign that the machine is out of order

and needs attention? Death.... Do not the wicked poison their own

life and ours? Who would wish to live for ever? Death is the cure

for the evils you bring upon yourself; nature would not have you

suffer perpetually. How few sufferings are felt by man living in

a state of primitive simplicity! His life is almost entirely free

from suffering and from passion; he neither fears nor feels death;

if he feels it, his sufferings make him desire it; henceforth it

is no evil in his eyes. If we were but content to be ourselves we

should have no cause to complain of our lot; but in the search for

an imaginary good we find a thousand real ills. He who cannot bear

a little pain must expect to suffer greatly. If a man injures his

constitution by dissipation, you try to cure him with medicine;

the ill he fears is added to the ill he feels; the thought of

death makes it horrible and hastens its approach; the more we seek

to escape from it, the more we are aware of it; and we go through

life in the fear of death, blaming nature for the evils we have

inflicted on ourselves by our neglect of her laws.

O Man! seek no further for the author of evil; thou art he. There

is no evil but the evil you do or the evil you suffer, and both

come from yourself. Evil in general can only spring from disorder,

and in the order of the world I find a never failing system. Evil

in particular cases exists only in the mind of those who experience

it; and this feeling is not the gift of nature, but the work of

man himself. Pain has little power over those who, having thought

little, look neither before nor after. Take away our fatal progress,

take away our faults and our vices, take away man's handiwork, and

all is well.

Where all is well, there is no such thing as injustice. Justice and

goodness are inseparable; now goodness is the necessary result of

boundless power and of that self-love which is innate in all sentient

beings. The omnipotent projects himself, so to speak, into the being

of his creatures. Creation and preservation are the everlasting

work of power; it does not act on that which has no existence; God

is not the God of the dead; he could not harm and destroy without

injury to himself. The omnipotent can only will what is good.

[Footnote: The ancients were right when they called the supreme

God Optimus Maximus, but it would have been better to say Maximus

Optimus, for his goodness springs from his power, he is good

because he is great.] Therefore he who is supremely good, because

he is supremely powerful, must also be supremely just, otherwise

he would contradict himself; for that love of order which creates

order we call goodness and that love of order which preserves order

we call justice.

Men say God owes nothing to his creatures. I think he owes them

all he promised when he gave them their being. Now to give them

the idea of something good and to make them feel the need of it,

is to promise it to them. The more closely I study myself, the more

carefully I consider, the more plainly do I read these words, "Be

just and you will be happy." It is not so, however, in the present

condition of things, the wicked prospers and the oppression of the

righteous continues. Observe how angry we are when this expectation

is disappointed. Conscience revolts and murmurs against her Creator;

she exclaims with cries and groans, "Thou hast deceived me."

"I have deceived thee, rash soul! Who told thee this? Is thy soul

destroyed? Hast thou ceased to exist? O Brutus! O my son! let there

be no stain upon the close of thy noble life; do not abandon thy

hope and thy glory with thy corpse upon the plains of Philippi.

Why dost thou say, 'Virtue is naught,' when thou art about to enjoy

the reward of virtue? Thou art about to die! Nay, thou shalt live,

and thus my promise is fulfilled."

One might judge from the complaints of impatient men that God owes

them the reward before they have deserved it, that he is bound to

pay for virtue in advance. Oh! let us first be good and then we

shall be happy. Let us not claim the prize before we have won it,

nor demand our wages before we have finished our work. "It is not

in the lists that we crown the victors in the sacred games," says

Plutarch, "it is when they have finished their course."