does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises
himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and
admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which
arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have
done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest
apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence
and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to
attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for
himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental
principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there
is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the
right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to
it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has
another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on
the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the
paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the
moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.
{63}
Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of
the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to
attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral
law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and
imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love
them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love
those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to
you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."
"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing
again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the
children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and
to the evil." [Footnote 15]
[Footnote 15: Luke vi. 32, 33, 35.]
"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of
the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If
we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other
respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point
with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.
{64}
It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion
of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of
those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is
the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on
the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law
to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet
melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a
person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a
modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light
as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea
of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a
moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not
a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the
moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power
attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the
relations of men with one another.
{65}
Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there
would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does
not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to
govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice
cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,
as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed
to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as
essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the
social bond;--the means of peace and of Union amongst
mankind;--the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and
defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every
man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep
others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him
to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and
respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the
man who has a right has absolutely nothing.
{66}
Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of
physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ
the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which
triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify
the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made
his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis
of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of
right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the
stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of
duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of
defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which
serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society
upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away
the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]
[Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir
considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in
the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur
l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,
l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"
(2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]
{67}
This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in
considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the
independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the
theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral
elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,
the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,
sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the
independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely
strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of
man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their
duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for
and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,
and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to
honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's
existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which
the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense
which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:
their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.
{68}
I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the
principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from
man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man
only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and
mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free
and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he
is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his
own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not
make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even
whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot
withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his
future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is
essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its
subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.
{69}
Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working
its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without
further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When
the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and
acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his
act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,
for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not
merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they
find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced
to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the
laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal
punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of
remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the
proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is
that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the
hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove
that it may be always reawakened.
{70}
Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.
Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that
to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which
feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.
As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an
idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made
of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,
ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of
merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common
sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the
accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.
It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and
most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the
political organisation of society, and in the problems which
concern the eternal future.
{71}
However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or
delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of
a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the
responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its
complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and
equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.
Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have
scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's
nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have
considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely
apart from every other element and every other consideration.
Those moral facts are briefly as follows:--
The distinction between moral good and moral evil.
The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil.
Moral Liberty.
Moral Responsibility.
Moral merit and demerit.
{72}
These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the
proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these
truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are
they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,
or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they
self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which
form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot
elude this question.
I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;
that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not
one of those laws of fate by which the material world is
governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free
world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as
law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.
Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man--upon man
of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without
enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life
is passed?
{73}
Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law
emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense
which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,
Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order
reigning in it:--
"Je ne puis songer
Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."
I cannot think
This clock exists and never had a maker.
In the moral world we have to do with something far different
from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine
constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is
to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free
agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to
accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the
supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the
expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both
contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant
found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is
nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human
Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most
clearly, most undeniably.
{74}
Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose
it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river
without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free
agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete
and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and
loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law
reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility
reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human
invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral
responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and
just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is
contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral
responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that
is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and
impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in
a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to
establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.
{75}
Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human
nature--that is, the distinction between moral good and moral
evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and
demerit,--are necessarily and intimately connected with the
truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God
moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and
essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a
thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of
man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble
to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that
ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is
reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its
authority.
Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and
described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable
from Religion.
{76}
What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the
heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are
distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to
each other in the unity of the human being?
The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the
study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms
Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most
remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant
struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle
what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent
an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and
what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected
in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by
the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to
all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the
moral law, the moral judgment comes.
{77}
"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero
prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up
unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just
providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of
the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was
the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman
Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very
Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after
having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice
of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on
the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on
account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had
governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by
those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is
incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in
this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and
Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,
sometimes manifests itself there with _éclat_, and sometimes
remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre
mysteries.
{78}
Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall
truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now
occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore
order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;
in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still
mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is
intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as
little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in
that of the individual man.
In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far
from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they
progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days
exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to
events of the most contradictory character: everything in the
world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts
has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.
{79}
Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more
than feeble convictions--dim hopes? On the other side, in the
midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power
over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and
confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the
material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and
paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have
plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the
fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human
conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in
our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;
intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's
soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!
{80}
Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and
indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have
limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the
advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I
have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,
natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of
man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the
threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general
that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which
it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his
unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity
alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and
security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is
not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic
value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human
soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect
harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already
tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful
expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the
moral being.
{81}
The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is
the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral
ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been
contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour
it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure
their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,
Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is
singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most
illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,
understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and
incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear
light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to
their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for
conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they
taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they
founded schools or sects.
{82}
The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a
philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and
instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around
him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain
special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of
mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of
discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to
the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the
moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his
disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,
and then to all men:--"Save your soul, for what would it profit a
man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and
preach to all nations."
What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so
ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so
universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?
{83}
And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has
been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward
movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly
arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,
it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of
Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and
the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen
centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and
evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that
Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to
fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same
task, and promises herself fresh success.
Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me
at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the
Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which
she entertains in the midst of her trials.
{84}
Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,
cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them
proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are
solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,
regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human
actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a
careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them
to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both
amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the
regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how
serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that
sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the
nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same
time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the
same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man
the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his
soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates
it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it
with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared
for every sacrifice.
{85}
Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine
of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin
without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the
sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so
well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely
and so austerely?