MASTER NEGATIVE NO. 93-81605- MICROFILMED 1993 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or other reproduction is not to be "used for anv purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research." If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. A UTHOR: COUSIN, VICTOR TITLE: LECTURES ON THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL PLACE: NEW YORK DA TE: 1857 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT * Master Negative # BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record 194C85 P2 Restrictions on Use: Cousin, Victor, 1792-1867. Lectures on the true, the beautiful, and the good. By M. V. Cousin. Increased by an appendix on French art. Tr, with the approbation of M. Cousin, by O. W. Wight ... 3d- e d. Edinbur g h, T ..fr-Tr-Cl y-^ pM.V;» K INCREASED BT |ln ^i^pnVn aw ixtnt\ Jlrt TRANSLATED, WITH THE APPEOBATION OF M. COUSIN, BY 0. W. WIGHT, TKAN8LATOB Or COU8IN*8 " COUBSB OP THE HISTORY OF HODESN PHILOSOPHY," AHBBICAil EDITOB OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIB WILLIAM HAMILTOK, BABT., AITTHOB OF "the BOMANCE of ABELABD and HELOISE," ETC., ETC. ** God is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body." The Platoiostb and the Fathebs. NEW YOKK: TV APPLETON & CO., 346 & 348 BROADWAY, AND 16 LITTLE BRITAIN, LONDON. M DCCC LVII. ' i > J • LECT.URB'S > I « •» » ••in < » ' bs ' THE TETJE, THE BEATJTIEUL, AND THE GOOD. # ■ X - » 1 INCREASED BT |in %ipnVn m ixtu\ pi TRANSLATED, WITH THE APPROBATION OF M. COUSIN, BT 0. W. WIGHT, TBAK6LAT0B OF COUSIN'S " COtntSE OF THE HI8TOKY OF HODERN PHILOSOPHY," AMEBIC A4 EDITOB OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF 8IE WILLIAM HAMILTON, BAET., ArTHOB OF "THE BOMANCE OF ABELABD AND HELOISE," ETC., ETC. *♦ God is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body." The Flatonistb akd the Fatuebs. NEW YORK: TV APPLETON & CO., 346 & 348 BROADWAY, AND 16 LITTLE BRITAIN, LONDON. M DCCC LVII. • • • •::: • : 1 •*• •*• .• • t •• • « t f . t I • t « • • • iSr.tct«vI according to Act ot Coogress, in the year 1854, By D. APPLETON & COMPANY, In the Gerk*8 Office of the District Court of the United States for the So^^^bom District of New York. TO SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, BART., ^tofe«or of Hoflic ant, mt^miits in tfie sanibetstta of EUinburflf, : WHO HAS oij:arly elucidated, and, with great erudition, SKETCHED THE HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF COMMON SENSE ; WHO, FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HIS ILLUSTRIOUS COUNTRYMAN, REID, HAS ESTABLISHED THE DOCTRINE OF THE IMMEDIATENESS OF PERCEPTION, THEREBY FORTIFYING PHILOSOPHY AGAINST THE ASSAULTS OF SKEPTICISM", ff WHO, TAKING A STEP IN ADVANCE OF ALL OTHERS, HAS GIVEN TO THE WORLD A DOCTRINE OF THE CONDITIONED, THE ORIGINALITY AND IMPORTANCE OF WHICH ARE ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE FEW QUALIFIED TO JUDGE IN SUCH MATTERS ; WHOSE NEW ANALYTIC OF LOGICAL FORMS COMPLETES THE HITHERTO UNFINISHED WORKS OF ARISTOTLE; THIS TRANSLATION OF M. COUSIN'S IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, IN ADMIRATION OF A PROFOUND AND INDEPENDENT THINKER, OF AN INCOMPARABLE MASTER OF PHILOSOPHIC CRITICISM; AS A TOKEN OF ESTEEM FOR A MAN IN WHOM GENIUS AND ALMOST UNEQUALLED LEARNING HAVE BEEN ADORNED BY TRUTH, BEAUTY, AND GOODNESS OF LIFE. 15108 a««m ; vol. v., Examination of Kant's System, lecture 8; 2d Series, vol. i., passim; vol. iii., Lectures on Judg- ment ; 3d Series. Fragments FhilosopJiiques, vol. iv., preface of the first edi- », 56 LECTUEE SECOND. Since every thing that bears the character of reflection cannot be primitive, and supposes an anterior state, it follows, that the principles which are the subject of our study could not have possessed at first the reflective and abstract character with which they are now marked, that they must have shown themselves at their origin in some particular circumstance, under a concrete and determinate form, and that in time they were disengaged from this form, in order to be invested with their actual, abstract, and universal fc»rm. These are the two ends of the chain ; it remains for us to seek how the human mind has been from one to the other, from the primitive state to the actual state, from the con- crete state to the abstract state. How can we go from the concrete to the abstract ? Evidently by that well-known operation which is called abstraction. Thus far, nothing is more simple. But it is necessary to discriminate between two sorts of abstractions. In presence of several particular objects, you omit the charac- tei-s which distinguish them, and separately consider a character which is common to them all— you abstract this character. Examine the nature and conditions of this abstraction ; it pro- ceeds by means of comparison, and it is founded on a certain number of particular and different cases. Take an example : examine how we form the abstract and general idea of color. Place before my eyes for the first time a white object. Can I here at the first step immediately arrive at a general idea of color ? Can I at first place on one side the whiteness, and on the other side the color? Analyze what passes within you. You experience a sensation of whiteness. Omit the individuality of this sensation, and you wholly destroy it ; you cannot neglect the whiteness, and preserve or abstract the color ; for, a single color beiqg given, which is a white color, if you take away that, tion, p. 87, etc. ; it wUl be found in different lectures of this volume, among others, in the third, On the value of Universal and Necessary Principles ; in the fifth, On Mysticism ; and in the eleventh. Primary Data of Common Sense. THE ORIGIN OF PEINCIPLES. 57 there remains to you absolutely nothing in regard to color. Let a blue object succeed this white object, then a red object, etc. ; having sensations differing from each other, you can neglect their differences, and only consider what they have in common, that they are sensations of sight, that is to say, colors, and you thus obtain the abstract and general idea of color. Take another ex- ample : if you had never smelled but a single flower, the violet, for instance, would you have had the idea of odor in general ? No. The odor of the violet would be for you the only odor, beyond which you would not seek, you could not even imagine another. But if to the odor of the violet is added that of the rose, and other diff*erent odors, in a greater or less number, pro- vided there be several, and a comparison be possible, and conse- quently, knowledge of their differences and their resemblances, then you will be able to form the general idea of odor. What is there in common between the odor of one flower and that of another flower, except that they have been smelled by aid of the same organ, and by the same person ? What here renders gen- eralization possible, is the unity of the sentient subject which re- members having been modified, while remaining the same, by different sensations; now, this subject can feel itself identical under different modifications, and it can conceive in the qualities of the object felt some resemblance and some dissimilarity, only on the condition of a certain number of sensations experienced, of odors smelled. In that case, but in that case alone, there can be comparison, abstraction, and generalization, because there are different and similar elements. In order to arrive at the abstract form of universal and neces- sary principles, we have no need of all this labor. Let us take again, for example, the principle of cause. If you suppose six particular cases from which you have abstracted this principle, it will contain neither more nor less ideas than if you had deduced it from a single one. To be able to say that the event which I see must have a cause, it is not indispensable to have seen several events succeed each other. The principle which compels me to 3* i 58 LECTURE SECOND. THE ORIGIN OF PRINCIBLES. 69- pronounce this judgment, is already complete in the first as in the last event ; it can change in respect to its object, it cannot change in itself; it neither increases nor decreases with the greater or less number of its applications. The only difference that it is subject to in regard to us, is, that we apply it whether we remark it or not, whether we disengage it or not from its particular application. The question is not to eliminate the par- ticularity of the phenomenon, wherein it appears to us, whether it be the fall of a leaf or the murder of a man, in order imme- diately to conceive, in a general and abstract manner, the neces- sity of a cause for every thing that begins to exist. Here, it is not because I have been the same, or have been affected in the same manner in several different cases, that I have come to this general and abstract conception. A leaf falls : at the same in- stant I think, I believe, I declare that this falling of the leaf must have a cause. A man has been killed : at the same instant I believe, I proclaim that this death must have a cause. Each one of these facts contains particular and variable circumstances, and something universal and necessary, to wit, both of them cannot but have a cause. Now, I am perfectly able to disengage the universal from the particular, in regard to the first fact as well as in regard to the second fact, for the universal is in the first quite as well as in the second. In fact, if the principle of causality is not universal in the first fact, neither will it be in the second, nor in the third, nor in a thousandth ; for a thousand are not nearer than one to the infinite, to absolute universality. It is the same, and still more evidently, with necessity. Pay particular attention to this point : if necessity is not in the first fact^ it cannot be in any ; for necessity cannot be formed little by little, and by suc- cessive increment. If, at the first murder that I see, I do not exclaim that this murder necessarily has a cause, at the thousandth murder, although it shall have been proved that all the others have had causes, I shall have the right to think that this new murder has, very probably, also its cause ; but I shall never have the right to declare that it necessarily has a cause. But when necessity and universality are already in a single case, that case alone is sufficient to entitle us to deduce them from it.^ We have established the existence of universal and necessary principles : we have marked their origin ; we have shown that they appear to us at first from a particular fact, and we have shown by what process, by what sort of abstraction the mind dis- eno-ages them from the determinate and concrete form which en- velops them, but does not constitute them. Our task, then, seems accomplished. But it is not,— we must defend the solution which we have just presented to you of the problem of the origin of principles against the theory of an eminent metaphysician, whose just authority might seduce you. M. Maine de Biran* is, like us, the declared adversary of the philosophy of sensa- tion,— he admits universal and necessary principles; but the origin which he assigns to them, puts them, according to us, in peril, and would lead back by a detour to the empirical school. Universal and necessary principles, if expressed in propositions, embrace several terms. For example, in the principle that every phenomenon supposes a cause ; and in this, that every quality supposes a substance, by the side of the ideas of quality and phe- nomenon are met the ideas of cause and substance, which seem the foundation of these two principles. M. de Biran pretends that the two ideas are anterior to the two principles which contain them, and that we at first find these ideas in ourselves in the consciousness that we are cause and substance, and that, these ideas once being thus acquired, induction transports them out of ourselves, makes us conceive causes and substances wherever there are phenomena and qualities, and that the principles of cause and substance are thus explained. I beg pardon of my illustrious » On immediate abstraction and comparative abstraction, see 1st Series, vol. i., Programme of the Course of 1817, and everywhere in our other Courses. . , » On M. de 5iran, on his merits and defects, see our Introduction at tne head of his Works. m • LECTURE SECOND. friend ; but it is impossible to admit in the least degree this explanation. The possession of the origin of the idea of cause is by no means sufficient for the possession of the origin of the principle of caus- ality ; for the idea and the principle are things essentially different. You have established, I would say to M. de Biran, that the idea of cause is found in that of productive volition : — you will to pro- duce certain effects, and you produce them ; hence the idea of a cause, of a particular cause, which is yourself; but between this fact and the axiom that all phenomena which appear necessarily have a cause, there is a gulf. You believe that you can bridge it over by induction. The idea of cause once found in ourselves, induction applies it, you say, wherever a new phenomenon appears. But let us not be deceived by words, and let us account for this extraordinary induction. The following dilemma I submit with confidence to the loyal dialectics of M. de Biran : Is the induction of which you speak universal and necessary ? Then it is a different name for the same thing. An induction which forces us universally and necessarily to associate the idea of cause with that of every phenomenon that begins to appear is precisely what is called the principle of causality. On the con- trary, is this induction neither universal nor necessary ? It cannot supply the place of the principle of cause, and the explanation destroys the thing to be explained. It follows from this that the only true result of these various psychological investigations is, that the idea of personal and free cause precedes all exercise of the principle of causality, but with- out explaining it. The theory which we combat is much more powerless in regard to other principles which, far from being exercised before the ideas from which it is pretended to deduce them, precede them, and even give birth to them. How have we acquired the idea of time and that of space, except by aid of the principle that the bodies and events, which we see are in time and in space ? We have THE OEIGIN OF PEINCIPLES. 61 seen^ that, without this principle, and confined to the data of the senses and consciousness, neither time nor space would exist for us. Whence have we deduced the idea of the infinite, except from the principle that the finite supposes the infinite, that all finite and defective things, Avhich we perceive by our senses and feel within us, are not sufficient for themselves, and suppose some- thing infinite and perfect ? Omit the principle, and the idea of the infinite is destroyed. Evidently this idea is derived from the application of the principle, and it is not the principle which is derived from the idea. Let us dwell a little longer on the principle of substances. The question is to know whether the idea of subject, of substance, precedes or follows the exercise of the principle. Upon what ground could the idea of substance be anterior to the principle that every quality supposes a substance ? Upon the ground alone that substance be the object of self-observation, as cause is said to be. When I produce a certain effect, I may perceive myself in action and as cause ; in that case, there would be no need of the intervention of any principle ; but it is not, it cannot be, the same, when the question is concerning the substance which is the basis of the phenomena of consciousness, of our qualities, our acts, our faculties even ; for this substance is not directly observable ; it does not perceive itself, it conceives itself. Consciousness per- ceives sensation, volition, thought, it does not perceive their subject. Who has ever perceived the soul ? Has it not been necessary, in order to attain this invisible essence, to set out from a principle which has the power to bind the visible to the invisible, phenomenon to being, to wit, the principle of substances ?* The idea of substance is necessarily posterior to the application of the principle, and, consequently, it cannot explain its formation. Let us be well understood. We do not mean to say that we * See lecture 1. • See vol. i. of the Ist Series, course of 1816, and 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 18, p. 140-146. 62 LECTURE SECOND. have in the mind the principle of substances before perceiving a phenomenon, quite ready to apply the principle to the phenome- non, when it shall present itself; we only say that it is impossible for us to perceive a phenomenon without conceiving at the same instant a substance, that is to say, to the power of perceiving a phenomenon, either by the senses or by consciousness, is joined that of conceiving the substance in which it inheres. The facts thus take place : — the perception of phenomena and the concep- tion of the substance which is their basis are not successive, they are simultaneous. Before this impartial analysis fall at once two equal and opposite errors — one, that experience, exterior or inte- rior, can beget principles; the other, that principles precede experience.^ To sum up, the pretension of explaining principles by the ideas which they contain, is a chimerical one. In supposing that all the ideas which enter into principles are anterior to them, it is necessary to show how principles are deduced from these ideas, — which is the first and radical diflSculty. Moreover, it is not true that in all cases ideas precede principles, for often principles pre- cede ideas, — a second difficulty equally insurmountable. But whether ideas are anterior or posterior to principles, principles are always independent of them ; they surpass them by all the superiority of universal and necessary principles over simple ideas.' We should, perhaps, beg your pardon for the austerity of this ^ We have developed this analysis, and elucidated these results in the 17th lecture of vol. ii. of the 2d Series. ' We have already twice recurred, and more in detail, to the impossibility of legitimately explaining universal and necessary principles by any associa- tion or induction whatever, founded upon any particular idea, 2d Series, vol. iii., Examen du Systeme de Locke, lecture 19, p. 166 ; and 8d Series, vol. iv.. Introduction, aux (Euvres de M. de Biran, p. 319. We have also made known the opinion of Keid, 1st Series^vol. iv., lecture 22, p. 489. Finally, the pro- foundcst of Eeid's disciples, the most enlightened judge that we know of things philosophical, Sir W. Hamilton, professor of logic in the University of Edinburgh, has not hesitated to adopt the conclusions of our discussion, to which he is pleased to refer his readers: — Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, etc., by Sir WilUam Hamilton, London, 1852. Appendix 1, p. 688. THE ORIGIN OF PRINCIPLES. 63 lecture. But philosophical questions must be treated philosophi- cally : it does not belong to us to change their character. On other subjects, another language. Psychology has its own lan- o-uage, the entire merit of which is a severe precision, as the highest law of psychology itself is the shunning of every hy- pothesis, and an inviolable respect for facts. This law we have religiously followed. While investigating the origin of univereal and necessary principles, we have especially endeavored not to destroy the thing to be explained by a systematic explanation. Universal and necessary principles have come forth in their in- tegrity from our analysis. We have given the history of the (lifterent forms which they successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and invol- untarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and de- terminate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstrac- tion makes them appear under the form in which their univer- sality and their necessity are manifest. Their certainty is the same under all their forms, in all their applications ; it has neither generation nor origin ; it is not born such or such a day, and it does not increase with time, for it knows no degrees. We have not commenced by believing a little in the principle of causality, of substances, of time, of space, of the infinite, etc., then be- lieving a little more, then believing wholly. These principles have been, from the beginning, what they will be in the end, all- powerful, necessary, irresistible. The conviction which they give is always absolute, only it is not always accompanied by a clear consciousness. Leibnitz himself has no more confidence in the principle of causality, and even in his favorite principle of suffi- cient reason, than the most ignorant of men ; but the latter ap- plies these principles without reflecting on their power, by which he is unconsciously governed, whilst Leibnitz is astonished at their power, studies it, and for all explanation, refers it to the human mind, and to the nature of things, that is to say, he elevates, to 64 LECTURE SECOND. borrow the fine expression of M. Royer-Collard,* the ignorance of the mass of men to its highest source. Such is, thank heaven, the only difference that separates the peasant from the philoso- pher, in regard to those great principles of every kind which, in one way or another, discover to men the same truths indispensa- ble to their physical, intellectual, and moral existence, and, in their ephemeral life, on the circumscribed point of space and time where fortune has thrown them, reveal to them something of the universal, the necessary, and the infinite. * CEuvres de Seid, vol. iv., p. 435. " When we revolt against primitive facts, we equally misconceive the constitution of our intelligence and the end of philosophy. Is explaining a fact any thing else than deriving it from another fact, and if this kind of explanation is to terminate at all, does it not suppose facts inexplicable ? The science of the human mind will have been carried to the highest degree of perfection it can attain, it will be com- plete, when it shall know how to derive ignorance from the most elevated source. » LECTUEE III. ON THE VALUE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES. Examination and refutation of Kant's skepticism. — Recurrence to the theory of spontaneity and reflection. After having recognized the existence of univei-sal and neces- sary principles, their actual characters, and their primitive char- acters, we have to examine their value, and the legitimacy of the conclusions which may be drawn from them, — we pass from psy- chology to logic. We have defended against Locke and his school the necessity and universality of certain principles. We now come to Kant, who recognizes with us these principles, but confines their power within the limits of the subject that conceives them, and, so far as subjective, declares them to be without legitimate application to any object, that is to say, without objectivity, to use the lan- guage of the philosopher of Koenigsberg, which, right or wrong, begins to pass into the philosophic language of Europe. Let us comprehend well the import of this new discussion. The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions, — have they in themselves an ab- solute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought ? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. If it is not absolutely true that every quality has its subject of inherence, it is not, then, certain, that we have a soul, a real substance of all the qualities which consciousness attests. # 66 LECTURE THIRD. THE VALUE OF PRINCIPLES. 67 If the principle of causality is only a law of our mind, the ex ternal world, which this principle discovers to us, loses its reality, it is only a succession of phenomena, without any effective action over each other, as Hume would have it, and even the impressions of our senses are destitute of causes. Matter exists no more than the soul. Nothing exists ; every thing is reduced to mobile appearances, given up to a perpetual becoming, which again is accomplished we know not where, since in reality there is neither time nor space. Since the principle of sufficient reason only serves to put in motion human curiosity, once in possession of the fatal secret that it can attain nothing real, this curiosity would be very good to weary itself in searching for reasons which inevitably escape it, and in discovering relations which correspond only to the wants of our mind, and do not in the least correspond to the nature of things. In fine, if the principle of causality, of substances, of final causes, of sufficient reason, are only our modes of conception, God, whom all these principles reveal to us will no more be any thing but the last of chimeras, which vanishes with all the others in the breath of the Critique. Kant has established, as well as Reid and ourself, the existence of universal and necessary principles ; but an involuntary disciple of his century, an unconscious servant of the empirical school, to which he places himself in the attitude of an adversary, he makes to it the immense concession that these principles are applied only to the impressions of sensibility, that their part is to put these impressions in a certain order, but that beyond these impressions, beyond experience, their power expires. This concession has ru- ined the whole enterprise of the German philosopher. This enterprise was at once honest and great. Kant, grieved at the skepticism of his times, proposed to arrest it by fairly meet- intr it. He thoudit to disarm Hume by conceding to him that our highest conceptions do not extend themselves beyond the in- cisure of the human mind ; and at the same time, he supposed that he had sufficiently vindicated the human mind by restoring to it the universal and necessary principles which direct it. But, ac- cording to the strong expression of M. Royer-Collard, "one does not encounter skepticism, — as soon as he has penetrated into the human understanding he has completely taken it by storm." A severe circumspection is one thing, skepticism is another. Doubt is not only permitted, it is commanded by reason itself in the em- ployment and legitimate applications of our different faculties ; but when it is applied to the legitimacy itselfpf our faculties, it no longer elucidates reason, it overwhelms it. (in fact, with what would you have reason defend herself, when she has called herself in question ?J Kant himself, then, overturned the dogmatism which he proposed at once to restrain and save, at least 'n morals, and he put German philosophy upon a route, at the end of which was an abyss. In vain has this great man— for his intentions and his character, without speaking of his genius, merit for him this name — undertaken with Hume an ingenious and learned controversy ; he has been vanquished in this controversy, and Hume remains master of the field of battle. ^^hat matters it, in fact, whether there may or may not be in the human mind universal and necessary principles, if these prin- ciples only serve to classify our sensations, and to make us ascend, step by step, to ideas that are most sublime, but have for ourselves no reality ? The human mind is, then, as Kant himself well ex- pressed it, like a banker who should take bills ranged in order on his desk for real values ; — he possesses nothing but papers. We have thus returned, then, to that conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence projecting itself everywhere out of itself, at once triumphant and impotent, since it produces every thing, and produces only chimeras.M * On conceptualism, as well as on nominalism and realism, see the Intro- duction to the inedited tvorks cf Abelard, and also 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 21, p. 457; 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 20, p. 215, and the work already cited on tlie Metaphysics of Aristotle, p. 49 : "Nothing exists in this world which has not its law more general than itself. There is no individual that is not related to a species ; there are no phenomena bound together that are not united to a plan. And it is necessary there should really be in nature epecies t 68 LECTURE THIRD. The reproach which a sound philosophy will content itself with making to Kant, is, that his system is not in accordance with facts. Philosophy can and must separate itself from the crowd for the explanation of facts ; but, it cannot be too often repeated, it must not in the explanation destroy what it pretends to explain ; other- wise it does not explain, it imagines. Here, the important fact which it is the question to explain is the belief itself of the human mind, and the system of Kant annihilates it. .'In fact, when we are speaking of the truth of universal and n^essary principles, we do not believe they are true only for us:— we believe them to be true in themselves, and still true, were there no mind of ours to conceive them. We regard them as inde- pendent of us ; they seem to us to impose themselves upon our intelligence by the force of the truth that is in them. So, in or- der to express faithfully what passes within us, it would be neces- sary to reverse the proposition of Kant, and instead of saying with him, that these principles are the necessary laws of our mind, therefore they have* no absolute value out of our mind ; we should much rather say, that these principles have an absolute value in themselves, therefore we cannot but believe them^ And even this necessity of belief with which the new skepticism arms itself, is not the indispensable condition of the application of principles. We have established^ that the necessity of believ- ing supposes reflection, examination, an effort to deny and the want of power to do it ; but before all reflection, intelligence spon- taneously seizes the truth, and, in the spontaneous apperception, and a plan, if every thing has been made with weight and me^ure cum pon- dere el Jnsura, without which our very ideas of species and a plan would only be chimeras, and liuraan science a systematic illusion. If it is pretended thatthere are individuals and no species, thmgs in juxtaposition and no plan ; for example, human individuals more or less different, and no human type, and a thousand other things of the same sort, weU and good ; but m that case there is nothing general in the world, except in the human understand- ing, that is to say, in other terms, the world and nature are destitute of order and reason except in the head of man." 1 See preceding lecture. THE VALUE OF PRINCIPLES. 69 is not the sentiment of necessity, nor consequently that character of subjectivity of which the German school speaks so much. Let us, then, here recur to that spontaneous intuition of truth, which Kant knew not, in the circle where his profoundly reflec- tive and somewhat scholastic habits held him captive. Is it true that there is no judgment, even aflirmative in form, which is not mixed with negation ? It seems indeed that every affirmative judgment is at the same time negative ; in fact, to afl[irm that a thing exists, is to deny its non-existence ; as every negative judgment is at the same time aflfirmative ; for to deny the existence of a thing, is to affirm its non-existence. If it is so, then every judgment, whatever may be its form, affirmative or negative, since these two forms come back to each other, supposes a pre-established doubt in regard to the existence of the thing in question, supposes some exercise of re- flection, in the course of which the mind feels itself constrained to bear such or such a judgment, so that at this point of view the foundation of the judgment seems to be in its necessity ; and then recurs the celebrated objection : — if you judge thus only because it is impossible for you not to do it, you have for a guaranty of the truth nothing but yourself and your own ways of conceiving ; it is the human mind that transports its laws out of itself; it is the subject that makes the object out of its own image, without ever going beyond the inclosure of subjectivity. We respond, going directly to the root of the difficulty : — it is not true that all our judgments are negative. We admit that in the reflective state every affirmative judgment supposes a negative judgment, and reciprocally. \But is reason exercised only on the condition of reflection ? Is there not a primitive affirmation I which implies no negation ? As we often act without deliberating on our action, without premeditating it, and as we manifest in this case an activity that is free still, but free with a liberty that is not reflective ; so reason often perceives the truth without traversing doubt or error. Reflection is a return to consciousness, or to an operation wholly different from itj We do not find, then, in any f 70 LECTURE THIRD. primitive fact, that every judgment which contains it presupposes another in which it is not. ^e thus arrive at a judgment free from all reflection, to an affirmation without any mixture of nega- tion, to an immediate intuition, the legitimate child of the natural energy of thought, like the inspiration of tlie poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet. Such is the first act of the faculty of knowing?) If one contradicts this primitive affirma- tion, the faculty of knowing falls back upon itself, examines itself, attempts to call in doubt the truth it has perceived ; it cannot ; it affirms anew what it had affirmed at first ; it adheres to the truth already recognized, but with a new sentiment, the sentiment that it is not in its power to divest itself of the evidence of this same truth ; then, but only then, appears that character of necessity and subjectivity that some would turn against the truth, as though truth could lose its own value, while penetrating deeper into the mind and there triumphing over doubt ; as though reflective evi- dence of it were the less evidence; as though, moreover, the necessary conception of it were the only form, the primary form of the perception of truth. The skepticism of Kant, to which good sense so easily does justice, is driven to the extreme and forced within its intrenchment by the distinction between sponta- neous reason and reflective reason. Reflection is the theatre of the combats which reason engages in with itself, with doubt, sophism, and error. But above reflection is a sphere of light and peace, where reason perceives truth without returning on itself, for the sole reason that truth is truth, and because God has made the reason to perceive it, as he has made the eye to see and the ear to hear^ Analyze, in fact, with impartiality, the fact of spontaneous ap- perception, and you will be sure that it has nothing subjective in it except what it is impossible it should not have, to wit, the me which is mingled with the fact without constituting it. The me inevitably enters into all knowledge, since it is the subject of it. Reason directly perceives truth ; but it is in some sort augmented, in consciousness, and then we have knowledge. Consciousness is THE VALUE OF PRINCIPLES. 71 there its witness, and not its judge ; its only judge is reason, a faculty subjective and objective together, according to the lan- guage of Germany, which immediately attains absolute trijth, almost without personal intervention on our part, although it might not enter into exercise if personality did not precede or were not added to it.* Spontaneous apperception constitutes natural logic. Reflective conception is the foundation of logic properly so called. One is based upon itself, verum index sui ; the other is based upon the impossibility of the reason, in spite of all its efforts, not betaking itself to truth and believing in it. The form of the first is an affirmation accompanied with an absolute security, and without the least suspicion of a possible negation ; the form of the second is reflective affirmation, that is to say, the impossibility of deny- ing and the necessity of affirming. The idea of negation governs ordinary logic, whose affirmations are only the laborious product of two negations. Natural logic proceeds by affirmations stamped with a simple faith, which instinct alone produces and sustains. Now, will Kant reply that this reason, which is much purer than that which he has known and described, which is wholly pure, which is conceived as something disengaged from reflection, from volition, from every thing that constitutes personality, is nevertheless personal, since we have a consciousness of it, and since it is thus marked with subjectivity ? To this argument we have nothing to respond, except that it is destroyed in the excess of its pretension. In fact, if, that reason may not be subjective, we must in no way participate in it, and must not have even a consciousness of its exercise, then there is no means of ever esca- ping this reproach of subjectivity, and the ideal of objectivity which Kant pursued is a chimerical, extravagant ideal, above, Dr rather beneath, all true intelligence, all reason worthy the * On the just limits of the personality and the impersonality of reason, se« the following lecture, near the close. i 72 LECTURE THIRD. name ; for it is demanding that this intelligence and this reason should cease to have consciousness of themselves, whilst this is precisely what characterizes intelligence and reason.* Does Kant mean, then, that reason, in order to possess a really objective power, cannot make its appearance in a particular subject, that it must be, for example, wholly outside of the subject which I am ? Then it is nothing for me ; a reason that is not mine, that, under the pretext of being universal, infinite, and absolute in its essence, Joes not fall under the perception of my consciousness, is for me as if it were not. To wish that reason should wholly cease to be subjective, is to demand something impossible to God himself. No, God himself can understand nothing except in knowing it, with his intelligence and with the consciousness of this intelli- gence. There is subjectivity, then, in divine knowledge itself; if this subjectivity involves skepticism, God is also condemned to skepticism, and he can no more escape from it than men ; or in- deed, if this is too ridiculous, if the knowledge which God has of the exercise of his own intelligence does not involve skepticism for him, neither do the knowledge which we have of the exercise of our intelligence, and the subjectivity attached to this knowl- edge, involve it for us. In truth, when we see the ftither of German philosophy thus losing himself in the labyrinth of the problem of the subjectivity and the objectivity of first principles, we are tempted to pardon Reid for having disdained this problem, for limiting himself to repeating that the absolute truth of universal and necessary principles rests upon the veracity of our faculties, and that upon the veracity of our faculties we are compelled to accept their tes- timony. " To explain," says he, " why we are convinced by our senses, by consciousness, by our faculties, is an impossible thing ; we say — this is so, it cannot be otherwise, and we can go no far- ther. Is not this the expression of an irresistible belief, of a belief * We have everywhere maintained, that consciousness is the condition, or rather the necessary form of intelligence. Not to go beyond this volume, see farther on, lecture 5. THE VALUE OF PRINCIPLES. Y3 which is the voice of nature, and against which we contend in vain ? Do we wish to penetrate farther, to demand of our faculties, one by one, what are their titles to our confidence, and to refuse them con- fidence until they have produced their claims ? Then, I fear that this extreme wisdom would conduct us to folly, and that, not having been willing to submit to the common lot of humanity, we should be deprived of the light of common sense."* Let us support ourselves also by the following admirable pas- sao"e of him who is, for so many reasons, the venerated master of the French philosophy of the nineteenth century. " Intellectual life," says M. Royer-Collard, "is an uninterrupted succession, not only of ideas, but of explicit or implicit beliefs. The beliefs of the mind are the powers of the soul and the motives of the will. That which determines us to belief we call evidence. Reason renders no account of evidence ; to condemn reason to account for evidence, is to annihilate it, for it needs itself an evidence which is fitted for it. These are fundamental laws of belief which constitute intelligence, and as they flow from the same source they have the same authority ; they judge by the same right ; there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of an- other. He who revolts against a single one revolts against all, and abdicates his whole nature." ' Let us deduce the consequences of the facts of which we have just given an exposition. 1st. The argument of Kant, whicll is based upon the charac- ter of necessity in principles in order to weaken their objective authority, applies only to the form imposed by reflection on these principles, and does not reach their spontaneous application, wherein the character of necessity no longer appears. 2d. After all, to conclude with the human race from the neces- sity of believing in the truth of what we believe, is not to con- clude badly ; for it is reasoning from effect to cause, from the sign to the thing signified. ^ Ist Series, vol. iv., lecture 22, p. 494. 3 (Euvres de Reid, vol. iii., p. 450. 74 LECTUKE THIBD. Sd. Moreover, the value of principles is above all demonstra- tion. Psychological analysis seizes, takes, as it were, by surprise, in the fact of intuition, an affirmation that is absolute, that is in- accessible to doubt ; it establishes it ; and this is equivalent to demonstration. To demand any other demonstration than this, is to demand of reason an impossibility, since absolute principles, being necessary to all demonstration, could only be demonstrated by themselves.^ * We have not thought it best to make this lecture lengthy by an exposi- tion and detailed refutation of the Critique of Pure Reason and its sad con- clusion ; the little that \re say of it is sufficient for our purpose, which is much less historical than dogmatical. We refer the reader to a volume that "we have devoted to the father of German philosophy, 1st Series, vol. v., in which we have again taken up and developed some of the arguments that are here used, in which we believe that we have irresistibly exposed the capital defect of the transcendental logic of Kant, and of the whole German school, that it leads to skepticism, inasmuch as it raises superhuman, chi- merical, extravagant problems, and, when well understood, cannot solvn them. See especially lectures 6 and 8. LECTUKE lY. GOD THE PEmCIPLE OF PKmCIPLES. Object of tlie lecture: What is the ultimate basis of absolute truth?— Four hypotheses : Absolute truth may reside either in us, in particular beings and the world, in itself, or in God. 1. We perceive absolute truth, we do not constitute it. 2. Particular beings participate in absolute truth, but do not explain it ; refutation of Aristotle. 3. Truth does not exist in itself; defence of Plato. 4. Truth resides in God.— Plato ; St. Augustine ; Descartes; Malebranche; Fenelon; Bossuet; Leibnitz.— Truth the medi- ator between God and man.— Essential distinctions. We have justified the principles that govern our intelligence ; we have become confident that there is truth outside of us, that there are verities worthy of that name, which we can perceive, which we do not make, which are not solely conceptions of our mind, which would still exist although our mind should not per- ceive them. Now this other problem naturally presents iteelf: What, then, in themselves, are these universal and necessary truths ? where do they reside ? whence do they come ? We do not raise this problem, and the problems that it embraces ; the human mind itself proposes them, and it is fully satisfied only when it has resolved them, and when it has reached the extreme limit of knowledge that it is within its power to attain. It is certain that the principles which, in all the orders of knowledge, discover to us absolute and necessary truths, consti- tute part of our reason, which surely makes its dwelling in us, and is intimately connected with personality in the depths of in- tellectual life. It follows that the truth, which reason reveals to us, falls thereby into close relation with the subject that perceives it, and seems only a conception of our mind. Nevertheless, as 76 LECTURE FOURTH. we have proved, we perceive truth, we are not the authors of it. If the person that I am, if the individual me does not, per- haps, explain the whole of reason, how could it explain truth, and absolute truth ? Man, limited and passing away, perceives necessary, eternal, infinite truth ; that is for him a privilege suffi- ciently high ; but he is neither the principle that sustains truth, nor the principle that gives it being. Man may say, My reason ; but give him credit for never having dared to say, My truth. If absolute truths are beyond man who perceives them, once more, where are they, then ? A peripatetic would respond — In nature. Is it, in fact, necessary to seek for them any other subject than the beings themselves which they govern ? What are the laws of nature, except certain properties which our mind disengages from the beings and phenomena in which they are met, in order to consider them apart ? Mathematical principles are nothing more. For example, the axiom thus expressed — ^The whole is greater than any of its parts, is true of any whole and part whatever. The principle of contradiction, considered in its logical title, as the condition of all our judgments, of all our rea- sonings, constitutes a part of the essence of all being, and no being can exist without containing it. The universal exists, says Aristotle, but it does not exist apart from particular beings.^ This theory which considers universals as having their basis in things, is f^ progress towards the pure conceptualism which we have in the beoinninof indicated and shunned. Aristotle is much more of a realist than Abelard and Kant. He is quite right in maintaining that universals are in particular things, for particular things could not be without universals ; universals give to them their fixity, even for a day, and their unity. But from the fact that universals are in particular beings, is it necessary to conclude that they, wholly and exclusively, reside there, and that they ' See our work entitled, Metaphj/aics of Aristotle, 2d edition, passim. In Aristotle himself, see especially Metaphysics^ book vii., chap, xii., and book «ni„ fihan. ix. xiii., chap. ix. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 77 have no other reality than that of the objects to which they are applied ? It is the same with principles of which universals are the constitutive elements. It is, it is true, in the particular fact, of a particular cause producing a particular event, that is given us the universal principle of causality ; but this principle is much more extensive than the facts, for it is applied, not only to this fact, but to a thousand others. The particular fact contains the principle, but it does not wholly contain it, and, far from giving the basis of the principle, it is based upon it. As much may be said of other principles. Perhaps it will be replied that, if a principle is certainly more extensive than such a fact, or such a being, it is not more exten- sive than all facts and all beings, and that nature, considered as a whole, can explain that which each particular being does not explain. But nature, in its totality, is still only a finite and contingent thing, whilst the principles to be explained have a necessary and infinite bearing. The idea of the infinite can come neither from any particular being, nor from the whole of beings. Entire nature will not furnish us the idea of perfection, for all the beings of nature are imperfect. Absolute principles govern, then, all facts and all beings, they do not spring from them. Will it be necessary to come to the opinion, then, that absolute truths, being explicable neither by humanity nor by nature, sub- sist by themselves, and are to themselves their own' foundation and their own subject ? But this opinion contains still more absurdities than the prece- ding; for, I ask, what are truths, absolute or contingent, that exist by themselves, out of things in which they are found, and out of the intelligence that conceives them ? Truth is, then, only a realized abstraction. There are no quintessential metaphysics which can prevail against good sense ; and if such is the Platonic theory of ideas, Aristotle is right in his opposition to it. But such a theory is only a chimera that Aristotle created for the pleasure of combating it. Let us hasten to remove absolute truths from this ambiguous 78 LECTURE FOURTH. and equivocal state. And how ? By applying to them a prin- ciple which should now be familiar to you. Yes, truth necessarily appeals to something beyond itself. As every phenomenon has its subject of inherence, as our faculties, our thoughts, our voli- tions, our sensations, exist only in a being which is ourselves, so truth supposes a being in which it resides, and absolute truths sup- pose a being absolute as themselves, wherein they have their final foundation. We come thus to something absolute, which is no longer suspended in the vagueness of abstraction, but is a being substantially existing. This being, absolute and necessary, since it is the subject of necessary and absolute truths, this being which is at the foundation of truth as its very essence, in a single word, is called God} This theory, which conducts from absolute truth to absolute being, is not new in the history of philosophy : it goes back to Plato. Plato,* in searching for the principles of knowledge clearly saw, with Socrates his master, that the least definition, without which there can be no precise knowledge, supposes something universal and one, which does not come \7ithin the reach of the senses, which reason alone can discover ; this something universal and one he called Idea, Ideas, which possess universality and unity, do not come from material, changing, and mobile things, to which they are applied, and which render them intelligible. On the other hand, it is not * There are doubtless mauy other ways of arriving at God, as we shall suc- cessively see ; but this is the way of metaphysics. We do not exclude any of the known and accredited proofs of the existence of God ; but wc begin with that which gives all the others. See further on, part ii., God^ the Prin- ciple of Beauty, and part iii., God, the Principle of the Good, and the last lecture, which sums up the whole course. ' We have said a word on the Platonic theory of ideas, 1st Series, vol. iv., p. 461 and 522. See also, vol. ii. of the 2d Series, lecture 7, on Plato and Aristotle, especially 3d Series, vol. i., a few words on the Language of the Theor?/ of Ideas, p. 121 ; our work on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, p. 48 and 149, and our translation of Plato, passim. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 79 the human mind that constitutes ideas ; for man is not the meas- ure of truth. Plato calls Ideas veritable beings, ra ovrw^ ovra, since they alone communicate to sensible things and to human cognitions their truth and their unity. But does it follow that Plato gives to Ideas a substantial existence, that he makes of them beings properly so called ? It is important that no cloud should be left on this fundamental point of the Platonic theory. At first, if any one should pretend that in Plato Ideas are be- ings subsisting by themselves, without iuterconnection and without relation to a common centre, numerous passages of the Timaeus might be objected to him,^ in which Plato speaks of Ideas as forming in their whole an ideal unity, which is the reason of the unity of the visible world.* Will it be said that this ideal world forms a distinct unity, a unity separate from God ? But, in order to sustain this assertion, it is necessary to forget so many passages of the Republic^ in which the relations of truth and science with the Good, that is to say, with God, are marked in brilliant characters. Let not that magnificent comparison be forgotten, in which, after having^aid that the sun produces in the physical world light and life, Socrates adds : " So thou art able to say, intelligible beings not only hold from the Good that which renders them intelligi- ble, but also their being and their essence." * So, intelligible be- ings, that is to say. Ideas, are not beings that exist by themselves. Men go on repeating with assurance that the Good, in Plato, is only the idea of the good, and that an idea is not God. I reply, that the Good is in fact an idea, according to Plato, but that the idea here is not a pure conception of the mind, an object of thought, as the peripatetic school understood it ; I add, that * Aristotle first stated this ; modern peripatetics have repeated it ; and after them, all who have wished to decry the ancient philosophy, and phi- losophy in general, by giving the appearance of absurdity to its most illus- trious representative. ' See particularly p. 121 of the Timaeus, vol. xii. of our translation. * Republic, book vi., vol. x. of our translation, p. 57. 80 LECTURE FOURTH. the Idea of the Good is in Plato the first of Ideas, and that, for this reason, while remaining for us an object of thought, it is confounded as to existence with God. If the Idea of the Good is not God himself, how will the following passage, also taken from the Republic^ be explained ? " At the extreme limits of the intellectual world is the Idea of the Good, which is perceived with diflBculty, but, in fine, cannot be perceived without con- cluding that it is the source of all that is beautiful and good ; that in the visible world it produces light, and the star whence the light directly comes, that in the invisible world it directly produces truth and intelligence."* Who can produce, on the one hand, the sun and light, on the other, truth and intelligence, except a real being ? But all doubt disappears before the following passages from the Fhcedrus, neglected, as it would seem designedly, by the de- tractors of Plato: "In this transition, (the soul) contemplates justice, contemplates wisdom, contemplates science, not that wherein enters change, nor that which shows itself different in the different objects which we are pleased to call beings, but science as it exists in that which is called being, par excellence. " ^ — " It belongs to the soul to conceive the universal, that is to say, that which, in the diversity of sensations, can be com- prehended under a rational unity. This is the remembrance of what the soul has seen during its journey in the train of Deity, when, disdaining what we improperly call beings, it looked up- wards to the only true being. So it is just that the thought of the philosopher should alone have wings ; for its remembrance is always as much as possible with the things which make God a true God, inasmuch as he is with them^ * So the objects of the philosopher's contemplation, that is to say, Ideas, are in God, and it is by these, by his essential union with these, that God is the true God, the God who, as Plato admirably says in the Sophist, participates in august and holy intelligence.^ * HepuUic, book vii., p. 20 • Fhcedrus, vol. vi., p. 55. * PTuedrus, vol. vi., p. 51. * Vol. xi., p. 261. GOD THE PRmCIPLE OF PKmCIPLES. 81 It is therefore certain, that, in the true Platonic theory. Ideas are not beings in the vulgar sense of the word, beings which would be neither in the mind of man, nor in nature, nor in God, and would subsist only by themselves. No, Plato con- siders Ideas as being at once the principles of sensible things, of which they are the laws, and the principles also of human knowledge, which owes to them its light, its rule, and its end, and the essential attributes of God, that is to say, God himself. Plato is truly the father of the doctrine which we have ex- plained, and the great philosophers who have attached themselves to his school have always professed this same doctrine. The founder of Christian metaphysics, St. Augustine, is a de- clared disciple of Plato : everywhere he speaks, like Plato, of the relation of human reason to the divine reason, and of truth to God. In the City of God, book x., chap, ii., and in chap. ix. of book vii. of the Confessions, he goes to the extent of comparing the Platonic doctrine with that of St. John. He adopts, without reserve, the theory of Ideas. Book of Eighty-three Questions, question 46 : " Ideas are the primordial forms, and, as it were, the immutable reasons of things ; they are not created, they are eternal, and always the same : they are con- tained in the divine intelligence ; and without being subject to birth and death, they are the types according to which is formed every thing that is born and dies." * " What man, pious, and penetrated with true religion, would dare to deny that all things that exist, that is to say^ all things that, each of its kind, possess a determinate nature, have been created by God ? This point being once conceded, can it be said that God has created things without reason ? If it is impossible to say or think this, it follows that all things have been created *Edit. Bened., vol. vi., p. 17: Hex sunt formce qucRdam principales et rationes rerum stabiles atqiie incommutdbiles, quce ipscB formatcB non sunt ac per Ivoc (Eternce, ac semper eodem modo sese %ahentes, quae in divina inteUigeniia continentur .... 4* 82 LECTUKE FOURTH. with reason. But the reason of the existence of a man cannot be the same as the reason of the existence of a horse ; that is absurd ; each thing has therefore been created by virtue of a reason that is pecuHar to it. Now, where can these reasons be, except in the mind of the Creator ? For he saw nothing out of himself, which he could use as a model for creating what he created : such an opinion would be sacrilege.* « If the reasons of things to be created and things created are contained in the divine intelligence, and if there is nothing in the divine intelligence but the eternal and immutable, the reasons of things which Plato calls Ideas, are the eternal and immutable truths, by the participation in which every thing that is is such as it is." '^ St. Thomas himself, who scarcely knew Plato, and who was often enough held by Aristotle in a kind of empiricism, carried away by Christianity and St. Augustine, let the sentiment escape him, ^ that our natural reason is a sort of participation in the divine reason, that to this we owe our knowledge and our judgments, that this is the reason why it is said, that we see every thing in God."* There are in St. Thomas many other similar passages, of perhaps an expressive Platonism, which is not the Platonism of Plato, but of the Alexandrians. The Cartesian philosophy, in spite of its profound originality, and its wholly French character, is full of the Platonic spirit. Descartes has no thought of Plato, whom apparently he has never read ; in nothing does he imitate or resemble him : nevertheless, 1 Edit. BeneJ., vol. vi., p. 18. Sirigula igitur propriis creata sunt rationir- bus. Km autem rationes uM arUtnmdum est esse nisi in mente Creatoris ? rum enim extra se quidquam intuebatur, ut secundum id constltueret quod con- stituebat: nam hoc opinai'i sacrilegum est. ^Ibid. See also, book of the Confessions, book ii. of the Free Will, book xii. of the Trinity, book vii. of the City of God, &c. ^Summa totlus theologia. Primae partis quffist. xii. art. 11. Ad tertiutn dicendum, quod omnia dlcimus in Deo videre, et secundum ipsum de omnibus judicare, in quantum per participationem sui luminis omnia cognoscimus et dijudicamus. Nam et ipsum lumen naturale rati^?nis participatio qumdam est divini luminis GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PKTXCIPLES. 83 from the first, he is met in the same regions with Plato, whither he goes by a different route. The notion of the infinite and the perfect is for Descartes what the universal, the Idea, is for Plato. No sooner has Descartes found by consciousness that he thinks, than he concludes from this that he exists, then, in course, by consciousness still, he recog- nizes himself as imperfect, full of defects, limitations, miseries, and, at the same time, conceives something infinite and perfect. He possesses the idea of the infinite and the perfect ; but this idea is not his own work, for he is imperfect ; it must then have been put into him by another being endowed with perfection, whom he conceives, whom he does not possess : — that being is God. Such is the process by which Descartes, setting out from his own thought, and his own being, elevated himself to God. This process, so simple, which he so simply exposes in the Dis- cours de la Methode, he will put successively, in the Meditations, in the Responses aux Objections, in the Principes, under the most diverse forms, he will accommodate it, if it is necessary, to the language of the schools, in order that it may penetrate into them. After all, this process is compelled to conclude, from the idea of the infinite and the perfect, in the existence of a cause of this idea, adequate, at least, to the idea itself, that is to say, infinite and perfect. One sees that the fii-st difference between Plato and Descartes is, that the ideas which in Plato are at once conceptions of our mind, and the principles of things, are for Descartes, as well as for all modern philosophy, only our conceptions, amongst which that of the infinite and perfect occupies the first place ; the second difference is, that Plato goes from ideas to God by the principle of substances, if we may be allowed to use this techni- cal language of modern philosophy ; whilst Descartes employs rather the principle of causality, and concludes — well understood without syllogism — from the idea of the infinite and the perfect in a cause also perfect and infinite.^ But under these differences, * On the doctrine of Descartes, and on the proof of the existence of God 84 LECniRE FOURTH. and in spite of many more, is a common basis, a genms tlie same, which at first elevates us above the senses, and, by the interme- diary of marvellous ideas that are incontestably in us, bears us towards him who alone can be their substance, who is the infinite and perfect author of our idea of infinity and perfection. For this reason, Descartes belongs to the family of Plato and Socrates. The idea of the perfect and the finite being once introduced into the philosophy of the seventeenth century, it becomes there for the successors of Descartes what the theory of ideas became for the successors of Plato. Among the French writers, Malebranche, perhaps, reminds us with the least disadvantage, although very imperfectly still, of 'the manner of Plato : he sometimes expresses its elevation and grace ; but he is far from possessing the Socratic good sense, and, it must be confessed, no one has clouded more the theory of ideas by exaggerations of every kind which he has mingled with them.' Instead of estabhshing that there is in the human reason, wholly personal as it is by its intimate relation with our other faculties, something also which is not personal, something universal which permits it to elevate itself to universal truths, Malebranche does not hesitate to absolutely confound the reason that is in us with the divine reason itself. Moreover, according to Malebranche, we do not directly know particular things, sensible objects ; we know them only by ideas ; it is the intelligible extension and not the material extension that we immediately perceive ; in vision the and the true process that he employs, see 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 12, p. 64, lecture 22, p. 509—518 ; vol. v., lecture 6, p. 205 ; 2d Series, vol. xi., lec- ture 11 ; especially the three articles, already cited, of the Journal des Sa- vants for the year 1850. * See on Malebranche, 2d Series, lecture 2, and 3d Series, vol. iii., Modern Fhilosophi/, as well as the Fragments of Cartesian PMosopJiij ; preface of the l8t edition of our Pascal: — "On this basis, so pure, Malebranche is not steady; is excessive and rash, I know; narrow and extreme, I do not fear to say ; but always sublime, expressing only one side of Plato, but expressing it in a wholly Christian spirit and in angelic language. Malebranche is a Descartes who strays, having found divine wings, and lost all connection with the earth." GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 85 proper object of the mind is the universal, the idea ; and as the idea is in God, it is in God that we see all things. We can understand how well-formed minds must have been shocked by such a theory ; but it is not just to confound Plato with his bril- liant and unfaithful disciple. In Plato, sensibility directly attains sensible things ; it makes them known to us as they are, that is to say, as very imperfect and undergoing perpetual change, which rende: s the knowledge that we have of them almost unworthy of the name of knowledge. It is reason, different in us from sensi- biUty, which, above sensible objects, discovers to us the universal, the idea, and gives a knowledge solid and durable. Having once attained ideas, we have reached God himself, in whom they have their foundation, who finishes and consummates true knowledge. But we have no need of God, nor of ideas, in order to perceive sensible objects, which are defective and changing ; for this our senses are suflBcient. Reason is distinct from the senses ; it tran- scends the imperfect knowledge of what they are capable ; it attains the universal, because it possesses something universal itself; it participates in the divine reason, but it is not the divine reason ; it is enlightened by it, it comes from it, — it is not it. Fenelon is inspired at once by Malebranche and Descartes in the treatise, de V Existence de Dieu. The second part is entirely Cartesian in method, in the order and sequence of the proofs. Nevertheless, Malebranche also appears there, especially in the fourth chapter, on the nature of ideas, and he predominates in all the metaphysical portions of the first part. After the explana- tions which we have given, it will not be diflBcult for you to discern what is true and what is at times excessive in the passages which follow '} Part i., chap. Hi. " Oh ! how great is the mind of man ! It bears in itself what astonishes itself and infinitely surpasses itself. Its ideas are universal, eternal, and immutable. . . . The idea of > We use the only good edition of the treatise on the Existence of God, that which the Abb6 Gosselin has given in the collection of the Works of Fenelon. Versailles, 1820. See vol. i.. p. 80. 86 LECTURE FOURTH. the infinite is in me as well as that of lines, numbers, and circles. , . . — Chap. liv. Besides this idea of the infinite, I have also universal and immutable notions, which are the rule of all my judgments. I can judge of nothing except by consulting them, and it is not in my power to judge against what they represent to me. My thoughts, far from being able to correct this rule, are themselves corrected in spite of me by this superior rule, and they are irresistibly adjusted to its decision. Whatever effort of mind t may make, I can never succeed in doubting that two and two are four ; that the whole is not greater than any of its parts ; that the centre of a perfect circle is not equidistant from all points of the circumference. I am not at liberty to deny these proposi- tions ; and if I deny these truths, or others similar to them, I have in me something that is above me, that forces me to the conclusion. This fixed and immutable rule is so internal and so intimate that I am inclined to take it for myself; but it is above me since it corrects me, redresses me, and puts me in defiance against myself, and reminds me of my impotence. It is some- thing that suddenly inspires me, provided I listen to it, and I am never deceived except in not listening to it. . . . This internal rule is what I call my reason. . . . — Chap. Iv. In truth my reason is in me ; for I must continually enter into myself in order to find it. But the higher reason which corrects me when neces- sary, which I consult, exists not by me, and makes no part of me. This rule is perfect and immutable ; I am changing and imper- fect. When I am deceived, it does not lose its integrity. When I am undeceived, it is not this that returns to its end : it is this which, without ever having deviated, has the authority over me to remind me of my error, and to make me return. It is a mas- ter within, which makes me keep silent, which makes me speak, which makes me believe, which makes me doubt, which makes me acknowledge my errors or confirm my judgments. Listening to it, I am instructed; listening to myself, I err. This master is everywhere, and its voice makes itself heard, from end to end of the universe, in all men as well as in me. . . . — Chap. Ivi. . , , GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 8Y TLat which appears the most in us and seems to be the founda- tion of ourselves, I mean our reason, is that which is least of all our own, which we are constrained to believe to be especially borrowed. We receive without cessation, and at all moments, a reason superior to us, as we breathe without cessation the air, which is a foreign body. . . . — Chap. Ivii. The internal and universal master always and everywhere speaks the same truths. We are not this master. It is true that we often speak without it, and more loftily than it. But we are then deceived, we are stammering, we do not understand ourselves. We even fear to see that we are deceived, and we close the ear through fear of being humiliated by its corrections. Without doubt, man, who fears being corrected by this incorruptible reason, who always wanders in not following it, is not that perfect, universal, immu- table reason which corrects him in spite of himself. In all things we find, as it were, two principles within us. One gives, the other receives ; one wants, the other supplies ; one is deceived, the other corrects ; one goes wrong by its own inclination, the other rectifies it. . . . Each one feels within himself a limited and sub- altern reason, which wanders when it escapes a complete subordi- nation, which is corrected only by returning to the yoke of another superior, universal, and immutable power. So every thing in us bears the mark of a subaltern, limited, partial, bor- rowed reason, which needs another to correct it at every moment. All men are rational, because they possess the same reason which is communicated to them in diflferent degrees. There is a certain number of wise men ; but the wisdom which they receive, as it were, from the fountain-head, which makes them what they are, is one and the same — Chap. Iviii. Where is this wisdom ? Where is this reason, which is both common and superior to all the limited and imperfect reasons of the human race ? Where, then, is this oracle which is never silent, against which the vain prejudices of peoples are always impotent ? Where is this reason which we ever need to consult, which comes to us to inspire us with the desire of listening to its voice? Where is this light 88 LECTURE FOURTH. that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world? ; . . The substance of the human eye is not light ; on the contrary, the eye borrows at each moment the light of the sun's rays. So my mind is not the pi-imitive reason, the universal and immutable truth, it is only the medium that conducts this original light, that is illu- minated by it — Chap. Ix. I find two reasons in myself, — one is myself, the other is above me. That which is in me is very imperfect, faulty, uncertain, preoccupied, precipitate, subject to aberration, changing, conceited, ignorant, and limited ; in fine, it possesses nothing but what it borrows. The other is common to all men, and is superior to all ; it is perfect, eternal, immutable, always ready to communicate itself in all places, and to rectify all minds that are deceived, in fine, incapable of ever being exhausted or divided, although it gives itself to those who desire it. Where is this perfect reason, that is so near me and so different from me ? Where is it ? It must be something real. . . . Where is this supreme reason ? Is it not God that I am seeking ?" Part ii., chap, i., sect. 28.^ " I have in me the idea of the infi- nite and of infinite perfection Give me a finite thing as great as you please — let it quite transcend the reach of my senses, so that it becomes, as it were, infinite to my imagination ; it always remains finite in my mind ; I conceive a limit to it, even when I cannot imagine it. I am not able to mark the limit ; but I know that it exists ; and far from confounding it with the infi- nite, I conceive it as infinitely distant from the idea that I have of the veritable infinite. If one speaks to me of the indefinite as a mean between the two extremes of the infinite and the limited, I reply, that it signifies nothing, that, at least, it only signifies something truly finite, whose boundaries escape the imagination without escaping the mind. . . . Sect. 29. Where have I ob- tained this idea, which is so much above me, which infinitely surpasses me, which astonishes me, which makes me disappear in my own eyes, which renders the infinite present to me ? Whence » Edit de Versailles, p. 145. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 89 does it come ? Where have I obtained it ? . . . Once more, whence comes this marvellous representation of the infinite, which pertains to the infinite itself, which resembles nothing finite ? It is in me, it is more than myself; it seems to me every thing, and myself nothing. I can neither efface, obscure, diminish, nor con- tradict it. It is in me ; I have not put it there, I have found it there ; and I have found it there only because it was already there before I sought it. It remains there invariable, even when I do not think of it, when I think of something else. I find it whenever I seek it, and it often presents itself when I am not seeking it. It does not depend upon me ; I depend upon it. . . . Moreover, who has made this infinite representation of the infinite, so as to give it to me ? Has it made itself? Has the infinite image^ of the infinite had no original, according to which it has been made, no real cause that has produced it ? Where are we in relation to it ? And what a mass of extravagances ! It is, therefore, absolutely necessary to conclude that it is the infinitely perfect being that renders himself immediately present to me, when I conceive him, and that he himself is the idea which I have of him. . . ." Chap, iv., sect. 49. ". . . My ideas are myself; for they are my reason. . . . My ideas, and the basis of myself, or of my mind, appear but the same thing. On the other hand, my mind is changing, uncertain, ignorant, subject to error, precipitate in its judgments, accustomed to believe what it does not clearly un- derstand, and to judge without having suflSciently consulted its ideas, which are by themselves certain and immutable. My ideas, then, are not myself, and I am not my ideas. What shall I believe, then, they can be? . . . What then! are my ideas * It is not necessary to remark how incorrect are the expressions, represen- tation of the infinite^ image of the infnite, especially infinite image of the infi- nite. We cannot represent to ourselves, we cannot imagine to ourselves the infinite. We conceive the infinite; the infinite is not an object of the imagi- nation, but of the under^^tanding, of reason. See 1st Series, vol. v., lecture 6, p. 223, 224. 90 LECTURE FOURTH. God ? They are superior to my mind, since they rectify and correct it ; they have the character of the Divinity, for they are universal and immutable like God ; they really subsist, according to a principle that we have already established : nothing exists so really as that which is universal and immutable. If that which is changing, transitory, and derived, truly exists, much more does that which cannot change, and is necessary. It is then necessary to find in nature something existing and real, thai is, my ideas, something that is within me, and is not myself, that is superior to me, that is in me even when I am not thinking of it, with which I believe myself to be alone, as though I were only with myself, in fine, that is more present to me, and more intimate than my own foundation. I know not what this some- thing, so admirable, so familiar, so unknown, can be, except God." Let us now hear the most solid, the most authoritative of the Christian doctors of the seventeenth century — let us hear Bos- suet in his Logic, and in the Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Self} Bossuet may be said to have had three masters in philosophy — St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Descartes. He had been taught at the college of Navarre the doctrine of St. Thomas, that is to say, a modified peripateticism ; at the same time he was nour- ished by the reading of St. Augustine, and out of the schools he found spread abroad the philosophy of Descartes. He adopted it, and had no difliculty in reconciling it with that of St. Augus- tine, while, upon more than one point, it corroborated the doc- trine of St. Thomas. Bossuet invented nothing in philosophy ; he received every thing, but every thing united and purified, thanks to that supreme good sense which in him is a quality pre- dominating over force, grandeur, and eloquence.' In the passages * By a trifling anaclironism, for which we shall be pardoned, we have heie joined to the TraiU de la Connaissance de Dleu et de Soirineme^ so long known, the LogiquBy which was only published in 1828. ^ 4th Series, vol. i., prefiice of the 1st edition of Paacal: " Bossuet, with more moderation, and supported by a good sense which nothing can shake, is, in his way, a disciple of the same doctrine, only the extremes of which, GOD THE PRmCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 91 which I am about to exhibit to you, which I hope you will im- press upon your memories, you will not find the grace of Male- branche, the exhaustless abundance of Fenelon; you will find what is better than either, to wit, clearness and precision — all the rest in him is in some sort an addition to these. Fenelon disengages badly enough the process which conducts from ideas, from universal and necessary truths, to God. Bossuet renders to himself a strict account of this process, and marks it with force ; it is the principle that we have invoked, that which concludes from attributes in a subject, from qualities in a being, from laws in a legislator, from eternal verities in an eternal mind that comprehends them and eternally possesses them. Bossuet cites St. Augustine, cites Plato himself, interprets him and de- fends him in advance against those who would make Platonic ideas beings subsisting by themselves, whilst they really exist only in the mind of God. Logic, book i., chap, xxxvi. " When I consider a rectilineal triangle as a figure bounded by three straight lines, and having three angles equal to two right angles, neither more nor less ; and when I pass from this to an equilateral triangle with its three sides and its three angles equal, whence it follows, that I according to his custom, he shunned. This great mind, which may have superiors in invention, but has no equal for force in common sense, was very careful not to place revelation and philosophy in opposition to each other : he found it the safer and truer way to give to each its due, to bor- row from philosophy whatever natural light it can give, in order to increase it in turn with the supernatural light, of which the Church has been made the depository. It is in this sovereign good sense, capable of comprehend- ing every thing, and uniting every thing, that resides the supreme original- ity of Bossuet. He shunned particular opinions as small minds seek them for the triumph of self-love. He did not think of himself; he only searched for truth, and wherever he found it he listened to it, well assured that if the connection between truths of different orders sometimes escapes us, it is no reason for closing the eyes to any truth. If we wished to give a scholastic name to Bossuet, according to the custom of the Middle Age, we would have to call him the infallible doctor. He is not only one of the highest, he is also one of the best and solidest intelligences that ever existed ; and this great conciliator has easily reconciled religion and philosophy, St. Augustine and Descartes, tradition and reason." 92 LECTURE FOURTH. consider each angle of this triangle as less than a right angle ; and when I come again to consider a right-angled triangle, and what I clearly see in this idea, in connection with the preceding ideas, that the two angles of this triangle are necessarily acute, and that these two acute angles are exactly equal to one right angle, neither more nor less — I see nothing contingent and mu- table, and consequently, the ideas that represent to me these truths are eternal. Were there not in nature a single equilateral or right-angled triangle, or any triangle whatever, every thing that I have just considered would remain always true and indu- bitable. In fact, I am not sure of having ever seen an equilateral or rectilineal triangle. Neither the rule nor the dividers could assure me that any human hand, however skilful, could ever make a line exactly straight, or sides and angles perfectly equal to each other. In strictness, we should only need a microscope, in order, not to understand, but to see at a glance, that the lines which we trace deviate from straightness, and differ in length. We have never seen, then, any but imperfect images of equilateral, recti- lineal, or isosceles triangles, since they neither exist in nature, nor can be constructed by art. Nevertheless, what we see of the na- ture and the properties of a triangle, independently of every existing triangle, is certain and indubitable. Place an under- standing in any given time, or at any point in eternity, thus to speak, and it will see these truths equally manifest ; they are, therefore, eternal. Since the understanding does not give being to truth, but is only employed in perceiving truth, it follows, that were every created understanding destroyed, these truths would immutably subsist. . . ." Chap, xxxvii. " Since there is nothing eternal, immutable, in- dependent, but God alone, we must conclude that these truths do not subsist in themselves, but in God alone, and in his eternal ideas, which are nothing else than himself. " There are those who, in order to verify these eternal truths which we have proposed, and others of the same nature, have fiorured to themselves eternal essences aside from deity — a pure GOD THE PRmCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 93 illusion, which comes from not understanding that in God, as in the source of being, and in his understanding, where resides the art of making and ordering all things, are found primitive ideas, or as St. Augustine says, the eternally subsisting reasons of things. Thus, in the thought of the architect is the primitive idea of a house which he perceives in himself; this intellectual house would not be destroyed by any ruin of houses built ac- cording to this interior model ; and if the architect were eternal, the idea and the reason of the house would also be eternal. But, without recurring to the mortal architect, there is an immortal architect, or rather a primitive eternally subsisting art in the ira- mutable thought of God, where all order, all measure, all rule, all proportion, all reason, in a word, all truth are found in their origin. " These eternal verities which our ideas represent, are the true object of science ; and this is the reason why Plato, in order to render us truly wise, continually reminds us of these ideas, wherein is seen, not what is formed, but what is, not what is be- gotten and is corrupt, what appears and vanishes, what is made and defective, but what eternally subsists. It is this intellectual world which that divine philosopher has put in the mind of God before the world was constructed, which is the immutable model of that great work. These are the simple, eternal, immutable, unbegotten, incorruptible ideas to which he refers us, in order to understand truth. This is what has made him say that our ideas, images of the divine ideas, were also immediately derived from the divine ideas, and did not come by the senses, which serve very well, said he, to awaken them, but not to form them in our mind. For if, without having ever seen any thing eternal, we have so clear an idea of eternity, that is to say, of being that is always the same ; if, without having perceived a perfect trian- gle, we understand it distinctly, and demonstrate so many incon- testable truths concerning it, it is a mark that these ideas do not come from our senses." 94 LECTUKE FOURTH. Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Self} Chap, iv., sect. 5. Intelligence has for its object eternal truths^ which are nothing else than God himself in whom they are always subsisting and perfectly understood. "... We have already remarked that the understanding has eternal verities for its object. The standards by which we meas- ure all things are eternal and invariable. We know clearly that every thing in the universe is made according to proportion, from the greatest to the least, from the strongest to the weakest, and we know it well enough to undei-stand that these proportions are related to the principles of eternal truth. All that is demon- strated in mathematics, and in any other science whatever, is eternal and immutable, since the effect of the demonstration is to show that the thing cannot be otherwise than as it is demon- strated to be. So, in order to understand the nature and the properties of things which I know, for example, a triangle, a square, a circle, or the relations of these figures, and all other figures, to each other, it is not necessary that I should find such in nature, and I may be sure that I have never traced, never seen, any that are perfect. Neither is it necessary that I should think that there is motion in the world in order to understand the nature of motion itself, or that of the lines which every mo- tion describes, and the hidden proportions according to which it is developed. When the idea of these things is once awakened in ray mind, I know that, whether they have an actual existence or not, so they must be, that it is impossible for them to be of another nature, pr to be made in a dififerent way. To come to something that concerns us more nearly, I mean by these princi- ples of eternal truth, that they do not depend on human exist- ence, that, so far as he is capable of reasoning, it is the essential duty of man to live according to reason, and to search for his maker, through fear of lacking the recognition of his maker, * The best, or, rather, only good edition is that which was published from an authentic copy, in 1846, by LecoflEre. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 95 if in fault of searching for him, he should be ignorant of him. All these truths, and all those which I deduce from them by sure reasoning, subsist independently of all time. In whatever time I place a human understanding, it will know them, but in know- in "• them it will find them truths, it will not make them such, for our cognitions do not make their objects, but suppose them. So these truths subsist before all time, before the existence of a human understanding : and were every thing that is made accord- mcr to the laws of proportion, that is to say, every thing that I see in nature, destroyed except myself, these laws would be preserved in ray thought, and I should clearly see that they would always be good and always true, were I also destroyed with the rest. " If I seek how, where, and in what subject they subsist eter- nal and immutable, as they are, I am obliged to avow the exist- ence of a being in whom truth is eternally subsisting, in whom it is always understood ; and this being must be truth itself, and must be all truth, and from him it is that truth is derived in every thing that exists and has understanding out of him. " It is, then, in him, in a certain manner, who is incomprehen- sible^ to me, it is in him, I say, that I see these eternal truths ; and to see them is to turn to him who is immutably all truth, and to receive his light. " This eternal object is God eternally subsisting, eternally true, eternally truth itself. ... It is in this eternal that these eternal truths subsist. It is also by this that I see them. All other men see them as well as myself, and we see them always the same, and as having existed before us. For we know that we have commenced, and we know that these truths have always been. Thus we see them in a light superior to ourselves, and it Is in this superior light that we see whether we act well or ill, that is to say, whether we act according to these constitutive principles of our being or not. In that, then, we see, with all * These words, d'une certaine maniere qui m'est incomprehensWle^ c'est en lui, dU-je^ are not in the first edition of 1722. 96 LECTURE FOURTH. I other truths, the invariable rules of our conduct, and we see that there are things in regard to which duty is indispensable, and that in things which are naturally indifferent, the true duty is to accommodate ourselves to the greatest good of society. A well- disposed man conforms to the civil laws, as he conforms to cus- tom. But he listens to an inviolable law in himself, which says to him that he must do wrong to no one, that it is better to be injured than to injure. . . . The man who sees these truths, by these truths judges himself, and condemns himself when he eri-s. Or, rather, these truths judge him, since they do not accommo- date themselves to human judgments, but human judgments are accommodated to them. And the man judges rightly when, feeling these judgments to be variable in their nature, he gives them for a rule these eternal verities. "These eternal verities which every understanding always per- ceives the same, by which every understanding is governed, are something of God, or rather, are God himself. ... "Truth must somewhere be very perfectly understood, and man is to himself an indubitable proof of this. For, whether he considers himself or extends his vision to the beings that surround him, he sees every thing subjected to certain laws, and to immu- table rules of truth. He sees that he understands these laws, at least in part, — he who has neither made himself, nor any part of the universe, however small, and he sees that nothing could have been made had not these laws been elsewhere perfectly^ understood ; and he sees that it is necessary to recognize an eternal wisdom wherein all law, all order, all proportion, have their primitive reason. For it is absurd to suppose that there is so much sequence in truths, so much proportion in things, so much economy in their arrangement, that is to say, in the world, and that this sequence, this proportion, this economy, should nowhere be under- stood : — and man, who has made nothing, veritably knowing these things, although not fully knowing them, must judge that there is some one who knows them in their perfection, and that this is he who has made all things. . » \ GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRmCIPLES. 97 Sect. 6 is wholly Cartesian. Bossuet there demonstrates that the soul knows by the imperfection of its own intelligence that there is elsewhere a perfect intelligence. In sect. 9, Bossuet elucidates anew the relation of truth to God. " Whence comes to my intelligence this impression, so pure, of truth ! Whence come to it those immutable rules that govern reasoning, that form manners, by which it discovers the secret proportions of figures and of movements ? Whence come to it, in a word, those eternal truths which I have considered so much ? Do the triangles, the squares, the circles, that I rudely trace on paper, impress upon my mind their proportions and ^heir rela- tions ? Or are there others whose perfect trueness produces this effect ? Where have I seen these circles ^d these triangles so true, — I who am not sure of ever having seen a perfectly regular figure, and, nevertheless, understand this regul-arity so perfectly ? Are there somewhere, either in the world or out of the world, triangles or circles existing with this perfect regularity, whereby it could be impressed upon my mind ? And do these rules of reasoning and conduct also exist in some place, whence they com- municate to me their immutable truth ? Or, indeed, is it not rather he who has everywhere extended measure, proportion, truth itself, that impresses on my mind the certain idea of them ? ... It is, then, necessary to understand that the soul, made in the image of God, capable of understanding truth, which is God himself, actually turns towards its original, that is to say, towards God, where the truth appears to it as soon as God wills to make the truth appear to it. . . . It is an astonishing thing that man understands so many truths, without understanding at the same time that all truth comes from God, that it is in God, that it is God himself. ... It is certain that God is the primitive reason of all that exists and has understanding in the universe ; that he is the true original, and that every thing is true by relation to his eternal idea, that seeking truth is seeking him, and that finding truth is finding him. . . .'* Chap, v., sect. 14. "The senses do not convey to the soul 5 > '■:■: % 98 LECTURE FOURTH. f. knowledge of truth. They excite it, awaken it, and apprize it of certain eWts': it is soUcited to search for causes, but it discovers them, it sees their connections, the principles which put them in motion, only in a superior light that comes from God, or is God himself. God is, then, truth, which is always the same to all minds, and the true source of intelligence. For this reason intel- ligence beholds the light, breathes, and lives." At tbi-' close of the seventeenth century, Leibnitz comes to crown these great testimonies, and to complete their unanimity. Her4 i^s a ,3assage from an important treatise entitled, Medtta- twnes de Cognitione, Veritate et Idoeis, in which Leibnitz declares that primary notions are the attributes of God. " I know not," he says;'' "whether man can perfectly account to himself for his ideas, except by ascending to primary ideas for which he can no more account, that is to say, to the absolute attributes of God."^ The same doctrine is in the Principia Philosophy sen Theses in Gratiam Principle EugeniL *^ The intelligence of God is the region of eternal truths, and the ideas that depend upon them."^ Theodkea, part ii., sect. 189.» " It must not be said with the Scotists that eternal truths would subsist if there were no under- standing, not even that of God. For, in my opinion, it is Jhe divine understanding that makes the reality of eternal truths." Nouveaux Essais sur VEntendement Humain, book ii., chap, xvii. " The idea of the absolute is in us internally like that of being. These absolutes are nothing else than the attributes of God, and it may be said they are just as much the source of ideas as God is in himself the principle of beings." Ibid., book iv., chap. xi. "But it will be demanded where those ideas would be if no mind existed, and what would then become of the real foundation of this certainty of eternal truths ? That brings us in fine to the last foundation of truths, to wit, to that supreme and universal mind which cannot be destitute of 1 Zeibnitzii Opera, edit. Deutens, vol. ii., p. 17. » Ibid., p. 24. » l8t edition, Amsterdam, 1710, p. 354, edit, of M. de Jaucourt, Amster- dam, 1747, vol. ii., p. 93. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 99 existence, whose understanding, to speak truly, is the region of eternal truths, as St. Augustine saw and clearly enough expressed it. And that it may not be thought necessary to recur to it, we must consider that these necessary truths contain the determina- ting reason and the regulative principle of existences themselves, and, in a word, the laws of the universe. So these. unnecessary truths, being anterior to the existences of contingent beings, must have their foundation in the existence of a necessaiy 'substance. It is there that I find the original of truths which are stamped upon our souls, not in the form of propositions, but ^s sources, the application and occasions of which will produce actual enun- ciations." So, from Plato to Leibnitz, the greatest metaphysicans have thought that absolute truth is an attribute of absolute being. Truth is incomprehensible without God, as God is incomprehen- sible without truth. Truth is placed between human intelligence and the supreme intelligence, as a kind of mediator. In the low- est degree, as well as at the height of being, God is everywhere met, for truth is everywhere. Study nature, elevate yourselves to the laws that govern it and make of it as it were a living truth : — the more profoundly you understand its laws, the nearer you approach to God. Study, above all, humanity ; humanity is much greater than nature, for it comes from God as well as nature, and knows him, while nature is ignorant of him. Especially seek and love truth, and refer it to the immortal being who is its source. The more you know of the truth, the more you know of God. The sciences, so far from turning us away from religion, conduct us to it. Physics, with their laws, mathematics, with their sublime ideas, especially philosophy, which cannot take a single step without encountering universal and necessary principles, are so many stages on the way to Deity, and, thus to speak, so many temples in which homage is perpetually paid to him. But in the midst of these high considerations, let us carefully guard ourselves against two opposite errors, from which men of fine genius have not always known how to preserve themselves, »■ z\ 100 LECTUEE FOURTH. fl>; —against the error of making the reason of man purely individ- ual, and against the error of confounding it with truth and the divine reason.^ If the reason of man is purely individual because it is in the individual, it can comprehend nothing that is not indi- vidual, nothing that transcends the limits wherein it is confined. Not only is it unable to elevate itself to any universal and neces- sary truth, not only is it unable to have any idea of it, even any suspicion of it, as one blind from his birth can have no suspicion that a sun exists ; but there is no power, not even thit of God, that by any means could make penetrate the reason of man any truth of that order absolutely repugnant to its nature; since, for this end, it would not be suflBcient for God to lighten our mind ; it would be necessary to change it, to add to it another faculty. Neither, on the other hand, must we, with Malebranche, make the reason of man to such a degi-ee impersonal that it takes the place of truth which is its object, and of God who is its principle. It is truth that to us is absolutely impersonal, and not reason. Reason is in man, yet it comes from God. Hence it is individual and finite, whilst its root is in the infinite ; it is personal by its » "We have many times designated these two rocks, for example, 2d Series, vol. i., lecture 5, p. 92 :— " One cannot help smiling when, in our times, he hears individual reason spoken against. In truth it is a great waste of decla- mation, for the reason is not individual ; if it were, we should govern it as we govern our resolutions and our volitions, we could at any moment change its acts, that is to say, our conceptions. If these conceptions were merely individual, we should not think of imposing them upon another individual, for to impose our own individual and. personal conceptions on another indi- vidual, on another person, would be the most extravagant despotism. . . . "We call those mad who do not admit the relations of numbers, the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, the just and the unjust. Why ? Because we know that it is not the individual that constitutes these conceptions, or, in other terms, we know that the reason has something universal and abso- lute, that upon this ground it obligates all individuals ; and an individual, at the same time that he knows that he himself is obligated by it, knows that all others are obligated by it on the same ground."— i5i<3?., p. 93 : " Truth misconceived is thereby neither altered nor destroyed ; it subsists independently of the reason that perceives it or perceives it ill. Truth in itself is independent of our reason. Its true subject is the universal and ab- solute reason." GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES. 101 iil relation to the person in which it resides, and must also possess I know not what character of universality, of necessity even, in order to be capable of conceiving universal and necessary truths ; hence it seems, by turns, according to the point of view from which it is regarded, pitiable and sublime. Truth is in some sort lent to human reason, but it belongs to a totally different reason, to wit, that supreme, eternal, uncreated reason, which is God himself. The truth in us is nothing else than our object ; in God, it is one of his attributes, as well as justice, holiness, mercy, as we shall subsequently see. God exists ; and so far as he exists, he thinks, and his thoughts are truths, eternal as himself, which are reflected in the laws of the universe, which the reason of man has received the power to attain. Truth is the offspring, the utter- ance, I was about to say, the eternal word of God, if it is per- mitted philosophy to borrow this divine language from that holy religion which teaches us to worship God in spirit and in truth. Of old, the theory of Ideas, which manifest God to men, and remind them of him, had given to Plato the surname of the pre- cursor ; on account of that theory of Ideas he was dear to St. Augustine, and is invoked by Bossuet. It is by this same theory, wisely interpreted, and purified by the light of our age, that the new philosophy is attached to the tradition of great philosophies, and to that of Christianity. The last problem that the science of the true presented is re- solved: — we are in possession of the basis of absolute truths. God is substance, reason, supreme cause, and the unity of all these truths ; God, and God alone, is to us the boundary beyond which we have nothing more to seek. LECTUEE 7. ON MYSTICISM. Distinction between the philosophy that we profess and mysticism. Mysti- cism consists in pretending to know God without an intermediary.— Two sorts of mysticism.— Mysticism of sentiment. Theory of sensibility. Two sensibilities— the one external, the other internal, and corresponding to the soul as external sensibility corresponds to nature.— Legitimate part of sentiment.- Its aberrations.— Philosophical mysticism. Plotinus : God, or ,. absolute unity, perceived without an intermediary by pure thought.— ' Ecstasy.- Mixture of superstition and abstraction in mysticism.— Conclu- sion of the first part of the course. ' Whether we turn our attention to the forces and the laws that animate and govern matter without belonging to it, or as the order of our labors calls us to do, reflect upon the universal and necessary truths which our mind discovers but does not con- stitute, the least systematic use of reason makes us naturally conclude from the forces and laws of the universe that there is a first intelligent mover, and from necessary truths that there is a necessary being who alone is their substance. We do not per- ceive God, but we conceive him, upon the faith of this admirable world exposed to our view, and upon that of this other world, more admirable still, which we bear in ourselves. By this double road we succeed in going to God. This natural course is that of all men : it must be sufficient for a sound philosophy. But there are feeble and presumptuous minds that do not know how to go thus far, or do not know how to stop there. Confined to experi- ence, they do not dare to conclude from what they see in what they do not see, as if at all times, at the sight of the first phenom- enon that appears to their eyes, they did not admit that this ON MYSTICISM. 103 phenomenon has a cause, even when this cause does not come within the reach of their senses. They do not perceive it, yet they believe in it, for the simple reason that they necessarily con- ceive it. Man and the universe are also facts that cannot but have a cause, although this cause may neither be seen by our eyes nor touched by our hands. Reason has been given us for the very purpose of going, and without any circuit of reasoning, from the visible to the invisible, from the finite to the infinite, from the imperfect to the perfect, and also, from necessary and universal truths, which surround us on every side, to their eternal and necessary principle. Such is the natural and legitimate bearing of reason. It possesses an evidence of which it renders no account, and is not thereby less irresistible to whomsoever does not undertake to contest with God the veracity of the faculties which he has received. But one does not revolt against reason with impunity. It punishes our false wisdom by giving us up to extravagance. When one has confined himself to the narrow, limits of what he directly perceives, he is smothered by these limits, wishes to go out of them at any price, and invokes some other means of knowing ; he did not dare to admit the existence of an invisible God, and now behold him aspiring to enter into immediate communication with him, as with sensible objects, and the objects of consciousness. It is an extreme feebleness for a rational being thus to doubt reason, and it is an incredible rash- ness, in this despair of intelligence, to dream of direct communi- cation with God. This desperate and ambitious dream is mys- ticism. It behooves us to separate with care this chimera, that is not without danger, from the cause that we defend. It behooves us so much the more to openly break with mysticism, as it seems to touch us more nearly, as it pretends to be the last word of phi- losophy, and as by an appearance of greatness it is able to seduce many a noble soul, especially at one of those epochs of lassitude, when, after the cruel disappointment of excessive hopes, human reason, having lost faith in its own power without having lost the 104 LECTURE FIFTH. ON MYSTICISM. . 105 need of God, in order to satisfy this immortal need, addresses itself to every thing except itself, and in fault of knowing how to go to God by the way that is open to it, throws itself out of common sense, and tries the new, the chimerical, even the ab- surd, in order to attain the impossible. Mysticism contains a pusillanimous skepticism in the place of reason, and, at the same time, a faith blind and carried even to the oblivion of all the conditions imposed upon human nature. To conceive God under the transparent veil of the universe and above the highest truths, is at once too much and too little for mysticism. It does not believe that it knows God, if it knows him only in his manifestations and by the signs of his existence : it wishes to perceive him directly, it wishes to be united to him, sometimes by sentiment, sometimes by some other extraordinary process. Sentiment plays so important a part in mysticism, that our first care must be to investigate the nature and proper function of this interesting and hitherto ill-studied part of human nature. It is necessary to distinguish sentiment well from sensation. There are, in some sort, two sensibilities : one is directed to the external world, and is charged with transmitting to the soul the impressions that it sees ; the other is wholly interior, and is re- lated to the soul as the other is to nature, — its function is to re- ceive the impression, and, as it were, the rebound of what passes in the soul. Have we discovered any truth ? there is something in us which feels joy on account of it. Have we performed a good action ? we receive our reward in a feeling of satisfaction less vivid, but more delicate and more durable than all the agree- able sensations that come from the body. It seems as if intelli- gence also had its intimate organ, which suffers or enjoys, accord- ing to the state of the intelligence. We bear in ourselves a profound source of emotion, at once physical and moral, which expresses the union of our two natures. .The animal does not go beyond sensation, and pure thought belongs only to the an- gelic nature. The sentiment that partakes of sensation and thought is the portion of humanity. Sentiment is, it is true, only an echo of reason ; but this echo is sometimes better understood than reason itself, because it resounds in the most intimate, the most delicate portions of the soul, and moves the entire man. It is a singular, but incontestable fact, that as soon as reason has conceived truth, the soul attaches itself to it, and loves it. Yes, the soul loves truth. It is a wonderful thing that a being strayed into one corner of the universe, alone charged with sus- taining himself against so many obstacles, who, it would seem, has enough to do to think of himself, to preserve and somewhat embellish his life, is capable of loving what is not related to him, and exists only in an invisible world ! This disinterested love of truth gives evidence of the greatness of him who feels it. Reason takes one step more : — it is not contented with truth, even absolute truth, when convinced that it possesses it ill, that it does not possess it as it really is ; as long as it has not placed it upon its eternal basis ; having arrived there, it stops as before its impassable barrier, having nothing more to seek, nothing more to find. Sentiment follows reason, to which it is attached ; it stops, it rests, only in the love of the infinite being. In fact, it is the infinite that we love, while we believe that w^e are loving finite things, even while loving truth, beauty, virtue. And so surely is it the infinite itself that attracts and charms us, that its highest manifestations do not satisfy us until we have re- feri-ed them to their immortal source. The heart is insatiable, because it aspires after the infinite. This sentiment, this need of the infinite, is at the foundation of the greatest passions, and the most trifling desires. A sigh of the soul in the presence of the starry heavens, the melancholy attached to the passion of glory, to ambition, to all the great emotions of the soul, express it better without doubt, but they do not express it more than the caprice and mobility of those vulgar loves, wandering from object to object in a perpetual circle of ardent desires, of poignant disquietudes, and mournful disenchantments. Let us designate another relation between reason and sentiment. 5^ 106 LECTURE FIFTH. ON MYSTICISM. 107 The mind at first precipitates itself towards its object without rendering to itself an account of what it does, of what it perceives, of what it feels. But, with the faculty of thinking, of feeling, it has also that of willing ; it possesses the liberty of returning to itself, of reflecting on its own thought and sentiment, of consenting to this, or of resisting it, of abstaining from it, or of reproducing its thought and sentiment, while stamping them with a new char- acter. Spontaneity, reflection, — these are the two great forms of intelligence.* One is not the other ; but, after all, the latter does little more than develop the former ; they contain at bottom the same things : — the point of view alone is difierent. Every thing that is spontaneous is obscure and confused ; reflection carries with it a clear and distinct view. Reason does not begin by reflection ; it does not at first per- ceive the truth as universal and necessary ; consequently, when it passes from idea to being, when it refers truth to the real being that is its subject, it has not sounded, it even has no suspicion of the depth of the chasm it passes ; it passes it by means of the power which is in it, but it is not astonished at what it has done. It is subsequently astonished, and undertakes by the aid of the liberty with which it is endowed, to do the opposite of what it has done, to deny what it has aflSrmed. Here commences the strife between sophism and common sense, between false science and natural truth, between good and bad philosophy, both of which come from free reflection. The sad and sublime privilege of reflection is error ; but reflection is the remedy for the evil it produces. If it can deny natural truth, usually it confirms it, re- turns to common sense by a longer or shorter circuit ; it opposes in vain all the tendencies of human nature, by which it is almost always overcome, and brought back submissive to the first inspi- rations of reason, fortified by this trial. But there is nothing more in the end than there was at the beginning ; only in prim- itive inspiration there was a power which was ignorant of itself, * See the preceding lectures. and in the legitimate results of reflection there is a power which knows itself :— one is the triumph of instinct, the other, that of true science. Sentiment which accompanies intelligence in all its proceedings presents the same phenomena. The heart, like reason, pursues the infinite, and the only dif- ference there is in these pursuits is, that sometimes the heart seeks the infinite without knowing that it seeks it, and sometimes it renders to itself an account of the final end of the need of loving what disturbs it. When reflection is added to love, if it finds that tho object loved is in fact worthy of being loved, far from enfeeliing love, it strengthens it ; ar from clipping its divine wings, it develops them, and nourishes them, as Plato^ says. But if the object of love is only a symbol of the true beauty, only capable of exciting the desire of the soul without satisfying it, reflection breaks the charm which held the heart, dissipates the chimera that enchained it. It must be very sure in regard to its attachments, in order to dare to put them to the proof of reflec- tion. Psyche! Psyche! preserve thy good fortune; do not sound the mystery too deeply. Take care not to bring the fear- ful light near the invisible lover with whom thy soul is enamored. At the first ray of the fatal lamp love is awakened, and flies away. Charming image of what takes place in the soul, when to the serene and unsuspecting confidence of sentiment succeeds reflection with its bitter train. This is perhaps also the meaning of the biblical account of the tree of knowledge.^ Before science and reflection are innocence and faith. Science and reflection at first engender doubt, disquietude, distaste for what one possesses, the disturbed pursuit of what one knows not, troubles of mind and soul, sore travail of thought, and, in life, many faults, until inno- cence, forever lost, is replaced by virtue, simple faith by true » See the PTicBdrus and the Banquet, vol. vii. of our translation. > We BhaU not be accused of perverting the holy Scriptures by these anal- ogies, for we give them only as analogies, and St. Augustine and Bossuetar* full of such. 108 LECTURE FIFTH. science, until love, through so many vanishing illusions, finally succeeds in reaching its true object Spontaneous love has the native grace of ignorance and happi- ness. Reflective love is very different ; it is serious, it is great, even in its faults, with the greatness of liberty. Let us not be in haste to condemn reflection : if it often produces egotism, it also produces devotion. What, in fact, is self-devotion ? It is giving ourselves freely, with full knowledge of what we are doing. Therein consists the sublimity of love, love worthy of a noble and generous creature, not an ignorant and blind love. When Affec- tion has conquered selfishness, instead of loving its object for its own sake, the soul gives itself to its object, and miracle of love, the more it gives the more it possesses, nourishing itself by its own sacrifices, and finding its strength and its joy in its entire self-abandonment. But there is only one being who is worthy of being thus loved, and who can be thus loved without illusions, and without mistakes, at once without limits, and without regret, to wit, the perfect being who alone does not fear reflection, who alone can fill the entire capacity of our heart. ^[ysticism corrupts sentiment by exaggerating its power. Mysticism begins by suppressing in man reason, or, at least, it subordinates and sacrifices reason to sentiment. Listen to mysticism : it says that by the heart alone is man in relation with God. All that is great, beautiful, infinite, eternal, love alone reveals to us. Reason is only a lying faculty. Be- cause it may err, and does err, it is said that it always errs. Reason is confounded with every thing that it is not. The errors of the senses, and of reasoning, the illusions of the imagination, even the extravagances of passion, which sometimes give rise to those of mind, every thing is laid to the charge of reason. Its imperfections are triumphed over, its miseries are complacently exhibited ; the most audacious dogmatical system — since it aspires to put man and God in immediate communication — borrows against reason all the arms of skepticism. ON MYSTICISM. 109 Mysticism goes farther : it attacks liberty itself; it orders lib- erty to renounce itself, in order to identify itself by love with him from whom the infinite separates us. The ideal of virtue is no lono-er the courageous perseverance of the good man, who, in struggling against temptation and suffering, makes life holy ; it is no longer the free and enlightened devotion of a loving soul ; it is the entire and blind abandonment of ourselves, of our will, of our being, in a barren contemplation of thought, in a prayer without utterance, and almost without consciousness. The source of mysticism is in that incomplete view of human nature, which knows not how to discern in it what therein is most profound, which betakes itself to what is therein most striking, most seizing, and, consequently, also most seizable. We have already said that reason is not noisy, and often is not heard, whilst its echo of sentiment loudly resounds. In this compound phenomenon, it is natural that the most apparent elemei&t should cover and dim the most obscure. Moreover, what relations, what deceptive resemblances between these two faculties ! Without doubt, in their development, they manifestly differ ; when reason becomes reasoning, one easily dis- tinguishes its heavy movement from the flight of sentiment ; but spontaneous reason is almost confounded with sentiment, — there is the same rapidity, the same obscurity. Add that they pursue the same object, and almost always go together. It is not, then, astonishing that they should be confounded. A wise philosophy distinguishes^ them without separating them. Analysis demonstrates that reason precedes, and that sentiment follows. How can we love what we are ignorant of? In order to enjoy the truth, is it not necessary to know it more or less ? In order to be moved by certain ideas, is it not neces- sary to have possessed them In some degree ? To absorb reason » See part ii., TTie Beautiful, lecture 6, and part, iii., lecture 18, on the Morals of Sentiment. See also our Pascal, preface of the last edition, p. 8, etc., vol. i. of the 4th Series. no LECTURE FIFTH. in sentiment is to stifle the cause in the effect. When one speaks of the light of the heart, he designates, without knowing it, that light of the spontaneous reason which discovers to us truth by a pure and immediate intuition entirely opposite to the slow and laborious processes of the reflective reason and reasoning. Sentiment by itself is a source of emotion, not of knowledge. The sole faculty of knowledge is leason. At bottom, if senti- ment is different from sensation, it nevertheless pertains on all sides to general sensibihty, and it is, like it, variable ; it has, like it, its interruptions, its vivacity, and its lassitude, its exaltation and its short-comings. The inspirations of sentiment, then, which are essentially mobile and individual, cannot be raised to a universal and absolute rule. It is not so with reason ; it is constantly the same in each one of us, the same in all men. The laws that govern its exercise constitute the common legislation of all intelligent beings. There is no intelligence that does not conceive some universal and necessary truth, and, consequently, . the infinite being who is its principle. These grand objects beinor once known excite in the souls of all men the emotions that we have endeavored to describe. These emotions partake of the dignity of reason and the mobility of imagination and sensibility. Sentiment is the harmonious and living relation be- tv*een reason and sensibility. Suppress one of the two terms, and what becomes of the relation ? Mysticism pretends to ele- vate man directly to God, and does not see that in depriving reason of its power, it really deprives him of that which makes him know God, and puts him in a just communication with God by the intermediary of eternal and infinite truth. The fundamental error of mysticism is, that it discards this in- termediar}^, as if it were a barrier and not a tie : it makes the infinite being the direct object of love. But such a love can be sustained only by superhuman efforts that end in folly. Love tends to unite itself with its object : mysticism absorbs love in its object. Hence the extravagances of that mysticism so severely and so justly condemned by Bossuet and the Church in quiet- ON MYSTICISM. Ill ism.* Quietism lulls to sleep the activity of man, extinguishes his intelligence, substitutes indolent and irregular contemplation for the seeking of truth and the fulfilment of duty. The true union of the soul with God is made by truth and virtue. Every other union is a chimera, a peril, sometimes a crime. It is not permitted man to reject, under any pretext, that which makes him man, that which renders him capable of comprehending God, and expressing in himself an imperfect image of God, that is to say, reason, hberty, conscience. Without doubt, virtue has its prudence, and if we must never yield to passion, there are diverse ways of combating it in order to conquer it. One can let it sub- side, and resignation and silence may have their legitimate em- ployment. There is a portion of truth, of utility even, in the Spiritual Letters, even in the Maxims of the Saints. But, in general, it is unsafe to anticipate in this world the prerogatives of death, and to dream of sanctity when virtue alone is required of us, when virtue is so difficult to attain, even imperfectly. The best quietism can, at most, be only a halt in the course, a truce in the strife, or rather another manner of combating. It is not by flight that battles are gained ; in order to gain them it is necessary to come to an engagement, so much the more as duty consists in combating still more than in conquering. Of the two opposite extremes— stoicism and quietism — the first, taken all in all, is preferable to the second ; for if it does not always elevate man to God, it maintains, at least, human personality, hberty, conscience, whilst quietism, in abolishing these, abolishes the entire man. Oblivion of life and its duties, inertness, sloth, death of soul,— such are the fruits of that love of God, which is lost in the sterile contemplation of its object, provided it does not cause still sadder aberrations ! There comes a moment when the soul that believes itself united with God, puffed up with this imaginary possession, despises both the body and human person- ality to such an extent that all its actions become indifferent to > See the admirable work of Bossuet, Instruction mr lea etaU d'Orakon, 112 lectuhe fifth. it, and good and evil are in its eyes the same. Thus it is that fanatical sects have been seen mingling crime and devotion, find- ing in one the excuse, often even the motive, of the other, and prefacing infamous irregularities or abominable cruelties with mystic transports, — deplorable consequences of the chimera of pure love, of the pretension of sentiment to rule over reason, to serve alone as a guide to the human soul, and to put itself in direct communication with God, without the intermediary of the visible world, and without the still surer intermediary of intelli- gence and truth. But it is time to pass to another kind of mysticism, more sin- gular, more learned, more refined, and quite as unreasonable, al- though it presents itself in the very name of reason. We haveseen^ that reason, if one of the principles which gov- ern it be destroyed, cannot lay hold of truth, not even absolute truths of the intellectual and moral order ; it refers all universal, necessary, absolute truths, to the being that alone can explain them, because in him alone are necessary and absolute existence, immutability, and infinity. God is the substance of uncreated truths, as he is the cause of created existences. Necessary truths find in God their natural subject. If God has not arbitrarily made them, — which is not in accordance with their essence and his, — he constitutes them, inasmuch as they are himself. His intelligence possesses them as the manifestations of itself. As long as our intelligence has not referred them to the divine intel- ligence, they are to it an effect without cause, a phenomenon without substance. It refers them, then, to their cause and their substance. And in that it obeys an imperative need, a fixed principle of reason. Mysticism breaks in some sort the ladder that elQvates us to infinite substance : it regards this substance alone, independent- ly* of the truth that manifests it, and it imagines itself to possess * Lecture 4. * See especially in our writings the regular and detailed refutation of the double extravagance of considering substance apart from its determinations ON MYSTICISM. 113 also the pure absolute, pure unity, being in itself. The advan- tage which mysticism here seeks, is to give to thought an object wherein there is no mixture, no division, no multiplicity, wherein every sensible and human element has entirely disappeared. But in order to obtain this advantage, it must pay the cost of it. It is a very simple means of freeing theodicea from every shade of anthropomorphism ; it is reducing God to an abstraction, to the abstraction of being in itself. Being in itself, it is true, is free from all division, but upon the condition that it have no attribute, no quality, and even that it be deprived of knowledge and intel- ligence ; for intelligence, if elevated as it might be, always sup- poses the distinction between the intelligent subject and the in- tellioible object. A God from whom absolute unity excludes intelligence, is the God of the mystic philosophy. and its qualities, or of considering its qualities and its faculties apart from the being that possesses them. 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture 3, On Condillac, and vol. v., lectures 5 and 6, On Kant. We say, the same Series, vol. iv., p. 56 : " There are philosophers beyond the Khine, who, to appear very profound, are not contented with qualities and phenomena, and aspire to pure substance, to being in itself. The problem stated as follows, is quite insoluble : the knowledge of such a substance is impossible, for this very simple reason, that such a substance does not exist. Being in itself, das Ding in aich, which Kant seeks, escapes him, and this does not humiliate Kant and philosophy ; for there is no being in itself. The human mind may forrn to itself an abstract and general idea of being, but this idea has no real object in nature. All being is determinate, if it is real; and to be determinate is to possess certain modes of being, transitory and accidental, or constant and essential. Knowledge of being in itself is then not merely interdicted to the human mind ; it is contrary to the nature of things. At the other extreme of metaphysics is a powerless psychology, which, by fear of a hollow ontology, is condemned to voluntary ignorance. We are not able, say these philosophers, Mr. Dugald Stewart, for example, to attain being in itself; it is permitted us to know only phenomena and qualities: so that, in order not to wander in search of the substance of the soul, they do not dare affirm its spirituality, and devote themselves to the study of its different faculties. Equal error, equal chimera ! There are no more quali- ties without being, than beiug without qualities. No being is without its determinations, and reciprocally its determinations are not without it. Te consider the determinations of being independently of the being which possesses them, is no longer to observe ; it is to abstract, to make an ab- straction quite as extravagant as that of being considered independently of its qualities." 114 LECTURE FIFTH. ON MYSTICISM. 115 How could the school of Alexandria, how could Plotinus, its founder/ in the midst of the lights of the Greek and Latin civili- zation, have arrived at such a strange notion of the Divinity? By the abuse of Platonism, by the corruption of the best and severest method, that of Socrates and Plato. The Platonic method, the dialectic process, as its author calls it, searches in particular, variable, contingent things, for what they also have general, durable, one, that is to say, their Idea, and is thus elevated to Ideas, as to the only true objects of intel- ligence, in order to be elevated still from these Ideas, which are arranged in an admirable hierarchy, to the first of all, beyond which intelligence has nothing more to conceive, nothing more to seek. By rejecting in finite things their limit, their individu- ality, we attain genera, Ideas, and, by them, their sovereign prin- ciple. But this principle is not the last of genera, nor the last of abstractions ; it is a real and substantial principle.^ The God of Plato is not called merely unity, he is called the Good ; he is not the lifeless substance of the Eleatics ;* he is endowed with life and movement ;* strong expressions that show how much the God of the Platonic metaphysics differs from that of mysticism. This God is the father of the world} He is also the father of truth, that light of spirits.* He dwells in the midst of Ideas which make him a true God inasmuch as he is with them? He possesses august and holy intelligence} He has made the world * On the school of Alexandria, see 2d Series, vol. ii., Shitch of a General History of PliilosopTiy^ lecture 8, p. 211, and 3d Series, vol. i., pasnm. * See the previous lecture. ' 3d Series, vol. i., Ancient FJdlosophyj article Xenophanee, and article Zeno. * The Sophist, vol. xi. of our translation, p. 261. ' Tinueus, vol. xii., p. 117. ' RepuUic, book vii., p. 70 of vol. x. ' Phcedrus, vol. vi., p. 55. * The Sophist, p. 261, 262. The following little-known and decisive pas- sage, which we have translated for the first time, must be cited : — " Stranger, But what, by Zeus ! shall we be so easily persuaded that in reality, motion, life, soul, intelligence, do not belong to absolute being? that this being neither lives nor thinks, that this being remains immobile, immutable, with- out having part in august and holy intelligence ? — Theatetus. That would without any external necessity, and for the sole reason that he is good.* In fine, he is beauty without mixture, unalterable, im- mortal, that makes him who has caught a glimpse of it disdain all earthly beauties.* The beautiful, the absolute good, is too dazzling to be looked oti directly by the eye of mortal ; it must at first be contemplated in the images that reveal it to us, in truth, in beauty, in justice, as they are met here below, and among men, as the eye of one who has been a chained captive from infancy, must be gradually habituated to the light of the sun.* Our reason, enlightened by true science, can perceive this light of spirits ; reason rightly led can go to God, and there is no need, in order to reach him, of a particular and mysterious faculty. Plotinus erred by pushing to excess the Platonic dialectics, and by extending them beyond the boundary where they should stop. In Plato they terminate at ideas, at the idea of the good, and produce an intelligent and good God; Plotinus applies them without Hmit, and they lead him into an abyss of mysticism. If all truth is in the general, and if all individuality is imperfection, it follows, that as long as we are able to generalize, as long as it is possible for us to overlook any difference, to exclude any deter- mination, we shall not be at the limit of dialectics. Its last object, then, will be a principle without any determination. It will not spare in God being itself. In fact, if we say that God is a being, by the side of and above being, we place unity, of be consenting, dear Eleatus, to a very strange assertion.— /S'^ran^^r. Or, in- deed, shall we accord to this being intelligence while we refuse him life ?— Theatetus. That cannot hd.— Stranger. Or, again, shall we say that there is in him intelligence and life, but that it is not in a soul that he possesses them ? —Theatetus. And how could he possess them otherwise "i— Stranger. In fine, tliat, endowed with intelligence, soul, and life, all animated as he is, he remains incomplete immobility.— ^A^a^^^w^. All that seems to me unrea- sonable." » Timcens, p. 119 : " Let us say that the cause which led the supreme ordainer to produce and compose this universe was, that he was good." " Bouquet, discourse of Diotimus, vol. vi., and the 2d part of this vol., The Beautiful, lecture 7. ' BepuhUc. Ibid. 1!« 116 LECTURE FIFTH. which being partakes, and which it cannot disengage, in order to consider it alone. Being is not here simple, since it is at once being and unity ; unity alone is simple, for one cannot go beyond that. And still when we say unity, we determine it. True ab- solute unity must, then, be something absolutely indeterminate, which is not, which, properly speaking, cannot be named, the unnamahle, as Plotinus says. This principle, which exists not, for a still stronger reason, cannot think, for all thought is still a determination, a manner of being. C^o being and thought are excluded from absolute unity. If Alexandrianism admits them, it is only as a forfeiture, a degradation of unity. Considered in thought, and in being, the supreme principle is inferior to itself; only in the pure simplicity of its indefinable essence is it the last object of science, and the last term of perfection. In order to enter into communication with such a God, the ordinary faculties are not sufficient, and the theodicea of the school of Alexandria imposes upon it a quite peculiar psychology. In the truth of things, reason conceives absolute unity as an attribute of absolute being, but not as something in itself, or, if it considers it apart, it knows that it considers only an abstraction. Does one wish to make absolute unity something else than an attribute of an absolute being, or an abstraction, a conception of human intelligence ? Reason could accept nothing more on any condition. Will this barren unity be the object of love ? But love, much more than reason, aspires after a real object. One does not love substance in general, but a substance that possesses such or such a character. In human friendships, suppress all the qualities of a person, or modify them, and you modify or sup- press the love. This does not prove that you do not love this person ; it only proves that the person is not for you without his qualities. So neither reason nor love can attain the absolute unity of mysticism. In order to correspond to such an object, there must be in us something analogous to it, there must be a mode of knowing that implies the abolition of consciousness. In fact, ON MYSTICISM. 117 consciousness is the sign of the me, that is to say, of that which is most determinate : the being who says, me, distinguishes him- self essentially from every other ; that is for us the type itself of individuality. Consciousness should degrade the ideal of dialectic knowledge, or every division, every determination must be want- ing, in order to respond to the absolute unity of its object. This mode of pure and direct communication with God, which is not reason, which is not love, which excludes consciousness, is ecstasy (sxTaCi?). This word, which Plotinus first applied to this singu- lar state of the soul, expresses this separation from ourselves which mysticism exacts, and of which it believes man capable. Man, in order to communicate with absolute being, must go out of himself. It is necessary that thought should reject all deter-' minate thought, and, in falling back within its own depths, should arrive at such an oblivion of itself, that consciousness should van- ish or seem to vanish. But that is only an image of ecstasy ; what it is in itself, no one knows ; as it escapes all consciousness, it escapes memory, escapes reflection, and consequently all ex- pression, all human speech. This philosophical mysticism rests upon a radically false notion of absolute being. By dint of wishing to free God from all the conditions of finite existence, one comes to deprive him of all the conditions of existence itself; one has such a fear that the infi- nite may have something in common with the finite, that he does not dare t» recognize that being is common to both, save differ- ence of degree, as if all that is not were not nothingness itself! Absolute being possesses absolute unity without any doubt, as it possesses absolute intelligence ; but, once more, absolute unity without a real subject of inherence is destitute of all reality. Real and determinate are synonyms. What constitutes a being is its special nature, its essence. A being is itself only on the condition of not being another ; it cannot but have characteristic traits. All that is, is such or such. Difference is an element as essential to being as unity itself. If, then, reality is in determi- nation, it follows that God is the most determinate of beings. 116 ON MYSTICISM. 117 LECTURE FIFTH. .'.'I which being partakes, and which it cannot disengage, in order to consider it alone. Being is not here simple, since it is at once being and unity ; unity alone is simple, for one cannot go beyond that. And still when we say unity, we determine it. True ab- solute unity must, then, be something absolutely indeterminate, which is not, which, properly speaking, cannot be named, the unnamable, as Plotinus says. This principle, which exists not, for a still stronger reason, cannot think, for all thought is still a determination, a manner of being, r^o being and thought are excluded from absolute unity. If Alexandrianism admits them, it is only as a forfeiture, a degradation of unity. Considered in thought, and in being, the supreme principle is inferior to itself; only in the pure simplicity of its indefinable essence is it the last object of science, and the last term of perfection. In order to enter into communication with such a God, the ordinary faculties are not suflScient, and the theodicea of the school of Alexandria imposes upon it a quite peculiar psychology. In the truth of things, reason conceives absolute unity as an attribute of absolute being, but not as something in itself, or, if it considers it apart, it knows that it considers only an abstraction. Does one wish to make absolute unity something else than an attribute of an absolute being, or an abstraction, a conception of human intelligence ? Reason could accept nothing more on any condition. Will this barren unity be the object of love ? But love, much more than reason, aspires after a real object. One does not love substance in general, but a substance that possesses such or such a character. In human friendships, suppress all the qualities of a person, or modify them, and you modify or sup- press the love. This does not prove that you do not love this person ; it only proves that the person is not for you without his qualities. So neither reason nor love can attain the absolute unity of mysticism. In order to correspond to such an object, there must be in us something analogous to it, there must be a mode of knowing that implies the abolition of consciousness. In fact, consciousness is the sign of the me, that is to say, of that which is most determinate : the being who says, me, distinguishes him- self essentially from every other ; that is for us the type itself of individuality. Consciousness should degrade the ideal of dialectic knowledge, or every division, every determination must be want- ing, in order to respond to the absolute unity of its object. This mode of pure and direct communication with God, which is not reason, which is not love, which excludes consciousness, is ecstasy {^hradig). This word, which Plotinus first applied to this singu- lar state of the soul, expresses this separation from ourselves which mysticism exacts, and of which it believes man capable. Man, in order to communicate with absolute being, must go out of himself. It is necessary that thought should reject all deter- minate thought, and, in falling back within its own depths, should arrive at such an oblivion of itself, that consciousness should van- ish or seem to vanish. But that is only an image of ecstasy ; what it is in itself, no one knows ; as it escapes all consciousness, it escapes memory, escapes reflection, and consequently all ex- pression, all human speech. This philosophical mysticism rests upon a radically false notion of absolute being. By dint of wishing to free God from all the conditions of finite existence, one comes to deprive him of all the conditions of existence itself; one has such a fear that the infi- nite may have something in common with the finite, that he does not dare t^ recognize that being is common to both, save diflfer- ence of degree, as if all that is not were not nothingness itself! Absolute being possesses absolute unity without any doubt, as it possesses absolute intelligence ; but, once more, absolute unity without a real subject of inherence is destitute of all reality. Real and determinate are synonyms. What constitutes a being is its special nature, its essence. A being is itself only on the condition of not being another ; it cannot but have characteristic traits. All that is, is such or such. Difference is an element as essential to being as unity itself. If, then, reality is in determi- nation, it follows that God is the most determinate of beings. 118 LECTURE FIFTH. Aristotle is much more Platonic than Plotinus, when he says that God is the thought of thought,^ that ho is not a simple power, but a power effectively acting, meaning thereby that God, to be perfect, ought to have nothing in himself that is not com- pleted. To finite nature it belongs to be, in a certain sense, in- determinate, since being finite, it has always in itself powers that are* not realized ; this indetermination diminishes as these powers are realized. So true divine unity is not abstract unity, it is the precise unity of perfect being in which every thing is accom- plished. At the summit of existence, still more than at its low degree, every thing is determinate, every thing is developed, every thing is distinct, every thing is one. The richness of deter- •minations is a certain sign of the plenitude of being. Reflection distinguishes these determinations from each other, but it is not necessary that it should in these distinctions see the limits. In us, for example, does the diversity of our faculties and their richest development divide the me and alter the identity and the unity of the person ? Does each one of us believe himself less than himself, because he possesses sensibility, reason, and will ? No, surely. It is the same with God. Not having employed a suflBcient psychology, Alexandrian i mysticism imagined that di- versity of attributes is incompatible with simplicity of essence, and through fear of corrupting simple and pure essence, it made of it an abstraction. By a senseless scruple, it feared that God would not be sufficiently perfect, if it left him all his perfections ; it regards them as imperfections, being as a degradation, creation as a fall ; and, in order to explain man and the universe, it is forced to put in God what it calls failings, not having seen that these pretended failings are the very signs of his infinite perfec- tion. The theory of ecstasy is at once the necessary condition and the condemnation of the theory of absolute unity. Without ab- * Book xii. of the Metaphysics. De la Metaphysique d'Aristotley 2d edition p. 200, etc. ON MYSTICISM. 119 solute unity as the direct object of knowledge, of what use is ecstasy in the subject of knowledge ? Ecstasy, far from elevating man to God, abases him below man ; for it eftaces in him thought, by taking away its condition, which is consciousness. To suppress consciousness, is to render all knowledge impossible ; it is not to comprehend the perfection of this mode of knowing, wherein the limitation of subject and object gives at once the simplest, anost immediate, and most determinate knowledge.^ The Alexandrian mysticism is the most learned and the pro- foundest of all known mysticisms. In the heights of abstraction where it loses itself, it seems very far from popular superstitions ; V, and yet the school of Alexandria unites ecstatic contemplation and theurgy. These are two things, in appearance, incompatible, but they pertain to the same principle, to the pretension of di- rectly perceiving what inevitably escapes all our efforts. On the one hand, a refined mysticism aspires to God by ecstasy ; on the other, a gross mysticism thinks to seize him by the senses. The processes, the faculties employed, differ, but the foundation is the same, and from this common foundation necessarily spring the most opposite extravagances. Apollonius of Tyanus is a popu- lar Alexandrianist, and Jambhcus is Plotinus become a priest, mystagogue, and hierophant. A new worship shone forth by miracles ; the ancient worship would have its own miracles, and * On this fundamental point, see lecture 3, in this vol.— 2d Series, vol. i., lecture 5, p. 97. " The peculiarity of intelligence is not the power of know- ing, but knowing in fact. On what condition is there intelligence for us ? It is not enough that there should be in us a principle of intelligence ; this principle must be developed and exercised, and take itself as the object of its intelligence. The necessary condition of intelligence is consciousness — that is to say, difference. There can be consciousness only where there are several terms, one of which perceives the other, and at the same time per- ceives itself. That is knowing, and knowing self; that is intelligence. In- telligence without consciousness is the abstract possibility of intelligence, it is not real intelligence. Transfer this from human intelligence to divine in- telligence, that is to say, refer ideas, I mean ideas in the sense of Plato, of St. Augustine, of Bossuet, of Leibnitz, to the only intelligence to which they can belong, and you will have, if I may thus express myself, the life of the divine intelligence . . . , etc." 120 LECTUEE FIFTH. philosophers boasted that they could make the divinity appear before other men. They had demons for themselves, and, in some sort, for their own orders ; the gods were not only invoked, but evoked. Ecstasy for the initiates, theurgy for the crowd. At all times and in all places, these two mysticisms have given each other the hand. In India and in China, the schools where the most subtile idealism is taught, are not far from pagodas of the most abject idolatry. One day the Bhagavad-Gita or Lao- tseu* is read, an indefinable God is taught, without essential and determinate attributes ; the next day there is shown to the people such or such a form, such or such a manifestation of this God, who, not having a form that belongs to him, can receive all forms, and being only substance in itself, is necessarily the substance of every thing, of a stone and a drop of water, of a dog, a hero, and a sage. So, in the ancient world under Julien, for example, the same man was at once professor in the school of Athens and guardian of the temple of Minerva or Cybele, by turns obscuring the Timceus and the Repuhlic by subtile commentaries, and ex- hibiting to the eyes of the multitude sometimes the sacred vale,* sometimes the shrine of the good goddess,' and in either function, as priest or philosopher, imposing on others and himself, under- taking to ascend above the human mind and falling miserably below it, paying in some sort the penalty of an unintelligible metaphysics, in lending himself to the most shameless super- stitions. When the Christian religion triumphed, it brought humanity under a discipline that puts a rein upon this deplorable mysticism. But how many times has it brought back, under the reign of spiritual religion, all the extravagances of the religions of nature ! It was to appear especially at the renaissance of the schools and of the genius of Paganism in the sixteenth century, when the * Vol. ii. of tlie 2d Series, Shetch of a General History of Philosophy^ lec- tures 5 and 6, On the Indian Philosophy. ' See the Euthyphron^ vol. i. of our tranalation. ' Lucien, Apuleius, Lucius of Patras. ON MYSTICISM. 121 human mind had broken with the philosophy of the Middle Age, without yet having arrived at modern philosophy.^ The Paracel- suses and the Von Helmonts renewed the Apolloniuses and the Jamblicuses, abusing some chemical and medical knowledge, as the former had abused the Socratic and Platonic method, altered in its character, and turned from its true object. And so, in the midst of the eighteenth century, has not Swedenborg united in his own person an exalted mysticism and a sort of magic, opening thus the way to those senseless^ persons who contest with me in the morning the solidest and best-established proofs of the exist- ence of the soul and God, and propose to me in the evening to make me see otherwise than with my eyes, and to make me hear otherwise than with my ears, to make me use all my faculties otherwise than by their natural organs, promising me a superhu- man science, on the condition of first losing consciousness, thought, liberty, memory, all that constitutes me an intelligent and moral being. I should know all, then, but at the cost of knowing nothing that I should know. I should elevate myself to a mar- vellous world, which, awakened and in a natural state, I am not even able to suspect, of which no remembrance will remain to me : — a mysticism at once gross and chimerical, which perverts both psychology and physiology ; an imbecile ecstasy, renewed without genius from the Alexandrine ecstasy ; an extravagance which has not even the merit of a little novelty, and which history has seen reappearing at all epochs of ambition and impotence. This is what we come to when we wish to go beyond the con- ditions imposed upon human nature. Charron first said, and 1 2d Series, vol. ii., Sketch of a General History of Philosophy^ lecture 10, On the Philosophy of the Renaissance. " One was then ardently occupied with magnetism, and more than a mag- netizer, half a materialist, half a visionary, pretended to convert us to a sys- tem of perfect clairvoyance of soul, obtained by means of artificial sleep. Alas ! the same follies are now renewed. Conjunctions are the fashion. Spirits are interrogated, and they respond ! Only let there be conscious- ness that one does not interrogate, and superstition alone counterpoises skepticism. 6 122 LECTURE FIFTH. after him Pascal repeated it, that whoever would become an angel becomes a beast. The remedy for all these follies is a severe theory of reason, of what it can and what it cannot do; of reason enveloped first in the exercise of the senses, than elevating itself to universal and necessary ideas, referring them to their principle, to a being infinite and at the same time real and sub- stantial, whose existence it conceives, but whose nature it is always interdicted to penetrate and comprehend. Sentiment ac- companies and vivifies the sublime intuitions of reason, but we must not confound these two orders of facts, much less smother reason in sentiment. Between a finite being like man and God, absolute and infinite substance, there is the double intermediary of that magnificent universe open to our gaze, and of those mar- vellous truths which reason conceives, but has not made more than the eye makes the beauties it perceives. The only means that is given us of elevating ourselves to the Being of beings, without being dazzled and bewildered, is to approach him by the aid of a divine intermediary ; that is to say, to consecrate our- selves to the study and the love of truth, and, as we shall soon see, to the contemplation and reproduction of the beautiful, espe eially to the practice of the good. PART SECOND. THE BEAUTIFUL. LECTUEE YI. THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. The method that must govern researches on the beautiful and art is, as in the investigation of the true, to commence by psychology.— Faculties of the soul that unite in the perception of the beautiful.— The senses give only the agreeable ; reason alone gives the idea of the beautiful.— Refuta- tion of empiricism, that confounds the agreeable and the beautiful.— Pre- eminence of reason.— Sentiment of the beautiful; different from sensation and desire.— Distinction between the sentiment of the beautiful and that of the sublime.— Imagination.— Influence of sentiment on imagination.— Influence of imagination on sentiment.— Theory of taste. Let us recall in a few words the results at which we have arrived. Two exclusive schools are opposed to each other in the eigh- teenth century ; we have combated both, and each by the other. To empiricism we have opposed the insufficiency of sensation, and its own inevitable necessity to idealism. We have admitted, with Locke and Condillac, in regard to the origin of knowledge, pjirticular and contingent ideas, which we owe to the senses and consciousness; and above the senses and consciousness, the direct sources of all particular ideas, we have recognized, with Reid and Kant, a special faculty, diflferent from sensation and conscious- ness, but developed with them,— reason, the lofty source of uni- versal and necessary truths. We have established, against Kant, 124 LECTURE SIXTH. the absolute authority of reason, and the truths which it discovers. Then, the truths that reason revealed to us have themselves re- vealed to us their eternal principle, — God. Finally, this rational spiritualism, which is both the faith of the human race and the doctrine of the greatest minds of antiquity and modern times, we have carefully distinguished from a chimerical and dangerous mysticism. Thus the necessity of experience and the necessity of reason, the necessity of a real and infinite being which is the first and last foundation of truth, a severe distinction between spirit- ualism and mysticism, are the great principles which we have been able to gather from the first part of this course. The second part, the study of the beautiful, will give us the same results elucidated and aggrandized by a new application. It was the eighteenth century that introduced, or rather brought back into philosophy, investigations on the beautiful and art, so familiar to Plato and Aristotle, but which scholasticism had not entertained, to which our great philosophy of the seventeenth century had remained almost a stranger.^ One comprehends that it did not belong to the empirical school to revive this noble part of philosophic science. Locke and Condillac did not leave a chapter, not even a single page, on the beautiful. Their follow- ers treated beauty with the same disdain ; not knowing very well how to explain it in their system, they found it more convenient not to perceive it at all. Diderot, it is true, had an enthusiasm for beauty and art, but enthusiasm was never so ill placed. Di- derot had genius ; but, as Voltaire said of him, his was a head in which every thing fermented without coming to maturity. He scattered here and there a mass of ingenious and often contradic- tory perceptions ; he has no principles ; he abandons himself to the impression of the moment ; he knows not what the ideal is ; he delights in a kind of nature, at once common and mannered. * Except the estimable Esmy on tJie Beautiful^ by P. Andre, a disciple of Malebranche, whose life was considerably prolonged into the eighteenth century. On P. Andre, see 3d Series, vol. iii., Modern Fhilosoph]/, p. 207, 516. THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. 125 such as one might expect from the author of the Interpretation de la Nature, the Pere de Famille, the Neveu de Bameau, aud Jacques le Fataliste. Diderot is a fatalist in art as well as in philosophy ; he belongs to his times and his school, with a grain of poetry, sensibiHty, and imagination.* It was worthy of the Scotch^ school and Kant^ to give a place to the beautiful in their doctrine. They considered it in the soul and in nature ; but they did not even touch the diflScult question of the reproduction of the beautiful by the genius of man. We will try to embrace this * great subject in its whole extent, and we are about to offer at least a sketch of a regular and complete theory of beauty and art. Let us begin by establishing well the method that must preside over these investigations. One can study the beautiful in two ways : — either out of us, in itself and in the objects, whatever they may be, that bear its im- press ; or in the mind of man, in the faculties that attain it, in the ideas or sentiments that it excites in us. Now, the true method, which must now be familiar to you, makes setting out from man to arrive at things a law for us. Therefore psychologi- cal analysis will here again be. our point of departure, and the study of the state of the soul in presence of the beautiful will pre- pare us for that of the beautiful considered in itself and its objects. Let us interrogate the soul in the presence of beauty. Is it not an incontestable fact that before certain objects, under very different circumstances, we pronounce the following judg- ment -.—This object is beautiful ? This affirmation is not always explicit. Sometimes it manifests itself only by a cry of admira- tion ; sometimes it silently rises in the mind that scarcely has a consciousness of it. The forms of this phenomenon vary, but the » See in the works of Diderct, Pensees sur la Sculpture, Us Salons, etc. " See Ist Series, vol. iv,, explained and estimated, the theories of Hutch- eson and Reid. ' The theory of Kant is found in the Critique of Judgment, and in the Ob- servations on the Sentiment of the Beautiful and the Sublime. See the excel- lent translation made by M. Barny, 2 vols., 1846. f 126 LECrrURE SIXTH. THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. 127 phenomenon is attested by the most common and most certain observation, and all languages bear witness of it. Although sensible objects, with most men, oftenest provoke the judgment of the beautiful, they do not alone possess this ad- vantage ; the domain of beauty is more extensive than the domain of the physical world exposed to our view ; it has no bounds but those of entire nature, and of the soul and genius of man. Before an heroic action, by the remembrance of a great sacrifice ; even bj^ the thought of the most abstract truths firmly united with each other in a system admirable at once for its simplicity and its pro- ductiveness ; finally, before objects of another order, before the Avorks of art, this same phenomenon is produced in us. We recognize in all these objects, however different, a common quality in regard to which our judgment is pronounced, and this quality we call beauty. The philosophy of sensation, in faithfulness to itself, should have attempted to reduce the beautiful to the agreeable. Without doubt, beauty is almost always agreeable to the senses, or at least it must not wound them. Most of our ideas of the beautiful come to us by sight and hearing, and all the arts, witk- out exception, are addressed to the soul through the body. An object which makes us suffer, were it the most beautiful in the world, very rarely appears to us such. Beauty has little influence over a soul occupied with grief. But if an agreeable sensation often accompanies the idea of the beautiful, we must not conclude that one is the other. Experience testifies that all agreeable things do not appear beautiful, and that, among agreeable things, those which are most so are not the most beautiful, — a sure sign that the agree- able is not the beautiful ; for if one is identical with the other, they should never be separated, but should always be commensu- rate with each other. Far from this, whilst all our senses give us agreeable sensa- tions, only two have the privilege of awakening in us the idea of beauty. Does one ever say : This is a beautiful taste, this is a beautiful smell ? Nevertheless, one should say it, if the beautiful is the agreeable. On the other hand, there are certain pleasures of odor and taste that move sensibility more than the greatest beauties of nature and art ; and even among the perceptions of hearing and sight, those are not always the most vivid that most excite in us the idea of beauty. Do not pictures, ordinary in coloring, often move us more deeply than many dazzling produc- tions, more seductive to the eye, less touching to the soul ? I say farther ; sensation not only does not produce the idea of the beautiful, but sometimes stirfes it. Let an artist occupy himself with the reproduction of voluptuous forms ; while pleasing the senses, he disturbs, he repels in us the chaste and pure idea of beauty. The agreeable is not, then, the measure of the beautiful, since in certain cases it effaces it and makes us forget it ; it is not, then, the beautiful, since it is found, and in the highest degree, where the beautiful is not. This conducts us to the essential foundation of the distinction between the idea of the beautiful and the sensation of the agree- able, to wit, the difference already explained between sensibility and reason. When an object makes you experience an agreeable sensation, if one asks you why this object is agreeable to you, you can answer nothing, except that such is your impression ; and if one informs you that this same object produces upon others a differ- ent impression and displeases them, you are not much astonished, because you know that sensibility is diverse, and that sensations must not be disputed. Is it the same when an object is not only agreeable to you, but when you judge that it is beautiful ? You pronounce, for example, that this figure is noble and beautiful, that this sunrise or sunset is beautiful, that disinterestedness and devotion are beautiful, that virtue is beautiful ; if one contests with you the truth of these judgments, then you are not as ac- commodating as you were just now; you do not accept the dissent as an inevitable effect of different sensibilities, you no longer appeal to your sensibility which naturally terminates in 128 LECTUKE SIXTH. you, you appeal to an authority which is made for others as \v*'ll as you, that of reason ; you beHeve that you have the right of accusing him with error who contradicts your judgment, for here your judgment rests no longer on something variable and indi- vidual, like an agreeable or painful sensation. The agreeable is confined for us within the inclosure of our own organization, where it changes every moment, according to the perpetual revo- lutions of this organization, according to health and sickness, the state of the atmosphere, that of our nerves, etc. But it is not so with beauty ; beauty, like truth, belongs to none of us ; no one has the right to dispose of it arbitrarily, and when we say: this is true, this is beautiful, it is no longer the particular and varia- ble impression of our sensibility that we express, it is the absolute judgment that reason imposes on all men. Confound reason and sensibility, reduce the idea of the beauti- ful to the sensation of the agreeable, and taste no longer has a law. If a person says to me, in the presence of the Apollo Bel- videre, that he feels nothing more agreeable than in presence of any other statue, that it does not please him at all, that he does not feel its beauty, I cannot dispute' his impression ; but if this person thence concludes that the Apollo is not beautiful, I proudly , contradict him, and declare that he is deceived. Good taste is / distinguished from bad taste ; but what does this distinction sig- nify, if the judgment of the beautiful is resolved into a sensation ? You say to me that I have no taste. What does that mean ? Have I not senses like you ? Does not the object which you admire act upon me as well as upon you ? Is not the impression which I feel as real as that which you feel ? Whence comes it, then, that you are right, — you who only give expression to the impression which you feel, and that I am wrong, — I who do pre- cisely the same thing ? Is it because those who feel like you are more numerous than those who feel like me ? But here the number of voices means nothing ? The beautiful being defined as that which produces on the senses an agreeable impression, a thing that pleases a single man, though it were frightfully ugly THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. 129 in the eyes of all the rest of the human race, must, nevertheless, and very legitimately, be called beautiful by him who receives from it an agreeable impression, for, so far as he is concerned, it satisfies the definition. There is, then, no true beauty ; there are only relative and changing beauties, beauties of circumstance, custom, fashion, and all these beauties, however different, will have a right to the same respect, provided they meet sensibilities to which they are agreeable. And as there is nothing in this world, in the infinite diversity of our dispositions, which may not please some one, there will be nothing that is not beautiful ; or, to speak more truly, there will be nothing either beautiful or ugly, and the Hottentot Venus will equal the Venus de Medici. The absurdity of the consequences demonstrates the absurdity of the principle. But there is only one means of escaping these conse- quences, which is to repudiate the principle, and recognize the judgment of the beautiful as an absolute judgment, and, as such, entirely different from sensation. Finally, and this is the last rock of empiricism, is there in us only the idea of an imperfect and finite beauty, and while we are • admiring the real beauties that nature furnishes, are we not ele- vating ourselves to the idea of a superior beauty, which Plato, with great excellence of expression, calls the Idea of the beauti=" ful, which, after him, all men of delicate taste, all true artists call the Ideal ? If we establish degrees in the beauty of things, is it not because we compare them, often without noticing it, with this ideal, which is to us the measure and rule of all our judg- ments in regard to particular beauties ? How could this idea of absolute beauty enveloped in all our judgments on the beautiful, — how could this ideal beauty, which it is impossible for us not to conceive, be revealed to us by sensation, by a faculty variable and relative like the objects that it perceives ? The philosophy which deduces all our ideas from the senses falls to the ground, then, before the idea of the beautiful. It re- mains to see whether this idea can be better explained by means of sentiment, which is different from sensation, which so nearly 6* 130 LECTURE SIXTH. resembles reason that good judges have often taken it for reason, and have made it the principle of the idea of the beautiful as well as that of the good. It is already a progress, without doubt, to go from sensation to sentiment, and Hutcheson and Smith* are in our eyes very different philosophers from Condillac and Helvetius ; * but we believe that we have suflSciently established'' that, in confounding sentiment with reason, we deprive it of its foundation and rule, that sentiment, particular and variable in its nature, different to different men, and in each man continually changing, cannot be sufficient for itself. Nevertheless, if senti- ment is not a principle, it is a true and important fact, and, after having distinguished it well from reason, we ourselves proceed to elevate it far above sensation, and elucidate the important part it plays in the perception of beauty. Place yourself before an object of nature, wherein men recog- nize beauty, and observe what takes place within you at the sight of this object. Is it not certain that, at the same time that you judge that it is beautiful, you also feel its beauty, that is to say, that you experience at the sight of it a delightful emotion, and that you are attracted towards this object by a sentiment of sym- pathy and love ? In other cases you judge otherwise, and feel an opposite sentiment. Aversion accompanies the judgment of the ugly, as love accompanies the judgment of the beautiful. And this sentiment is awakened not only in presence of the ob- jects of nature : all objects, whatever they may be, that we judge to be ugly or beautiful, have the power to excite in us this senti- ment. Vary the circumstances as much as you please, place me before an admirable edifice or before a beautiful landscape ; repre- sent to my mind the great discoveries of Descartes and Newton, * On Hutcheson and Smith, their merits and defects, the part of truth and the part of error, which their philosophy contains, see the detailed lectures which we have devoted to them, 1st Series, vol. iv. ' See the exposition and refutation of the doctrine of Condillac and Hel- vetius, Ibid.^ vol. iii. " See lecture 5, in this voL THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. 131 the exploits of the great Conde, the virtue of St. Vincent de Paul ; elevate me still higher ; awaken in me the obscure and too much forgotten idea of the infinite being; whatever you do, as often as you give birth within me to the idea of the beautiful, you give me an internal and exquisite joy, always followed by a sentiment of love for the object that caused it. The more beautiful the object is, the more lively is the joy which it gives the soul, and the more profound is the love with- out being passionate. In admiration judgment rules, but ani- mated by sentiment. Is admiration increased to the degree of impressing upon the soul an emotion, an ardor that seems to ex- ceed the limits of human nature ? this state of the soul is called enthusiasm : " Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo." The philosophy of sensation explains sentiment, as well as the idea of the beautiful, only by changing its nature. It confounds it with agreeable sensation, and, consequently, for it the love of beauty can be nothing but desire. There is no theory more con- tradicted by facts. What is desire ? It is an emotion of the soul which has, for its avowed or secret end, possession. Admiration is in its nature respectful, whilst desire tends to profane its object. Desire is the offspring of need. It supposes, then, in him who experiences it, a want, a defect, and, to a certain point, suffering. The sentiment o • the beautiful is to itself its own satisfaction. Desire is burning, impetuous, sad. The sentiment of the beau- tiful, free from all desire, and always without fear, elevates and warms the soul, and may transport if even to enthusiasm, with- out making it know the troubles of passion. The artist sees only the beautiful where the sensual man sees only the alluring and the frightful. On a vessel tossed by a tempest, while the passen- gers tremble at the sight of the threatening waves, and at the sound of the thunder that breaks over their heads, the artist re- mains absorbed in the contemplation of the sublime spectacle. 132 LECTURE SIXTH. I Vernet has himself lashed to the mast in order to contemplate for a longer time the storm in its majestic and terrible beauty. When he knows fear, when he participates in the common feel- ing, the artist vanishes, there no more remains any thing but the man. The sentiment of the beautiful is so far from being desire, that each excludes the other. Let me take a common example. Be- fore a table loaded with meats and delicious wines, the desire of enjoyment is awakened, but not the sentiment of the beautiful. Suppose that if, instead of thinking of the pleasures which all these things spread before my eyes promise me, I only take no- tice of the manner in which they are arranged and set upon the table, and the order of the feast, the sentiment of the beautiful might in some degree be produced ; but surely this will be neither the need nor the desire of appropriating this symmetry, this order. It is the property of beauty not to irritate and inflame desire, but to purify and ennoble it. The more beautiful a woman is, — I do not mean that common and gross beauty which Reubens in vain animates with his brilliant coloring, but that ideal beauty which antiquity and Raphael understood so well, — the more, at the sight of this noble creature is desire tempered by an exquisite and delicate sentiment, and is sometimes even replaced by a dis- interested worship. If the Venus of the Capitol, or the Saint Cecilia, excites in you sensual desires, you are not made to feel the beautiful. So the true artist addresses himself less to the senses than to the soul ; in painting beauty he only seeks to awaken in us seLtiment ; and when he has carried this sentiment as far as enthusiasm, he has obtained the last triumph of art. The sentiment of the beautiful is, therefore, a special sentiment, as the idea of the beautiful is a simple idea. But is this senti- ment, one in itself, manifested only in a single way, and applied only to a single kind of beauty ? Here again — here, as always — ^let us interrogate experience. When we have before our eyes an object whose forms are per- THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. 133 fectly determined, and the whole easy to embrace,— a beautiful flower, a beautiful statue, an antique temple of moderate size,— each of our faculties attaches itself to this object, and rests upon it with an unalloyed satisfaction. Our senses easily perceive its details ; our reason seizes the happy harmony of all its parts. Should this object disappear, we can distinctly represent it to oui-selves, so precise and fixed are its forms. The soul in this contemplation feels again a sweet and tranquil joy, a sort of ef- florescence. Let us consider, on the other hand, an object with vague and indefinite forms, which may nevertheless be very beautiful : the impression which we experience is wituout doubt a pleasure still, but it is a pleasure of a diff'erent order. This object does not call forth all our powers like the first. Reason conceives it, but the senses do not perceive the whole of it, and imagination does not distinctly represent it to itself. The senses and the imagination try in vain to attain its last limits ; our faculties are enlarged, are inflated, thus to speak, in order to embrace it, but it escapes and surpasses them. The pleasure thai we feel comes from the very magnitude of the object ; but, at. the same time, this magnitude produces in us I know not what melancholy sentiment, because it is disproportionate to us. At the sight of the starry heavens, of the vast sea, of gigantic mountains, admiration is mingled with sadness. These objects, in reality finite, like the world it- self, seem to us infinite, in our want of power to comprehend their immensity, and, resembling what is truly without bounds, they awaken in us the idea of the infinite, that idea which at once elevates and confounds our intelligence. The corre- sponding sentiment whicb the soul experiences is an austere pleasure. In order to render the diff'erence which we wish to mark more perceptible, examples may be multiplied. Are you affected in the same way at the sight of a meadow, variegated in its rather limited dimensions, whose extent the eye can easily take in, and at the aspect of an inaccessible mountain, at the foot of which 134 LECTURE SIXTH. THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. 135 the ocean breaks ? Do the sweet light of day and a melodious voice produce upon you the same effect as darkness and silence ? In the intellectual and moral order, are you moved in the same way when a rich and good man opens his purse to the indigent, and when a magnanimous man gives hospitality to his enemy, and saves him at the peril of his own life ? Take some light poetry in which measure, spirit, and grace, everywhere predomi- nate ; take an ode, and especially an epistle of Horace, or some small verses of Voltaire, and compare them with the Iliad, or those immense Indian poems that are filled with marvellous events, wherein the highest metaphysics are united to recitals by turns graceful or pathetic, those poems that have more than two hundred thousand verses, whose personages are gods or symbolic beings; and see whether the impressions that you experience will be the same. As a last example, suppose, on the one hand, a writer who, with two or three strokes of the pen, sketches an analysis of intelligence, agreeable and simple, but without depth, and, on the other, a philosopher who engages in a long labor in order to arrive at the most rigorous decomposition of the faculty of knowing, and unfolds to you a long chain of principles and consequences, — read the Traiti des Sensations and the Critique of Pure Reason^ and, even leaving out of the account the truth and the falsehood they may contain, with reference solely to the beautiful, compare your impressions. These are, then, two very different sentiments ; different names have also been given them ; one has been more particularly called the sentiment of the beautiful, the other that of the sub- lime. In order to complete the study of the different faculties that enter into the perception of beauty, after reason and sentiment, it remains to us to speak of a faculty not less necessary, which animates them and vivifies them, — imagination. When sensation, judgment, and sentiment have been produced by the occasion of an external object, they are reproduced even in the absence of this object ; this is memory. Memory is double :— not only do I remember that I have been in the presence of a certain object, but I represent to myself this absent object as it was, as I have seen, felt, and judged it :— the remembrance is then an image. In this last case, memory has been called by some philosophers imaginative memory. Such is the foundation of imagination ; but imagination is something more still. The mind, applying itself to the images furnished by memory, decomposes them, chooses between their different traits, and forms of them new images. Without this new power, imagina- tion would be captive in the circle of memory. The gift of being strongly affected by objects and reproducing their absent or vanished images, and the power of modifying these images so as to compose of them new ones,-do they fully constitute what men call imagination ? No, or at least, if these are indeed the proper elements of imagination, there must be somethincr else added, to wit, the sentiment of the beautiful in all its decrees. By this means is a great imagination preserved and kindled. Did the careful reading of Titus Livius enable the author of the Horaces to vividly represent to himself some of the scenes described, to seize their principal traits and combine them happily? From the outset, sentiment, love of the beautiful, especially of the morally beautiful, were requisite ; there was required that great heart whence sprang the word of the ancient Horace. Let us be well understood. We do not say that sentftoent is imagination, we say that it is the source whence ima^ation derives its inspirations and becomes productive. If men are so different in regard to imagination, it is because some are cold m presence of objects, cold in the representations which they preserve of them, cold also in the combinations which they form of them, whilst others, endowed with a particular sensibility, are vividly moved by the first impressions of objects, preserve strong recollec- tions of them, and cairy into the exercise of all their faculties this ^me force of omotion. Take away sentiment and all else is man. 136 LECTUEE SIXTH. THE BEAUTIFUL m THE MIND OF MAN. 137 imate; let it manifest itself, and every thing receives warmthj color, and life. It is then impossible to limit imagination, as the word seems to demand, to images properly so called, and to ideas that are related to physical objects. To remember sounds, to choose between them, to combine them in order to draw from them new effects, — does not this belong to imagination, although sound is not an image ? The true musician does not possess less imagina- tion than the painter. Imagination is conceded to the poet when he retraces the images of nature ; will this same faculty be refused him when he retraces sentiments ? But, besides images and sen- timents, does not the poet employ the high thoughts of justice, liberty, virtue, in a word, moral ideas ? Will it be said that in moral paintings, in pictures of the intimate life of the soul, either graceful or energetic, there is no imagination ? You see what is the extent of imagination : it has no limits, it is applied to all things. Its distinctive character is that of deeply moving the soul in the presence of a beautiful object, or by its remembrance alone, or even by the idea alone of an imaginary object. It is recognized by the sign that it produces, by the aid of its representations, the same impression as, and even an im- pression more vivid than, nature by the aid of real objects. If beauty, absent and dreamed of, does not affect you as much as, and more than, present beauty, you may have a thousand other gifts, — that of imagination has been refused you. In the eyes of imagination, the real world languishes in com- parison with its own fictions. One may feel that imagination is his master by the ennui that real and present things give him. The phantoms of imagination have a vagueness, an indefiniteness of form, which moves a thousand times more than the clearness and distinctness of actual perceptions. And then, unless we are wholly mad, — and passion does not always render this service, — r it is very difficult to see reality otherwise than as it is not, that is . to say, very imperfectly. On the other hand, one makes of an image what he wishes, unconsciously metamorphoses it, embel- lishes it to his own liking. There is at the bottom of the human soul an infinite power of feeling and loving to which the entire world does not answer, still less a single one of its creatures, how- ever charming. All mortal beauty, viewed near by, does not suffice for this insatiable power which it excites and cannot satisfy. But from afar, its effects disappear or are diminished, shades are mingled and confounded in the clear-obscure of memory and dream, and the objects please more because they are less deter- minate. The peculiarity of men of imagination is, that they repre- sent men and things otherwise than as they are, and that they have a passion for such fantastic images. Those that are called positive men, are men without imagination, who perceive only what they see, and deal with reality as it is instead of transform- ino- it. They have, in general, more reason than sentiment ; they may be seriously, profoundly honest; they will never be either poets or artists. What makes the poet or artist is, with a foimda- tion of good sense and reason— without which all the rest is useless— a sensitive, even a passionate heart; above all, a vivid, a powerful imagination. If sentiment acts upon imagination, we see that imagination returns with usury to sentiment what it gives. This pure and ardent passion, this worship of beauty that makes the great artist, can be found only in a man of imagina- tion. In fact, the sentiment of the beautiful may be awakened in each one of us before any beautiful object ; but, when this object has disappeared, if its image does not subsist vivaciously retraced, the sentiment which it for a moment excited is little by little effaced ; it may be revived at the sight of another object, but only to be extinguished again,— always dying to be born again at hazard; not being nourished, increased, exalted by the vivacious and continuous reproduction of its object in the imagi- nation, it wants that inspiring power, without which there is no artist, no poet. A word more on another faculty, which is not a simple fac- ulty, but a happy combination of those which have just been 138 LECTURE SIXTH. THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. 139 mentioned, — taste, so ill treated, so arbitrarily limited in aU theories. If, after having heard a beautiful poetical or musical work, admired a statue or a picture, you are able to recall what your senses have perceived, to see again the absent picture, to hear again the sounds that no longer exist ; in a word, if you have imagination, you possess one of the conditions without which there is no true taste. In fact, in order to relish the works of imagination, is it not necessary to have taste ? Do we not need, in order to feel an author, not to equal him, without doubt, but to resemble him in some degree ? Will not a man of sensible, but dry and austere mind, like Le Batteux or Condillac, be in- sensible to the happy darings of genius, and will he not carry into criticism a narrow severity, a reason very Httle reasonable — since he does not comprehend all the parts of human nature, — an intolerance that mutilates and blemishes art while thinking to purify it ? On the other hand, imagination does not suffice for the appre- ciation of beauty. Moreover, that vivacity of imagination so precious to taste, when it is somewhat restrained, produces, when it rules, only a very imperfect taste, which, not having reason for a basis, carelessly judges, runs the risk of misunderstanding the greatest beauty, — beauty that is regulated. Unity in composi- tion, harmony of all the parts, just proportion of details, skilful combination of effects, discrimination, sobriety, measure, are so many merits it will little feel, and will not put in their place. Imagination has doubtless much to do with works of art ; but, in fine, it is not every thing. Is it only imagination that makes the Polyeucte and the Misanthrope^ two incomparable marvels ? Is there not, also, in the profound simplicity of plan, in the measured development of action, in the sustained truth of characters, a su- perior reason, different from imagination which furnishes the superior colors, and from sensibility that gives the passion ?' Besides imagination and reason, the man of taste ought to possess an enlightened but ardent love of beauty ; he must take delight in meeting it, must search for it, must summon it. To comprehend and demonstrate that a thing is not beautiful, is an ordinary pleasure, an ungrateful task ; but to discern a beautiful thing, to be penetrated with its beauty, to make it evident, and make others participate in our sentiment, is an exquisite joy, a generous task. Admiration is, for him who feels it, at once a happiness and an honor. It is a happiness to feel deeply what is beautiful ; it is an honor to know how to recognize it. Admi- ration is the sign of an elevated reason served by a noble heart It is above a small criticism, that is skeptical and poweriess ; but it is the soul of a large criticism, a criticism that is productive : it is, thus to speak, the divine part of taste. After having spoken of taste which appreciates beauty, shall we say nothing of genius which makes it live again ? Genius is nothing else than taste in action, that is to say, the three powers of taste carried to their culmination, and armed with a new and mysterious power, the power of execution. But we are already entering upon the domain of art. Let us wait, we shall soon find art again and the genius that accompanies it. « THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS. 141 LECTUEE YII. THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS. Eefutation of diflferent theories on the nature of the beautiful : the beautiful cannot be reduced to what is useful. — Nor to convenience. — Nor to pro- portion. — Essential characters of the beautiful. — Different kinds of beau- ties. The beautiful and the sublime. Physical beauty. Intellectual beauty. Moral beauty. — Ideal beauty: it is especially moral beauty. — God, the first principle of the beautiful. — Theory of Plato. We have made known the beautiful in ourselves, in the facul- ties that perceive it and appreciate it, in reason, sentiment, imagination, taste ; we come, according to the order determined by the method, to other questions : What is the beautiful in ob- jects? What is the beautiful taken in itself? What are its characters and different species ? What, in fine, is its first and last principle ? All these questions must be treated, and, if pos- sible, solved. Philosophy has its point of departure in psychol- ogy ; but, in order to attain also its legitimate termination, it must set out from man, and reach things themselves. The history of philosophy offers many theories on the nature Df the beautiful : we do not wish to enumerate nor discuss them all ; we will designate the most important.* There is one very gross, which defines the beautiful as that * If one would make himself acquainted with a simple and piquant refuta- tion, written two thousand years ago, of false theories of beauty, he may read the Hippias of Plato, vol. i v. of our translation. The Fhcedrus, vol. vi., contains the veiled exposition of Plato's own theory ; but it is in the Banquet (Ibid.), and particularly in the discourse of Diotimus, that we must look for the thought of Plato carried to its highest degree of development, and clothed with all the beauty of human language. which pleases the senses, that which procures an agreeable im- pression. We will not stop at this opinion. We have sufficiently refuted it in showing that it is impossible to reduce the b^utiful to the agreeable. A sensualism a little more wise puts the useful in the place of the agreeable, that is to say, changes the form of the same prin- ciple. Neither is the beautiful the object which procures for us in the present moment an agreeable but fugitive sensation, it is the object which can often procure for us this same sensation or others similar. No great effort of observation or reasoning is necessary to convince us that utility has nothing to do with beauty. What is useful is not always beautiful. What is beautiful is not always useful, and what is at once useful and beautiful is beautiful for some other reason than its utility. Ob- serve a lever or a pulley : surely nothing is more useful. Never- theless, you are not tempted to say that this is beautiful. Have you discovered an antique vase admirably worked ? You exclaim that this vase is beautiful, without thinking to seek of what use it may be to you. Finally, symmetry and order are beautiful things, and at the same time, are useful things, because they economize space, because objects symmetrTcally disposed are easier to find when one wants them ; but that is not what makes for us the beauty of symmetry, for we immediately seize this kind of beauty, and it is often late enough before we recognize the utility that is found in it. It even sometimes happens, that after having admired the beauty of an object, we are not able to divine its use, although it may have one. The useful is, then, entirely different from the beautiful, far from being its foundation. A celebrated and very ancient* theory makes the beautiful consist in the perfect suitableness of means to their end. Here the beautiful is no longer the useful, it is the suitable ; these two ideas must be distinguished. A machine produces excellent eftects, economy of time, work, etc. ; it is therefore useful. If, See the Sippias, 142 LECTURE SEVENTH. moreover, examining its construction, I find that each piece is it its place, and that all are skilfully disposed for the result which they should produce ; even without regarding the utility of this result, as the means are well adapted to their end, I judge that there is suitableness in it. We are already approaching the idea of the beautiful ; for we are no longer considering what is useful, but what is proper. Now, we have not yet attained the true character of beauty ; there are, in fact, objects very well adapted to their end, which we do not call beautiful. A bench without ornament and without elegance, provided it be solid, provided all the parts are firmly connected, provided one may sit down on it with safety, provided it may be for this purpose suitable, agree- able even, may give an example of the most perfect adaptation of means to an end ; it will not, therefore, be said that this bench is beautiful. There is here always this difference between suita- bleness and utility, that an object to be beautiful has no need of being useful, but that it is not beautiful if it does not possess suitableness, if there is in it a, disagreement between the end and the means. Some have thought to find the beautiful in proportion, and this is, in fact, one of the conditions of beauty, but it is not the only one. It is very certain, that an object ill-proportioned can- not be beautiful. There is in all beautiful objects, however far they may be from geometric form, a sort of living geometry. >^ But, I ask, is it proportion that is dominant in this slender tree, with flexible and graceful branches, with rich and shady foliage ? What makes the terrible beauty of a storm, what makes that of a great picture, of an isolated verse, or a sublime ode ? It is not, I know, wanting in law and rule, neither is it law and rule ; often, even what at first strikes us is an apparent irregularity. It is absurd to pretend that what makes us admire all these things and many more, is the same quality that makes us admire a geometric figure, that is to say, the exact correspondence of parts. 1 What we say of proportion may be said of order, which is something less mathematical than proportion, but scarcely I j THE BEAUTIFUL IS OBJECTS. 143 explains better what is free, varied, and negligent in certain beauties. All these theories which refer beauty to order, harmony, and proportion, are at foundation only one and the same theory which in the beautiful sees unity before all. And surely unity is beau- tiful ; it is an important part of beauty, but it is not the whole of beauty. The most probable theory of the beautiful is that which com- poses it of two contrary and equally necessary elements, unity and variety. Behold a beautiful flower. Without doubt, unity, order, proportion, symmetry even, are in it ; for, without these qualities, reason would be absent from it, and all things are made with a marvellous reason. But, at the same time, what a diversity ! How many shades in the color, what richness in the least details ! Even in mathematics, what is beautiful is not an abstract principle, it is a principle carrying with itself a long chain of consequences. There is no beauty without life, and life is movement, is divei-sity. Unity and variety are applied to all orders of beauty. Let us rapidly run over these different orders. In the first place, there are beautiful objects, to speak properly, and sublime objects. A beautiful object, we have seen, is some- thing completed, circumscribed, limited, which all our faculties easily embrace, because the different parts are on a somewhat narrow scale. A sublime object is that which, by forms not in themselves disproportionate, but less definite and more diflScult to seize, awakens in us the sentiment of the infinite. There are two very distinct species of beauty. But reality is inexhaustible, and in all the degrees of reality there is beauty. Among sensible objects, colors, sounds, figures, movements, are capable of producing the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful. All these beauties are arranged under that species of beauty which, right or wrong, is called physical beauty. If from the world of sense we elevate ourselves to that of mind, truth, and science, we shall find there beauties more severe, but ^ ' 144 LECTURE SEVENTH. THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS. 145 not less real. The universal laws that govein bodies, those that govern intelligences, the great principles that contain and produce long deductions, the genius that creates, in the artist, poet, or philosopher, — all these are beautiful, as well as nature herself: this is what is called intellectual beauty. Finally, if we consider the moral world and its laws, the idea of liberty, virtue, and devotedness, here the austere justice of an Aristides, there the heroism of a Leonidas, the prodigies of charity or patriotism, w^e shall certainly find a third order of beauty that still surpasses the other two, to wit, moral beauty. Neither let us forget to apply to all these beauties the distinc- tion between the beautiful and the sublime. There are, then, the beautiful and the sublime at once in nature, in ideas, in senti- ments, in actions. What an almost infinite variety in beauty ! After having enumerated all these differences, could we not reduce them ? They are incontestable ; but, in this diversity is there not unity ? Is there not a single beauty of which all par- ticular beauties are only reflections, shades, degrees, or degrada- tions ? Plotinus, in his treatise On the Beautiful,^ proposed to him- self this question. He asks — What is the beautiful in itself? I see clearly that such or such a form is beautiful, that such or such an action is also beautiful ; but why and how are these two objects, so dissimilar, beautiful ? What is the common quality which, being found in these two objects, ranges them under the general idea of the beautiful ? It is necessary to answer this question, or the theory of beauty is a maze without issue ; one applies the same name to the most diverse things, without understanding the real unity that author- izes this unity of name. Either the diversities which we have designated in beauty are such that it is impossible to discover their relation, or these diver- » First Enneadj book vi., in the work of M. B. Saint-Hillaire, on the School uf Alexandria^ the translation of this morsel of Plotinus, p. 197. sities are especially apparent, and have their harmony, their con- cealed unity. Is it pretended that this unity is a chimera ? Then physical beauty, moral beauty, and intellectual beauty, are strangers to each other. What, then, will the artist do ? He is surrounded by different beauties, and he must make a work ; for such is the recognized law of art. But if this unity that is imposed upon him is a factitious unity, if there are in nature only essentially dis- similar beauties, art deceives and lies to us. Let it be explained, then, how falsehood is the law of art. That cannot be ; the unity that art expresses, it must have somewhere caught a glimpse of, in order to transport it into its works. We neither retract the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, nor the other distinctions just now indicated ; but it is necessary to re-unite after having distinguished them. These distinctions and these re-unions are not contradictory : the great law of beauty, like that of truth, is unity as well as variety. All is one, and all is diverse. We have divided beauty into three great classes — physical beauty, intellectual beauty, and moral beauty. We must now seek the unity of these three sorts of beauty. Now, we think that they resolve themselves into one and the same beauty, moral beauty, meaning by that, with moral beauty properly so called, all spiritual beauty. Let us put this opinion to the proof of facts. Place yourself before that statue of Apollo which is called Apollo Belvidere, and observe attentively what strikes you in that master-piece. Winkelmann, who was not a metaphysician, but a learned antiquarian, a man of taste without system, made a celebrated analysis of the Apollo.* It is curious to study it ' Winkelmann has twice described the Apollo, History of Art among tU AnciezUs, Paris, 1802, 3 vols., in 4to. Vol. i., book iv., chap, iii., AH among the Greeks:—"' The Apollo of the Vatican offers us that God in a movement of indignation against the serpent Python, which he has just killed with ar- row-shots, and in a sentiment of contempt for a victory so little worthy of a divinity. The wise artist, who proposed to represent the most beautiful of .7 146 LECTURE SEVENTH. What Winkelmann extols before all, is the character of divinity stamped upon the immortal youth that invests that beautiful body, upon the height, a little above that of man, upon the ma- the gods, placed the anger ia the nose, which, according to the ancients, was its seat ; and the disdain on the lips. He expressed the anger by the inflation of the nostrils, and the disdain by the elevation of the under lip, which causes the same movement in the chin." — Ibid., vol. ii., book iv., chap, vi.. Art under the Emperors :—'''■ Of all the antique statues that have escaped the fury of barbarians and the destructive hand of time, the statue of Apollo is, without contradiction, the most sublime. One would say tha*; the artist composed a figure purely ideal, and employed matter only because it was necessary for him to execute and represent his idea. As much as Homer's description of Apollo surpasses the descriptions which other poets have un- dertaken after him, so much this statue excels all the figures of this god. Its height is above that of man, and its attitude proclaims the divine gran- deur with which it is filled. A perennial spring-time, like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, clothes with lovable youth the beautiful body, and shines with sweetness over the noble structure of the limbs. In order to feel the merit of this dhef-d'ceuvre of art, we must be penetrated with intellectual beauty, and become, if possible, the creatures of a celestial na- ture ; for there is nothing mortal in it, nothing subject to the wants of hu- manity. That body, whose forms are not interrupted by a vein, which is not agitated by a nerve, seems animated with a celestial spirit, which circu- lates like a sweet vapor in all the parts of that admirable figure. The god has just been pursuing Python, against which he has ben% for the first time, his formidable bow ; in his rapid course, he has overtaken him, and given him a mortal wound. Penetrated with the conviction of his power, and lost in a concentrated joy, his august look penetrates far into the infinite, and ia extended fiir beyond his victory. Disdain sits upon his lips ; the indigna- tion that he breathes distends his nostrils, and ascends to his eyebrows ; but an unchangeable serenity is painted on his brow, and his eye is full of sweetness, as though the Muses were caressing him. Among all the figures that remain to us of Jupiter, there is none in which the father of the gods approaches the grandeur with which he manifested himself to the intelli- gence of Homer ; but in the traits of the Apollo Belvidere, we find the indi- vidual beauties of all the other divinities united, as in that of Pandora. Tho forehead is the forehead of Jupiter, inclosing the goddess of wisdom ; tho eyebrows, by their movement, announce his supreme will ; the large eyes are those of the queen of the gods, orbed with dignity, and the mouth is an image of that of Bacchus, where breathed voluptuousness. Like the tender branches of the vine, his beautiful locks flow around his head, as if they were lightly agitated by the zephyr's breath. They seem perfumed with the essence of the gods, and are charmingly arranged over his head by the hand of the Graces. At the sight of this marvel of art, I forget every thing else, and my mind takes a supernatural disposition, fitted to judge of it with dignity ; from admiration I pass to ecstasy ; I feel my breast dilating and THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS. 147 jestic altitude, upon the imperious movement, upon the ensemble and all the details of the person. The forehead is indeed that of a god -an unalterable placidity dwells upon it. Lower down, humanity reappears somewhat; and that is very necessary m order to^interest humanity in the works of art. In that satisfied look in the distension of the nostrils, in the elevation of the under lip, are at once felt anger mingled with disdam, pride of victory, and the little fatigue which it has cost. Weigh well each word of Winkelmann : you will find there a moral impres- sion The tone of the learned antiquary is elevated, little by lit- tle, to enthusiasm, and his analysis becomes a hymn to spiritual l>eauty. t> j Instead of a statue, observe a real and living man. Regard that man who, solicited by the strongest motives to sacrifice duty to fortune, triumphs over interest, after an heroic struggle, and sacrifices fortune to virtue. Regard him at the moment when he is about to take this magnanimous resolution ; his face will appear to you beautiful, because it expresses the beauty of his soul. Per- haps under all other circumstances, the face of the man is common, even' trivial; here, illuminated by the soul which it manifests, it is ennobled, and takes an imposing character of beauty. So, the natural face of Socrates^ contrasts strongly with the type of Gre- cian beauty; but look at him on his death-bed, at the moment of drinking the hemlock, conversing with his disciples on the im- mortality of the soul, and his face will appear to you sublime.* At the highest point of moral grandeur, S ocrates expires :— rising like those who are filled with the spirit of prophecy ; I am transported rm^Xd Te Lred groves of Syria,-places which ApoHo honored w.^ his presence— the statue seems to be animated as it were with the beauty K ung "f old from the hands of Pygmalion. How can I describe thee nimitabh3 master-piece? For this it would \^ -— f ^tch^ed Ilay should deign to inspire my pen. The traits that I have just sketched I lay before thee, as those who came to crown^the gods, put their crowns at their feet, not being able to reach their heads." _ 1 See the last part of the Ba^uet, the discourse of Alcibiades, p. 326 of vol. vi. of our translation. . , o * «^ TiovSrl which « We here have in mind, and we avow it, the Socrates of David, whicn '^ 148 LECTUKE SEVENTH. THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS. 149 you Iiave before your eyes no longer any thing but his dead body ; the dead face preserves its beauty, as long as it preserves traces of the mind that animated it ; but little by little the expression is extinguished or disappears ; the face then becomes vulgar and uMy. The expression of death is hideous or sublime, — hideous at the aspect of the decomposition of the matter that no longer retains the spirit, — sublime when it awakens in us the idea of eternity. > Consider the figure of man in repose : it is more beautiful than that of an animal, the figure of an animal is more beautiful than the form of any inanimate object. It is because the human figure, even in the absence of virtue and genius, always reflects an intel- li We arc fortunate in finding this theory, which is so dear to us, eonflrmed by the authority of one of the severest and most oiro»"sPf»« "f!™';?-'' may be seen in Keid, 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 28. The Sco ch philosopher terminates his Eesaff on. TmU with these words, which happUy «"»'°'J us o' the thought and manner of Plato himself :-" Whether *e reasons that I have given to prove that sensible beauty is only the image of moral beauty appear sufficient or not, I hope that my doctrine, in '''''.""Pt'^S >" ""f ';' terrestrial Venus more closely to the celestial Venus, w^ not seem to have for its object to abase the first, and render her less worthy of the homage that mankind has always paid her." 150 LECTURE SEVENTH. THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS. 151 God, being the principle of all things, must for this reason be that of perfect beauty, and, consequently, of all natural beauties that express it more or less imperfectly ; he is the principle of beauty, both as author of the physical world and as father of the intellectual and moral world. \ Is it not necessary to be a slave of the senses and of appear- ances in order to stop at movements, at forms, at sounds, at col- ors, whose harmonious combinations produw the beauty of this visible world, and not to conceive behind this scene so magnifi- cent and well regulated, the orderer, the geometer, the supreme artist ? 7 Physical beauty serves as an envelope to intellectual and moral beauty. What can be the principle of intellectual beauty, that splendor of the true, except the principle of all truth ? Moral beauty comprises, as we shall subsequently see,^ two dis- tinct elements, equally but diversely beautiful, justice and charity, respect and love of men. He who expresses in his conduct jus- tice and charity, accomplishes the most beautiful of all works ; the good man is, in his way, the greatest of all artists. But what shall we say of him who is the very substance of justice and the exhaustless source of love ? If our moral nature is beau- tiful, what must be the beauty of its author ! His justice and goodness are everywhere, both in us and out of us. \His justice is the moral order that no human law makes, that all human laws are forced- ta express,, that is preserved and perpetuated in the world by its own force. , Let us descend into ourselves, and consciousness will attest the divine justice in the peace and con tentment that accompany virtue, in the troubles and tortures thai are the invariable punishments of vice and crime. How many times, and with what eloquence, have men celebrated the indefat igable solicitude of Providence, its benefits everywhere manifest in the smallest as well as in the greatest phenomena of nature, * Part iii.. lecture 15. which we forget so easily because they have become so ^miliar to us, but which, on reflection, call forth our mingled admiration and gratitude, and proclaim a good God, full of love for his creatures ! « Thus, God is the principle of the three orders of beauty that we have distinguished, physical beauty, intellectual beauty, moral beauty. In him also are reunited the two great forms of the beautiful distributed in each of these three orders, to wit, the beautiful and the sublime. / God is, par excellence, the beautiful— for what ob- ject satisfied' more all our faculties, our reason, our imagination, our heart ! He oflers to reason the highest idea, beyond which it has nothing more to seek ; to imagination the most ravishing contemplation ; to the heart a sovereign object of love. He is, then, perfectly beautiful; but is he not sublime also in other ways ? If he extends the horizon of thought, it is to confound it in the abyss of his greatness. If the soul blooms at the spec- tacle of his goodness, has it not also reason to be aflfrighted at the idea of his justice, which is not less present to it ? God is at once mild and terrible. At the same time that he is the life, the light, the movement, the ineffable grace of visible and finite na- ture, he is also called the Eternal, the Invisible, the Infinite, the Absolute Unity, and the Being of beings. Do not these awful attributes, as certain as the first, produce in the highest degree m the imagination and the soul that melancholy emotion excited by the sublime? Yes, God is for us the type and source of the two great forms of beauty, because he is to us at once an impenetrable enigma and still the clearest word that we are able to find for all enigmas. Limited beings as we are, we comprehend nothing in comparison with that which is without limits, and we are able to explain nothing without that same thing which is without limits. By the being that we possess, we have some idea of the infinite being of God ; by the nothingness that is in us, we lose ourselves in the being of God ; and thus always forced to recur to him in order to explain any thing, and always thrown back within our- i 152 LECTUEE SEVENTH. selves under the weight of his infinitude, we experience by turns, or rather at the same time, for this God who raises and casts us down, a sentiment of irresistible attraction and astonishment, not to say insurmountable terror, which he alone can cause and allay, because he alone is the unity of the sublime and the beau- tiful. Thus absolute being, which is both absolute unity and infinite variety,— God, is necessarily the last reason, the ultimate foun- dation, the completed ideal of all beauty. This is the marvellous beauty that Diotimus had caught a glimpse of, and thus paints to Socrates in the Banquet : " Eternal beauty, unbegotten and imperishable, exempt from decay as well as increase, which is not beautiful in such a part and ugly in such another, beautiful only, at such a time, in such a place, in such a relation, beautiful for some, ugly for others, beauty that has no sensible form, no visage, no hands, nothing corporeal, which is not such a thought or such a particular science, which resides not in any being different from itself, as an animal, the earth, or the heavens, or any other thing, which is absolutely identical and invariable by itself, in which all other beauties participate, in such a way, nevertheless, that their birth or their destruction neither diminishes nor increases, nor in the least chano-es it ! In order to arrive at this perfect beauty, it is necessary to commence with the beauties of this lower world, and, the eyes being fixed upon the supreme beauty, to elevate our- selves unceasingly towards it, by passing, thus to speak, through all the degrees of the scale, from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others, from beautiful bodies to beautiful senti- ments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until from thouf'ht to thouijht we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the beautiful itself, until we end by knowing it as it is in itself. "O my dear Socrates," continued the stranger of Mantinea, " that which can give value to this life is the spectacle of the eternal beauty. . . . What would be the destiny of a mortal to THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS. 153 whom it should be granted to contemplate t"-tM w^^^^^^^^ alloy in its purity and simplicity, no longer clothed with the flesh and'hues of'humanity, and with all those vain charms that are condemned to perish, to whom it should be^given to see face to face, under its sole form, the divine beauty 1" Vol vi. of our translation, p. 816-818 7* LECTUEE YIII, ON AKT. Genius :~its attribute is creative power. — Eefutation of the opinion that art is the imitation of nature.— M. Emeric David, and M. Quatremere de Quincy.— Eefutation of the theory of illusion. That dramatic art has not solely for its end to excite the passions of terror and pity. — Nor even di- rectly the moral and religious sentiment.— The proper and direct object of art is to produce the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful ; this idea and this sentiment purify and elevate the soul by the affinity between the beautiful and the good, and by the relation of ideal beauty to its principle, which is God. — True mission of ^rt. Man is not made only to know and love the beautiful in the works of nature, he is endowed with the power of reproducing it. At the sight of a natural beauty, whatever it may be, physical or moral, his first need is to feel and admire. He is penetrated, ravished, as it were overwhelmed with the sentiment of beauty. But when the sentiment is energetic, he is not a long time sterile. We wish to see again, we wish to feel again what caused us so vivid a pleasure, and for that end we attempt to revive the beauty that charmed us, not as it was, but as our imagination represents it to us. Hence a work original and peculiar to man, a work of art. Art is the free reproduction of beauty, and the power' in us capable of reproducing it is called genius. What faculties are used in this free reproduction of the beauti- ful ? The same that serve to recognize and feel it. Taste carried to the highest degree, if you always join to it an additional ele- ment, is genius. What is this element ? Three faculties enter into that complex faculty that is called taste, — imagination, sentiment, reason. ON ART. 155 These three faculties are certainly necessary for genius, but they are not sufficient for it. What essentially distinguishes .enius from taste is the attribute of creative power. Taste feels, judges, discusses, analyzes, but does not invent. Genius is, before all, inventive and creative. The man of genius is not the master of the power that is in him ; it is by the ardent, irresistible need of expressing what he feels, that he is a man of genius. He suf- fers by withholding the sentiments, or images, or thoughts, that agitate his breast. ^ It has been said that there is no superior man without some grain of folly ; but this folly, like that of the cross, is the divine part of reason. This mysterious power Socrates called his demon. Voltaire called it the devil in the body ; he demanded it even in a comedian in order to be a comedian of genius Give to it what name you please, it is certain that there is a I-know-not-what that inspires genius, that also torments it until it has delivered itself of what consumes it; until, by ex- pressing them, it has solaced its pains and its joys, its emotions, its ideas ; until its reveries have become living works. Thus two things characterize genius ; at first, the vivacity of the Heed it has of producing, then the power of producing ; for the need without the power is only a malady that resembles genius, but is not it. Genius is above all, is essentially, the power of doing, of inventing, of creatino-. Taste is contented with observing, with admiring. False genius, ardent and impotent imagination, consumes itself m sterile dreams and produces nothing, at least nothing great. Ge- nius alone has the power to convert conceptions into creations. If o-enius creates it does not imitate. BnZ genius, it is said, is then superior to nature, since it does not imitate it. Nature is the work of God ; man is then the rival of God. . 1 i.n J The answer is very simple. No, genius is not the rival of God ; but it is the interpreter of him. Nature expresses him in its way, human genius expresses him in its own way. Let us stop a moment at that question so much discussed,— whether art is any thing else than the imitation of nature. 156 LECTURE EIGHTH. Doubtless, in one sense, art is an imitation ; for absolute crea- tion belongs only to God. Where can genius find the elements upon which it works, except in nature, of which it forms a part ? But does it limit itself to the reproduction of them as nature fur- nishes them to it, without adding any thing to them which belongs to itself? Is it only a copier of reality ? Its sole merit, then, is that of the fidelity of the copy. And what labor is more sterile than that of copying works essentially inimitable on account of the life with which they are endowed, in order to obtain an indif- ferent image of them ? If art is a servile pupil, it is condemned never to be any thing but an impotent pupil. The true artist feels and profoundly admires nature ; but every thing in nature is not equally admirable. As we have just said, it has something by which it infinitely surpasses art — its life. Besides that, art can, in its turn, surpass nature, on the condition of not wishing to imitate it too closely. Every natural object, however beautiful, is defective on some side. Every thing that is real is imperfect. Here, the horrible and the hideous are united to the sublime ; there, elegance and grace are separated from grandeur and force. The traits of beauty are scattered and di- verse. To reunite them arbitrarily, to borrow from such a face a mouth, eyes from such another, without any rule that governs this choice and directs these borrowings, is to compose monsters ; to admit a rule, is already to admit an ideal different from all in- dividuals. It is this ideal that the true artist forms to himself in studying nature. Without nature, he never would have conceived this ideal ; but with this ideal, he judges nature herself, rectifies her, and dares undertake to measure himself with her. The ideal is the artist's object of passionate contemplation. Assiduously and silently meditated, unceasingly purified by re- flection and vivified by sentiment, it warms genius and inspires it with the irresistible need of seeing it realized and living. For this end, genius takes in nature all the materials that can serve it, and applying to them its powerful hand, as Michael Angelo impressed his chisel upon the docile marble, makes of them works OK ART. 157 I2iat have no model in nature, that imitate nothing else than the ideal dreamed of or conceived, that are in some sort a second creation inferior to the first in individuality and life, but much superior to it, we do not fear to say, on account of the intellectual and moral beauty with which it is impressed. Moral beauty is the foundation of all true beauty. This foun- dation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art disengages it and gives to it forms more transparent. On this account, art, when it knows well its power and its resources, institutes with nature a contest in which it may have the advantage. Let us establish well the end of art: it is precisely where its power lies The end of art is the expression of moral beauty, by the aid of physical beauty. The latter is only a symbol of the former. In nature, this symbol is often obscure : art in brmging it to light attains effects that nature does not always produce Nature may please more, for, once more, it possesses m an in- comparable degree what makes the great charm of imagination and sight— life ; art touches morej because in expressing, above all moral beauty, it addresses itself more directly to the source of 'profound emotions. Art can be more pathetic than nature, and the pathetic is the sign and measure of great beauty. Two extremes are equally dangerous-a lifeless ideal, or the absence of the ideal. Either we copy the model, and are want- ing in true beauty, or we work de me, and fall into an ideality without character. Genius is a ready and sure perception of the right proportion in which the ideal and the natural, form and thought, ought to be united. This union is the perfection of art • chefs-d'oeuvre are produced by observing it. It is important, in my opinion, to follow this rule in teaching art It is asked whether pupils should begin with the study of the ideal or the real. I do not hesitate to answer,-by both. Nature herself never offers the general without the individual, nor the individual without the general. Every figure is composed of individual traits which distinguish it from all othere, and make its own looks, and, at the same time, it has general traits which 158 LECTUKE EIGHTH. constitute what is called the human figure. These general traits are the constitutive lineaments, and this figure is the type, that are given to the pupil that is beginning in the art of design to trace. .It would also l?e good, I believe, in order to preserve him from the dry and abstract, to exercise him early in copying some natural object, especially a living figure. This would be putting pupils to the true school of nature. They would thus become accustomed never to sacrifice either of the two essential elements of the beautiful, either of the two imperative conditions of art. But, in uniting these two elements, these two conditions, it is necessary to distinguish them, and to know how to put them in their place. There is no true ideal without determinate form 'iiere is no unity without variety, no genus without individuals uut, in fine, the foundation of the beautiful is the idea ; what makes art is before all, the realization of the idea, and not the imitation of such or such a particular form. At the commencement of our century, the Institute of France offered a prize for the best -answer to the following question : What were the causes of the perfection of the antique sculpture, and what would be the best means of attaining it ? The success- ful competitor, M. Emeric David,^ maintained the opinion then dominant, that the assiduous study of natural beauty had alone conducted the antique art to perfection, and that thus the imita- tion of nature was the only route to reach the same perfection. A man whom I do not fear to compare with Winkelmann, the future author of the Olympic Jupiter,^ M. Quatremere de Quincy, in some ingenious and profound disquisitions,^ combated the doc- trine of the laureate, and defended the cause of ideal beauty. It is impossible to demonstrate more decidedly, by the entire history of Greek sculpture, and by authentic texts from the greatest cri- ' Recherckes sur VArt Statuaire, Paris, 1805. " Paris, 1815, in folio, an eminent work that will subsist even when time shall have destroyed some of its details, » Since reprinted under the title of Essaia sur V Ideal dam ses Apfl^itions Pratiqu€8. Paris, 1837. ON ART. 159 .iques oi antiquity, that the process of art among the Greeks was not the imitation of nature, either by a particular model, or by several, the most beautiful model being always very imperfect, and several models not being able to compose a single beauty. The true process of the Greek art was the representation of an ideal beauty which nature scarcely j^ossessed more in Greece than among us, which it could not then oflfer to the artist. We regret that the honorable laureate, since become a member of the Insti- tute, pretended that this expression of ideal beauty, if it had been known by the Greeks, would have meant visible beauty, because meal comes from s/^o^, which signifies only, according to M. Emeric David, a form seen by the eye. Plato would have been much surprised at this exclusive interpretation of the word ei^oj. M. Quatremere de Quincy confounds his unequal adversary by two admirable texts, one from the Timceus, where Plato marks with precision in what the true artist is superior to the ordinary artist, the other at the commencement of the Orator, where Cicero explains the manner in which great artists work, in refer- ring to the manner of Phidias, that is to say, the most perfect master of the most perfect epoch of art. " The artist,^ who, with eye fixed upon the immutable being, and using such a model, reproduces its idea and its excellence, cannot fail to produce a whole whose beauty is complete, whilst ^^e who fixes his eye upon what is transitory, with this perishable model will make nothing beautiful." " Phidias,* that great artist, when he made the form of Jupiter or Minerva, did not contemplate a model a resemblance of which he would express ; but in the depth of his soul resided a perfect type of beauty, upon which he fixed his look, which guided his hand and his art." * Translation of Plato, vol. xii., Tlmceus, p. 116. ' Orator: "Neque enim ille artifex (Phidias) cum faceret Jovis formam aut Minervse, contemplabatur aliquem a quo similitudinem duceret; sed ipsius in mente insidebat species pulchritudinis eximia quaedara, quam intu- ens, in eaque defixus, ad illius similitudinem artem et manum dirigebat." 160 LECTTTEE EIGHTH. Is not this process of Phidias precisely that which Raphael de- scribes in the famous letter to Castiglione, which he declares that he followed himself for the Galatea ? ^ " As," he says, " I am destitute of beautiful models, I use a c^in ideal which I form for myself." There is another theory which comes back, by a circuit, to imitation : it is that which makes illusion the end of art. If this theory be true, the ideal beauty of painting is a tromp-Voeil,^ and its master-piece is the grapes of Zeuxis that the birds came and pecked at. The height of art in a theatrical piece would be to persuade you that you are in the presence of reality. What is true in this opinion is, that a work of art is beautiful only on the condition of being life-like, and, for example, the law of dramatic art is not to put on the stage pale phantoms of the past, but per- sonages borrowed from imagination or history, as you like, but animated, endowed with passion, speaking and acting like men and not like shades. It is human nature that is to be represented to itself under a magic light that does not disfigure it, but en- nobles it. This magic is the very genius of art. It lifts us above the miseries that besiege us, and transports us to regions where we still find ourselves, for we never wish to lose sight of our- selves, but where we find ourselves transformed to our advantage, where all the imperfections of reality have given place to a cer- tain perfection, where the language that we speak is more equal and elevated, where persons are more beautiful, where the ugly is not admitted, and all this while duly respecting history, espe- cially without ever going beyond the imperative conditions of human nature. Has art forgotten human nature ? it has passed beyond its end, it has not attained it; it has brought forth nothing but chimeras without interest for our soul. Has it been too human, too real, too nude? it has fallen short of its end; it has then attained it no better. » Baccolta di letU Sulla pitt., i., p. 83. " Eeaendo carestia e de' buom giu- diei e di belle donne, to mi servo di certa idea cTie mi viene alia m£nte.^^^ 2 « A picture representing a broken glass over several subjects pwnted on the canvas, by which the eye is deceived." ON ART. 161 Elusion is so little the end of art, that it may be complete and have no charm. Thus, in the interest of illusion, theatrical men have taken great pains in these latter times to secure historical accuracy of costume. This is all very well ; but it is not the most important thing. Had you found, and lent to the actor who plays the part of Brutus, the very costume that of old the Roman hero wore, it would touch true connoisseurs very little. This is not all ; when the illusion goes too far, the sentiment of art disappears in order to give place to a sentiment purely natu- ral, sometimes insupportable. If I believed that Iphegenia were in fact on the point of being immolated by her father at a dis-* tance of twenty paces from me, I should leave the theatre trem- bling with horror. If the Ariadne that I see and hear, were the true Ariadne who is about to be betrayed by her sister, in that pathetic scene where the poor woman, who already feels herself less loved, asks who then robs her of the heart, once so tender, of Theseus, I would do as the young Englishman did, who cried out, sobbing and trying to spring upon the stage, " It is Phedre, it is Phedre !" as if he would warn and save Ariadne. But, it is said, is it not the aim of the poet to excite pity and terror ? Yes ; but at first in a certain measure ; then he must mix with them some other sentiment that tempers them, or makes them serve another end. If the aim of dramatic art were only to excite in the highest degree pity and terror, art would be the powerless rival of nature. All the misfortunes represented on the stage are very feeble in comparison with those sad specta- cles which we may see every day. The first hospital is fuller of pity and terror than all the theatres in the world. What should the poet do in the theory that we combat ? He should transfer to the stage the greatest possible reality, and move us powerfully by shocking our senses with the sight of frightful pains. The great resort of the pathetic would then be the representation of death, especially that of the greatest torture. Quite on the con- trary, there is an end of art when sensibility is too much excited. To take, again, an example that we have already employed, what in. ■f H 162 LECTURE EIGHTH. ON ART. 163 •» constitutes the beauty of a tempest, of a shipwreck ? What at- tracts us to those great scenes of nature ? It is certainly not pity and terror, — these poignant and lacerating sentiments would much sooner keep us away. An emotion very different from these is necessary, which triumphs over us, in order to retain us by the shore ; this emotion is the pure sentiment of the beautiful and the sublime, excited and kept alive by the grandeur of the spectacle, by the vast extent of the sea, the rolling of the foaming waves, and the imposing sound of the thunder. But do we think for a single instant that there are in the midst of the sea the unfortunate who are suffering, and are, perhaps, about to perish ? From that moment the spectacle becomes to us insup- portable. It is so in art. Whatever sentiment it proposes to excite in us, must always be tempered and governed by that of the beautiful. If it only produces pity or terror beyond a certain limit, especially physical pity or terror, it revolts, and no longer charms ; it loses the effect that belongs to it in exchange for a foreign and vulgar effect. For this same reason, I cannot accept another theory, which, confounding the sentiment of the beautiful with the moral and religious sentiment, puts art in the service of religion and morals, and gives it for its end to make us better and elevate us to God. There is here an essential distinction to be made. If all beauty covers a moral beauty, if the ideal mounts unceasingly towards the infinite, art, which expresses ideal beauty, purifies the soul in elevating it towards the infinite, that is to say, towards God. Art, then, produces the perfection of the soul, but it produces it indirectly. The philosopher who investigates effects and causes, knows what is the ultimate principle of the beautiful and its cer- tain, although remote, effects. But the artist is before all things an artist ; what animates him is the sentiment of the beautiful ; what he wishes to make pass into the soul of the spectator is the same sentiment that fills his own. He confides himself to the virtue of beauty ; he fortifies it with all the power, all the charm of the ideal • it must then do its own work ; the artist has done his when he has procured for some noble souls the exquisite sen- timent of beauty. This pure and disinterested sentiment is a noble ally of the moral and religious sentiments; it awakens, preserves, and develops them, but it is a distinct and special sen- timent. So art, which is founded on this sentiment, which is inspired by it, which expands it, is in its turn an independent power. It is naturally associated with all that ennobles the soul, with morals and religion ; but it springs only from itself] • Let us confine our thought strictly within its proper limits. In vindicating the independence, the proper dignity, and the par- ticular end of art, we do not intend to separate it from religion, from morals, from country. Art draws its inspirations from these profound sources, as well as from the ever open source of nature. But it is not less true that art, the state, religion, are powers which have each their world apart and their own effects ; they mutually help each other; they should not serve each other. As soon as one of them wanders from its end, it errs, and is degra- ded. Does art bHndly give itself up to the orders of religion and the state ? In losing its liberty, it loses its charm and its empire. Ancient Greece and modern Italy are continually cited as tri- umphant examples of what the alliance of art, religion, and the state can do. Nothing is more true, if the question is concerning their union ; nothing is more false, if the question is concerning the servitude of art. Art in Greece was so little the slave of religion, that it little by little modified the symbols, and, to a cer- tain extent, the spirit itself, by its free representations. There is a long distance between the divinities that Greece received from Egypt and those of which it has left immortal exemplars. Are those primitive artists and poets, as Homer and Dedalus are called, strangers to this change? And in the most beautiful epoch of art, did not JEschylus and Phidias carry a great liberty into the religious scenes which they exposed to the gaze of the people, in the theatre, or in front of the temples ? In Italy as in Greece, as everywhere, art is at first in the hands of priesthoods and governments ; but, as it increases its importance and is de* 164 LECTURE EIGHTH. veloped, it more and more conquers its liberty. Men speak of the faith that animated the artists and vivified their works ; that is true of the time of Giotto and Ciambue ; but after Angelico de Fiesole, at the end of the fifteenth century, in Italy, I perceive especially the faith of art in itself and the worship of beauty. Raphael was about to become a cardinal ;* yes, but always paint- ing Galatea, and without quitting Fornarine. Once more, let us exaggerate nothing; let us distinguish, not separate; let us unite art, religion, and country, but let not their union injure the lib- erty of each. Let us be thoroughly penetrated with the thought, that art is also to itself a kind of religion. God manifests himself to us by the idea of the true, by the idea of the good, by the idea of the beautiful. Each one of them leads to God, because it comes from him. True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the infinite. So, independently of all oflScial alliance with religion and morals, art is by itself essentially reli- gious and moral ; for, far from wanting its own law, its own genius, it everywhere expresses in its works eternal beauty. Bound on all sides to matter by inflexible laws, working upon inanimate stone, upon uncertain and fugitive sounds, upon words of limited and finite signification, art communicates to them, with the precise form that is addressed to such or such a sense, a mys- terious character that is addressed to the imagination and the soul, takes them away from reality, and bears them sweetly or \nolently into unknown regions. Every work of art, whatever may be it? form, small or great, figured, sung, or uttered, — every work of an, truly beautiful or sublime, throws the soul into a centle or severe reverie that elevates it towards the infinite. The infinite is the common limit after which the soul aspires upon the wino-s of imaorination as well as reason, by the route of the sub- lime and the "beautiful, as well as by that of the true and the good. The emotion that the beautiful produces turns the soul from this world ; it is the beneficent emotion that art produces for humanity. *Vassari, Vie de EapMel. LECTUKE IX. THE DIFFERENT ARTS. Expression is the general law of art. — Division of arts. — Distinction between liberal arts and trades.— Eloquence itself, philosophy, and history do not make a part of the fine arts. — That the arts gain nothing by encroaching upon each other, and usurping each other's means and processes. — Classi- fication of the arts : — its true principle is expression. — Comparison of arts with each other. — Poetry the first of arts. A resume of the last lecture would be a definition of art, of its end and law. Art is the free reproduction of the beautiful, not of a single natural beauty, but of ideal beauty, as the human imagina- tion conceives it by the aid of data which nature furnishes it. The ideal beauty envelops the infinite : — the end of art is, then, to produce works that, like those of nature, or even in a still higher degree, may have the charm of the infinite. But how and by what illusion can we draw the infinite from the finite ? This is the diflBculty of art, and its glory also. What bears us towards the infinite in natural beauty ? The ideal side of this beauty. The ideal is the mysterious ladder that enables the soul to ascend from the finite to the infinite. The artist, then, must devote himself to the representation of the ideal. Every thing has its ideal. The first care of the artist will be, then, whatever he does, to penetrate at first to the concealed ideal of his subject, for his subject has an ideal, — in order to render it, in the next place, more or less striking to the senses and the soul, according to the conditions which the very materials that he employs — the stone, the color, the sound, the language — impose on him. So, to express the ideal of the infinite in one way or another, is the law of art ; and all the arts are such only by their relation to 166 LECTUEE NINTH. the sentiment of the beautiful and the infinite which they awa- ken in the soul, by the aid of that high quality of every work of art that is called expression. Expression is essentially ideal : what expression tries to make felt, is not what the eye can see and the hand touch, evidently it is something invisible and impalpable. The problem of art is to reach the soul through the body. Art offers to the senses forms, colors, sounds, words, so arranged that they excite in the soul, concealed behind the senses, the inex- pressible emotion of beauty. Expression is addressed to the soul as form is addressed to the senses. Form is the obstacle of expression, and, at the same time, is its imperative, necessaiy, only means. By working upon form, by bending it to its service, by dint of care, patience, and genius, art succeeds in converting an obstacle into a means. By their object, all arts are equal ; all are arts only because they express the invisible. It cannot be too often repeated, that expression is the supreme law of art. The thing to express is always the same, — it is the idea, the spirit, the soul, the invisible, the infinite. But, as the question is concerning the expression of this one and the same thing, by addressing ourselves to the senses which are diverse, the difference of the senses divides art into dif- ferent arts. We have seen, that, of the five senses which have been given to man,^ three — taste, smell, and touch — are incapable of pro- ducing in us the sentiment of beauty. Joined to the other two, they may contribute to the understanding of this sentiment ; but alone and by themselves they cannot produce it. Taste judges of the agreeable, not of the beautiful. No sense is less allied to the soul and more in the service of the body ; it flatters, it serves the grossest of all masters, the stomach. If smell sometimes seems to participate in the sentiment of the beautiful, it is be- cause the odor is exhaled from an object that is already beautiful, * Lecture 6. THE DIFFERENT AETS. 167 that is beautiful for some other reason. Thus the rose is beau- tiful for its graceful form, for the varied splendor of its colors ; its odor is agreeable, it is not beautiful. Finally, it is not touch alone that judges of the regularity of forms, but touch enlight- ened by sight. There remain two senses to which all the world concedes the privilege of exciting in us the idea and the sentiment of the beau- tiful. They seem to be more particularly in the service of the soul. The sensations which they give have something purer, more intellectual. They are less indispensable for the material preservation of the individual. They contribute to the embellish- ment rather than to the sustaining of life. They procure us pleasures in which our personality seems less interested and more self-forgetful. To these two senses, then, art should be addressed, is addressed, in fact, in order to reach the soul. Hence the division of arts into two great classes, — arts addressed to hearing, arts addressed to sight ; on the one hand, music and poetry ; on the other, painting, with engraving, sculpture, architecture, gar- dening. It will, perhaps, seem strange that w^e rank among the arts neither eloquence, nor history, nor philosophy. The arts are called the fine arts, because their sole object is to produce the disinterested emotion of beauty, without regard to the utility either of the spectator or the artist. They are also called the liberal arts, because they are the arts of free men and not of slaves, which affranchise the soul, charm and ennoble ex- istence ; hence the sense and origin of those expressions of anti- quity, aj'tes liherales^ artes ingenuce. There are arts without no- bihty, whose end is practical and material utility ; they are called trades, such as that of the stove-maker and the mason. True art may be joined to them, may even shine in them, but only in the accessories and the details. Eloquence, history, philosophy, are certainly high employments of intelligence ; they have their dignity, their eminence, which nothing surpasses, but rigorously speaking, they are not arts. (68 LECTUEE NINTH. Eloquence does not propose to itself to produce in the soul of the auditors the disinterested sentiment of beauty. It may also produce this effect, but without having sought it. Its direct end, which it can subordinate to no other, is to convince, to per- suade. Eloquence has a client which before all it must save or make triumph. It matters little, whether this client be a man, a people, or an idea. Fortunate is the orator if he elicits the ex- pression : That is beautiful ! for it is a noble homage rendered to his talent ; unfortunate is he if he does not elicit this, for he has missed his end. The two great types of political and religious eloquence, Demosthenes in antiquity, Bossuet among the mod- ems, think only of the interest of the cause confided to their genius, the sacred cause of country and that of religion ; whilst at bottom Phidias and Raphael work to make beautiful things. Let us hasten to say, what the names of Demosthenes and Bos- suet command us to say, that true eloquence, very different from that of rhetoric, disdains certain means of success ; it asks no more than to please, but without any sacrifice unworthy of it ; every foreign ornament degi'ades it. Its proper character is sim- plicity, earnestness — I do hot mean aft'ected earnestness, a de- signed and artful gravity, the worst of all deceptions — I mean true earnestness,* that springs from sincere and profound convic- tion. This is what Socrates understood by true eloquence.* As much must be said of history and philosophy. The phi- losopher speaks and writes. Can he, then, like the orator, find accents which make truth enter the soul, colors and forms that make it shine forth evident and manifest to the eyes of intelli- gence ? It would be betraying his cause to neglect the means that can serve it ; but the profoundest art is here only a means, the aim of pliilosophy is elsewhere ; whence it follows that phi- losophy is not an art. Without doubt, Plato is a great artist ; he is the peer of Sophocles and Phidias, as Pascal is sometimes * See the Gorgias, with the Argument^ vol. iii. of our translation of Plato. THE DIFFERENT ARTS. 169 the rival of Demosthenes and Bossuet ;* but both would have blushed if they had discovered at the bottom of their soul another design, another aim than the service of truth and virtue. History does not relate for the sake of relating ; it does not paint for the sake of painting ; it relates and paints the past that it may be the living lesson of the future. It proposes to instruct new generations by the experience of those who have gone before them, by exhibiting to them a faithful picture of great and impor- tant events, with their causes and their effects, with general de- signs and particular passions, with the faults, virtues, and crimes that are found mingled together in human things. It teaches the excellence of prudence, courage, and great thoughts pro- foundly meditated, constantly pursued, and executed with mod- eration and force. It shows the vanity of immoderate preten- sions, the power of wisdom and virtue, the impotence of folly and crime. Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus undertake any thing else than procuring new emotions for an idle curiosity or a worn- out imagination ; they doubtless desire to interest and attract, but more to instruct ; they are the avowed masters of statesmen and the preceptors of mankind. The sole object of art is the beautiful. Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns this. It is often constrained to make conces- sions to circumstances, to external conditions that are imposed upon it ; but it must always retain a just liberty. Architecture and the art of gardening are the least free of arts ; they are subjected to unavoidable obstacles ; it belongs to the genius of the artist to govern these obstacles, and even to draw from them happy effects, as the poet tmns the slavery of metre and rhyme into a source of unexpected beauties. Extreme liberty may carry art to a caprice which degrades it, as chains too heavy crush it. It is the death of architecture to subject it to conve- * There is a Provincial that for vehemence can be compared only to the Fhilipics, and its fragment on the infinite has the grandeur and magnificence of Bossuet. See our work on the ThougTits of Pascal^ 4th Series, Literature^ vol. i. 8 V 170 LECTURE NINTH. THE DIFFERENT ARTS. 171 nience, to cx)mfort. Is the architect obliged to subordinate gen- eral effect and the proportions of the edifice to such or such a particular end that is prescribed to him ? He takes refuge in details, in pediments, in friezes, in all the parts that have not utility for a special object, and in them he becomes a true artist. Sculpture and painting, especially music and poetry, are freer than architecture and the art of gardening. One can also shackle them, but they disengage themselves more easily. Similar by their common end, all the arts differ by the partic- ular effects which they produce, and by the processes which they employ. They gain nothing by exchanging their means and confounding the limits that separate them. I bow before the authority of antiquity ; but, perhaps, through habit and a remnant of prejudice, I have some difficulty in representing to myself witlf pleasure statues composed of several metals, espe- cially painted statues.^ Without pretending that sculpture has not to a certain point its color, that of perfectly pure matter, that especially which the hand of time impresses upon it, in spite of all the seductions of a contemporaneous' artist of great talent, I have little taste, I confess, for that artifice that is forced to give to marble the morhidezza of painting. Sculpture is an austere muse ; it has its graces, but< they are those of no other art. Flesh- color must remain a stranger to it : there would nothing more remain to communicate to it but the movement of poetry and the indefiniteness of music ! And what will music gain by aiming at the picturesque, when its proper domain is the pa- thetic ? Give to the most learned symphonist a storm to render. Nothing is easier to imitate than the whistling of the winds and the noise of thunder. But by what combinations of harmony will he exhibit to the eyes the glare of the lightning rending all of a sudden the veil of the night, and what is most fearful in the tempest, the movement of the waves that now ascend like a * See the JupiUr Olympien of M. Quatremere de Quincy. • Allusion to the Magdeleine of Canova, which was then to be seen in tho gallery of M. cle Soramariva. mountain, now descend and seem to precipitate themselves into bottomless abysses ? If the auditor is not informed of the sub- ject, he will never suspect it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of science and genius, sounds cannot paint forms. Music, when well guided, will guard itself from contending against the impossible ; it will not undertake to express the tumult and strife of the waves and other similar phe- nomena; it will do more: with sounds it will fill the soul with the sentiments that succeed each other in us during the different scenes of the tempest. Haydn will thus become^ the rival, even the vanquisher of the painter, because it has been given to music to move and agitate the soul more profoundly than painting. Since the Laocoon of Lessing, it is no longer permitted to re- peat, without great reserve, the famous axiom, — JJt piciura poesis ; or, at least, it is very certain that painting cannot do every thing that poetry can do. Everybody admires the picture of Rumor, drawn by Virgil ; but let a painter try to realize this symbolic figure ; let him represent to us a huge monster with a hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, and a hundred ears, whose feet toucl) the earth, whose head is lost in the clouds, and such a figure will bedome very ridiciilous. . So the arts have a common end, and entirely different means. Hence the general rules common to all, and particular rules for each. I have neither time nor space to enter into details on this point. I limit myself to repeating, that the great law which governs all others, is expression. Every work of art that does not express an idea signifies nothing ; in addressing itself to such or such a sense, it must penetrate to the mind, to the soul, and bear thither a thought, a sentiment capable of touching or ele- vating it. From this fundamental rule all the others are derived ; for example, that which is continually and justly recommended, — composition. To this is particularly applied the precept of unity and variety. But, in saying this, we have said nothing so * See the Tempest of Haydn, among the pUnoforte works of this master. 172 LECTURE NINTH. THE DIFFERENT ARTS. 173 long as we have not determined the nature of the unity of which we would speak. True unity, is unity of expression, and variety is made only to spread over the entire work the idea or the sin- gle sentiment that it should express. It is useless to remark, that between composition thus defined, and what is often called composition, as the symmetry and arrangement of parts accord- ing ta artificial rules, there is an abyss. True composition is -^ nothing else than the most powerful means of expression. Expression not only furnishes the general rules of art, it also gives the principle that allows of their classification. In fact, every classification supposes a principle that serves as a common measure. Such a principle has been sought in pleasure, and the first of arts has seemed that which gives the most vivid joys. But we have proved that the object of art is not pleasure : — the more or less of pleasure that an art procures cannot, then, be the true measure of its value. This measure is nothing else than expression. Expression being the supreme end, the art that most nearly approaches it is the first of all. All true arts are expressive, but they are diversely so. Take i music ; it is without contradiction the most penetrating, the pro- j^foundest, the most intimate art. There is physically and morally between a sound and the soul a marvellous relation. It seems as though the soul were an echo in which the sound takes a new power. Extraordinary things are recounted of the ancient mu- sic. And it must not be believed that the greatness of effect supposes here very complicated means. No, the less noise mu- sic makes, the more it touches. Give some notes to Pergolese, give him especially some pure and sweet voices, and he returns a celestial charm, bears you away into infinite spaces, plunges you into ineffable reveries. The peculiar power of music is to open to the imagination a limitless career, to lend itself with astonishing facility to all the moods of each one, to arouse or calm, with the sounds of the simplest melody, our accustomed sentiments, our favorite affections. In this respect music is an art without a rival : — however, it is not the first of arts. Music pays for the immense power that has been given it ; it awakens more than any other art the sentiment of |the infinite, because it is vague, obscure, indeterminate in its effects. It is just the opposite art to sculpture, which bears less towards the infinite, because every thing in it is fixed with the last degree of precision. Such is the force and at the same time the feebleness of music, that it expresses every thing and expresses nothing in particular. Sculpture, on the contrary, scarcely gives rise to any reverie, for it clearly represents such a thing and not such another. Music does not paint, it touches ; it puts in motion imagination, not the imagination that reproduces images, but that which makes the heart beat, for it is absurd to limit imagi- nation to the domain of images.* The heart, once touched, moves all the rest of our being ; thus music, indirectly, and to a certain point, can recall images and ideas; but its direct and natural power is neither on the representative imagination nor intelligence, it is on the heart, and that is an advantage sufiS- ciently beautiful. The domain of music is sentiment, but even there its power is more profound than extensive, and if it expresses certain senti- ments with an incomparable force, it expresses but a very small number of them. By way of association, it can awaken them all, but directly it produces very few of them, and the simplest and the most elementary, too, — sadness and joy with their thou- sand shades. Ask music to express magnanimity, virtuous reso- lution, and other sentiments of this kind, and it will be just as incapable of doing it, as of painting a lake or a mountain. It goes about it as it can ; it employs the slow, the rapid, the loud, the soft, etc., but imagination has to do the rest, and imagination does only what it pleases. The same measure reminds one of a mountain, another of the ocean ; the warrior finds in it heroic * See lecture 6. -■rry apm ans JWJ*P- 174 LECTURE NINTH. inspirations, the recluse religious inspirations. Doubtless, words determine musical expression, but the merit then is in the word, not in the music ; and sometimes the word stamps the music with a precision that destroys It, and deprives it of its proper effects— vagueness, obscurity, monotony, but also fulness and profundity, I was about to say infinitude. I do not in the least admit that famous definition of song :— a noted declamation. A simple declamation rightly accented is certainly preferable to stunning accompaniments ; but to music must be left its charac- ter, and its defects and advantages must not be taken away from it. Especially it must not be turned aside from its object, and there must not be demanded from it what it could not give. It is not made to express complicated and factitious sentiment, nor terrestrial and vulgar sentiments. Its peculiar charm is to ele- vate the soul towards the infinite. It is therefore naturally al- lied to religion, especially to that religion of the infinite, which is at the same time the religion of the heart ; it excels in transport- ing to the feet of eternal mercy the soul trembling on the wings of repentance, hope, and love. Happy are those, who, at Rome, in the Vatican,* during the solemnities of the Catholic worship, » I have not myself had the good fortune to hear the religious rausic of the Vatican. Therefore, I shall let a competent judge, M. Quatremere de Quincy, speak, Considerations Morales sur les Destination des Ouvrages de VArt, Paris, 1815, p. 98 : " Let one call to mind those chants so simple and so touching, that terminate at Kome the funeral solemnities of those three days which the Church particularly devotes to the expression of its grief, in the last week of Lent. In that nave where the genius of Michael Angelo has embraced the duration of ages, from the wonders of creation to the last judgment that must destroy its works, are celebrated, in the presence of the Eoman pontiff, those nocturnal ceremonies whose rites, symbols, and plain- tive liturgies seem to be so many figures of the mystery of grief to which they are consecrated. The light decreasing by degrees, at the termination of each psalm, you would say that a funeral veil is extended little by little over those religious vaults. Soon the doubtful light of the last lamp allows you to perceive nothing but Christ in the distance, in the midst of clouds, pronouncing his judgments, and some angel executors of his behests! Then, at the bottom of a tribune interdicted to the regard of the profane, is heard the psalm of the penitent king, to which three of the greatest masters of the art have added tbe modulations of a simple and pathetic chant. No instrument is mingled with those accents. Simple harmonies of voice exe- THE diffp:rknt arts. 175 have heard the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolese, on the old consecrated text ! They have entered heaven for a moment, and their souls have been able to ascend thither without distinc- tion of rank, country, even belief, by those invisible and myste- rious steps, composed, thus to speak, of all the simple, natural, universal sentiments, that everywhere on earth draw from the bosom of the human creature a sigh towards another world ! Between sculpture and music, those two opposite extremes, is painting, nearly as precise as the one, nearly as touching as the other. Like sculpture, it marks the visible forms of objects, but fidds to them life ; like music, it expresses the profoundest senti- ments of the soul, and expresses them all. Tell me what senti- ment does not come within the province of the painter ? He has entire nature at his disposal, the physical world, and the moral world, a churchyard, a landscape, a sunset, the ocean, the great scenes of civil and religious life, all the beings of creation, above all, the figure of man, and its expression, that living mir- ror of what passes in the soul. More pathetic than sculpture, clearer than music, painting is elevated, in my opinion, above both, because it expresses beauty more under all its forms, and the human soul in all the richness and variety of its senti- ments. But the art j?^ar excellence, that which surpasses all others, be- cause it is incomparably the most expressive, is poetry. Speech is the instrument of poetry ; poetry fashions it to its use, and idealizes it, in order to make it express ideal beauty. cute that music ; but these voices seem to be those of angels, and their effect penetrates the depths of the soul." We have cited this beautiful passage— and we could have cited many others, even superior to it— of a man now forgotten, and almost always mis- understood, but whom posterity will put in his place. Let us indicate, at least, the last pages of the same production, on the necessity of leaving the works of art in the place for which they were made, for example, the" por- trait of Mile, de Valliere in the Madeleine atix Carmelites, instead of trans- ferring it to, and exposing it in the apartments of Versailles, " the only place in the world," eloquently says M. Quatremere, " which never should have seen it." 176 LECTUEE NINTH. Poetry gives to it the charm and power of measure ; it makes of it something intermediary between the ordinary voice and music, something at once material and immaterial, finite, clear, and precise, like contours and forms the most definite, living and animated like color, pathetic and infinite like sound. A word in itself, especially a w^ord chosen and transfigured by poetiy, is the most energetic and universal symbol. Armed with this talisman, poetry reflects all the images of the sensible world, like sculpture and painting; it reflects sentiment hke painting and music, with all its varieties, which music does not attain, and in their rapid succession that painting cannot follow, as precise and immobile as sculpture ; and it not only expresses all that, it expresses what is inaccessible to every other art, I mean thought, entirely distinct from the senses and even from sentiment, — thought that has no forms, — thought that has no color, that lets no sound escape, that does not manifest itself in any way, — thought in its highest flight, in its most refined abstraction. Think of it. What a w^orld of images, of sentiments, of thoughts at once distinct, and confused, are excited within us by this one word — country ! and by this other word, brief and im- mense, — God ! What is more clear and altogether more pro- found and vast ! Tell the architect, the sculptor, the painter, even the musician, to call forth also by a single stroke all the powers of nature and the soul ! They cannot, and by that they acknowledge the supe- riority of speech and poetry. They proclaim it themselves, for they take poetry for their own measure ; they esteem their own works, and demand that they should be esteemed, in proportion as they approach the poetic ideal. And the human race does as artists do : a beautiful pic- ture, a noble melody, a living and expressive statue, gives rise to the exclamation — How poetical ! This is not an arbitrary com- parison ; it is a natural judgment which makes poetry the type of the perfection of all the arts, — the art pir excellence^ which THE DIFFERENT ARTS. 177 comprises all others, to which they aspire, which none can I'each. When the other arts would imitate the works of poetry, they usually err, losing their own genius, without robbing poetry of its genius. But poetry constructs according to its own taste palaces and temples, like architecture ; it makes them simple or magnifi- cent ; all orders, as well as all systems, obey it ; the diflferent ages of art are the same to it ; it reproduces, if it pleases, the classic or the Gothic, the beautiful or the sublime, the measured or the in- finite. Lessing has been able, with the exactest justice, to com- pare Homer to the most perfect sculptor ; with such precision are the forms which that marvellous chisel gives to all beings deter- mined 1 And what a painter, too, is Homer ! and, of a different kind, Dante ! Music alone has something more penetrating than poetry, but it is vague, limited, and fugitive. Besides its clearness, its variety, its durability, poetry has also the most pathetic accents. Call to mind the words that Priam utters at the feet of Achilles while asking him for the dead body of his son, more than one verse of Virgil, entire scenes of the Cid and the Polyeucte, the prayer of Esther kneeling before the Lord, the choruses of Esther and AtJm- lie. In the celebrated song of Pergolese, Stahat Mater Dolorosa, we may ask which moves most, the music or the words. The Dies ires, Dies ilia, recited only, produces the most terrible effect. In those fearful words, every blow tells, so to speak ; each word con- tains a distinct sentiment, an idea at once profoimd and determi- nate. The intellect advances at each step, and the heart rushes on in its turn. Human speech idealized by poetry has the depth and brilliancy of musical notes; it is luminous as well as pa- thetic ; it speaks to the mind as well as to the heart ; it is in that inimitable, uniqixe, and embraces all extremes and all contraries in a harmony that redoubles their reciprocal eflfect, in which^y turns, appear and are developed, all images, all sentiments, all ideas, all the human faculties, all the inmost recesses of the soul, all the forms of things, all real and all intelligible worlds ! 8* ''■■'•^)l.i. \i 'I' ^r, LECTUEE X. FRENCH ART IN THE SETENTEENTH CENTURY. Expression not only serves to appreciate the different arts, but the different schools of art. Example : — French art in the seventeenth century. French poetry :—Corneille. Eacine. Moliere. La Fontaine. Boileau.— Paint- ing:— Lesueur. Poussin. Le Lorrain. Champagne.— Engraving.-— Sculpture :— Sarrazin. The Anguiers. Girardon. Pujet.— Le Notre.— Architecture. We believe that we have firmly established that all kinds of beauty, although most dissimilar in appearance, may, when sub- jected to a serious examination, be reduced to spiritual and moral beauty ; that expression, therefore, is at once the true object and the first law of art ; that all arts are such only so far as they ex- press the idea concealed under the form, and are addressed to the soul through the senses ; finally, that in expression the difl*erent arts find the true measure of their relative value, and the most expressive art must be placed in the first rank. If expression judges the different arts, does it not naturally fol- low, that by the same title it can also judge the different schools which, in each art, dispute with each other the empire of taste ? There is not one of these schools that does not represent in its own way some side of the beautiful, and we are disposed to em- brace all in an impartial and kindly study. We are eclectics in the arts as well as in metaphysics. But, as in metaphysics, the knowledge of all systems, and the portion of truth that is in each, enlightens without enfeebling our convictions ; so, in the history of arts, while holding the opinion that no school must be dis- dained, that even in China some shade of beauty can be found, our eclecticism does not make us waver in regard to the sentiment of true beauty and the supreme rule of art. What we demand FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 179 , of the different schools, without distinction of time or place, what we see in the south as well as in the north, at Florence, Rome Venice, and Seville, as well as at Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Paris, — wherever there are men, is something human, is the ex- pression of a sentiment or an idea. A criticism that should be founded on the principle of expres- sion, would somewhat derange, it must be confessed, received judgments, and would carry some disorder into the hierarchy of the renowned. We do not undertake such a revolution; we only propose to confirm, or at least elucidate our principle by an example, and by an example that is at our hand. There is in the world a school formerly illustrious, now very lightly treated :— this school is the French school of the seven- teenth century. We would replace it in honor, by recalling attention to the qualities that make its glory. • We have worked with constancy to reinstate among us the philosophy of Descartes, unworthily sacrificed to the philosophy of Locke, because with its defects it possesses in our view the incomparable merit of subordinating the senses to the mind, of elevating and ennobling man. So we profess a serious and re- flective admiration for our national art of the seventeenth century, because, without disguising what is wanting to it, we find in it what we prefer to every thing else, grandeur united to gooHlense and reason, simplicity and force, genius of composition, especially that of expression. France, careless of her glory, does not appear to have the least notion that she reckons in her annals perhaps the greatest century of humanity, that which embraces the greatest number of extra- ordinary men of every kind. When, I pray you, have politicians li^e Henry IV., Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, Louis XIV. been seen giving each other the hand ? I do not pretend that each of them has no rival, even superiors. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, perhaps excel them. But Alexander has but a single contempo- rary that can be compared with him, his father Philip; Csesar cannot even have suspected that Octavius would one day be 180 LECTURE TENTH. worthy of him ; Charlemagne is a colossus in a desert ; whilst among us these five men succeed each other without an interval, press upon each other, and have, thus to speak, a single soul. And by what oflScers were they served ! Is Conde really inferior to Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar; for among his predecessors we must not look for other rivals ? Who among them surpasses him in the extent and justness of his conceptions, in quickness of sight, in rapidity of manoeuvres, in the union of impetuosity and firmness, in the double glory of taker of cities and gainer of bat- tles ? Add that he dealt with generals like Merci and William, that he had under him Turenne and Luxemburg, without speak- ino" of so many other soldiers who were reared in that admirable school, and at the hour of revei-se still sufficed to save France. What other time, at least among the moderns, has seen flour- ishing together so many poets of the first order ? We have, it is true, neither Homer, nor Dante, nor Milton, nor even Tasso. The epic, with its primitive simplicity, is interdicted us. But in the drama we scarcely have equals. It is because dramatic poet- ry is the poetry that is adapted to us, moral poetry par excellence, which represents man with his difierent passions armed against each other, the violent contentions between virtue and crime, the freaks of fortune, the lessons of providence, and in a narrow compass, too, in which the events press upon each other with- out confusion, in which the action rapidly progresses towards the crisis that must reveal what is most intimate to the heart of the personages. Let us dare to say what we think, that, in our opinion, ^Eschy- lus, Sophocles, and Euripides, together, do not equal Corneille ; for none of them has known and expressed like him what is of all things most truly touching, a great soul at war with itself, between a generous passion and duty. Corneille is the creator of a new pathetic unknown to antiquity and to all the moderns before him. He disdains to address common and subaltern pas- sions ; he does not seek to rouse terror and pity, as demands Aristotle, who limits himself to erecting into maxims the practice FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENITJRY. 181 of the Greeks. Corneille seems to have read Plato, and followed his precepts : — he addresses a most elevated part of human nature, the noblest passion, the one nearest virtue,— admiration ; and from admiration carried to its culmination he draws the most powerful efiects. Shakspeare, we admit, is superior to Corneille in extent and richness of dramatic genius. Entire human nature seems at his disposal, and he reproduces the difierent scenes of life in their beauty and deformity, in their grandeur and baseness. He excels in painting the terrible or the gentle passions, Othello is jealousy. Lady Macbeth is ambition, as Juliet and Desdemona are the immortal names of youthful and unfortunate love. But if Corneille has less imagination, he has more soul. Less varied, he is more profound. If he does not put upon the stage so many different characters, those that he does put on it are the greatest that can be offered to humanity. The scenes that he gives are less heart-rending, but at once more delicate and more sublime. What is the melancholy of Hamlet, the grief of King Lear, even the disdainful intrepidity of Caesar, in comparison with the mag- nanimity of Augustus striving to be master of himself as well as the universe, in comparison with Chim^ne sacrificing love to honor, especially in comparison with Pauline, not suffering even at the bottom of her heart an involuntary sigh for the one that she must not love? Corneille always confines himself to the highest regions. He is by turns Roman and Christian. He is the interpreter of heroes, the chanter of virtue, the poet of warriors and politicians.* And it must not be forgotten that Shakspeare is almost alone in his times, whilst after Corneille comes Racine, who would suffice for the poetical glory of a nation. Racine assuredly cannot be compared with Corneille for dramatic genius ; he is more the man of letters ; he has not the tragic soul ; he neither loves nor understands politics and war. When he imitates Corneille, for example, in Alexander, and even in Mith- * One is reminded of the expression of the great Conde ; " Where then has Corneille learned politics and war ?" 182 LECTURE TENTH. FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 183 ridates, he imitates him badly enough. The scene, so vaunted, of Mithridates exposing his plan of campaign to his sons is a morsel of the finest rhetoric, which cannot be compared with the political and military scenes of Cinna and Sertorius, especially with that first scene of the Death of Pompey, in which you wit- ness a counsel as true, as grand, as profound as ever could have been one of the counsels of Richelieu or Mazarin. Racine was not born to paint heroes, but he paints admirably man with his natural passions, and the most natural as well as the most touch- ing of all, love. So he particularly excels in feminine characters. For men he has need of being sustained by Tacitus or holy Sciip- ture.^ With woman he is at his ease, and he makes the.n think and speak with perfect truth, set off by exquiste art. Demand of him neither Emilie, Cornelie, nor Pauline ; but listen to Andro- maque, Monime, Berenice, and Phedre ! There, even in imita- ting, he is original, and leaves the ancients very far behind him. Who has taught him that charming delivery, those graceful troubles, that purity even in feebleness, that melancholy, some- times even that depth, with that marvellous language which seems the natural accent of woman's heart ? It is continually repeated that Racine wrote better than Corneille :— say only that the tvvo wrote very differently, and like men in very different epochs. One has two sovereign qualities, which belong to his own nature » It would be a curious and useful study, to compare with the original all the passages of Britannicus imitated from Tacitus ; in them Racine would almost always be found below his model. I will give a single example. In the account of the death of Britannicus, Racine thus expresses the diflfereat effects of the crime on the spectators : Juez combien ce coup frappe tons les esprits ; La moitie s'epouvante et sort avec des cris ; Mais ceux qui de la cour ont un plus long usage Sur les yeux de Cesar composent leur visage. Certainly the style is excellent ; but it pales and seems nothing more than a very feeble sketch in comparison with the rapid and sombre pencil-strokes of the great Roman painter : " Trepidatur a circumsedentibus, diffugiunt imprudentes ; at, quibus altior intellectus, resistant defixi et Neronem in- tuentes." and his times, a naivete and grandeur, the other is not naive, but he has too much taste not to be always simple, and he supplies the place of grandeur, forever lost, with consummate elegance. Corneille speaks the language of statesmen, soldiers, theolog-ians, philosophers, and clever women ; of Richelieu, Rohan, Saint-Cyran, Descartes, and Pascal ; of mother Angelique Arnaud and mother Madeleine de Saint-Joseph ; the language which Moliere still spoke, which Bossuet preserved to his last breath. Racine speaks that of Louis XIV. and the women who were the ornament of his court. I suppose that thus spoke Madame, the amiable, sprightly, and unfortunate Henriette ; thus wrote the author of the Princesse de Cleves and the author of Telemaque. Or, rather, this language is that of Racine himself, of that feeble and tender soul, which passed quickly from love to devotion, which uttered its complaints in lyric poetry, which was wholly poured out in the choruses oi Esther and Athalie, and in the Cantiques Spirituels; that soul, so easy to be moved, that a religious ceremony or a representation of Esther at Saint-Cyr touched to tears, that pitied the misfortunes of the people, that found in its pity and its char- ity the courage to speak one day the truth to Louis XIV., and was extinguished by the first breath of disgrace. Moliere is, in comparison with Aristophanes, what Corneille is, in comparison with Shakspeare. The author of Flutus, the Wasps, and the Clouds, has doubtless an imagination, an explo- sive buffoonery, a creative power, above all comparison. Moliere has not as great poetical conceptions : he has more, perhaps ; he has characters. His coloring is less brilliant, his graver is more penetrating. He has engraved in the memory of men a certain number of irregularities and vices which will ever be called VAvare (the Miser), le Malade Imaginaire (the Hypochondriac), les Femmes Savantes (the Learned Women), le Tartufe (the Hypocrite), and Don Juan, not to speak of the Misaiithrope, a piece apart, touching as pleasant, which is not addressed to the crowd, and cannot be popular, because it expresses a ridicule rare enough, excess in the passion of truth and honor. 184 LECTUEE TENTH. Of all fabulists, ancient and modern, does any one, even the ingenious, the pure, the elegant Phaedrus, approach our La Fon- taine ? He composes his personages, and puts them in action with the skill of Moliere ; he knows how to take on occasion the tone of Horace, and mingle an ode with a fable ; he is at once the most naive, and the most refined of writers, and his art dis- appears in its very perfection. We do not ^peak of the tales, first, because we condemn the kind, then, because La Fontaine displays in them qualities more Italian than French, a narrative full of nature, malice, and grace, but without any of those pro- found, tender, melancholy traits, that place among the greatest poets of all time the author of the Two Pigeons [Deux Pigeons), the Old Man (Vieillard), and the Three Young Persons (Gens). We do not hesitate to put Boileau among these great men. He comes after them, it is true, but he belongs to their company : he comprehends them, loves them, sustains them. It was he, who, in 1663, after the School of Women [VEcole des Femmes) and long before the Hypocrite {le Tartufe), and the Misanthrope, proclaimed Moliere the master in the art of verse. It was he who, in 1677, after the failure of Phedre, defended the van- quisher of Euripides against the successes of Pradon. It was he who, in ?idvance of posterity, first put in light what is new and entirely original in the plays of Corneille.^ He saved the pension of the old tragedian by offering the sacrifice of his own. Louis XIV. asking him what writer most honored his reign, Boi- leau answered, that it was Moliere ; and when the great king in his decline persecuted Port-Royal, and wished to lay hands on Arnaud, he encountered a man of letters, who said to the face of the imperious monarh, — " Your Majesty in vain seeks M. Arnaud, you are too fortunate to find him." Boileau is somewhat wanting in imagination and invention ; but he is great in the energetic sentiment of truth and justice ; he carries to the extent of passion See the letter to Perrault. FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 185 taste for the beautiful and the honest ; he is a poet by force of soul and good sense. More than once his heart dictated to him the most pathetic verses : " In vain against the Cid a minister is leagued,* All Paris for Chimeno has the eyes of Rodrique," etc. " After a little spot of earth, obtained by prayer, Forever in the tomb had inclosed Moliere," etc. .8 And this epitaph of Arnaud, so simple and so grand : "At the feet of this altar of structure gross. Lies without pomp, inclosed in a coffin vile, The most learned mortal that ever wrote ; Arnaud, who in grace instructed by Jesus Christ, Combating for the Church, has, in the Church itself, Suffered more than one outrage and more than one anathema,- etc. " Wandering, poor, banished, proscribed, persecuted ; And even by his death their ill-extinguished rage Had never left his ashes in repose, • If God himself here by his holy flock From these devouring wolves had not concealed his bones." ' These are, I think, poets suflSciently great, and we have more of them still : I mean those charming or sublime minds who * En vain centre le Cid ministre se ligue, Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrique, etc. Apres qu'un peu de terre, obtenu par priere, Pour jamais dans la tombe cut enferme Moliere, etc. * Aux pieds de cet autel de structure grosaiere. Git sans pompe, enferm6 dans une vile biere, Le plus savant mortel qui jamais ait ecrit ; Arnaud, qui sur la gr4ce instruit par Jesus-Christ, Combattant pour I'Eglise, a, dans I'Eglise m6me, Souffert plus d'un outrage et plus d'un anatheme, etc. • ••••••« Errant, pauvre, banni, proscrit, pers^cut^ ; Et m6me par sa mort leur fureur mal eteinte N'aurait jamais laisse ses cendres en repos, Si Dieu lui-m6me ici de son ouaille sainte A ces loups d^vorants n'avait cach6 les os. These verses did not appear till after the death of Boileau, and they are 186 LECTURE TENTH. have elevated prose to poetry. Greece alone, in her most beauti- ful days, offers, perhaps, such a variety of admirable prose writers. Who can enumerate them ? At first, Rabelais and Montaigne ; later, Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche; La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere ; Retz and Saint-Simon ; Bourdaloue, Flechier, Fenelon, and Bossuet ; add to these so many eminent women, at their head Madame de Sevigne ; while Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon are still to come.^ By what strange diversity could a country, in which the mental not well known. Jean-Baptiste Konsseau, in a letter to Brossette, rightly said that these are "the most beautiful verses that M. Desprcaux ever made." » 4th Series of our works, Literature, book i., Preface^ p. 3 : " It is in prose, perhaps, that our literary glory is most certain. ... What modern nation reckons prose writers that approach those of our nation ? The c^uti- iry of Shakspeare and Milton does not possess, since Bacon, a single prose writer of the first order [?] ; that of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, is in vain proud of Machiavel, whose sound and manly diction, like the thought that it expresses, is destitute of grandeur. Spain, it is true, has produced Cervantes, an admirable writer, but he is alone. . . . France can easily show a list of more than twenty prose writers of genius : Froissard, Eabelais, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, La Eoehefoucauld, Moli^re, Eetz, La Bruyere, Mtdebranche, Bossuet, Fenelon, Flechier, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Mme. de Sevigne, Saint-Simon, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Buffon, J. J. Rousseau ; with- out speaking of so many more that would be in the first rank everywhere else,— Amiot, Calvin, Pasquier, D'Aubigue, Charron, Balzac, Vaugelas, Pe- lisson, Nicole, Fleury, Bussi, Saint-Evremont, Mme. de Lafayette, Mme de Maintenon, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, Hamilton, Le Sage, Prevost, Beau- marchais, etc. It may be said with the exactest truth, that French prose is without a rival in modern Europe ; and, even in antiquity, superior to the Latin prose, at least in the quantity and variety of models, it has no equal but the Greek prose, in its palmiest days, in the days of Herodotus and De- mosthenes. I do not prefer Demosthenes to Pascal, and it would be difficult for me to put Plato himself above Bossuet. Plato and Bossuet, in my opinion, are the two greatest masters of human language, with manifest dif- ferences, as well as more than one trait of resemblance; both ordinarily speak like the people, with the last degree of simplicity, and at moments ascending without effort to a poetry as magnificent as that of Homer, ingeni- ous and polished to the most charming delicacy, and by instinct majestic and sublime. Plato, without doubt, has incomparable graces, the supreme iierenity, and, as it were, the demi-smile of the divine sage. Bossuet, on his side, has the pathetic, in which he has no rival but the great Corneille. When such writers are possessed, is it not a religion to render them the honor that is their due, that of a regular and profound study?" FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 187 arts were carried to such perfection, remain ordinary in the other arts ? Was the sentiment of the beautiful wanting, then, to that society so polished, to that magnificent court, to those great lords and those great ladies passionately loving luxury and elegance, to that public of the elite^ enamored of every kind of glory, whose enthusiasm defended the Cid against Richelieu? No; France in the seventeenth century was a whole, and produced artists that she can place by the side of her poets, her philosophers, her orators. But, in order to admire our artists, it is necessary to compre- hend them. We do not believe that imagination has been less freely im- parted to France than to any other nation of Europe. It has even had its reign among us. It is fancy that rules in the six- teenth century, and inspires the literature and the arts of the Menaissance. But a great revolution intervened at the commence- ment of the seventeenth century. France at that moment seems to pass from youth to virility. Instead of abandoning imagina- tion to itself, we apply ourselves from that moment to restrain it without destroying it, to moderate it, as the Greeks did by the aid of taste ; as in the progress of life and society we learn to re- press or conceal what is too individual in character. An end is made of the literature of the preceding age. A new poetry, a new prose, begin to appear, which, during an entire century, bear fruits sufficiently beautiful. Art follows the general movement ; after having been elegant and graceful, it becomes in its turn serious ; it no longer aims at originality and extraordinary effects ; it neither flashes nor dazzles ; it speaks, above all, to the mind and the soul. Hence its good qualities and also its defects. In general, it is somewhat wanting in brilliancy and coloring, but it is in the highest degree expressive. Some time since we have changed all that. We have discov- ered, somewhat late, that we have not sufficient imagination ; we are in training to acquire it, it is true, at the expense of reason, alas ! also at the expense of soul, which is forgotten, repudiated, 188 LECTURE TENTH. proscribed. At this moment, color and form are the order of the day, in poetry, in painting, in every thing. We are beginning to run mad with Spanish painting. Tiie Flemish and Venetian schools are gaining ground on the schools of Florence and Rome. Rossini equals Mozart, and Gluck will soon seem to us insipid. Young artists, who, rightly disgusted with the dry and inani- mate manner of David, undertake to renovate French painting, who would rob the sun of its heat and splendor, remember that of all beings in the world, the greatest is still man, and that what is greatest in man is his intelligence, and above all, his heart ; that it is this heart, then, which you must put and develop on vour canvas. This is the most elevated object of art. In order to reach it, do not make yourselves disciples of Flemings, Vene- tians, and Spaniards ; return, return to the masters of our great nationiil school of the seventeenth century. We bow with respectful admiration before the schools of Rome and Florence, at once ideal and living; but, those excepted, we maintain that the French school equals or surpasses all others. W^e prefer neither Murillo, Rubens, Corregio, nor Titian himself to Lesueur and Poussin, because, if the former have an incompara- ble hand and color, our two countrymen are much greater in thought and expression. What a destiny was that of Eustache Lesueur!^ He was born at Paris about 1617, and he never went out of it. Poor and humble, he passed his life in the churches and convents where he worked. The only sweetness of his sad days, his only consolation was his wife : he loses her, and goes to die, at thirty- eight, in that cloister of Chartreux, which his pencil has immor- talized. What resemblance at once, and what difference between his life and that of Raphael, who also died young, but in the midst of pleasures, in honors, and already almost in purple ! Our Raphael was not the lover of Fornarina and the favorite of a pope : he was Christian ; he is Christianity in art. * See the Appendix, at the end of the vohime. PEENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 189 Lesueur is a genius wholly French. Scarcely having escaped from the hands of Simon Vouet, he formed himself according to the model which he had in the soul. He never saw the sky of Italy. He knew some fragments of the antique, some pictures of Raphael, and the designs that Poussin sent him. With these feeble resources, and guided by a happy instinct, in less than ten years he mounted by a continual progress to the perfection of his talent, and expired at the moment when, finally sure of himself, he was about to produce new and more admirable master-pieces. Follow him from the St, Bruno completed in 1648, through the St. Paul of 1649, to the Vision of St. Benedict in 1651, and to the Muses, scarcely finished before his death. Lesueur went on adding to his essential qualities which he owed to his own genius, and to the national genius, I mean composition and expression, qualities which he had dreamed of, or had caught glimpses of. His design from day to day became more pure, without ever being that of the Florentine school, and the same is true of his coloring. In Lesueur every thing is directed towards expression, every thing is in the service of the mind, every thing is idea and senti- ment. There is no affectation, no mannerism ; there is a pertect naivete; his figures sometimes would seem even a little com- mon, so natural are they, if a Divine breath did not animate them. It must not be forgotten that his favorite subjects do not exact a brilliant coloring: : he oftenest retraces scenes mournful or austere. But as in Christianity by the side of suffering and resignation is faith with hope, so Lesueur joins to the pathetic sweetness and grace; and this man charms me at the same time that he moves me. The works of Lesueur are almost always great wholes that demanded profound meditation, and the most flexible talent, in order to preserve in them unity of subject, and to give them va- riety and harmony. The History of St. Bruno, the founder of the order des Chartreux, is a vast melancholy poem, in which are represented the difierent scenes of monastic life. The His- 190 LECTURE TENTH. tory of St. Martin and St. Benedict has not come down to us entire ; but the two fragments of it that we possess, the Mass of St. Martin, and the Vision of St. Benedict, allow us to compare that great work with every better thing of the kind that has been done in Italy, as, to speak sincerely, the Muses and the Jlis- tort/ of Love, appear to us to equal at least the Farnesina. In the History of St. Bruno, it is particularly necessary to re- mark St. Bruno, prostrated before a crucifix, the saint reading a letter of the pope, his death, his apotheosis. Is it possible to carry meditation, humiliation, rapture farther ? >S^^. Paul preach- ing at Ephesus reminds one of the School of Athens, by the ex- tent of the scene, the employment of architecture, and the skilful'* distribution of groups. In spite of the number of personages, and the diversity of episodes, the picture wholly centres in St. Paul. He preaches, and upon his words hang those who are listening, of every sex, of every age, in the most varied attitudes. In that we behold the grand lines of the Roman school, its de- sign full of nobleness and truth at the same time. What charm- ing and grave heads ! What graceful, bold, and always natural movements ! Here, that child with ringlets, full of naive enthu- siasm ; there, that old man with bended knees, and hands joined. Are not all those beautiful heads, and those draperies, too, worthy of Raphael ? But the marvel of the picture is the figure of St. Paul,* — it is that of the Olympic Jupiter, animated by a new spirit. The Mass of St. Martin carries into the soul an impres- sion of peace and silence. The Vision of St. Benedict hd^ ihQ character of simplicity full of grandeur. A desert, the saint on his knees, contemplating his sister, St. Scholastique, who is as- cending to heaven, borne up by angels, accompanied by two young girls, crowned with flowers, and bearing the palm, the sym- bol of virginity. St. Peter and St. Paul show St. Benedict the abode whither his sister is going to enjoy eternal peace. A slight ray of the sun pierces the cloud. St. Benedict is as it were * See the Appendix. FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 191 lifted up from the earth by this ecstatic vision. One scarcely de- sires a more lively color, and the expression is divine. Those two virgins, a little too tall, perhaps, how beautiful and pure they are ! How sweet are those forms ! How grave and gentle are those faces ! The person of the holy monk, with all the material ac- cessories, is perfectly natural, for it remains on the earth ; whilst his face, where his soul shines forth, is wholly ideal, and already in heaven. But the chefd'ceuvre of Lesueur is, in our opinion, the Descent from the Cross, or rather the enshrouding of Jesus Christ, already descended from the cross, whom Joseph of Arimathea, Nicode- mus, and St. John are placing in the shroud. On the left, Mag- dalen, in tears, kisses the feet of Jesus ; on the right, are the holy women and the Virgin. It is impossible to carry the pathetic farther and preserve beauty. Tlie holy women, placed in front, have each their particular grief. While one of them abandons herself to despair, an immense but internal and thoughtful sad- ness is upon the face of the mother of the crucified. She has comprehended the divine benefit of the redemption of the human race, and her grief, sustained by this thought, is calm and re- signed. And then what dignity in that head! It, in some sort, sums up the whole picture, and gives to it its character, that of a profound and subdued emotion. I have seen many Descents from the Cross ; I have seen that of Rubens at Ant- werp, in which the sanctity of the subject has, as it were, con- strained the great Flemish painter to join sensibility and senti- ment to color ; none of those pictures have touched me like that of Lesueur. All the parts of art are there in the service of ex- pression. The drawing is severe and strong ; even the color, without being brilliant, surpasses that of the St. Bruno, the Mass of St. Martin, the St. Paul, and even that of the Vision of St. Benedict ; as if Lesueur had wished to bring together in it all the powers of his soul, all the resources of his talent !* ' This picture had been made for a chapel of the church of St. Gervais. 192 LECTUEE TENTH, FKENCn AET IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 193 Now, regard the Muses, — other scenes, other beauties, the same genius. Those are Pagan pictures, but Christianity is in them also, by reason of the adorable chastity with which Le- sueur has clothed them. All critics have emulously shown the mythological errors into which poor Lesueur fell, and they have not wanted occasion to deplore that he had not made the jour- ney to Italy and studied antiquity more. But who can have the strange idea of searching in Lesueur for an archeology ? I seek and find in him the very genius of painting. Is not that Terp- sichore, well or ill named, with a harp a little too strong, it is said, as if the Muse had no particular gift, in her modest atti- tude the symbol of becoming grace ? In that group of three Muses, to which one may give what name he pleases, is not the one that holds upon her knees a book of music, who sings or is about to sing, the most ravishing creature, a St. Cecilia thai preludes just before abandoning herself to the intoxication of in- spiration ? And in those pictures there is brilliancy and color mg ; the landscape is beautifully lighted, as if Poussin had guided the hand of his friend. Poussin! What a name I pronounce. If Lesueur is the painter of sentiment, Poussin is the painter of thought. He is in some sort the philosopher of painting. His pictures are reli- gious or moral lectures that testify a great mind as well as a great heart. It is sufficient to recall the Seven Sacraments, the Deluge, the Arcadia, the Truth that Time frees from the Taints of Envy, the Will of Eudamidas, and the Dance of Human Life. And the style is equal to the conception. Poussin draws hke a Florentine, composes like a Frenchman, and often equals Lesueur in expression ; coloring alone is sometimes wanting to him. As well as Racine, he is smitten with the antique beauty, and imitates it ; but, like Racine, he always remains original. In place of the naivete and unique charm of Lesueur, he has a severe simplicity, with a correctness that never abandons him. Remember, too, that he cultivated every kind of painting. He is at once a great historical painter and a great landscape paint- er,— he treats religious subjects as well as profane subjects, and by turns is inspired by antiquity and the Bible. He lived much at Rome, it is true, and died there ; but he also worked in France, and almost always for France. Scarcely had he become known, when Richelieu attracted him to Paris and retained him there, loading him with honors, and giving him the commission of first painter in ordinary to the king, with the general direction of all the works of painting, and all the ornaments of the royal houses. During that sojourn of two years in Paris, he made i\\Q Last Supper (Cene), the St. Francois Xavier, the Truth that Time frees from the Taints of Envy. It was also to France, to his friend M. de Chantelou, that from Rome he addressed the Lispiration of St. Paul, as well as the second series of the Seven Sacraments, an immense composition that, for grandeur of thought, can vie with the Stanze of Raphael. I speak of it from the engravings ; for the Seven Sacraments are no longer in France. Eternal shame of the eighteenth century ! It was at least necessary to wrest from the Greeks the pediments of the Parthenon, — we, we delivered up to strangers, we sold all those monuments of French genius which Richelieu and Mazarin, with religious care, had collected. Public indignation did not avert the act ! And there has not since been found in France a king, a statesman, to interdict letting the master-pieces of art that honor the nation depart without authorization from the national territory !* There has not been found a government which has undertaken at least to repurchase those that we have lost, to get back again the great works of Poussin, Lesueur, and so many others, scattered in Europe, instead of squandering millions to It formed the altar-piece, and in the foreground there was the admirable Bearing of the Cross, which is still seen in the Museum. * Such a law was the first act of the first assembly of aflfranchised Greece, and all the friends of art have applauded it from end to end of civilized Europe. • 9 194 LECTURE TENTH. acquire the baboons of Holland, as Louis XIV. said, or Spanish canvasses, in truth of an admirable color, but without nobleness and moral expression.^ I know and I love the Dutch pastorals and the cows of Potter ; I am not insensible to the sombre and ardent coloring of Zurbaran, to the brilliant Italian imitations of Murillo and Velasquez ; but in fine, what is all that in compari- son with serious and powerful compositions like the Seven Sacra- ments, for example, that profound representation of Christian rites, a work of the highest faculties of the intellect and the soul, in which the intellect and the soul will ever find an exhaustless subject of study and meditation ! Thank God, the graver of Pesne has saved them from our ingratitude and barbarity. Whilst the originals decorate the gallery of a great English lord,' the love and the talent of a Pesne, of a Stella, have preserved for us faithful copies in those expressive engravings that one never grows tired of contemplating, that every time we examine them, reveal to us some new side of the genius of our great countryman. Regard especially the Extreme Unction ! What a sublime and at the same time almost graceful scene ! One would call it an antique bas-relief, so many groups are properly distributed in it, with natural and varied attitudes. The drape- ries are as admirable as those of a fragment of the Fanathencea, which is in the Louvre. The figures are all beautiful. Beauty of figures belongs to sculpture, one is about to say :— yes, but it also belongs to painting, if you have yourself the eye of the painter, if you have been struck with the expression of those postures, those heads, those gestures, and almost those looks ; for every thing lives, every thing breathes, even in those engra- vings, and if it were the place, we would endeavor to make the reader penetrate with us into those secrets of Christian sentiment which are also the secrets of art. I FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 195 We endeavor to console ourselves for having lost the Seven Sacraments, and for not having known how to keep from Eng- land and Germany so many productions of Poussin, now buried in foreign collections,* by going to see at the Louvre what re- mains to us of the great French artist, — thirty pictures produced at different epochs of his life, which, for the most part, worthily sustain his renown, — the portrait of Poussin, one of the Baccha- nals made for Richelieu, Mars and Venus, the Death of Adonis^ tlie Rajye of the Sahims,^ Eliezer and Rebecca, Moses saved from the Waters, the Infant Jesus on the Knees of the Virgin and St. Joseph standing hy,* especially the Manna in the Desert, the Judgment of Solomon^ the Blind Men of Jericho, the Woman taken in Adultery, the Inspiration of St. Paul, the Diogenes, the Deluge^ the Arcadia. Time has turned the color, which was never very brilliant ; but it has not been able to disturb what will make them live forever, — the design, the composition, and the expression. The Deluge has remained, and in fact will always be, the most striking. After so many masters who have treated the same subject, Poussin has found the secret of being original, and more pathetic than his predecessors, in representing the solemn moment when the race is about to disappear. There are few details ; some dead bodies are floating upon the abyss ; a sinister-looking moon has scarcely risen ; a few moments and mankind will be no more ; the last mother uselessly extends her last child to the last father, who cannot take it, and the serpent that has destroyed mankind darts forth triumphant. We try in vain to find in the Deluge some signs of a trembling hand : the * See the Appendix. « The Seven Sacraments of Poussin are now in the Bridg|water Gallery See the Appendix. * See the Appendix. ' In the midst of this scene of brutal violence, everybody has remarked this delicate trait— a Roman quite young, almost juvenile, while possessing himself by force of a young girl taking refuge in the arms of her mother, asks her from her mother with an air at once passionate and restrained. In order to appreciate this picture, compare it with that of David in the ensemble and in the details. • In fact, the St. Joseph is here the important personage. He governs the whole scene ; he prays, he is as it were in ecstasy. 196 LECTIJKE TENTH. soul that sustained and conducted that hand makes itself felt hy our soul, and profoundly moves it. Stop at that scene of mourning, and almost by its side let your eyes rest upon that fresh landscape and upon those shepherds that surround a tomb. The most aged, with a knee on the ground, reads these words graven upon the stone : M in Arcadia ego, and I also lived in Arcadia. At the left a shepherd listens with serious attention. xVt the right is a charming group, composed of a shepherd in the sprmg-time of life, and a young girl of ravishing beauty. An artless admiration is painted on the face of the young peasant, who looks with happiness on his beautiful companion. As for her, her adorable face is not even veiled with the slightest shade ; she smiles, her hand resting carelessly upon the shoulder of the young man, and she has no appearance of comprehending that lecture given to beauty, youth, and love. I confess that, for this picture alone, of so touching a philosophy, I would give many master-pieces of coloring, all the pastorals of Potter, all the badinages of Ostade, all the buffooneries of Teniers. Lesueur and Poussin, by very different but nearly equal titles, are at the head of our great painting of the seventeenth century. After them, what artists again are Claude Lorrain and Philippe de Champagne ? Do you know in Italy or Holland a greater landscape painter than Claude ? And seize well his true character. Look at those vast and beautiful solitudes, lighted by the fii-st or last rays of the sun, and tell me whether those solitudes, those trees, those waters, those mountains, that light, that silence,— whether all that nature has a soul, and whether those luminous and pure horizons do not lift you involuntarily, in ineffable reveries, to the invisible source of beauty and grace ! Lorrain is, above all, the painter of light, and his works might be called the history of light and all its combinations, in small and great, when it is poured out over large plains or breaks in the most varied accidents, on land, on waters, in the heavens, in its eternal source. The human scenes thrown into one corner have no other objeQt FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 197 than to relieve and make appear to advantage the scenes of nature by harmony or contrast. In the Village Fete, life, noise, movement are in front, — peace and grandeur are at the founda- tion of the landscape, and that is truly the picture. The same effect is in the Cattle Crossing a River. The landscape placed immediately under your eyes has nothing in it very rare, we can find such a one anywhere ; but follow the perspective, — it leads you across flowering fields, a beautiful river, ruins, mountains that overlook these ruins, and you lose yourself in infinite distan- ces. That Landscape crossed by a river, where a peasant waters his herd, means nothing great at first sight. Contemplate it some time, and peace, a sort of meditativeness in nature, a well-gradua- ted perspective, will, little by little, gain your heart, and give you in that small picture a penetrating charm. The picture called a Landscape represents a vast champagne filled with trees, and lighted by the rising sun, — in it there is freshness and — already — warmth, mystery, and splendor, with skies of the sweetest har- mony. A Dance at Sunset expresses the close of a beautiful day. One sees in it, one feels in it the decline of the heat of the day ; in the foreground are some shepherds and shepherdesses dancing by the side of their flocks.* Is it not strange, that Champagne has been put in the Flemish school f He was born at Brussels, it is true, but he came very early to Paris, and his true master ^was Poussin, who counselled him. He de-oted his talent to France, lived there, died there, and what is decisive, his manner is wholly French. Will it be * The pictures of Claude Lorrain, of which we have just spoken, are in the Museum of Paris. In all there are thirteen, whilst the Museum of Madrid alone possesses almost as many, while there are in England more than fifty, and those the most admirable. See the Appendix. ^ The last Notice of the Pictures exidhited in tJie Gallery of the National Mu- seum of the Louvre^ 1852, although its author, M. Villot, is surely a man ot incontestable knowledge and taste, persists in placing Champagne in the Flemish school. En, revanche, a learned foreigner, M. Waageu, claims him for the French school. Kunstwerke and Kunstler in Paris, Berlin, 1839, p. 651. 198 LECTURE TENTH. FKENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 199 said that he owes to Flanders liis color ? We respond that this quality is balanced by a grave defect that he also owes to Flan- ders, the want of ideality in the figures ; and it was from France that he learned how to repair this defect by beauty of moral ex- pression. Champagne is inferior to Lesueur and Poussin, but he is of their family. He was, also, of those artists contemporaneous with Corneille, simple, poor, virtuous. Christian.^ Champagne worked both for the convent of the Carmelites in the Rue St. Jacques, that venerable abode of ardent and sublime piety, and Port-Royal, that place of all others that contained in the smallest space the most virtue and genius, so many admirable men and women worthy of them. What has become of that famous cru- cifix that he painted for the Church of the Carmelites, a master- piece of perspective that upon a horizontal plane appeared per- pendicular ? It perished with the holy house. The Last Swpper (Cene) is a living picture, on account of the truth of all the figures, movements, and postures ; but to my eyes it is blemished by the absence of the ideal. I am obliged to say as much of the EejMst with Simon the Pharisee. The chef-d'oeuvre of Champagne is the Apparition of St. Gervais and St. Protais to St. Ambrose in a Basilica of Milan. All the qualities of French art are seen in it,— simplicity and grandeur in composition, with a profound expression, bn that canvas are only four personages, the two martyrs and St. Paul, who presents them to St. Ambrose. Those four figures fill the temple, lighted above all in the obscurity of » Well appreciated by Richelieu, he preferred his esteem to his benefits. One day when an envoy of Eichelieu said to him that he had only to ask freely what he wished for the advancement of his fortune, Champagne re- sponde 1 that if M. the Cardinal could make him a more skilful painter than he was, it was the only thing that lie asked of his Eminence ; but that being im- possible, he only desired the honor of his good graces. Felibien, Eniretiens, 1st edition, 4to., part v., p. 171 ; and dc Piles, Ahrege de la Vie des Peintres, 2d edition, p. 500.— "As ho had much love for justice and truth, provided he satisfied what they both demanded, he easily passed over all the rest."— Nicrologe de Port-Eoyal, p. 336. the night, by the luminous apparition. The two martyrs are full of majesty. St. Ambrose, kneeling and in prayer, is, as it were, seized with terror.^ I certainly admire Champagne as an historical painter, and even as a landscape painter ; but he is perhaps greatest as a portrait painter. In portraits truth and nature are particularly in their place, relieved by coloring, and idealized in proper measure by expression. The portraits of Champagne are so many monu- ments in which his most illustrious contemporaries will live for- ever. Every thing about them is strikingly real, grave, and severe, with a penetrating sweetness. Should the records of Port- Royal be lost, all Port-Royal might be found in Champagne. Among those portraits we see the inflexible Saint-Cyran,^ as well as his persecutor, the imperious Richelieu.^ We see, too, the learned, the intrepid Antoine Araaud, to whom the contempora- ries of Bossuet decreed the name of Great ; * and Mme. Angelique Arnaud, with her yidive and strong figure.* Among them is mother Agnes and the humble daughter of Champagne himself, sister St. Suzanne.^ She has just been miraculously cured, and her whole prostrated person beai*s still the impress of a relic of suffering. Mother Agnes, kneeling before her, regards her with a look of grateful joy. The place of the scene is a poor cell ; a wooden cross hanging on the wall, and some straw chairs, are all the ornaments. On the picture is the inscription, — Christo uni TTAtdico animarum et corporum, etc. There is possessed the * See the Appendix, ^ The original is in the Museum of Grenoble ; but see the engraving of Morin ; see also that of Daret, after the beautiful design ol' Demonstier. ' In the Museum of the Louvre ; see also the engraving ol Morin. * The original is now in the Chateau of Sable, belonging to the Marquis of Rouge ; see the engraving of Simonneau in Perrault. The beautiful engra- ving of Edelinck was made after a different original, attributed to a nephew of Champagne. ° The original is also in the possession of the Marquis of Eouge ; the ad- mirable engraving of Van Schupen may take its place. * In the Museum, 198 LECTURE TENTH. said that lie owes to Flanders his color ? We respond that this quahty is balanced by a grave defect that he also owes to Flan- ders, the want of ideality in the figures ; and it was from France that he learned how to repair this defect by beauty of moral ex- pression. Champagne is inferior to Lesueur and Poussin, but he is of their family. He was, also, of those artists contemporaneous with Corneille, simple, poor, virtuous, Christian.* Champagne worked both for the convent of the Carmelites in the Rue St. Jacques, that venerable abode of ardent and sublime piety, and Port-Royal, that place of all others that contained in the smallest space the most virtue and genius, so many admirable men and women worthy of them. What has become of that famous cru- cifix that he painted for the Church of the Carmelites, a master- piece of perspective that upon a horizontal plane appeared per- pendicular ? It perished with the holy house. The Last Su^yper (Cene) is a living picture, on account of the truth of all the figures, movements, and postures ; but to my eyes it is blemished by the absence of the ideal. I am obliged to say as much of the Bcjmst with Sim(m the Pharisee. The chef-d'oeuvre of Champagne is the Apparition of St. Gervais and St. Protais to St. Ambrose in a Basilica of Milan. All the qualities of French art are seen in it, — simplicity and grandeur in composition, with a profound expression. On that canvas are only four personages, the two martyrs and St. Paul, who presents them to St. Ambrose. Those four figures fill the temple, lighted above all in the obscurity of » Well appreciated by Kichelien, he preferred liis esteem to his benefits. One day when an envoy of Richelieu said to him that he had only to ask freely what he wished for the advancement of his fortune, Champagne re- sponde 1 that if M. the Cardinal could make him a more skilful painter than he was, it was the only thing that he asked of his Eminence ; but that being im- possible, he only desired the honor of his good graces. Felibien, Entretiens. 1st edition, 4to., part v., p. 171 ; and de Piles, Ahrege de la Vie des Feintres, 2d edition, p. 500.— "As he had much love for justice and truth, provided he satisfied what they both demanded, he easily passed over all the rest."— Necrologe de Port-Boyal, p« 836. FKENCH AKT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTCRY. 199 the night, by the luminous apparition. The two martyrs are full of majesty. St. Ambrose, kneeling and in prayer, is, as it were, seized with terror.^ I certainly admire Champagne as an historical painter, and even as a landscape painter ; but he is perhaps greatest as a portrait I)ainter. In portraits truth and nature are particularly in their place, relieved by coloring, and idealized in proper measure by expression. The portraits of Champagne are so many monu- ments in which his most illustrious contemporaries will live for- ever. Every thing about them is strikingly real, grave, and severe, with a penetrating sweetness. Should the records of Port- Royal be lost, all Port-Royal might be found in Champagne. Among those portraits we see the inflexible Saint-Cyran,^ as well as his persecutor, the imperious Richelieu.* We see, too, the learned, the intrepid Antoine Arnaud, to whom the contempora- ries of Bossuet decreed the name of Great ; * and Mme. Angelique Arnaud, with her naive and strong figure.^ Among them is mother Agnes and the humble daughter of Champagne himself, sister St. Suzanne.* She has just been miraculously cured, and her whole prostrated person beai-s still the impress of a relic of suffering. Mother Agnes, kneeling before her, regards her with a look of grateful joy. The place of the scene is a poor cell ; a wooden cross hanging on the wall, and some straw chairs, are all the ornaments. On the picture is the inscription, — Christo uni TTAtdico animarum et corporum, etc. There is possessed the * See the Appendix. " The original is in the Museum of Grenoble ; but see the engraving of Morin ; see also that of Daret, after the beautiful design ol* Demonstier. " In the Museum of the Louvre ; see also the engraving ol Morin. * The original is now in the Chateau of Sable, belonging to the Marquis of Rouge ; see the engraving of Simonneau in Perrault. The beautiful engra- ving of Edelinck was made after a different original, attributed to a nephew of Champagne. * The original is also in the possession of the Marquis of Kouge ; the ad- mirable engraving of Van Schupen may take its place. * In the Museum. 200 LECTURE TENTH. FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 201 Christian stoicism of Port-Royal in its imposing austerity. Add to all these portraits that of Champagne ; ^ for the painter may be put by the side of his personages. Had France produced in the seventeenth century only these four great artists, it would be necessary to give an important place to the French school ; but she counts many other painters of the greatest merit. Among these we may distinguish P. Mignard, so much admired in his times, so little known now, and so worthy of being known. How have we been able to let fall into oblivion the author of the immense fresco of Val-de-grdce^ so celebrated by Moliere, which is perhaps the greatest page of painting in the world ! ^ What strikes at first, in this gigantic work, is the order and harmony. Then come a thousand charm- ing details and innumerable episodes which form themselves im- portant compositions. Remark also the brilliant and sweet coloring which should at least obtain favor for so many other beauties of the fii-st order. Again, it is to the pencil of Mignard that we owe that ravishing ceiling of a small apartment of the King at Versailles, a master-piece now destroyed, but of which there remains to us a magnificent translation in the beautiful en- graving of Gerard Audran. What profound expression in the Plague of jEaciisf and in the St. Charles giving the Communion * In the Museum, and enoraved by Gerard Edelinck. * La Gloire dtt Val-de- Grace, in 4to, 1669, with a frontispiece and vignettes. Moliere there enters into infinite details on all the parts of the art of painting and the genius of Mignard. lie pushes eulogy perhaps to the extent of hy- perbole ; afterwards, hyperbole gave place to tiie most shameful indiiference. The fresco of the dome of Val-de grace is composed of four rows of figures, which rise in a circle from the base to the vertex of the arch. In the upper part is the Trinity, above whieli is raised a resplendent sky. Below the Trinity are the celestial powers. Descending a degree, we see the Virgin and the holy personages of the Old and New Testament. Finally, at the lower extremity is Anne of Austria, introduced into paradise by St. Anne and St. Louis, and these three figures are accompanied by a multitude of personages pertaining to the history of France, among whom are distin- guished Joan of Arc, Charlemagne, etc. * Engraved by Gerard Audran under the name of the Plague of Dwvld [ia Peste de David). "What has become of the original ? I to the Plague-infected of Milan ! Mignard is recognized as one of our best portrait painters : grace, sometimes a little too refined, is joined in him to sentiment. The French school can also pre- sent with pride Valentin, who died young and was so full of piomise ; Stella, the worthy friend of Poussin, the uncle of Clau- dine, Antoinette, and Fran^oise Stella ; Lahyre, who, has so much spirit and taste ;* Sebastien Bourdon, so animated and elevated ;* the Lenains, who sometimes have the naivete of Lesueur and the color of Champagne ; Bourguignon, full of fire and enthusiasm ; Jouvenet, whose composition is so good ;^ finally, besides so many others, Lebrun, whom it is now the ftxshion to treat cavalierly, who received from nature, with perhaps an immoderate passion for fame, passion for the beautiful of every kind, and a talent of admirable flexibility, — the true painter of a great king by the richness and dignity of his manner, who, like Louis XIV., worthily closes the seventeenth century.* Since we have spoken somewhat extensively of painting, would it not be unjust to pass in silence over engraving, its daughter, or its sister ? Certainly it is not an art of ordinary importance ; we have excelled in it ; we have above all carried it to its per- fection in portraits. Let us be equitable to ourselves. What school — and we are not unmindful of those of Marc' Antonio, Albert Durer, and Rembrandt — can present such a succession of artists of this kind ? Thomas de Leu and Leonard Gautier make * See his Landscape at Sunset, and the Bathers (les Baigneuses), an agreea- ble scene somewhat blemished by careless drawing. ' It would be necessary to cite all his compositions. In his Holy Family the figure of the Virgin, without being celestial, admirably expresses medi- tation and reflection. We lost some time ago the most important work of S. Bourdon, the Sept (Euvres de Miser icorde. See the Appendix. 'See especially liis Extretne Unction. * The picture that is called le Silence, which represents the sleep of the in- fant Jesus, is not unworthy of Poussin. The head of the infant is of super- human power. The Battles of Alexander, with their defects, are pages of history of the highest order; and in tlie Alexander visiting with Ephestion the Mother and the Wife of Darius, one knows not which to admire most, tho noble ordering of the whole or the just expression of the figures. 9^ 202 LECTURE TENTH. in some sort the passage from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Then come a crowd of men of the most diverse talents, — Mellan, Michel Lasne, Morin, Daret, Huret, Masson, Nanteuil, Drevet, Van Schupen, the Poillys, the Edelincks, and the Audrans. Gerard Edelinck and Nanteuil alone have a popular renown, and they merit it by the delicacy, splendor, and charm of their graver. But the connoisseurs of elevated taste find at least their rivals in engravers now less admired, because they do not flatter the eye so much, but have, perhaps, more truth and vigor. It must also be said, that the portraits of these two masters have not the historic importance of those of their predecessors. The Conde of Nanteuil is justly admired ; but if we wish to know the great Conde, the conqueror of Rocroy and Lens, we must not demand him from Nanteuil, but from Huret, Michel Lasne, and Daret,^ who desiof-ned and en^jraved him in all his force and heroic beauty. Edelinck and Nanteuil himself scarcely knew and re- traced the seventeenth century, except at the approach of its decline.'* Morin and Mellan were able to see it, and transmit it in its glorious youth. Morin is the Champagne of engraving : he does not engrave, he paints. It is he who represents and transmits to posterity the illustrious men of the first half of the great century — Henry IV., Louis XIII., the de Thous, Berulle, Jansenius, Saint-Cyran, Marillac, Bentivoglio, Richelieu, Mazarin, » It seems that Lesueur sometimes furnished Daret with designs. It is indeed to Lesueur that Daret owes the idea and the design of his chef- d'auvre, the portrait of Arraand de Bourbon, prince de Conti, represented in his earliest youth, and in an abbe, sustained and surrounded by angels of different size, forming a charming composition. The drawing is completely pure, except some imperfect fore-shortenings. The little angels that sport with the emblems of the future cardinal are full of spirit, and, at the same time, sweetness. * Edelinck saw only the reign of Louis XIV. Nanteuil was able to en- grave very few of the great men of the time of Louis XIII., and the regency, and in the latter part of their life ; Mazarin, in his last five or six years ; Conde, growing old ; Turenne, old ; Fouquet and Mattliieu Mole, some years before the full of the one and the death of the other ; and he was too often obliged to waste his talent upon a crowd of parliamentarians, ecclesiastics, and obscure financiers. FRENCH AET IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 203 still young, and Eetz, when he was only a coadjutor.^ Mellan had the same advantage. He is the first in date of all the en- gravers of the seventeenth century, and perhaps is also the most expressive. With a single line, it seems that from his hands only shades can spring ; he does not strike at first sight ; but the more we regard him, the more he seizes, penetrates, and touches, like Lesueur.^ Christianity, that is to say, the reign of the spirit, is favorable to painting, is particularly expressive. Sculpture seems to be a pagan art ; for, if it must also contain moral expression, it is al- ways under the imperative condition of beauty of form. This is the reason why sculpture is as it were natural to antiquity, and appeared there with an incomparable splendor, before which painting somewhat paled,* whilst among the moderns it has been eclipsed by painting, and has remained very inferior to it, by reason of the extreme difficulty of bringing stone and marble to express Christian sentiment, without which, material beauty suf- fers ; so that our sculpture is too insignificant to be beautiful, too mannered to be expressive. Since antiquity, there have scarcely been two schools of sculpture :* — one at Florence, before Michael Angelo, and especially with Michael Angelo ; the other * If I wished to make any one acquainted with the greatest and most neg- lected portion of the seventeenth century, that which Voltaire almost wholly omitted, I would set him to collecting the works of Morin. * Mellan not only made portraits after the celebrated painters of his time, he is himr-alf the author of great and charming compositions, many of which serve as frontispieces to books. I willingly call attention to that one which is at the head of a folio edition of the Introduction a la Vie Devote, and to the beautiful frontispieces of the writings of Richelieu, from the press of the Louvre. » This was the opinion of Winkelmann at the end of the eighteenth cen- tury ; it is our opinion now, even after all the discoveries that have been made during fifty years, that may be seen in great part retraced and described in the Muaio real Barbonico. * There was doubtless sculpture in the middle age : the innumerable fig- ures at the portals of our cathedrals, and the statues that are discovered " every day sufficiently testify it. The imagers of that time certainly had much spirit and imagination ; but, at least in every thing that we have seen, beauty is absent, and taste wanting. 204 LECTUKE TENTH. in France, at the Benaissance, with Jean Cousin, Goujon, Ger- main Pilon. We may say that these three artists have, as it were, shared among themselves grandeur and grace : to the first belong nobility and force, with profound knowledge;* to the other two, an elegance full of charm. Sculpture changes its character in the seventeenth century as well as every thing else : it no lono-er has the same attraction, but it finds moral and reli- gious inspiration, which the skilful masters of the Renaissance too much lacked. Jean Cousin excepted, is there one of them that is superior to Jacques Sarazin ? That great artist, now al- most forgotten, is at once a disciple of the French school and the Italian school, and to the quahties that he borrows from his predecessors, he adds a moral expression, touching and elevated, which he owes to the spirit of the new school. He is, in sculp- ture, the worthy contemporary of Lesueur and Poussin, of Cor- neille, Descartes, and Pascal. He belongs entirely to the reign of Louis XHL, Richelieu, and Mazarin ; he did not even see that of Louis XIV.* Called into France by Richelieu, who had also called there Poussin and Champagne, Jacques Sarazin in a few years produced a multitude of works of rare elegance and great character. What has become of them ? The eighteenth century passed over them without regarding them. The barbarians that destroyed )r scattered them, were arrested before the paintings of Lesueur and Poussin, protected by a remnant of admiration : while breaking the master-pieces of the French chisel, they had no suspicion of the sacrilege they were committing against art as well as their country. I was at least able to see, some yeai*s ago, at the Museum of French Monuments, collected by the piety of a friend of the arts, beautiful parts of a superb mauso- * Go and see at the Museum of Versailles the statue of Francis I., and say whether any Italian, except the author of the Laurent de Medicis, has made any thing like it. See also in the Museum of the Louvre, the statue of Ad- miral Chabot. * Sarazin died in 1660, Lesueur in 1655, Poussin in 1665, Descartes in 1650, Pascal in 1662, and the genius* of Corneille did not extend beyond that epoch. FRENCH ART IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 205 leum erected to the memory of Henri de Bourbon, second of the name, Prince of Conde, father of the great Conde, the worthy support, the skilful fellow-laborer of Richelieu and Mazarin. This monument was supported by four figures of natural gran- deur, — Faith, Prudence, Justice^ Charity, There were four bas- reliefs in bronze, representing the Triumphs of Renown, Time, Death, and Eternity. In the Triumph of Death, the artist had represented a certain number of illustrious moderns, among whom he had placed himself by the side of Michael Angelo.* We can still contemplate in the court of the Louvre, in the pa- vilion of the Horloge, those caryatides of Sarazin at once so ma- jestic and so graceful, which are detached with admirable relief and lightness. Have Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon done any thing more elegant and hfelike ? Those females breathe, and are about to move. Take the pains to go a short distance* to visit the humble chapel that now occupies the place of that magnifi- cent church of the Carmelites, once filled with the paintings of Champagne, Stella, Lahire, and Lebrun ; where the voice of Bossuet was heard, where Mile, de Lavalliere and Mme. de Lon- gueville were so often seen prostrated, their long hair shorn, and their faces bathed in tears. Among the relics that are preserved of the past splendor of the holy monastery, consider the noble statue of the kneeling Cardinal de Berulle. On those meditative and penetrating features, in those eyes raised to heaven, breathes the soul of that great servant of God, who died at the altar like a warrior* on the field of honor. He prays God for his dear * Lenoir, Musee des Monuments Fran^ais, vol. v., p. 87-91, and the Muaee Royale des Monuments Frangais of 1815, p. 98, 99, 108, 122, and 140. This wonderful monument, erected to Henri de Bourbon, at the expense of his old intendant Perrault, president of the Chambre des Comptes, was placed in the Church of the Jesuits, and was wholly in bronze. It must not be con- founded with the other monument that the Condes erected to the same prince in their family burial-ground at Vallery, near Montereau, in Yonne. This monument is in marble, and by the hand of Michel Anguier ; see the description in Lenoir, vol. v., p. 23-25, and especially in the Annuaire de V Yonne pour 1842, p. 175, etc. * Rue d'Enfer, No. 67. 206 LECTURE TENTH. Carmelites. That head is perfectly natural, as Champagne might have painted it, and has a severe grace that reminds one of Lesueur and Poussin.^ Below Sarazin, the Anguiers are still artists that Italy would admire, and to whom there is wanting, since the great century, nothing but judges worthy of them. These two brothers covered Paris and France with the most precious monuments. Look at the tomb of Jacques- Auguste de Thou, by Francois Anguier : the face of the great historian is reflective and melancholy, like that of a man weary of the spectacle of human things ; and nothinsr is more amiable than the statues of his two wives, Marie Barbancon de Cany, and Gasparde de la Chatre.* The mauso- leum of Henri de Montmorency, beheaded at Toulouse in 1632, which is still seen at Moulins, in the church of the ancient con- vent of the daughters of Sainte-Marie, is an important work of the same artist, in which force is manifest, with a little heaviness.* To Michel Ancfuier are attributed the statues of the duke and duchess of Tresmes, and that of their illustrious son, Potier, Mar- quis of Gevres."* Behold in him the intrepid companion of Conde, * The Museum of the Louvre possesses only a very small number of Sara- zin's works, and those of very little importance : — a bust of Pierre Seguier, strikingly true, two statuettes full of grace, and the small funeral monument of Hennequin, Abbe of Bernay, member of Parliament, who died in 1651, which is a chef-, ble joys and the successes that are not legitimate. It wounds, rends, bites, thus to speak, and thereby receives its name.^ To be man, is suflScient to undei-stand this suffering, — it is remorse. Here are other facts equally incontestable : I perceive a man whose face bears the marks of distress and miseiy. There is nothing in this that reaches and injures me ; nevertheless, without reflection or calculation, the sight alone of this suffering man makes me suffer. This sentiment is pity, com- passion, whose general principle is sympathy. The sadness of one of my fellow-men inspires me with sadness, and a glad face disposes me to joy : Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adflent Huraani vultus. The joy of others has an echo in our souls, and their sufferings, even their physical sufferings, communicate themselves to us almost physically. Not as exaggerated as it has been supposed was that expression of Mme. de Sevigne to her sick daughter: I have a pain in your breast. Our soul feels the need of putting itself in unison, and, as it were, in equilibrium with that of others. Hence those electric movements, thus to speak, that run through large assemblies. One receives the counter-stroke of the sentiments of his neigh- bors, — admiration and enthusiasm are contagious, as well as pleasantry and ridicule. Hence again the sentiment with which the author of a virtuous action inspires us. We feel a pleasure analogous to that which he feels himself. But are we witnesses of a bad action ? our souls refuse to participate in the sentiments that animate the culpable man, — they have for him a true aver- sion, what is called antipathy. We do not forget a third order of facts that pertain to the preceding, but differ from them. We not only sympathize with the author of a virtuous action. * Mcrdre— to bite, is the main root of remards—iQmoTQG. we wish him well, we voluntarily do good to him, in a certain degree we love him. This love goes as far as enthusiasm when it has for its object a sublime act and a hero. This is the prin- ciple of the homages, of the honors that humanity renders to great men. And this sentiment does not pertain solely to others, —we apply it to ourselves by a sort of return that is not egoism. Yes, it may be said that we love ourselves when we have done well. The sentiment that others owe us, if they are just, we accord to ourselves, — that sentiment is benevolence. On the contrary, do we witness a bad action ? We expe- rience for the author of this action antipathy ; moreover we wish him evil,— we desire that he should suffer for the fault that he has committed, and in proportion to the gravity of the fault. For this reason great culprits are odious to us, if they do not compensate for their crimes by deep remorse, or by great virtues mingled with their crimes. This sentiment is not malevolence. Malevolence is a personal and interested sentiment, which makes us wish evil to others, because they are an obstacle to us. Ha- tred does not ask whether such a man is virtuous or vicious, but whether he obstructs us, surpasses us, or injures us. The senti- ment of which we are speaking is a sort of hatred, but a generous hatred that neither springs from interest nor envy, but from a shocked conscience. It is turned against us when we do evil, as well as against others. Moral satisfaction is not sympathy, neither is sympathy, to speak rigorously, benevolence. But these three phenomena have the common character of all being sentiments. They give birth to three different and analogous systems of ethics. According to certain philosophers, a good action is that which is followed by moral satisfaction, a bad action is that which is followed by remorse. The good or bad character of an action is at first attested to uf by the sentiment that accompanies it. Then, this sentiment, with its moral signification, we attribute to other men ; for we judge that they do as we do, that in presence of the same actions they feel the same sentiments. 25S LECTURE THIRTEENTH. *• Other philosophers have assigned the same part to sympathy or benevolence. For these the sign and measure of the good is in the senti- ments of affection and benevolence which we feel for a moral agent. Does a man excite in us by such or such an action a more or less vivid disposition to wish him well, a desire to see and even make him happy ? we may say that this action is good. If, by a series of actions of the same kind, he makes this dispo- sition and this desire permanent in us, we judge that he is a vir- tuous man. Does he excite an opposite desire, an opposite disposition ? he appears to us a dishonest man. For the former, the good is that with which* we naturally sympathize. Has a man devoted himself to death through love for his country ? this heroic action awakens in us, in a certain degree, the same sentiments that inspired him. Bad passions are not thus echoed in our hearts, unless they find us already very corrupt, and have interest for their accomplice ; but even then there is something in us that revolts against these passions, and in the most depraved soul subsists a concealed sentiment of sympathy for the good, and antipathy for the evil. These different systems may be reduced to a single one, which is called the ethics of sentiment. It is not difficult to show the difference which separates these ethics from those of egoism. Egoism is the exclusive love of self, is the thoughtful and permanent search for our own pleas- ure and our own well-being. What is there more opposed to interest than benevolence ? In benevolence, far from wishing others well by reason of our interest, we will voluntarily risk something, we will make some sacrifice in order to serve an honest man who has gained our heart. If even in this sacrifice the soul feels a pleasure, this pleasure is only the involuntary accompaniment of sentiment, it is not the end proposed, — we feel it without having sought it. It is, indeed, permitted the soul to taste this pleasure, for it is nature herself that attaches it to benevolence. OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 259 Sympathy, like benevolence, is related to another than oup- selves, — our interest is not its starting-point. The soul is so constituted that it is capable of suflfering on account of the suf- ferings of an enemy. That a man does a noble action, although it opposes our interests, awakens in us a certain sympathy for that action and its author. The attempt has been made to explain the compassion with which the suffering of one of our fellow-men inspires us by the fear that we have of feeling it in our turn. But the unhappiness for which we feel compassion, is often so far from us and threatens us so little, that it would be absurd to fear it. Doubtless, that sympathy may have existence it is necessary to experience suf- fering, — non ignara mali. For how do you suppose that I can be sensible to evils of which I form to myself no idea ? But that is only the condition of sympathy. It is not at all necessary to conclude that it is only a remembrance of our own ills or the fear of ills to come. No recun-ence to ourselves can account for sympathy. In the first place, it is involuntary, like antipathy. Then it cannot be supposed that we sympathize with any one in order to win his benevolence ; for he who is its object often knows not what we feel. What benevolence are we seeking, when we sympathize with men that we have never seen, that we never shall see, with men that are no more ? Egoism admits all pleasures ; it repels none ; it may, if it is enlightened, if it has become delicate and refined, recommend, as more durable and less alloyed, the pleasures of sentiment. The ethics of sentiment would then be confounded with those of egoism, if they should prescribe obedience to sentiment for the pleasure that we find in it. There would, then, be no disinter- estedness in it, — the individual would be the centre and sole end of all his actions. But such is not the case. The charm of the pleasures of conscience comes from the very fact that wo are forgetful of self in the action that has produced them. So if nature has joined to sympathy and benevolence a true enjoy- 260 LECTURE THIRTEENTH. ment, it is on condition that these sentiments remain as they are, pure and disinterested ; you must only think of the object of your sympathy and benevolence in order that benevolence and sympathy may receive their recompense in the pleasure which they give. Otherwise, this pleasure no longer has its reason for existence, and it is wanting as soon as it softght for itself. No metamorphose of interest can produce a pleasure attached to disinterestedness alone. The ethics of egoism are only a perpetual falsehood, — they preserve the names consecrated by ethics, but they abolish ethics themselves ; they deceive humanity by speaking to humanity its own language, concealing under this borrowed language a radi- cal opposition to all the instincts, to all the ideas that form the treasure of mankind. On the contrary, if sentiment is not the good itself, it is its faithful companion and useful auxiliary. It is as it were the sign of the presence of the good, and renders the accomplishment of it more easy. We always have sophisms at our disposal, in order to persuade ourselves that our true interest is to satisfy present passion ; but sophism has less influ- ence over the mind when the mind is in some sort defended by the heart. Nothing is, therefore, more salutary than to excite and preserve in the soul those noble sentiments that lift us above the slavery of personal interest. The habit of participating in the sentiments of virtuous men disposes us to act like them. To cultivate in ourselves benevolence and sympathy is to fertilize the source of charity and love, is to nourish and develop the germ of generosity and devotion. It is seen that we render sincere homage to the ethics of sen- timent. These ethics are true, — only they are not sufi&cient for themselves ; they need a principle which authorizes them. I act well, and I feel on account of it an internal satisfaction ; I do evil, and feel remorse on account of it. These two senti- ments do not qualify the act that I have just done, since they follow it. Would it be possible for us to feel any internal satis- faction for having acted well if we did not judge that we had OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 261 acted well ? — any remorse for having done evil, if we did not judge that we had done evil ? At the same time that we do such or such an act, a natural and instinctive judgment charac- terizes it, and it is in consequence of this judgment that our sensibility is moved. Sentiment is not this primitive and imme- diate judgment ; far from foiming the basis of the idea of the good, it supposes it. It is manifestly a vicious circle to derive the knowledge of the good from that which Tould not exist without this knowledge.* So is it not because we find a good action that we sympathize with it ? Is it not because the dispositions of a man appear to us conformed to the idea of justice, that we are inclined to par- ticipate in them with him ? Moreover, if sympathy were the true criterion of the good, every thing for which we feel sympa- thy would be good. But sympathy is not only related to things in their nature moral, we also sympathize with the grief and the joy that have nothing to do with virtue and crime. We even sympathize with physical sufferings. Moral sympathy is only a case of general sympathy. It must even be acknowledged that sympathy is not always in accordance with right. We some- times sympathize with certain sentiments that we condemn, be- cause, without being in themselves bad — which would prevent all sjrmpathy — they give an inclination to the greatest faults ; for example, love, which comes so near to irregularity, and emu- lation, that so quickly leads to ambition. Benevolence also is not always determined by the good alone. And, again, when it is applied to a virtuous man, it supposes a judgment by which we pronounce that this man is virtuous. It is not because we wish the author of an action well that we judge that this action is good ; it is because we judge that this action is good that we wish its author well. This is not all. In the sentiment of benevolence is enveloped a new judgment which is * Seo 1st part, lecture 5, On Mysticism^ and 2d part, lecture 6, On the Sen- timent of the Beautiful. Sec, also, 1st Series, vol. iv., detailed refntatiou of the Theories of Hutcheson and Smith. I) ^ 262 LECTURE THIRTEENTH. •I not in sympathy. This judgment is the following : the author of a good action deserves to be happy, as the author of a bad action deserves to suffer in order to expiate it. This is the rea- son why we desire happiness for the one and reparatory suffering for the other. Benevolence is little else than the sensible form of this judgment. All these sentiments, therefore, suppose an anterior and supe- rior judgment. Eveiy where and always the same vicious circle. From the fact that the sentiments which we have just ;'cscribed have a moral character, it is concluded that they constitute the idea of the good, whilst it is the idea of the good that communi- cates to them the character that we perceive in them. Another difficulty is, that sentiments pertain to sensibility, and borrow from it something of its relative and changing nature. It is, then, very necessary that all men should be made to enjoy with the same delicacy the pleasures of the heart. There are gross natures and natures refined. If your desires are impetuous and violent, will not the idea of the pleasures of virtue be in you much more easily overcome by the force of passion than if na- ture had given you a tranquil temperament ? The state of the atmosphere, health, sickness, calm or rouse our moral sensibility. Solitude, by delivering man up to himself, leaves to remorse all its energy, the presence of death redoubles it ; but the world, noise, force of example, habit, without power to smother it, in some sort stun it. The spirit has a little season of rest. We are not always in the vein of enthusiasm. Courage itself has its intermissions. We know the celebrated expression: He was one day brave. Humor has its vicissitudes that influence our most intimate sentiments. The purest, the most ideal sentiment still pertains on some side to organization. The inspiration of the poet, the passion of the lover, the enthusiasm of the mar- tyr, have their languors and shortcomings that often depend on very pitiable material causes. On those perpetual fluctu- ations of sentiment, is it possible to ground a legislation equal for all? OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 263 i Sympathy and benevolence do not escape the conditions of all the phenomena of sensibility. We do not all possess in the same degree the power of feeling what others experience. Those who have suffered most best comprehend suffering, and conse- quently feel for it the most lively compassion. With mere imacrination one also represents to himself better and feels more what passes in the souls of his fellow-man. One feels more sympathy for physical pleasures and pains, another for pleasures and pains of soul ; and each of these sympathies has in each of us its degrees and variations. They not only differ, they jften oppose each other. Sympathy for talent weakens the indigna- tion that outraged virtue produces. We overlook many things in Voltaire, in Rousseau, in Mirabeau, and we excuse them on account of the corruption of their century. The sympathy caused by the pain of a condemned person renders less lively the just antipathy excited by his crime. Thus turns and wavers at each step that sympathy which some would set up as the su- preme arbiter of the good. Benevolence does not vary less. We Jiave souls naturally more or less affectionate, more or less animated. And, then, like sympathy, benevolence receives the counter-stroke of different passions that are mingled with it. Friendship, for example, often renders us, in spite of ourselves, more benevolent than justice would wish. Is it not a rule of prudence not to listen to, without always disdaining them, the inspirations — often capricious — of the heart ? Governed by reason, sentiment becomes to it an admirable sup- port. But, delivered up to itself, in a little while it degenerates into passion, and passion is fantastic, excessive, unjust ; it gives to the soul spring and energy, but generally troubles and perverts it. It is even not very far from egoism, and it usually terminates in that, wholly generous as it is or seems to be in the beginning. Unless we always keep in sight the good and the inflexible obli- gation that is attached to it, unless we always keep in sight this fixed and imnmtable point, the soul knows not where to betake itself on tbat moving ground that is called sensibility; it floats 264 LECTURE THmiEENTH. from sentiment to passion, from generosity to selfishness, ascend ing one day to the pitch of enthusiasm, and the next day descend- 'ng to all the miseries of pei*sonality. Thus the ethics of sentiment, although superior to those of interest, are not less insufficient : 1st. They give as the founda- tion of the idea of the good what is founded on this same idea ; 2d. The rule that they propose is too mobile to be universally obligatory.* There is another system of which I will also say, as of the pre- ceding, that it is not false, but incomplete and insufficient. The partisans of the ethics of utility and happiness have tried to save their principle by generahzing it. According to them, the good can be nothing but happiness ; but egoism is wrong in understanding by that the happiness of the individual ; we must undei-stand by it the general happiness. Let us establish, in the first place, that the new principle is en- tirely opposed to that of personal interest, for, according to cir- * We do not grow weary of citing M. Koyer-CoUard. He has marked the defects of the ethics of sentiment in a lively and powerful passage, from which we borrow some traits. (Emres de Beid^ vol. iii., p. 410, 411 : " The perception of the moral qualities of human actions is accompanied by an emotion of the soul that is called sentiment. Sentiment is a support of nature that invites us to good by the attraction of the noblest joys of which man is capable, and turns us from evil by the contempt, the aversion, the horror with which it inspires us. It is a fact that by the contemplation of a beauti- ful action or a noble character, at the same time that we perceive these qual- ities of the action and the character (perception, which is a judgment), we feel for the person a love mingled with respect, and sometimes an admiration that is full of tenderness. A bad action, a loose and perfidious character, excite a contrary perception and sentiment. The internal approbation of conscience and remorse are sentiments attached to the perception of the moral qualities of our own actions. ... I do not weaken the part of sentiment ; yet it is not true that ethics are wholly in sentiment ; if we main- tain this, we annihilate moral distinctions. . . . Let ethics be wholly in sentiment, and nothing is in itself good, nothing is in itself evil; good and evil are relative ; the qualities of human actions are precisely such as each one feels them to be. Change sentiment, and you change every thing ; the same action is at once good, indifferent, and bad, according to the affection of the spectator. Silence sentiment, and actions are only physical phenom- ena ; obligation is resolved into inclinations, virtue into pleasure, honesty into utility. S uch are the ethics of Epicurus : Dil meliora pits .'" OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 265 cumstances, it may demand, not only a passing sacrifice, but an irreparable sacrifice, that of life. Now, the wisest calculations of personal interest cannot go thus far. And, notwithstanding, this principle is far from containing true ethics and the whole of ethics. The principle of general interest leans towards disinterested- ness, and this is certainly much ; but disinterestedness is the con- dition of virtue, not virtue itself. We may commit an injustice wHh the most entire disinterestedness. From the fact that an action does not profit him who does it, it does not follow that it may not be in itself very unjust, in seeking general interest before all, we escape, it is true, that vice of soul which is called selfishness, but we may fall into a thousand iniquitiesr Or, in- deed, it must be felt, that general interest is always conformed to justice. But these two ideas are not adequate to each other. If they very often go together, they are sometimes ^Iso separated. Themistocles proposed to the Athenians to burn the fleet of the allies that was in the port of Athens, and thus to secure to them- selves the supremacy. The project is useful, says Aristides, but it is unjust, and on account of this simple speech, the Athenians renounce an advantage that must be purchased by an injustice. Observe that Themistocles had no particular interest in that ; he thought only of the interest of his country. But, had he hazarded or given his life in order to engage the Athenians in such an act, he would only have been consecrating — what has often been seen — an admirable devotion to a course in itself immoral. To this it is replied, that if, in the example cited, justice and interest exclude each other, it is because the interest was not suflSciently general ; and the celebrated maxim is arrived at, that one must sacrifice himself to his family, his family to the city, the city to country, country to humanity, that, in fine, the good is the interest of the greatest number.* ^ In this formula is recognized the system of Bentham, who, for some time, had numerous partisans in Eugla id, and even in France. 12 266 LECTURE THIRTEENTH. OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 267 When you have gone thus far, you have not yet attained even the idea of justice. The interest of humanity, like that of the individual, may accord in fact with justice, for in that there is certainly no incompatibility, but the two things are none the more identical, so that we cannot say with exactness that the in- terest of humanity is the foundation of justice. A single case, even a single hypothesis, in which the interest of humanity should not accord°with the good, is sufficient to enable us to conclude that one is not essentially the other. We go farther : if it is the interest of humanity that constitutes and measures justice, that only is unjust which this interest de- clares to be so. But you are not able to affirm absolutely, that, in any circumstance, the interest of humanity will not demand such or such an action ; and if it demands it, by virtue of your principle, it will be necessary to do it, whatever it may be, and to do it inasmuch as it is just. You order me to sacrifice particular interest to general interest. But in the name of what do you order me to do this ? Is it m the name of interest ? If interest, as such, must touch me, evi- dently my interest must also touch me, and I do not see why I should sacrifice it to that of others. The supreme end of human life, you say, is happiness. I hence conclude very reasonably, that the supreme end of my hfe is my happiness. In order to ask of me the sacrifice of my happiness, it must be called for by some other principle than happiness itself. Consider to what perplexity this famous principle of the greatest good of the greatest number condemns me. I have already much difficulty in discerning my true interest in the obscurity of the future ; by substituting for the infallible voice of justice the un- certain calculations of personal interest, you have not rendered action easy for me ;' but it becomes impossible, if it is necessary to seek, before acting, what is the interest not only of myself, but See lecture 12. W |i of my family, not only of my family, but of my country, not only of my country, but of humanity. What ! must I embrace the entire world in my foresight ? What ! is such the price of virtue ? You impose upon me a knowledge that God alone possesses. Am I in his counsels so as to adjust my actions according to his decrees ? The philosophy of history and the wisest diplomacy are not, then, sufficient for conducting ourselves well. Imagine, therefore, that there is no mathematical science of human life. Chance and liberty confound the profoundest calculations, over- turn the best-established fortunes, relieve the most desperate miseries, mingle good fortune and bad, confound all foresight. And would you establish ethics on a foundation so mobile ? How much place you leave for sophism in that complaisant and enigmatical law of general interest !^ It will not be very difficult 1 1st Series, vol. iv., p. 174 : " If the good is that alone which must be the most useful to the greatest number, where can the good be found, and who can discern it ? In order to know whether such an action, which I propose to myself to do, is good or bad, I must be sure, in spite of its visible and direct utility in the present moment, that it will not become injurious m a future that I do not yet know. I must seek whether, useful to mme and those that surround me, it will not have counter-strokes disastrous to the human race, of which I must think before all. It is important that I should know whether the money that I am tempted to give this unfortunate who needs it, could not be otherwise more usefully employed. In fact, the rule is here the greatest good of the greatest number. In order to foUow it, what calculations are imposed on me ? In the obscurity of the future, in the un- certainty of the somewhat remote consequences of every action, the surest way is to do nothing that is not related to myself, and the last result of a prudence so refined is indiflference and egoism. Supposing you have re- ceived a deposit from an opulent neighbor, who is old and sick, a sum of which he has no need, and without which your numerous family runs the risk of dying with famine. He calls on you for this sum,-what will you do ? The greatest number is on your side, and the greatest utility also ; for this sum is insignificant for your rich neighbor, whilst it will save your family from misery, and perhaps from death. Father of a family, I should like much to know in the name of what principle you would hesitate to retain the sum which is necessary to you ? Intrepid reasoner, placed m the alter- native of killing this sick old man, or of letting your wife and children die ot hunger, in all honesty of conscience you ought to kill him. You have the right, it is even your duty to sacrifice the less advantage of a single person to much the greater advantage of a greater number ; and since this principle is the expression of true justice, you are only its minister in doing what you 268 LECTURE THIKTEENTfl. always to find some remote reason of general interest, which will excuse us from being faithful in the present moment to our friends, when they shall be in misfortune. A man in adversity addresses himself to my generosity. But could I not employ my money in a way more useful to humanity ? Will not the coun- try have need of it to-morrow ? Let us virtuously keep it for the country then. Moreover, even where the interest of all seems evident, there still remains some chance of error ; it is, therefore, better to withhold. It will always be wisdom to withhold. Yes, when it is necessary, in order to do well, to be sure of serving the greatest interest of the greatest number, none but the rash and senseless will dare to act. The principle of general interest will produce, I admit, great devotedness, but it will also produce great crimes. Is it not in the name of this principle that fanatics of every kind, fanatics in religion, fanatics in liberty, fanatics in phi- losophy, taking it upon themselves to understand the eternal inter- est of humanity, have engaged in abominable acts, mingled often with a sublime disinterestedness ? Another error of this system is that it confounds the good itself with one of its applications. If the good is the greatest interest of the greatest number, the consequence is clear, that there are only pubHc and social ethics, and no private ethics ; there is only a single class of duties, duties towards others, and there are no duties towards ourselves. But this is retrenching precisely those of our duties that most surely guarantee the exercise of all the rest.^ The most constant relations that I sustain are with that do. A vauquisliing enemy or a furious people threaten destruction to a whole city, if there be not delivered up to them the head of such a man, who is, nevertheless, innocent. In the name of the greatest good of the greatest number, this man will be immolated without scruple. It might even be maintained that innocent to the last, he has ceased to be so, since he is an obstacle to the public good. It having once been declared that jus- tice is the interest of the greatest number, the only question is to know where this interest is. Now, here, doubt is impossible ; therefore, it is per- fectly just to offer innocence as a holocaust to public safety. This conse- quence must be accepted, or the principle rejected." * See lecture 15, Private and Public Ethics. OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 269 being which is myself. I am my own most habitual society. I bear in myself, as Plato^ has well said, a whole world of ideas, sentiments, desires, passions, emotions, which claim a legislation. This necessary legislation is suppressed. Let us also say a word on a system that, imder sublime appear- ances, conceals a vicious principle. There are persons who beheve that they are magnifying God, by placing in his will alone the foundation of the moral law, and the sovereign motive of humanity in the punishments and re- wards that it has pleased him to attach to the respect and violation of his will. Let us understand what we are about in a matter of such deli- cacy. It is certain, and we shall establish it for the good,^ as we have done for the true and the beautiful,^ it is certain that, from expla- nations to explanations, we come to be convinced that God is definitively the supreme principle of ethics, so that it may be very truly said, that the good is the expression of his will, since his will is itself the expression of the eternal and absolute justice that resides in him. God wills, without doubt, that we should act according to the law of justice that he has put in our understand- ing and our heart ; but it is not at all necessary to conclude that he has arbitrarily instituted this law. Far from that, justice is in i the will of God only because it has its roots in his intelligence and wisdom, that is to say, in his most intimate nature and es- sence. While making, then, every reservation in regard to what is true in the system that founds ethics on the will of God, we must show what there is in this system, as it is presented to us, false, arbitrary, and incompatible with ethics themselves.* * Plato, BepuUiCf vol. ix. and x. of our translation. 2 Lecture 16. ' Lectures 4 and 7. * This polemic is not new. The school of St. Thomas engaged in it early against the theory of Occam, which was quite similar to that which we com- bat. See our Sketch of a General History of Philosophy, 2d Series, vol. ii., 270 LECTURE THIRTEENTH. In the first place, it does not pertain to the will, whatever it may be, to institute the good, any more than it belongs to it to institute the true and the beautiful. I have no idea of the will of God except by my own, to be sure with the differences that separate what is finite from what is infinite. Now, I cannot by my will found the least truth. Is it because my will is limited ? No ; were it armed with infinite power, it would, in this respect, be equally impotent. Such is the nature of my will that, in doino- a thing, it is conscious of the power to do the opposite; and that is not an accidental character of the will, it is its funda- mental character ; if, then, it is supposed that truth, or that first part of it which is called justice, has been established as it is by an act of volition, human or Divine, it must be acknowledged that another act might have established it otherwise, and made what is now just unjust, and what is unjust just. But such mo- bility is contrary to the nature of justice and truth. In fact, moral truths are as absolute as metaphysical truths. God can- not make effects exist without a cause, phenomena without a substance ; neither can he make it evil to respect his word, to love truth, to repress one's passions. The principles of ethics are immutable axioms like those of geometry. Of moral laws espe- cially must be said what Montesquieu said of all laws in general, — they are necessary relations that are derived from the nature of things. Let us suppose that the good and the just are derived from the divine will ; on the divine will obligation will also rest. But can any will whatever be the foundation of obligation? The lect. 9, On Scholasticism. Here are two decisive passages from St. Thomas, Isit book of the Summation against the Gentiles, chap. Ixxxvii: "Per prse- dicta autem excluditur error dicentinm omnia procedere a Deo secundum simplicem voluntatem, ut de nullo oporteat ratiouem reddere, nisi quia Deus vult. Quod etiam divinse Scripturae contrariatur, quce Deum perhibet secundum ordinem sapientiee su£e omnia fecisse, secundum illud Psalm ciii. : omnia in sapientia fecisti." Ibid., book ii., chap. xxiv. : " Per hoc autem ex- cluditur quorundam error qui dicebant omnia ex simplica divina voluntate iependere aliqua ratione." OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 271 divine will is the will of an omnipotent being, and I am a feeble being. This relation of a feeble being to an omnipotent being, does not contain in itself any moral idea. One may be forced to obey the stronger, but he is not obligated to do it. The sove- reign orders of the will of God, if his will could for a moment be separated from his other attributes, would not contain the least ray of justice ; and, consequently, there would not descend into my soul the least shade of obligation. One will exclaim, — It is not the arbitrary will of God that makes the foundation of obligation and justice ; it is his just will. Very well. Every thing changes then. It is not the pure will of God that obligates us, it is the motive itself that determines liis will, that is to say, the justice passed into his will. The dis- tinction between the just and the unjust is not then the work of his will. One of two things. Either we found ethics on the will of God alone, and then the distinction between good and evil, just and unjust, is gratuitous, and moral obligation does not exist ; or you give authority to the will of God by justice, which, in your hypothesis, must have received from the will of God its authority, which is a. petitio principii. Another petitio principii still more evident. In the first place, you are compelled, in order legitimately to draw justice from the will of God, to suppose that this will is just, or I defy any one to show that this will alone can ever form the basis of justice. Moreover, evidently you cannot comprehend what a just will of j God is, if you do not already possess the idea of justice. This idea, then, does not come from that of the will of God. On the one hand, you may have^ and you do have, the idea of justice, without understanding the will of God ; on the other, you cannot conceive the justice of the divine will, without having conceived justice elsewhere. Are not these reasons suflScient, I pray you, to conclude that the sole will of God is not for us the principle of the idea of the good? 272 LECTURE THIRTEENTH. And now, behold the natural consummation of the ethical system that we are examining : — the just and the unjust are what it has pleased God to declare such, by attaching to them the re- wards and punishments of another life. The divine will mani- fests itself here only by an arbitrary order; it adds to this order promises and threats. But to what human faculty are addressed the promise and threat of the chastisements and the rewards of another life ? To the same one that in this life feai-s pain and seeks pleasure, shuns unhappiness and desires happiness, that is to say, to sensibility animated by imagination, that is to say, again, to what is most changing in each of us and most diflferent in the human species. The joys and sufiferings of another life excite in us the two most vivid but most mobile passions, hope and fear. Every thing in- fluences our fears and hopes, — aye, health, the passing cloud, 9 ray of the sun, a cup of coffee, a thousand causes of this kind. 1 have known men, even philosophers, who on certain days hoped more, and other days less. And such a basis some would give to ethics! Then it is doing nothing else than proposing for human conduct an interested motive. The calculation which I obey is purer, if you will ; the happiness that one makes me hope for is greater ; but I see in that no justice that obligates me, no virtue and no vice in me, who know or do not know how to make this calculation, not having a head as strong as that of Pascal,^ who yield to or resist those fears and hopes according to the disposition of my sensibility and my imagination, over which I have no power. Finally, the pains and pleasures of the future life are instituted on the ground of punishments and rewards. Now, none but actions in themselves good or bad can be re- warded and punished. If already there is in itself no good, no law that in conscience we are obligated to follow, there is neither merit nor demerit; recompense is not then recompense, nor * See the famous calculus applied to the immortality of the soul, DeaPeU' sees de Pascal^ vol. i. of the 4th Series, p. 229-235, and p. 289-296. II OTHER DEFECTIVE PRINCIPLES. 273 penalty penalty, since they are such only on the condition of being the complement and the sanction of the idea of the good. Where this idea does not pre-exist, there remain, instead of rec- ompense and penalty, only the attraction of pleasure and the fear of suffering, added to a prescription deprived in itself of morality. In that we come back to the punishments of earth invented for the purpose of frightening popular imagination, and supported solely on the decrees of legislators, on an abstraction of good and evil, of justice and injustice, of merit and demerit. It is the worst human justice that is found thus transported into heaven. We shall see that the human soul has foundation somewhat solider.* These different systems, false or incomplete, having been rejected, we arrive at the doctrine that is to our eyes perfect truth, because it admits only certain facts, neglects none, and maintains for all of them their character and rank. * Lecture 16. 12^ TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. 275 LECTUEE XIY. * TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. Description of the different facts that compose the moral phenomena.— Analysis of each of these facts : — 1st, Judgment and idea of the good. That this judgment is absolute. Relation between the true and the good. — 2d, Obligation. Refutation of the doctrine of Kant that draws the idea of the good from obligation instead of founding obligation on the idea of the good. — 3d, Liberty, and the moral notions attached to the notion of liberty. — 4th, Principle of merit and demerit. Punishments and rewards. — 5th, Moral sentiments. — Harmony of ^11 these facts in nature and science. Philosophic criticism is not confined to discerning the errors of systems ; it especially consists in recognizing and disengaging the truths mixed with these errors. The truths scattered in different systems compose the whole truth which each of these almost always expresses on a single side. So, the systems that we have just run over and refuted deliver up to us, in some sort, divided and opposed to each other, all the essential elements of human morality. The only question is to collect them, in order to restore the entire moral phenomenon. The history of philosophy, thus understood, prepares the way for or confirms psychological analysis, as psychological analysis receives from the history of philosophy its light. Let us, then, interrogate ourselves in presence of human actions, and faithfully collect, without altering them by any preconceived system, the ideas and the sentiments of every kind that the spectacle of these actions produce in us. There are actions that are agreeable or disagreeable to us, that procure us advantages or injure us, in a word, that are, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, addressed to our inter- est. We are rejoiced with actions that are useful to us, and shun those that may injure us. We seek earnestly and with the greatest effort what seems to us our interest. This is an incontestable fact. Here is another fact that is not less incontestable. There are actions that have no relation to us, that, conse- quently, we cannot estimate and judge on the ground of our interest, that we nevertheless qualify as good or bad. Suppose that before your eyes a man, strong and armed, falls upon another man, feeble and disarmed, whom he maltreats and kills, in order to take away his purse. Such an action does not reach you in any way, and, notwithstanding, it fills you with indignation.^ You do every thing in your power that this mur- derer may be arrested and delivered up to justice ; you demand that he shall be punis!ifed, and if he is punished in one way or another, you think that it is just ; your indignation is appeased only after a chastisement proportioned to the crime committed has been inflicted on the culprit. I repeat that in this you neither hope nor fear any thing for yourself. Were you placed in an inaccessible fortress, from the top of which you might wit- ness this scene of murder, you would feel these sentiments none the less. This is only a rude picture of what takes place in you at the sight of a crime. Apply now a little reflection and analysis to the different traits of which this picture is composed, without destroying their nature, and you will have a complete philosophic theory. What is it that first strikes you in what you have experienced ? It is doubtless the indignation, the instinctive horror that you have felt. There is, then, in the soul a power of raising indig- nation that is foreign to all personal interests ! There are, then, in us sentiments of which we are not the end ! There is an an- tipathy, an aversion, a horror, that are not related to what * On indignation, see lecture 11. in 276 LECTURE FOURTEENTH. injures us, but to acts whose remotest influence cannot reach us, that we detest for the sole reason that we judge them to be bad ! Yes, we judge them to be bad. A judgment is enveloped under the sentiments that we have just mentioned. In fact, in the midst of the indignation that transports you, let one tell you that all this generous anger pertains to your particular organiza- tion, and that, after all, the action that takes place is indifferent, — you revolt against such an explanation, you exclaim that the action is bad in itself ; you not only express a sentiment, you pronounce a judgment. The next day after the action, when the feelings that agitated your soul have been quieted, you none the less still judge that the action was bad ; you judge thus six months after, you judge thus always and everywhere ; and it is because you judge that this action is in itself bad, that you bear this other judgment, that it should not have been done. This double judgment is at the foundation of sentiment ; other- wise sentiment would be without reason. If the action is not bad in itself, if he who has done it was not obligated not to do it, the indignation that we experience is only a physical emotion, an excitement of the senses, of the imagination, of the heart, — a phenomenon destitute of every moral character, like the trouble that visits us before some frightful scene of nature. You cannot rationally feel indignation for the author of an indifferent action. Every sentiment of disinterested anger against the author of an action supposes in him who feels it, this double conviction : — 1st, That the action is in itself bad ; 2d, That it should not have been done. This sentiment also supposes that the author of this action has himself a consciousness of the evil that he has done, and of the obligation that he has violated ; for without this he would have acted like a brutal and blind force, not like an intelligent and moral force, and we should have felt towards him no more indig- nation than towards a rock that falls on our head, towards a tor- rent that sweeps us away into an abyss. TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. 277 Indignation equally supposes in him who is the object of it an- other character still, to wit, that he is free,— that he could do or not do what he has doqe. It is evident that the agent must be free in order to be responsible. You desire that the murderer may be arrested and delivered up to justice, you desire that he may be punished ; when he has been arrested, delivered up to justice, and punished, you are sat- isfied. What does that mean ? Is it a capricious movement of the imagination and heart ? No. Calm or indignant, at the moment of the crime or a long time after, without any spirit of personal vengeance, since you are not the least interested in this affair, you none the less declare that the murderer ought to be punished. If, instead of receiving a punishment, the culpable man makes his crime a stepping-stone to fortune, you still declare that, far from deserving prosperity, he deserves to suffer in repa- ration of his fault ; you protest against lot, and appeal to a su- perior justice. This judgment philosophers have called the judg- ment of merit and demerit. I suppose, in the mind of man, the idea of a supreme law that attaches happiness to virtue, unhap- piness to crime. Omit the idea of this law, and the judgment of merit and demerit is without foundation. Omit this judgment, and indignation against prosperous crime and the neglect of vir- tue is an unintelligible, even an impossible sentiment, and never, at the sight of crime, would you think of demanding the chas- tisement of a criminal. All the parts of the moral phenomenon are connected together ; all are equally certain parts, — destroy one, and you completely overturn the whole phenomenon. The most common observation bears witness to all these facts, and the least subtle logic easily discovers their connection. It is necessary to renounce even sen- timent, or it must be avowed that sentiment covers a judgment, the judgment of the essential distinction between good and evil, that this distinction involves an obligation, that this obligation is applied to an intelligent and free agent ; in fine, it must be ob- served that the distinction between merit and demerit, that cor- 278 LECTURE FOURTEENTH. TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. 27& responds to the distinction between good and evil, contains the principle of the natural harmony between virtue and happiness. What have we done thus far ? We have done as the physicist or chemist does, who submits a composite body to analysis and reduces it to its simple elements. The only difference here is that the phenomenon to which our analysis is applied is in us, instead of being out of us. Besides, the processes employed are exactly the same ; there is in them neither system nor hypothesis ; there are only experience and the most immediate induction. In order to render experience more certain, we may vary it. Instead of examining what takes place in us when we are spec- tators of bad or good actions in another, let us interrogate our own consciousness when we are doing well or ill. In this case, the different elements of the moral phenomenon are still more striking, and their order appears more distinctly. Suppose that a dying friend has confided to me a more or less important deposit, charging me to remit it after his death to a person whom he has designated to me alone, and who himself knows not what has been done in his favor. He who confided to me the deposit dies, and carries with him his secret ; he for whom the deposit has been made to me has no knowledge of it ; if, then, I wish to appropriate this deposit ^to myself, no one will ever be able to suspect me. In this case what should I do ? It is diffi- cult to imagine circumstances more favorable for crime. If I con- sult only interest,' I ought not to hesitate to return the deposit If I hesitate, in the system of interest, I am senseless, and I revolt against the law of my nature. Doubt alone, in the impunity that is assured me, would betray in me a principle different from interest. But naturallv I do not doubt, I believe with the most entire certainty, that the deposit confided to me does not belong to me, that it has been confided to me to be remitted to another, and that to this other it belongs. Take away interest, and I should not even think of returning this deposit, — it is interest alone that tempts me. It tempts me, it does not bear me away without resistance. Hence the struggle between interest and duty, — a struggle filled with troubles, opposite resolutions, by turns taken and abandoned ; it energetically attests the presence of a principle of action difterent from interest and quite as powerful. Duty succumbs, interest triumphs over it. I retain the deposit that has been confided to me, and apply it to my own wants, and to the wants of my family ; it makes me rich, and in appearance happy ; but I internally suffer with that bitter and secret suffer- ing that is called remorse.^ The fact is certain ; it has been a thousand times described ; all languages contain the word, and there is no one who, in some degree, has not experienced the thing, that sharp gnawing at the heart which is caused by every fault, great or small, as long as it has not been expiated. This painful recollection follows me in the midst of pleasures and pros- perity. The applauses of the crowd are not able to silence this inexorable witness. Only a long habit of sin and crime, an accu- mulation of oft-repeated faults, can compass this sentiment, at once avenging and expiatory. When it is stifled, every resource is lost, and an end is made of the soul's life ; as long as it endures, the sacred fire is not wholly extinguished. Remorse is a suffering of a particular character. In remorse I do not suffer on account of such an impression made upon my senses, nor on account of the thwarting of my natural pas- sions, nor on account of the injury done or threatened to my in- terest, nor by the disquietude of my hopes and the agony of my fears : no, I suffer without any external cause, yet I suffer in the most cruel manner. I suffer for the sole reason that I have a consciousness of having committed a bad action which I knew I was obligated not to commit, which I was able not to commit, which leaves behind it a chastisement that I know to be deserved. No exact analysis can take away from remorse, without destroy- ing it, a single one of these elements. Remorse contains the idea of good and evil, of an obligatory law, of liberty, of merit and demerit All these ideas were already in the struggle between On remorse, see lecture 11. I 280 LECTUEE FOURTEENTH. TRUE PEINCrPLES OF ETHICS. 281 good and evil ; they reappear in remorse. In vain interest coun selled me to appropriate the deposit that had been confided to me ; something said to me, and still says to me, that to appro- priate it is to do evil, is to commit an injustice ; f judged, and judge, thus, not such a day, but always, not under such a circum- stance, but under all circumstances. In vain I say to myself that the person to whom I ought to remit this deposit has no need of it, and that it is necessary to me ; I judge that a deposit must be respected without regard to persons, and the obhgation that is imposed on me appears inviolable and absolute. Having taken upon myself this obligation, I believe by this fact alone that I have the power to fulfil it : this is not all ; I am directly con- scious of this power, I know with the most certain knowledge that I am able to keep this deposit or to remit it to the lawful owner ; and it is precisely because I am conscious of this power that I judge that I have deserved punishment for not having made the use of it for which it was given me. It is, in fine, be- cause I have a lively consciousness of all that, that I experience this sentiment of indignation against myself, this suffering of re- morse which expresses in itself the moral phenomenon entire. According to the rules of the experimental method, let us take an opposite course ; let us suppose that, in spite of the suggestions of interest, in spite of the pressing goad of misery, in order to be faithful to pledged faith, I send the deposit to the person that had been designated to me ; instead of the painful scene that just now passed in consciousness, there passes another quite as real, but very different. I know that I have done well ; I know that I have not obeyed a chimera, an artificial and mendacious law, but a law true, universal, obligatory upon all intelligent and free be- ings. I know that I have made a good use of my liberty ; I have of this liberty, by the very use that I have made of it, a sentiment more distinct, more energetic, and, in some sort, tri- umphant. Every opinion would accuse me in vain, I appeal from it to a better justice, and this justice is already declared in me by sentiments that press upon each other in my soul. I respect myself, esteem myself, and believe that I have a right to the esteem of others ; I have the sentiment of my dignity ; I feel for myself only sentiments of affection opposed to that species of horror for myself with which I was just now inspired. Instead of remorse, I feel an incomparable joy that no one can deprive me of, that, were every thing else wanting to me, would console and support me. This sentiment of pleasure is as penetrating, as profound as was the remorse. It expresses the satisfaction of all the generous principles of human nature, as remorse repre- sented their revolt. It testifies by the internal happiness that it gives me to the sublime accord between happiness and virtue, whilst remorse is the first link in that fatal chain, that chain of iron and adamant, which, according to Plato,^ binds pain to transgression, trouble to passion, misery to faithlessness, vice, and crime. Moral sentiment is the echo of all the moral judgments and entire moral life. It is so striking that it has been regarded by a somewhat superficial philosophy as sufficient to found entire ethics ; and, nevertheless, we have just seen that this admirable sentiment would not exist without the different judgments that we have just enumerated ; it is their consequence, but not their principle ; it supplies, but does not constitute them ; it does not take their place, but sums them up. Now that we are in possession of all the elements of human morality, we proceed to take these elements one by one, and sub- mit them to a detailed analysis. That which is most apparent in the complex phenomenon that we are studying is sentiment; but its foundation is judgment. - The judgment of good and evil is the principle of all that fol- lows it ; but this judgment rests only on the constitution itself of human nature, like the judgment of the true and the judgment of the beautiful. As well as these two judgments,^ that of the good is a simple, primitive, indecomposable judgment. - J ___ , ' See the Gorgim^ with the Argument^ vol. iii. of our translation. ^ Lectures 1 and 6. 1. % 282 LECTURE FOURTEENTH. TRUE PRINOIPLES OF ETHICS. 283 Like them, again, it is not arbitrary. We cannot but fear this judgment in presence of certain acts ; and, in fearing it, we knoM? that it does not make good or evil, but declares it. The reality of moral distinctions is revealed by this judgment, but it is inde- pendent of it, as beauty is independent of the eye that perceives it, as universal and necessary truths are independent of the reason that discovers them.^ Good and evil are real characters of human actions, although these characters might not be seen with our eyes nor touched with our hands. The moral qualities of an action are none the less real for not being confounded with the material qualities of this action. This is the reason why actions materially identical may be morally very different. A homicide is always a homi- cide ; nevertheless, it is often a crime, it is also often a legitimate action, for example, when it is not done for the sake of vengeance, nor for the sake of interest, in a strict case of self-defence. It is not the spilling of blood that makes the crime, it is the spilling of innocent blood. Innocence and crime, good and evil, do not reside in such or such an external circumstance determined one for all. Reason recognizes them with certainty under the most different appearances, in circumstances sometimes the same and sometimes dissimilar. Good and evil almost always appear to us connected with par- ticular actions ; but it is not on account of what is particular in them that these actions are good or bad. So when I declare that the death of Socrates is unjust, and that the devotion of Leonidas is admirable, it is the unjust death of a wise man that I condemn, and the devotion of a hero that I admire. It is not important whether this hero be called Leonidas or d'Assas, whether the im- molated sage be called Socrates or Bailly. The judgment of the good is at first appHed to particular ac- tions, and it gives birth to general principles which in course serve us as rules for judging all actions of the same kind. As ^ Lectures 2, 3, and 6. after having judged that such a particular phenomenon has such a particular cause, we elevate ourselves to the general principle that every phenomenon has its cause ;* so we erect into a general rule the moral judgment that we have borne in regard to a par- ticular fact. Thus, at first we admire the death of Leonidas, thence we elevate ourselves to the principle that it is good to die for one's country. We already possess the principle in its first application to Leonidas; otherwise, this particular application would not have been legitimate, it would not have been even possible ; but we possess it implicitly ; as soon as it is disengaged, it appears to us under its universal and pure form, and we apply it to all analogous cases. Ethics have their axioms like other sciences ; and these axioms are rightly called in all languages moral truths. It is good not to violate one's oath, and in this is also involved a truth. In fact, an oath is founded in the truth of things, — its good is only derived. Moral truths considered in themselves have no less certainty than mathematical truths. The idea of a deposit being given, I ask whether the idea of faithfully keeping it is not necessarily attached to it, as to the idea of a triangle is attached the idea that its three angles are equal to two right angles. You may withhold a deposit ; but, in withholding it, do not believe that you change the nature of things, nor that you make it possible for a deposit ever to become property. These two ideas exclude each other. You have only a false semblance of property ; and all the efforts of passion, all the sophisms of interest will not reverse the essential differences. This is the reason why moral truth is so troublesome, — it is because, like all truth, it is what it is, and does not bend to any caprice. Always the same and always present, in spite of all our efforts, it inexor- ably condemns, with a voice always heard, but not always list- ened to, the sensible and the culpable will which thinks to hinder it from being by denying it, or rather by pretending to deny it. Ist part, lecture 2. 284 LECTURE FOURTEENTH. Moral truths are distinguished from other truths by the singu lar character that, as soon as we perceive them, they appear to us as the rule of our conduct. If it is true that a deposit is made to be remitted to its legitimate possessor, it is necessary to remit it to him. To the necessity of believing is here added the neces- sity of practising. The necessity of practising is obligation. Moral truths, in the eyes of reason necessary, are to the will obligatory. Moral obligation, like the moral truth that is its foundation, is absolute. As necessary truths are not more or less necessary,^ so obligation is not more or less obligatory. There are degrees of importance between different obligations ; but there are no de- grees in the same obligation. We are not somewhat obligated, almost obligated ; we are either wholly obligated, or not at all. If obligation is absolute, it is immutable and universal. For, if the obligation of to-day were not the obligation of to-morrow, if what is obligatory for me were not so for you, obligation would differ from itself, would be relative and contingent. This fact of absolute, immutable, universal obligation is so cer- tain and so manifest, in spite of all the efforts of the doctrine of interest to obscure it, that one of the profoundest moralists of modern philosophy, particularly struck with this fact, has re- garded it as the principle of the whole of ethics. By separating duty from interest which ruins it, and from sentiment which enervates it, Kant restored to ethics their true character. He ele- vated himself very high in the century of Helvetius, in elevating himself to the holy law of duty ; but he still did not ascend high enough, he did not reach the reason itself of duty. Tlie good for Kant is what is obligatoiy. But logically, whence comes the obligation of performing an action, if not from the intrinsic goodness of this act ? Is it not because that, in the order of reason, it is absolutely impossible to regard a deposit as a property, that we cannot appropriate it to ourselves without a * Lecture 2. TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. 285 crime? If one action must be performed, and another action must not, it is because there is apparently an essential difference between these two acts. To found the good on obligation, in- stead of founding obligation on the good, is, therefore, to take the effect for the cause, is to draw the principle from the consequence. ' If I ask an honest man who, in spite of the suggestions of misery, has respected the deposit that was intrusted to him, why he respected it, he will answer me, — because it was my duty. If I persist, and ask why it was his duty, he will veiy rightly answer, — ^because it was just, because it was good. That point having been reached, all answers are stopped ; but questions also are stopped; No one allows a duty to be imposed upon him without rendering to himself a reason for it ; but as soon as it is recognized that this duty is imposed upon us because it is just, the mind is satisfied ; for it reaches a principle beyond which it has nothing more to seek, justice being its own principle. First truths carry with thopi their reason for being. Now, justice, the essential distinction between good and evil in the relations of men among themselves, is the primary truth of ethics. Justice is not a consequence, since we cannot ascend to another more elevated principle ; and duty is not, rigorously speaking, a principle, since it supposes a principle above it, that explains and authorizes it, to wit, justice. Moral truth no more becomes relative and subjective, to take for a moment the language of Kant, in appearing to us obliga- tory, than truth becomes relative and subjective in appearing to us necessary ; for in the very nature of truth and the good must be sought the reason of necessity and obligation. But if we stop at obligation and necessity, as Kant did, in ethics as well^ts in metaphysics, without knowing it, and even against our intention, we destroy, or at least weaken truth and the good.' Obligation has its foundation in the necessary distinction be- tween good and evil ; and is itself the foundation of liberty. If * Ist part, lecture 3. See also vol. v. of the let Series, lecture 8. I 286 LECTURE FOIJRTEENTH. TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS. 287 /man has duties, he must possess the faculty of fulfilling them, of " resisting desire, passion^ and interest, in order to obey law. He ought to be free, therefore he is free, or human nature is in con- tradiction with itself. The direct certainty of obligation imphes the corresponding certainty of liberty. This proof of liberty is doubtless good ; but Kant is deceived in supposing it the only legitimate proof. It is very strange that he should have preferred the authority of reasoning to that of consciousness, as if the former had no need of being confirmed by the latter ; as if, after all, my liberty ought not to be a fact for me.* Empiricism must be greatly feared to distrust the testi- mony of consciousness ; and, after such a distrust, one must be very credulous to have a boundless faith in reasoning. We do not believe in our liberty as we believe in the movement of the earth. The profoundest persuasion that we have of it comes from the continual experience that we carry with ourselves. Is it true that in presence of an act to be done I am able to will or not to will to do it ? In that lies the whole question of liberty. Let us clearly distinguish between the power of doing and the power of willing. The will has, without doubt, in its service and under its empire, the most of our faculties ; but that empire, which is real, is very limited. I will to move my arm, and I am often able to do it, — in that resides, as it were, the physical power of will ; but I am not always able to move my arm, if the muscles are paralyzed, if the obstacle to be overcome is too strong, &c. ; the execution does not always depend on me ; but what always depends on me is the resolution itself. The external efi'ects may be bpidered, my resolution itself can never be hindered. In its own domain, will is sovereign. And I am conscious of this sovereign power of the will. I feel in myself, before its determination, the force that can determine itself in such a manner or in such another. At the same time 1st Series, vol. v., lecture 7. that I will this or that, T am equally conscious of the power to will the opposite ; I am conscious of being master of my resolu- tion, of the ability to arrest it, continue it, repress it. When the voluntary act ceases, the consciousness of the power does not cease, — it remains with the power itself, which is superior to all its manifestations. Liberty is therefore the essential and always- subsisting attribute of will.* The will, we have seen,' is neither desire nor passion, — it is exactly the opposite. Liberty of will is not, then, the license of desires and passions. Man is a slave in desire and passion, he is free only in will. That they may not elsewhere be confounded, liberty and anarchy must not be confounded in psychology. Pas- sions abandoning themselves to their caprices, is anarchy. Pas- sions concentrated upon a dominant passion, is tyranny. Liberty consists in the struggle of will against this tyranny and this anar- chy. But this combat must have an aim, and this aim is the duty of obeying reason, which is our true sovereign, and justice, which reason reveals to us and prescribes for us. The duty of obeying reason is the law of will, and will is never more itself than when it submits to its law. We do not possess ourselves, as long as to the domination of desire, of passion, of interest, reason does not oppose the counterpoise of justice. Reason and justice free us from the yoke of passions, without imposing upon us another yoke. For, once more, to obey them, is not to abdicate liberty, but to save it, to apply it to its legitimate use. It is in liberty, and in the agreement of liberty with reason and justice, that man belongs to himself, to speak properly. He is a person only because he is a free being enlightened by reason. What distinguishes a person from a simple thing, is especially the difference between liberty and its opposite. A thing is ^^ See, for the entire development of the theory of liberty, 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture 1, lode, p. 71; lecture 8, Condillac, p. 116, 149, etc.; vol. iv., lecture 23, JRdd, p. 541-574; 2d Series, vol. iii., Examination of tTie System ecause desire can never be the title of a right, because there is something in us that is above all desires, participated or not participated, to wit, duty and right,— justice. To justice it belongs to be the rule of our desires, and not to our desires to be the rule of justice. Should entire humanity forget its dignity, should it consent to its own degradation, should it extend the hand to slavery, tyranny would be none the more legitimate ; eternal justice would protest against a contract, which, were it supported by desires, recip- rocal desires most authentically expressed and converted into solemn laws, is none the less void of all right, because, as Bossuet very truly said, there is no right against right, no contracts, no conventions, no human laws against the law of laws, against natural law." PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS. 311 is suffering, who, perhaps, is ready to die, has not the least right over the least part of your fortune, were it immense ; and, if he used violence for the purpose of wresting from you a single penny, he would commit a crime. We here meet a new order of duties that do not correspond to rights. Man may resort to force in order to make his rights respected ; he cannot impose on an- other any sacrifice whatever. Justice respects or restores ; charity gives, and gives freely. Charity takes from us something in order to give it to our fellow-men. If it goes so far as to inspire us to renounce our dearest interests, it is called devotedness. It certainly cannot be said that to be charitable is not obliga- tory. But this obligation must not be regarded as precise, as in- flexible as the obligation to be just. Charity is a sacrifice; and who can find the rule of sacrifice, the formula of self-renunciationj For justice, the formula is clear, — to respect the rights of another. But charity knows neither rule nor limit It transcends all obli- gation. Its beauty is precisely in its liberty. But it must be acknowledged that charity also has its dangers. It tends to substitute its own action for the action of him whom it wishes to help ; it somewhat effaces his personality, and makes itself in some sort his providence, — a formidable part for a mor- tal! In order to be useful to others, one imposes himself on them, and runs the risk of violating their natural rights. Love, in giving itself, enslaves. Doubtless it is not interdicted us to act upon another. We can always do it through petition and exhortation. We can also do it by threatening, when we see one of our fellows engaged in a criminal or senseless action. We have even the right to employ force when passion carries away liberty and makes the person disappear. So we may, we even ought to prevent by force the suicide of one of our fellow-men. The legitimate power of charity is measured by the more or less liberty and reason possessed by him to whom it is applied. What delicacy, then, is necessary in the exercise of this perilous virtue ! How can we estimate with sufficient certainty the de- m 312 LECTUKE FIFTEENTH. gree of liberty still possessed by one of our fellow-men to know how far we may substitute ourselves for him in the guiding of his destiny ? And when, in order to assist a feeble soul, we take possession of it, who is suflSciently sure of himself not to go far- ther, not to pass from the person governed to the love of domina- tion itself? Charity is often the commencement and the excuse, and always the pretext of usurpation. In order to have the right of abandoning one's self to the emotions of charity, it is necessary to be fortified against one's self by a long exercise of justice. To respect the rights of others and do good to men, to be at once just and charitable, — such are social ethics in the two ele- ments that constitute them. We speak of social ethics, and we do not yet know what society is. Let us look around us : — everywhere society exists, and where it is not, man is not man. * Society is a universal fact which must have universal foundations. Let us avoid at first the question of the origin of society.* * On the danger of seeking at first the origin of human knowledge, see 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture on Ilobbes, p. 261 : " Hobbes is not the only one who took the question of the origin of societies as the starting-point of political science. Nearly all the publicists of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu excepted, proceed in the same manner. Konsseau imagines at first a primi- tive state in which man being no longer savage without being yet civilized, lived happy and free under the dominion of the laws of nature. This golden age of humanity disappearing carries with it all the rights of the individual, who enters naked and disarmed into what we call the social state. But order cannot reign in a state without laws, and since natural laws perished in the shipwreck of primitive manners, new ones must be created. Society is formed by aid of a contract whose principle is the abandonment by each and all of their individual force and rights to the profit of t)ie community, of the state, the instrument of all forces, the depository of all rights. The state, for Hobbes, will be a man, a monarch, a king ; for Rousseau, the state is the col- lection itself of citizens, who by turns are considered as subjects and govern- ors, so that instead of the despotism of one over all, we have the despotism of all over each. Law is not the more or less happy, more or less faithful expression of natural justice ; it is the expression of the general will. This general will is alone free ; particular wills are not free. The general will has all rights, and particular wills have only the rights that it confers on them, or rather lends them. Force, in The Citizen^ is the foundation of society, of PEIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS. 313 The philosophy of the last century delighted in such questions too much. How can we demand light from the regions of darkness, and the explanation of reality from an hypothesis ? Why go back to a pretended primitive state in order to account for a present state which may be studied in itself in its unquestionable char- acters? Why seek what may have been in the germ that which may be perceived, that which it is the question to under- stand, completed and perfect ? Moreover, there is great peril in starting with the question of the origin of society. Has such or such an origin been found ? Actual society is arranged accord- ing to the type of the primitive society that has been dreamed of, and political society is delivered up to the mercy of histori- cal romances. This one imagines that the primitive state is violence, and he sets out from that in order to authorize the rif'ht of the strongest, and to consecrate despotism. That one thinksv that he has found in the family the first form of society, and he compares government to the father of a family, and subjects to children ; society in his eyes is a minor that must be held in tutelage in the hands of the paternal power, which in the origin is absolute, and consequently, must remain so. Or has one thrown himself to the extreme of the opposite opinion, and into the hypothesis of an agreement, of a contract that ex- presses the will of all or of the greatest number ? He delivers order, of laws, of the rights and duties which laws alone institute. In the Contrat Social, the general will plays the same part, fulfils the same function. Moreover, the general will scarcely differs in itself from force. In fact, the general will is number, that is to say, force still. Thus, on both sides, tyranny under different forms. One may here observe the power of method. If Hobbes, if Kousseau especially had at first studied the idea of right in it- self, with the certain characters without which we are not able to conceive it, they would have infallibly recognized that if there are rights derived from positive laws, and particularly from conventions and contracts, there are rights derived from no contract, since contracts take them for principles and rules ; from no convention, since they serve as the foundation to all conven- tions in order that these conventions may be reputed just; — rights that society consecrates and develops, but does not make, — rights not subject to the caprices of general or particular will, belonging essentially to human nature, and like it, inviolable and sacred." 14 314 LECTURE FIFTEENTH. up to the mobile will of the crowd the eternal laws of justice and the inalienable rights of the person. Finally, are powerful reli- gious institutions found in the cradle of society? It is hence concluded, that power belongs of right to priesthoods, which have the secret of the designs of God, and represent his sovereign authority. Thus a vicious method in philosophy leads to a de- plorable political system, — the commencement is made in hy- pothesis, and the termination is in anarchy or tyranny. True politics do not depend on more or less well directed his- torical researches into the profound night of a past forever vanished, and of which no vestige subsists: they rest on the knowledge of human natnre. Wherever society is, wherever it was, it has for its foundations : — 1st, The need that we have of our fellow-creatures, and the social instincts that man bears in himself; 2d, The permanent and indestructible idea and sentiment of justice and right. Man, feeble and powerless when he is alone, profoundly feels the need that he has of the succor of his fellow-creatures in order to develop his faculties, to embellish his life, and even to preserve it.^ Without reflection, without convention, he claims * 1st Series, vol. iii., p. 265 : " What !" somewhere says Montesquieu, " man is everywhere in society, and it is asked whether man was born for society! What is this fact that is reproduced in all the vicissitudes of the life of humanity, except a law of humanity? The universal and permanent fact of society attests the principle of sociability. This principle shines forth in all our inclinations, in our sentiments, in our beliefs. It is true that we love society for the advantages that it brings ; but it is none the less true, that we also love it for its own sake, tliat we seek it independently of all cal- culation. Solitude saddens us ; it is not less deadly to the life of the moral being, than a perfect vacuum is to the life of the physical being. Without society what would become of sympathy, which is one of the most powerful principles of onr soul, which establishes between men a community of sen- timents, by which each lives in all and all live in each ? Who would be blind enough not to see in that an energetic call of human nature for society ? And the attraction of the sexes, their union, the love of parents for children, — do they not found a sort of natural society, that is increased and developed by the power of the same causes which produced it ? Divided by interest, united by sentiment, men respect each other in the name of justice. Let us add that they love each other in virtue of natural charity. In the sight of PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS. 315 the hand, the experience, the love of those whom he sees made like himself. The instinct of society is in the first cry of the child that calls for the mother's help without knowing that it has a mother, and in the eagerness of the mother to respond to the cries of the child. It is in the feelings for othei-s that nature has put in us — pity, sympathy, benevolence. It is in the attraction of the sexes, in their union, in the love of parents for their chil- dren, and in the ties of every kind that these first ties engender. If Providen.€ has attached so much sadness to solitude, so much charm to society, it is because society is indispensable for the preservation of man and for his happiness, for his intellect and moral development. But if need and instinct begin society, it is justice that com- pletes it. In the presence of another man, without any external law, without any compact,* it is suflicient that I know that he is a man, that is to say, that he is intelligent and free, in order to know that he has rights, and to know that I ought to respect his justice, equal in right, charity inspires us to consider ourselves as brethren, and to give each other succor and consolation. Wonderful thing ! God has not left to our wisdom, nor even to experience, the care of forming and preserving society,— he has willed that sociability should be a law of our nature, and a law so imperative that no tendency to isolation, no egoism, no distaste even, can prevail against it. All the power of the spirit of system was necessary in order to make Hobbes say that society is an accident, as an incredible degree of melancholy to wring from Kousseau the extravagant ex- pression that society is an evil." » 1st Series, vol. iii., p. 283 : " We do not hold from a compact our quality as man, and the dignity and rights attached to it ; or, rather, there is an im- mortal compact which is nowhere written, which makes itself felt by every uncorrupted conscience, that compact which binds together all beings in- telligent, free, and subject to misfortune, by the sacred ties of a common respect and a common charity. . . . Laws promulgate duties, but do not give birth to them ; they could not violate duties without being unjust, and ceasing to merit the beautiful name of laws— that is to say, decisions of the public authority worthy of appearing obligatory to the conscience of all. Nevertheless, although laws have no other virtue than that of declaring what exists before them, we often found on them right and justice, to the great detriment of justice itself, and the sentiment of right. Time and habit despoil reason of its natural rights in order to transfer it to law. What 316 LECTURE FIFTEENTH. PEIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS. 317 rights as he ought to respect mine. As he is no freer than I am nor I than he, we recognize towards each other equal rights and equal duties. If he abuses his force to violate the equality of our rights, I know that I have the right to defend myself and make myself respected ; and if a third party is found between us, with- out any personal interest in the quarrel, he knows that it is his right and his duty to use force in order to protect the feeble, and even to make the oppressor expiate his injustice by a chastise- ment. Therein is already seen entire society with its essential principles, — justice, liberty, equality, government, and punishment. Justice is the guaranty of liberty. True liberty does not con- sist in doing what we will, but in doing what we have a right to do. Liberty of passion and caprice would have for its conse- quence the enslavement of the weakest to the strongest, and the enslavement of the strongest themselves to their unbridled de- sires. Man is truly free in the interior of his consciousness only in resisting passion and obeying justice ; therein also is the type if true social liberty. Nothing is falser than the opinion that society diminishes our mutual liberty ; far from that, it secures it, develops it : what it suppresses is not liberty ; it is its opposite, passion. Society no more injures liberty than justice, for society is nothing else than the very idea of justice realized. In securing liberty, justice secures equality also. If men are unequal in physical force and intelligence, they are equal in so far as they are free beings, and consequently equally worthy of respect. All men, when they bear the sacred character of the moral person, are to be respected, by the same title, and in the same degree.^ z then happens ? We either obey it, even when it is nnjust, which is not a very great evil, but we do not think of reforming it little by little, having no superior principle that enables us to judge it,— or we continually change it, in an invincible impotence of founding any thing, by not knowing the immutable baais on which written law must rest. In either case, all pro- gress is impossible, because the laws are not related to their true principle, which is reason, conscience, sovereign and absolute justice." * Lecture 12. The limit of liberty is in liberty itself; the limit of right is in duty. Liberty is to be respected, but provided it injure not the liberty of another. I ought to let you do what you please, but on the condition that nothing which you do will injure my liberty. For then, in virtue of my right of liberty, I should re- gard myself as obligated to repress the aberrations of your will, in order to protect my own and that of others. Society guaran- ties the liberty of each one, and if one citizen attacks that of another, he is arrested in the name of liberty. For example, re- ligious liberty is sacred ; you may, in the secret of consciousness, invent for yourself the most extravagant superstition ; but if you wish publicly to inculcate an immoral worship, you threaten the liberty and reason of your citizens : such preaching is interdicted. From the necessity of repressing springs the necessity of a con- stituted repressive force. Rigorously, this force is in us ; for if I am unjustly attacked, I have the right to defend myself. But, in the first place, I may not be the strongest ; in the second place, no one is an impartial judge in his own cause, and what I regard or give out as an act of legitimate defence may be an act of violence and oppression. So the protection of the rights of each one demands an im- partial and disinterested force, that may be superior to all partic- ular forces. This disinterested party, armed with the power necessary to secure and defend the liberty of all, is called government. The right of government expresses the rights of all and each. It is the right of personal defence transferred to a public force, to the profit of common liberty. Government is not, then, a power distinct from and independent of society ; it draws from society its whole force. It is not what it has seemed to two opposite schools of publicists,— to those who sacrifice society to government,— to those who consider gov- ernment as the enemy of society. If government did not repre- sent society, it would be only a material, illegitimate, and soon poweriess force ; and without government, society would be a war I' ii 318 LECTURE FIFTEENTH. PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS. 319 of all against all. Society makes the moral power of government, as government makes the security of society. Pascal is wrong^ when he says, that not being able to make what is just powerful, men have made what is powerful just. Government, in principle at least, is precisely what Pascal desired, — justice armed with force. It is a sad and false political system that places society and government, authority and liberty, in opposition to each other, by making them come from two different sources, by presenting them as two contrary principles. I often hear the principle of authority spoken of as a principle apart, indepenc.lnt, deriving from itself its force and legitimacy, and consequently made to rule. No error is deeper and more dangerous. Thereby it is thought to confirm the principle of authority ; far from that, from it is taken away its solidest foundation. Authority — that is to sav, legitimate and moral authority — is nothing else than justice, ana justice is nothing else than the respect of liberty ; so that there is not therein two different and contrary opinions, but one and the same principle, of equal certainty and equal grandeur, under all its forms and in all its applications. Authority, it is said, comes from God : doubtless; but whence comes liberty, whence comes humanity ? To God must be re- ferred every thing that is excellent on the earth ; and nothing is more excellent than liberty. Reason, which in man commands liberty, commands it according to its nature ; and the first law that reason imposes on liberty is that of self-respect. Authority is so much the stronger as its true title is better un- derstood ; and obedience is the easiest when, instead of degrading, it honors ; when, instead of resembling servitude, it is at once the condition and guaranty of liberty. The mission, the end of government, is to make justice, the protector of the common liberty, reign. Whence it follows, that as long as the liberty of one citizen does not injure the liberty of ' See 4th Series, vol. i., p. 40. another, it escapes all repression. So government cannot be severe against falsehood, intemperance, imprudence, levity, ava- rice, egoism, except when these vices become prejudicial to others. Moreover, it is not necessary to confine government within too narrow limits. Government, which represents society, is also a moral person ; it has a heart like the individual ; it has generos- ity, goodness, charity. There are legitimate, and even universally admired facts, that are not explained, if the function of govern- ment is reduced to the protection of rights alone.* Government owes to the citizens, in a certain measure, to guard their well- being, to develop their intelligence, to fortify their morality, for the interest of society, and even for the interest of humanity. Hence sometimes for government the formidable right of using force in order to do good to men. But we are here touching upon that delicate point where charity inclines to despotism. Too much intelligence and wisdom, therefore, cannot be demanded in the employment of a power perhaps necessary, but dangerous. Now, on what condition is government exercised ? Is an act of its own will sufficient for it in order to employ to its own liking under all circumstances, as it shall understand them, the power that has been confided to it? Government must have been thus exercised in early society, and in the infancy of the art of governing. But the power, exercised by men, may go astray in difterent ways, either through weakness or through excess of force. It must, then, have a rule superior to itself, a public and known rule, that may be a lesson for the citizens, and for the government a rein and support : that rule is called law. Universal and absolute law is natural justice, which cannot be written, but speaks to the reason and heart of all. Written laws are the formulas wherein it is sought to express, with the least * See onr pamphlet entitled Justice and Charity, composed in 1848, in the midst of the excesses of socialism, in order to remind of the dignity of lib- erty, the character, bearing, and the impassable limits of true charity, pri- vate and civil. 320 LECTUKE FIFTEENTH. PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS. 321 possible imperfection, what natural justice requires in such or such determined circumstances. If laws propose to express in each thing natural justice, which is universal and absolute justice, one of the necessary conditions of a good law is the universality of its character. It is necessary to examine in an abstract and general manner what is required by justice in such or such a case, to the end that this case being presented may be judged according to the rule laid down, with- out regard to circumstances, place, time, or person. The collection of those rules or laws that govern the social re- lations of individuals is called positive right. Positive right rests wholly on natural right, which at once serves as its foundation, measure, and limit. / The supreme law of every positive law is that it be not opposed to natural law : no law can impose on us a false duty, nor deprive us of a true right. The sanction of law is punishment. We have already seen that the right to punish springs from the idea of demerit.^ In * See on the theory of penalty, the Gorgias, vol. iii. of the translation of Plato, and our argument, p. 367 : " The first law of order is to be faithful to virtue, and to that part of virtue which is related to society, to wit, justice ; but if one is wanting in that, the second law of order is to expiate one's fault, and it is expiated by punishment. Publicists are still seeking the foundation of penalty. Some, who think themselves great politicians, find it in the utility of the punishment for those who witness it, and are turned aside from crime by fear of its menace, by its preventive virtue. And that it is true, is one of the effects of penalty, but it is not its foundation; for punishment fulling upon the innocent, would produce as much, and still more terror, and would be quite as preventive. Others, in their preten- sions to humanity, do not wish to see the legitimacy of punishment except in its utility for him who undergoes it, in its corrective virtue, — and that, too, is one of the possible effects of punishment, but not its foundation ; for that punishment may be corrective, it must be accepted as just. It is, then, always necessary to recur to justice. Justice is the true foundation of pun- ishment, — personal and social utility are only consequences. It is an incon- testable fact, that after every unjust act, man thinks, and cannot but think that he has incurred demerit, that is to say, has merited a punishment. In intelligence, to the idea of injustice corresponds that of penalty ; and when injustice has taken place in the social sphere, merited punishment ought to be inflicted by society. Society can inflict it only because it ought. Right here has no other source than duty, the strictest, most evident, and most the universal order, to God alone it belongs to apply a punish- ment to all faults, whatever they may be. In the social order, government is invested with the right to punish only for the pur- pose of protecting liberty by imposing a just reparation on those who violate it. Every fault that is not contrary to justice, and does not strike at liberty, escapes, then, social retribution. Neither is the right to punish the right of avenging one's self. To render evil for evil, to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is the barbarous form of a justice without light ; for the evil that I do you will not take away the evil that you have done me. It is not the pain felt by the victim that demands a corresponding pain ; it is violated justice that imposes on the culpable man the expiation of suffering. Such is the morality of penalty. The principle of penalty is not the reparation of damage caused. If I have caused you damage without intending it, I pay you an indemnity ; that is not a penalty, for I am not culpable ; whilst if I have committed a crime, in spite of the material indemnity for the evil that I have done, I owe a reparation to justice by a proper suffering, and in that truly consists the penalty. What is the exact proportion of chastisements and crimes? This question cannot receive an absolute solution. What is here immutable, is that the act opposed to justice merits a punishment, and that the more unjust the act is, the severer ought to be the punishment. But by the side of the right to punish is the duty of correcting. To the culprit must be left the possibility of re- sacred duty, without which this pretended right would be only that of force, that is to say, an atrocious injustice, should it even result in the moral profit of him who undergoes it, and in a salutary spectacle for the people,— what it would not then be ; for then the punishment would find no sympathy, no echo, either in the public conscience or in that of the condemned. The pun- ishment is not just, because it is preventively or correctively useful ; but it is in both ways useful, because it is just. This theory of penalty, in de- monstrating the falsity, the incomplete and exclusive character of two theo- ries that divide publicists, completes and explains them, and gives them both a legitimate centre and base. It is doubtless only indicated in Plato, but is met in several passages, briefly but positively expressed, and on it rests the sublime theory of expiation. 14* 322 LECTURE FIFTEENTH. pairing his crime. The culpable man is still a man ; he is not a thino- of which we ou Would it be possible that there might be several absolute beings, and that the being in whom are realized absolute truth and absolute beauty might not also be the one who is the princi- ple of absolute good ? The very idea of the absolute implies absolute unity. The true, the beautiful, and the good, are not three distinct essences ; they are one and the same essence con- sidered in its fundamental attributes. Our mind distinguishes them, because it can comprehend them >nly by division ; but, in the being in whom they reside, they are indivisibly united ; and this being at once triple and one, who sums up in himself perfect beauty, perfect truth, and the supreme good, is nothing else than God. So God is necessarily the principle of moral truth and the good. He is also the type of the moral person that we carry in us. Man is a moral person, that is to say, he is endowed with rea- son and liberty. He is capable of virtue, and virtue has in him two principal forms, respect of others, and love of others, justice and charity. Can there be among the attributes possessed by the creature something essential not possessed by the Creator ? Whence does the effect draw its reality and its being, except from its cause ? What it possesses, it borrows and receives. The cause at least contains all that is essential in the effect. What particularly belongs to the eflfect, is inferiority, is a lack, is imperfection : from the fact alone that it is dependent and derived, it bears in itself the signs and the conditions of dependence. If, then, we cannot legitimately conclude from the imperfection of the effect in that of the cause, we can and must conclude from the excellence of the effect in the perfection of the cause, otherwise there would be something prominent in the effect which would be without cause. Such is the principle of our theodicea. It is neither new nor subtle ; but it has not yet been thoroughly disengaged and eluci- dated, and it is, to our eyes, firm against every test. It is by the aid of this principle that we can, up to a certain point, penetrate into the true nature of God. God is not a being of logic, whose nature can be explained by way of deduction, and by means of algebraic equations. When, settino- out from a first attribute, we have deduced the attributes of God from each other, after the manner of geometricians and the schoolmen, what do we possess,* I pray you, but abstractions ? It is necessary to leave these vain dialectics in order to arrive at a real and living God. The first notion that we have of God, tc wit. the notion of an infinite being, is itself given to us independently of all experience. It is the consciousness of ourselves, as being at once, and as being limited, that elevates us directly to the conception of a being who is the principle of our being, and is himself without bounds. This solid and simple argument, which is at bottom that of Des- cartes,* opens to us a way that must be followed, in which Des- cartes too quickly stopped. If the being that we possess forces us to recur to a cause which possesses being in an infinite degree, all that we have of being, that is to say, of substantial attributes, equally requires an infinite cause. Then, God will no longer be merely the infinite, abstract, or at least indeterminate being in which reason and the heart know not where to betake themselves,* * Such 13 the common vice of nearly all theodiceas, without excepting the best— that of Leibnitz, that of Clarke; even the most popular of all, the Pro- fession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard. See our small work entitled PhilosoplU Fopuldire, 3d edition, p. 82. ' On the Cartesian argument, see above, part Ist, lecture 4 ; see also Ist Series, vol. iv., lecture 12, and especially vol. v., lecture 6. * Fragments de Philosophic Cartesienmy p. 24: "The infinite being, inasr much as infi.nite, is not a mover, a cause ; neither is he, inasmuch as infinite, an intelligence ; neither is he a will ; neither is he a principle of justice, nor much less a principle of love. We have no right to impute to him all these attributes in virtue of the single argument that every contingent being sup- poses a being that is not so, that every finite supposes an infinite. The God given by this argument is the God of Spinoza, is rigorously so ; but he is almost as though he were not, at least for us who with difficulty perceive him in the inaccesible heights of an eternity and existence that are absolute, void of thought, of liberty, of love, similar to nonentity itself, and a thou- sand times inferior, in his infinity and eternity, to an hour of our finite and V. 328 LECTUEE SIXTEENTH. he will be a real and determined being, a moral person like ours and psychology conducts us without hypothesis to a theodicea al once sublime and related to us.* Before all, if man is free, can it be that God is not free ? No one contends that he who is cause of all causes, who has no cause but himself, can be dependent on any thing whatever. But m freeing God from all external constraint, Spinoza subjects him to an internal and mathematical necessity, wherein he finds the perfection of being. Yes, of being which is not a person ; but the essential character of personal being is precisely liberty. If, then, God were not free, God would be beneath man. Would it not be strange that the creature should have the marvellous power of disposing of himself, and of freely willing, and that the being who has made him should be subjected to a neces- sary development, whose cause is only in himself, without doubt, but, in fine, is a sort of abstract power, mechanical or metaphys- ical, but very inferior to the personal and voluntary cause that we are, and of which we have the clearest consciousness ? God is therefore free, since we are free. But he is not free as we are free ; for God is at once all that we are, and nothing that we are. He possesses the same attributes that we possess, but ele- vated to infinity. He possesses an infinite liberty, joined to an infinite intelligence ; and, as his intelligence is infallible, excepted from the uncertainties of deliberation, and perceiving at a glance where the good is, so his liberty spontaneously, and without eflfort, fulfils it.* perishable existence, if during this fleeting hour we know what we are, if we think, if we love something else than ourselves, if we feel capable of freely sacrificing to an idea the few minutes that have been accorded to us." * This theodicea is here in resume, and in the 4th and 6th lectures of part first, as well as in the lecture that follows. The most important of our dif- ferent writings, on this point, will be found collected and elucidated by each other, in the Appendix to the 5th lecture of the first volume of the 1st Series. — See our translation of this entire Series of M. Cousin's works, under the title of the History of Modern Philosophy. ' 8d Series, vol. iv., advertisement to the 8d edition: "Without vaic subtilty, there is a real distinction between free will and spontaneous liber GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 329 In the same manner as we transfer to God the liberty that is the foundation of our being, we also transfer to him justice and charity. In man, justice and charity are virtues ; in God, they are attributes. What is in us the laborious conquest of liberty, ty. Arbitrary freedom is volition with the appearance of deliberation be- tween different objects, and under this supreme condition, that when, as a consequence of deliberation, we resolve to do this or that, we have the im- mediate consciousness of having been able, and of being able still, to will the contrary. It is in volition, and in the retinue of phenomena which sur- round it, that liberty more energetically appears, but it is not thereby ex- hausted. It is at rare and sublime moments in which liberty is as much greater as it appears less to the eyes of a superficial observation. I have often cited the example of d'Assas. D' Assas did not deliberate ; and for all that, was d'Assas less free, did he not act with entire liberty ? Has the saint who, after a long and painful exercise of virtue, has come to practise, as it were by nature, the acts of self-renunciation which are repugnant to human weakness ; has the saint, in order to have gone out from the contradictions and the anguish of this form of liberty which we called volition, fallen be- low it instead of being elevated above it; and is he nothing more than a blind and passive instrument of grace, as Luther and Calvin have inappro- priately wished to call it, by an excessive interpretation of the Augustinian doctrine ? No, freedom still remains ; and far from being annihilated, its liberty, in being purified, is elevated and ennobled ; from the human form of volition it has passed to the almost divine form of spontaneity. Sponta- neity is essentially free, although it may be accompanied with no deliberation, and although often, in the rapid motion of its inspired action, it escapes its own observation, and leaves scarcely a trace in the depths of consciousness. Let us transfer this exact psychology to theodicea, and we may recognize without hypothesis, that spontaneity is also especially the form of God's lib- erty. Yes, certainly, God is free ; for, among other proofs, it would be ab- surd that there should be less freedom in the first cause than in one of its effects, humanity ; God is free, but not with that liberty which is related to our double nature, and made to contend against passion and error, and pain- fully to engender virtue and our imperfect knowledge ; he is free, with a liberty that is related to his own divine nature, that is a liberty imlimited, in- finite, recognizing no obstacle. Between justice and injustice, between good and evil, between reason and its contrary, God cannot deliberate, and, con- sequently, cannot will after our manner. Can one conceive, in fact, that he could take what we call the bad part? This very supposition is impious. It is necessary to admit that when he has taken the contrary part, he has acted freely without doubt, but not arbitrarily, and with the consciousness of having been able to choose the other part. His nature, all-powerful, all-just, all-wise, is developed with that spontaneity which contains entire liberty, and excludes at once the efforts and the miseries of volition, and the me- chanical operation of necessity. Such is the principle and the true charac- ter of the divine action." 330 LECTUBE SIXTEENTH. is in him his very nature. If respect of rights is in us the very essence of justice and the sign of the dignity of our being, it is impossible that the perfect being should not know and respect the risfhts of the lowest beings, since it is he, moreover, who lias imparted to them those rights. In God resides a sovereign jus- tice, which renders to each one his due, not according to decep- tive appearances, but according to the truth of things. Finally, if man, that limited being, has the power of going out of himself, of forgetting his person, of loving another than himself, of de- voting himself to another's happiness, or, what is better, to the perfecting of another, should not the perfect being have, in an infinite degree, this disinterested tenderness, this charity, the su- preme virtue of the human person ? Yes, there is in God an infinite tenderness for his creatures : he at first manifested it in giving us the being that he might have withheld, and at all times it appears in the innumerable signs of his divine providence. Plato knew this love of God well, and expressed it in those great words, " Let us say that the cause which led the supreme or- dainer to produce and compose this universe is, that he was good ; and he who is good has no species of envy. Exempt from envy, he willed that all things should be, as much as possible, like himself."* Christianity went farther: according to the divine doctrine, God so loved men that he gave them his only Son. God is inexhaustible in his charity, as he is inexhaustible in his essence. It is impossible to give more to the creature ; he gives him every thing that he can receive without ceasing to be a crea- ture ; he gives him every thing, even himself, so far as the crea- ture is in him and he in the creature. At the same time nothing can be lost ; for being absolute being, he eternally expands and gives himself without being diminished. Infinite in power, infi- nite in charity, he bestows his love in exhaustless abundance upon the world, to teach us that the more we give the more we pos- sess. It is egoism, whose root is at the bottom of every heart, Timcemj p. 119, vol. xii. of our translation. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 331 even by the side of the sincerest chanty, that inculcates in us the error that we lose by self-devotion : it is egoism that makes us call devotion a sacrifice. If God is wholly just and wholly good, he can will nothing but what is good and just ; and, as he is all-powerful, every thing that he wills he can do, and consequently does do. The world is the work of God ; it is therefore perfectly made, perfectly adapted to its end. And nevertfieless, there is in the world a disorder that seems to accuse the justice and goodness of God. A principle that is attached to the very idea of the good, says to us that every moral agent deserves a reward when he does good, and a punishment when he does evil. This principle is universal and necessary : it is absolute. If this principle has not its application in this world, it must either be a lie, or this world is ordered ill. Now, it is a fact that the good is not always followed by hap- piness, nor evil always by unhappiness. Let us, in the first place, remark that if the fact exists, it is rare enough, and seems to present the character of an exception. Virtue is a struggle against passion ; this struggle, full of dignity, is also full of pain ; but, on one side, crime is con- demned to much harder pains ; on the other, those of virtue are of short duration ; they are a necessaiy and almost always be- neficent trial. Virtue has its pains, but the greatest happiness is still with it, as the greatest unhappiness is with crime ; and such is the case in small and great, in the secret of the soul, and on the theatre of fife, in the obscurest conditions and in the most conspicuous situations. Good and bad health are, after all, the greatest part of happi- ness or unhappiness. In this regard, compare temperance and its opposite, order and disorder, virtue and vice ; I mean a tem- perance truly temperate, and not an atrabilarious asceticism, a rational virtue, and not a fierce virtue. 332 LECTURE SIXTEENTH. The great physician Hufeland^ remarks that the benevolent sentiments are favorable to health, and that the malevolent sen- timents are opposed to it. Violent and sinful passions irritate, inflame, and carry trouble into the organization as well as the sou!; the benevolent affections preserve the measured and har- monious play of all the functions. Hufeland again remarks that the greatest longevities pertain to wise and well-regulated lives. Thus, for health, strength, and life, virtue is befter than vice : it is already much, it seems to me. I surely mean to speak of conscience only after health ; but, m fine, with the body, our most constant host is conscience. Peace or trouble of conscience decides internal happiness or un- happiness. At this point of view, compare again order and dis- order, virtue and vice. And without us, in society, to whom come esteem and con- tempt, consideration and infamy ? Certainly opinion has its mis- takes, but they are not long. In general, if charlatans, in- trip-uers, impostors of every kind, for some time surreptitiously get suffrages, it must be that a sustained honesty is the surest and the almost infallible means of reaching a good renown. I regret that upon this point time does not allow of any devel- opment. It would have afforded me delight, after having dis- tinguished virtue from happiness, to show them to you almost always united by the admirable law of merit and demerit. I should have been pleased to show you this beneficent law al- ready governing human destiny, and called to preside over it more exactly from day to day by the ever-increasing progress of lights in governments and peoples, by the perfecting of civil and judicial institutions. It would have been my wish to make pass into your minds and hearts the consoling conviction that, after all, justice is already in this world, and that the surest road to happiness is still that of virtue. De VArt deprolonger sa Vie^ etc. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 333 This was the opinion of Socrates and Plato ; and it is also that of Franklin, and I gather it from my personal experience and an attentive examination of human life. But I admit that there are exceptions ; and were there but one exception, it would be neces- sary to explain it. "* Suppose a man, young, beautiful, rich, amiable, and loved, who, placed between the scaffold and the betrayal of a sacred cause, voluntarily mounts the scaffold at twenty years of age. What do you make of this noble victim ? The law of merit and demerit seems here suspended. Do you dare blame virtue, or how in this world do you accord to it the recompense that it hag not sought, but is its due ? By careful search you will find more than one case analogous to that. The laws of this world are general ; they turn aside to suit no one : they pursue their course without regard to the merit or de- merit of any. If a man is born with a bad temperament, it is in virtue of certain obscure but undeviating physical laws, to which he is subject, like the animal and the plant, and he suffers during his whole life, although personally innocent. He is brought up in the midst of flames, epidemics, calamities that strike at hazard the good as well as the bad. Human justice condemns many that are innocent, it is true, but it absolves, in fault of proof, more than one who is culpable. Besides, it knows only certain derelictions. What faults, what basenesses occur in the dark, which do not receive merited chas- tisement! In like manner, what obscure devotions of which God is the sole witness and judge! Without doubt nothing escapes the eye of conscience, and the culpable soul cannot escape remorse. But remorse is not always in exact relation with the fault committed ; its vivacity may depend on a nature more or less delicate, on education and habit. In a word, if it is in general very true that the law of merit and demerit is ful- filled in this world, it is not fulfilled with mathematical rigor. What must we conclude from this ? That the world is ill- 33^ LECTURE SIXTEENTH. \nade? No. That cannot be, and is not. That cannot be, foi incontestably the world has a just and good author ; that is not, for, in fact, we see order reigning in the world ; and it would be absurd to misconceive the manifest order that almost every- where shines forth on account of a few phenomena that we can- not refer to order. The universe endures, therefore it is well made. The pessimism of Voltaire is still more opposed to the aggregate of facts than an absolute optimism. Between these two systematic extremes which facts deny, the human race places the hope of another life. It has found it very irrational to i eject a necessary law on account of some infractions ; it has, therefore, maintained the law ; and from infractions it has only concluded that they ought to be referred to the law, that there will be a reparation. Either this conclusion must be admitted, or the two great principles previously admitted, that God is just, and that the law of merit and demerit is an absolute law, must be rejected. Now, to reject these two principles is to totally overthrow all human belief. To maintain them, is implicitly to admit that actual life must be elsewhere terminated or continued. But is this continuation of the person possible ? After the dis- solution of the body, can any thing of us remain ? In truth, the moral person, which acts well or ill, which awaits the reward or punishment of its good or bad actions, is united to a body, — it lives with the body, makes use of it, and, in a certain measure, depends on it, but is not it.^ The body is composed of * On the spirituality of the soul, see all our writinffs. We will limit our- selves to two citations. 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 25, p. 359 : "It is impos- sible to know any phenomenon of consciousness, the phenomena of sensa- tion, or volition, or of intelligence, without instantly referring them to a sub- ject one and identical, which is the me; so we cannot know the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, of smell, of taste, etc., without judging that these are not phenomena in ap- pearance, but phenomena which belong to something real, which is solid, impenetrable, figured, colored, odorous, savory, etc. On the other hand, if GOD THE PEINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. ^35 parts, may decrease or increase ; is divisible, essentially divisible,* and even infinitely divisible. But that something that has con- sciousness of itself, that says, /, me^ that feels itself to be free and responsible, does it not also feel that there is in it no division, you did not know any of the phenomena of consciousness, you would never have the least idea of the subject of these phenomena ; if you did not know any of the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, etc., you would not have any idea of the subject of these phenomena : therefore the characters, whether of the phenomena of con- sciousness, or of exterior phenomena, are for you the only signs of the nature of the subjects of these phenomena. In examining the phenomena which fall under the senses, we find between them grave differences upon which it is useless here to insist, and which establish the distinction of primary qualities and of secondary qualities. In the first rank among the primary qualities is solidity, which is given to you in the sensation of resistance, and inevitably accompanied by form, etc. On the contrary, when you examine the phenomena of consciousness, you do not therein find this character of resistance, of solidity, of form, etc. ; you do not find that the phenomena of your consciousness have a figure, solidity, impenetrability, resistance ; with- out speaking of secondary qualities which are equally foreign to them, color, savor, sound, smell, etc. Now, as the subject is for us only the collection of the phenomena which reveal it to us, together with its own existence in so far as the subject of the inherence of these phenomena, it follows that, under phenomena marked with dissimilar characters and entirely foreign to each other, the human mind conceives dissimilar and foreign subjects. Thus as solidity and figure have nothing in common with sensation, will, and thought, as every solid is extended for us, and as we place it necessarily in space, while our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, are for us unex- tended, and while we cannot conceive them and place them in space, but only in time, the human mind concludes with perfect strictness that the subject of the exterior phenomena has the character of the latter, and that the subject of the phenomena of consciousness has the character of the for- mer ; that the one is solid and extended, and that the other is neither solid nor extended. Finally, as that which is solid and extended is divisible, and as that which is neither solid nor extended is indivisible, hence divisibility is attributed to the solid and extended subject, and indivisibility attributed to the subject which is neither extended nor solid. Who of us, in fact, does not believe himself an indivisible being, one and identical, the same yester- day, to-day, and to-morrow ? Well, the word body, the word matter, signi- fies nothing else than the subject of external phenomena, the most eminent of which are form, impenetrability, solidity, extension, divisibility. The word mind, the word soul, signifies nothing else than the subject of the phe- nomena of consciousness, thought, will, sensation, phenomena simple, un- extended, not solid, etc. Behold the whole idea of spirit, and the whole idea of matter ! See, therefore, all tl at must be done in order to bring back 33^ LECTURE SIXTEENTH. V ' »nade ? No. That cannot be, and is not. That cannot be, foi incontestably the world has a just and good author ; that is not, for, in fact, we see order reigning in the world ; and it would be absurd to misconceive the manifest order that almost every- where shines forth on account of a few phenomena that we can- not refer to order. The universe endures, therefore it is well made. The pessimism of Voltaire is still more opposed to the aggregate of facts than an absolute optimism. Between these two systematic extremes which facts deny, the human race places the hope of another life. It has found it very irrational to • eject a necessary law on account of some infractions ; it has, therefore, maintained the law ; and from infractions it has only concluded that they ought to be referred to the law, that there will be a reparation. Either this conclusion must be admitted, or the two great principles previously admitted, that God is just, and that the law of merit and demerit is an absolute law, must be rejected. Now, to reject these two principles is to totally overthrow all human belief. To maintain them, is implicitly to admit that actual life must be elsewhere terminated or continued. But is this continuation of the person possible ? After the dis- solution of the body, can any thing of us remain ? * In truth, the moral person, which acts well or ill, which awaits the reward or punishment of its good or bad actions, is united to a body, — it lives with the body, makes use of it, and, in a certain measure, depends on it, but is not it.* The body is composed of ' On the spirituality of the soul, see all our writings. We will limit our- selves to two citations. 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 25, p. 359 : "It is impos- sible to know any phenomenon of consciousness, the phenomena of sensa- tion, or volition, or of intelligence, without instantly referring them to a sub- ject one and identical, which is the me; so we cannot know the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, of smell, of taste, etc., without judging that these are not phenomena in ap- pearance, but phenomena which belong to something real, which is solid, impenetrable, figured, colored, odorous, savory, etc. On the other hand, if GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. ^35 parts, may decrease or increase ; is divisible, essentially divisibivf and even infinitely divisible. But that something that has con- sciousness of itself, that says, /, we, that feels itself to be free and responsible, does it not also feel that there is in it no division, you did not know any of the phenomena of consciousness, you would never have the least idea of the subject of these plicnomena ; if you did not know any of the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, etc., you would not have any idea of the subject of these phenomena : therefore the characters, whether of the phenomena of con- sciousness, or of exterior phenomena, are for you the only signs of the nature of the subjects of these phenomena. In examining the phenomena which fall under the senses, we find between them grave differences upon which it is useless here to insist, and which establish the distinction of primary qualities and of secondary qualities. In the first rank among the primary qualities is solidity, which is given to you in the sensation of resistance, and inevitably accompanied by form, etc. On the contrary, when you examine the phenomena of consciousness, you do not therein find this character of resistance, of solidity, of form, etc. ; you do not find that the phenomena of your consciousness have a figure, solidity, impenetrability, resistance ; with- out speaking of secondary qualities which are equally foreign to them, color, savor, sound, smell, etc. Now, as the subject is for us only the collection of the phenomena which reveal it to us, together with its own existence in so far as the subject of the inherence of these phenomena, it follows that, under phenomena marked with dissimilar characters and entirely foreign to each other, the human mind conceives dissimilar and foreign subjects. Thus as solidity and figure have nothing in common with sensation, will, and thought, as every solid is extended for us, and as we place it necessarily in space, while our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, are for us unex- tended, and while we cannot conceive them and place them in space, but only in time, the human mind concludes with perfect strictness that the subject of the exterior phenomena has the character of the latter, and that the subject of the phenomena of consciousness has the character of the for- mer ; that the one is solid and extended, and that the other is neither solid nor extended. Finally, as that which is solid and extended is divisible, and as that which is neither solid nor extended is indivisible, hence divisibility is attributed to the solid and extended subject, and indivisibility attributed to the subject which is neither extended nor solid. "Who of us, in fact, does not believe himself an indivisible being, one and identical, the same yester- day, to-day, and to-morrow ? Well, the word body, the word matter, signi- fies nothing else than the subject of external phenomena, the most eminent of which are form, impenetrability, solidity, extension, divisibility. The word mind, the word soul, signifies nothing else than the subject of the phe- nomena of consciousness, thought, will, sensation, phenomena simple, un- extended, not solid, etc. Behold the whole idea of spirit, and the whole idea of matter ! See, therefore, all tl at must be done in order to bring back 336 LECTUEE SIXTEENTH. even no possible division, that it is a being one and simple ? Is the me more or less me ? Is there a half of me, a quarter of me ? I cannot divide my person. It remains identical to itself under the diversity of the phenomena that manifest it. This identity, this indivisibility of the person, is its spirituality. Spirituality is, matter to spirit, and spirit to matter : it is necessary to pretend that sensa- tion, volition, thought, are reducible in the last analysis to solidity, exten- sion, figure, divisibility, etc., or that solidity, extension, figure, etc., are re- ducible to thought, volition, sensation." 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture 1, Locke. " Locke pretends that we cannot be certain hy the contemplation of our own ideas, that matter cannot think ; on the contrary, it is in the con- templation itself of our ideas that we clearly perceive that matter and thought are incompatible. What is thinking ? Is it not uniting a certain number of ideas under a certain unity ? The simplest judgment supposes several terms united in a subject, one and identical, which is me. This identical me is im- plied in every real act of knowledge. It has been demonstrated to satiety that comparison exacts an indivisible centre that comprises the different terms of the comparison. Do you take memory ? There is no memory pos- sible without the continuation of the same subject that refers to self the different modifications by which it has been successively affected. Finally, consciousness, that indispensable condition of intelligence, — is it not the sentiment of a single being ? This is the reason why each man cannot think without saying m£, without affirmmg that he is himself the identical and one subject of his thoughts. I am me and always me, as you are always yourself in the most different acts of your life. You are not more yourself to-day than you were yesterday, and you are not less yourself to-day than you were yesterday. This identity and this indivisible unity of the m£ inseparable from the least thought, is what is called its spirituality, in opposition to the evident and necessary characters of matter. By what, in fact, do you know matter? It is especially by form, by extension, by something solid that stops you, that resists you in different points of space. But is not a solid essentially divisible ? Take the most subtile fluids, — can you help conceiv- ing them as more or less susceptible of division? All thought has its different elements like matter, but in addition it has its unity in the think- ing subject, and the subject being taken away, which is one, the total phe- nomenon no longer exists. Far from that, the unknown subject to which we attach material phenomena is divisible, and divisible ad infinitum; it cannot cease to be divisible without ceasing to exist. Such are the ideas that we have, on the one side, of mind, on the other, of matter. Thought supposes a subject essentially one ; matter is infinitely divisible. What is the need of going farther? If any conclusion is legitimate, it is that which distinguishes thought from matter. God can indeed make them exist to- gether, and their co-existence is a certain fact, but he cannot confound them. God can unite thought and matter, be cannot make matter thought, nor what is extended simple." GOD THE PEINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 337 therefore, the very essence of the person. Belief in the spirit- uality of the soul is involved in the belief of this identity of the me, which no rational being has ever called in question. Accord- ingly, there is not the least hypothesis for aflSrming that the soul does not essentially differ from the body. Add that when we say the soul, we mean to say, and do say the person, which is not separated from the consciousness of the attributes that con- stitute it, thought and will. The being without consciousness is not a person. It is the person that is identical, one, simple. Its attributes, in developing it, do not divide it. Indivisible, it is in- dissoluble, and may be immortal. If, then, divine justice, in order to be exercised in regard to us, demands an immortal soul, it does not demand an impossible thing. The spirituality of the soul is the necessary foundation of immortality. The law of merit and demerit is the direct demonstration of this. The first proof is called the metaphysical proof, the second, the moral proof, which is the most celebrated, most popular, at once the most convincing and the most persuasive. What powerful motives are added to these two proofs to for- tify them in the heart ! The following, for example, is a pre- sumption of great value for any one that believes in the virtue of sentiment and instinct. Every thing has its end. This principle is as absolute as that which refers every event to a cause.^ Man has, therefore, an end. This end is revealed in all his thoughts, in all his ways, in all his sentiments, in all his life. Whatever he does, whatever he feels, whatever he thinks, he thinks upon the infinite, loves the infinite, tends to the infinite.* This need of the infinite is the main- spring of scientific curiosity, the principle of all discoveries. Love also stops and rests only there. On the route it may experience lively joys ; but a secret bitterness that is mingled with them soon makes it feel their insuflSciency and emptiness. Often, while ignorant of its true object, it asks whence comes that fStal disen- .=v- * See 1st part, lecture 1. See lecture 5, Mysticism, 15 338 LECTURE SIXTEENTH. cliantment by which all its successes, all its pleasures are succes- sively extinguished. If it knew how to read itself, it would re- cognize that if nothing here below satisfies it, it is because its ob- ject is more elevated, because the true bourne after which it as- pires is infinite perfection. Finally, like thought and love, human activity is without limits. Who can say where it shall stop ? Behold this earth almost known. Soon another world will be necessary for us. Man is journeying towards the infinite, which is always receding before him, which he always pursues. He conceives it, he feels it, he bears it, thus to speak, in himself,— how should his end be elsewhere ? Hence that unconquerable 'N instinct of immortality, that universal hope of another life to I which all worships, all poesies, all traditions bear witness. We ( tend to the infinite with all our powers ; death comes to interrupt the destiny that seeks its goal, and overtakes it unfinished. It is, therefore, likely that there is something after death, since at death nothing in us is terminated. Look at the flower that to- morrow will not be. To-day, at least, it is entirely developed : we can conceive nothing more beautiful of its kind ; it has at- tained its perfection. My perfection, my moral perfection, that of which I have the clearest idea and the most invincible need, for which I feel that I am born,— in vain I call for it, in vain I labor for it ; it escapes me, and leaves me only hope. Shall this hope be deceived? All beings attain their end; should man alone not attain his ? Should the greatest of creatures be the most ill- treated ? But a being that should remain incomplete and un- finished, that should not attain the end which all his instincts proclaim foi him, w^ould be a monster in the eternal order,— a problem mu .h more difficult to solve than the difficulties that have been raised against the immortality of the soul. In our opinion, this tendency of all the desires and all the powers of the soul towards the infinite, elucidated by the principle of final causes, is a serious and important confirmation of the moral proof and the metaphysical proof of another life. When we have collected all the arguments that authorize be- GOD THE PEmCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 339 lief in another life, and when we have thus arrived at a satisfying demonstration, there remains an obstacle to be overcome. Im- agination cannot contemplate without fright that unknown which is called death. The greatest philosopher in the world, says Pas- cal, on a plank wider than it is necessary in order to go without danger from one side of an abyss to the other, cannot think with- out trembling on the abyss that is beneath him. It is not reason, it is imagmation that frightens him ; it is also imagination that in great part causes that remnant of doubt, that trouble, that secret anxiety which the firmest faith cannot always succeed in overcoming in the presence of death. The religious man expe- riences this terror, but he knows whence it comes, and he sur- mounts it by attaching himself to the solid hopes furnished him by reason and the heart. Imagination is a child that must be educated, by putting it under the discipline and government of better faculties ; it must be accustomed to go to intelligence for aid instead of troubling intelligence with its phantoms. Let us acknowledge that there is a terrible step to be taken when we meet death. Nature trembles when face to face with the un- known eternity. It is wise to present ourselves there with all our forces united, — reason and the heart lendins: each other mutual support, the imagination being subdued or charmed. Let us continually repeat that, in death as in life, the soul is sure to find God, and that with God all is just, all is good.* * 4th Series, vol. iii., Santa-Rosa : " After all, the existence of a divine Providence is, to my eyes, a truth clearer than all lights, more certain than all mathematics. Yee, there is a God, a God who is a true intelligence, who consequently has a consciousness of himself, who has made and ordered every thing with weight and measure, whose works are excellent, whose ends are adorable, even when they are veiled from our feeble eyes. This world has a perfect author, perfectly wise and good. Man is not an orphan ; he has a father in heaven. What will this father do with his child when he returns to him ? Nothing but what is good. Whatever happens, all will bo well. Every thing that he has done has been done well ; every thing that he shall do, I accept beforehand, and bless. Yes, such is my unalterable faith, and this faith is my support, my refuge, my consolation, my solace in this fearful moment." 340 LECTURE SIXTEENTH. We now know what God truly is. We have already seen two of his adorable attributes,— truth and beauty. The most august attribute is revealed to us,— holiness. God is the holy of holies, as the author of the moral law and the good, as the principle of liberty, justice, and charity, as the dispenser of penalty and re- ward. Such a God is not an abstract God, but an intelligent and free person, who has made us in his own image, from whom we hold the law itself that presides over our destiny, whose judg- ments we await. It is his love that inspires us in our acts of charity ; it is his justice that governs our justice that of our so- cieties and our laws. If we do not continually remind ourselves that he is infinite, we degrade his nature ; but he would be for us as if he were not, if his infinite essence had no forms that per- tain to us, the proper forms of our reason and our soul. By thinking upon such a being, man feels a sentiment that is par excellence the religious sentiment. All the beings with whom we are in relation awaken in us diflerent sentiments, according to the qualities that we perceive in them ; and should he who pos- sesses all perfections excite in us no particular sentiment? When we think upon the infinite essence of God, when we are pene- trated with his omnipotence, when we are reminded that the moral law expresses his will, that he attaches to the fulfilment and the violation of this law recompenses and penalties which he dispenses with an inflexible justice, we cannot guard ourselves against an emotion of respect and fear at the idea of such a gran- deur. Then, if we come to consider that this all-powerful being has indeed wished to create us, us of whom he has no need, that in creating us he has loaded us with benefits, that he has given us this admirable universe for enjoying its ever-new beauties, so- ciety for ennobling our life in that of our fellow-men, reason for thinking, the heart for loving, liberty for acting ; without disap- pearing, respect and fear are tinged with a sweeter sentiment, that of love. Love, when it is applied to feeble and limited beings, inspires us with a desire to do good to them ; but in itself it proposes to itself no advantage from the person loved ; we love GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 341 a beautiful or good object, because it is beautiful or good, with- out at first regarding whether this love may be useful to its object and ourselves. For a still stronger reason, love, when it ascends to God, is a pure homage rendered to his perfections ; it is the natural overflow of the soul towards a being infinitely lovable. Respect and love compose adoration. True adoration does not exist without possessing both of these sentiments. If you consider only the all-powerful God, master of heaven and tarth, author and avenger of justice, you crush man beneath the weight of the grandeur of God and his own feebleness, you condemn him to a continual trembling in the uncertainty of God's judgments, you make him hate the world, life, and himself, for every thing is full of misery. Towards this extreme, Port-Royal inclines. Read the Fensees de Pascal} In his great humility, Pascal forgets two things, — the dignity of man and the love of God. On the other hand, if you see only the good God and the indulgent father, you incline to a chimerical mysticism. By substituting love for fear, little by little with fear, we run the risk of losing respect. God is no more a master, he is no more even a father ; for the idea of a father still to a certain point involves that of a respectful fear ; he is no more any thing but a friend, sometimes even a lover. True adoration does not separate love and respect; it is respect animated by love. Adoration is a universal sentiment. It difiers in degrees ac- cording to different natures ; it takes the most different forms ; it is often even ignorant of itself; sometimes it is revealed by an exclamation springing from the heart, in the midst of the great scenes of nature and life, sometimes it silently rises in the mute and penetrated soul ; it may err in its expressions, even in its object ; but at bottom it is always the same. It is a spontaneous, iriesistible emotion of the soul ; and when reason is applied to it, it is declared just and legitimate. What, in fact, is more just » See our digcussion on the Penaks ds Pascaly vol. i. of the 4th Series. 13 342 LECTURE SIXTEENTH. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 34:3 than to fear the judgments of him who is holiness itself, who knows our actions and our intentions, and will judge them ac- cording to the highest justice ? What, too, is more just than to love perfect goodness and the source of all love ? Adoration is at first a natural sentiment ; reason makes it a duty. Adoration confined to the sanctuary of the soul is what is called internal worship — the necessary principle of all public worships. Public worship is no more an arbitrary instituton than society and government, language and arts. All these things have their roots in human nature. Adoration abandoned to itself, would easily degenerate into dreams and ecstasy, or would be dissipated in the rush of affairs and the necessities of every day. The more energetic it is, the more it tends to express itself outwardly in acts that realize it, to take a sensible, precise, and regular form, which, by a proper reaction on the sentiment that produced it, awakens it when it slumbei-s, sustains it when it languishes, and also protects it against extravagances of every kind to which it might give birth in so many feeble or unbridled imaginations. Philosophy, then, lays the natural foundation of public worship in the internal worship of adoration. Having arrived at that point, it stops, equally careful not to betray its rights and not to go beyond them, to run over, in its whole extent and to its farthest limit, the domain of natural reason, as well as not to usurp a for- eign domain. But philosophy does not think of trespassing on the ground of theology ; it wishes to remain faithful to itself, and also to follow its true mission, which is to love and favor every thing that tends to elevate man, since it heartily applauds the awakening of reli- gious and Christian sentiment in all noble souls, after the ravages that have been made on every hand, for more than a century, by a false and sad philosophy. What, in fact, would not have been the joy of a Socrates and a Plato if they had found the human race in the arms of Christianity ! How happy would Plato — who was so evidently embarrassed between his beautiful doctrines and the religion of his times, who managed so carefully with that religion even when he avoided it, who was forced to take from it the best possible part, in order to aid a favorable interpretation of his doctrine— have been, if he had had to do with a religion which presents to man, as at once its author and its model, the sublime and mild Crucified, of whom he had an extraordinary presenti- ment, whom he almost described in the person of a just man dying on the cross ;* a religion which came to announce, or at least to consecrate and expand the idea of the unity of God and that of the unity of the human race ; which proclaims the equality of all souls before the divine law, which thereby has prepared ana maintains civil equality ; which prescribes charity still more than justice, which teaches man that he does not live by bread alone, that he is not wholly contained in his senses and his body, that he has a soul, a free soul, whose value is infinite, above the value of all worids, that life is a trial, that its true object is not pleasure, fortune, rank, none of those things that do not pertain to our real destiny, and are often more dangerous than useful, but is that alone which is always in our power, in all situations and all con- ditions, from end to end of the earth, to wit, the improvement of the soul by itself, in the holy hope of becoming from day to day less unworthy of the regard of the Father of men, of the examples given by him, and of his promises. If the greatest moralist that ever lived could have seen these admirable teachings, which in germ were already at the foundation of his spirit, of which more than one trait can be found in his works, if he had seen them consecrated, maintained, continually recalled to the heart and imagination of man by sublime and touching institutions, what would have been his tender and grateful sympathy for such a re- ligion ! If he had come in our own times, in that age given up to revolutions, in which the best souls were eariy infected by the breath 6f skepticism, in default of the faith of an Augustine, of an Anselm, of a Thomas, of a Bossuet, he would have had, we doubt ' See the eDd of the first book of the Bepuhlic, vol. ix. of our translation. 4 344 LECTURE SIXTEENTH. not, the sentiments at least of a Montesquieu,* of a Turgot,* of g Franklin,* and very far from putting the Christian religion and a good philosophy at war with each other, he would have been forced to unite them, to elucidate and fortify them by each other. That great mind and that great heart, which dictated to him the Fhedon, the Gorgias^ the Republic^ would also have taught him that such books are made for a few sages, that there is needed for the human race a philosophy at once similar and different, that this philosophy is a religion, and that this desirable and ne- cessary religion is the Gospel. We do not hesitate to say that, without religion, philosophy, reduced to what it can laboriously draw from perfected natural reason, addresses itself to a very small number, and runs the risk of remaining without much influ- ence on manners and life; and that, without philosophy, the purest religion is no security against many superstitions, which little by little bring all the rest, and for that reason it may see the best minds escaping its influence, as was the case in the eighteenth century. The alliance between true religion and true philosophy is, then, at once natural and necessary ; natural by the common basis of the truths which they acknowledge ; necessary for the better service of humanity. Philosophy and religion differ only in the forms that distinguish, without separating them. Another auditory, other forms, and another language. When St. Augus- tine speaks to all the faithful in the church of Hippone, do not seek in him the subtile and profound metaphysician who com- bated the Academicians with their own arms, who supports himself on the Platonic theory of ideas, in order to explain the creation. Bossuet, in the treatise De la Connaissance de JDieu et * E»prit des Lois, passim. ' WorJcs of Turgot, vol. ii., Discours en Sorbonnesurles Avantages queVeto hlissement du Ckristianism a procures au Genre Humain, etc. ' In the Correspondence, the letter to Dr. Stiles, March 9, 1790, written by Franklin a few months before his death : " I am convinced that the moral and religious system which Jesus Christ has transmitted to us is the best that the world has seen or can see." — We here re-translate, not having the works of Franklin immediately at hand. GOD THE PEINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD. 345 Soi-meme, is no longer, and at the same time he is always, the author of the Sermons^ of the Elevations^ and the incomparable Catechisme de Meaux. To separate religion and philosophy has always been, on one side or the other, the pretension of small, exclusive, and fanatical minds ; the duty, more imperative now than ever, of whomsoever has for either a serious and enlightened love, is to bring together and unite, instead of dividing and wast- ing the powers of the mind and the soul, in the interest of the common cause and the great object which the Christian religion and philosophy pursue, each in its own way, — I mean the moral grandeur of humanity.* ^ We have not ceased to claim, to earnestly call for, the alliance between Christianity and philosophy, as well as the alliance between the monarchy and liberty. Sec particularly 8d Series, vol. iv., PltHosophie Oontemporaine, preface of the second edition; 4th Series, vol. L, Pascal, 1st and 2d preface, passim; 5th Series, vol. ii., Discours a la CJiamlyre des Paris pour le Defence de V Universite etdela Philoscyphi^, We everywhere profess the most tender veneration for Christianity, — we have only repelled the servitude of philoso- phy, with Descartes, and the most illustrious doctors of ancient and modem times, from St. Augustine and St. Thomas, to the Cardinal de la Lucerne and the Bishop of Herraopolis. Moreover, we love to think that those quar- rels, originating in other times from the deplorable strife between the clergy and the University, have not survived it, and that now all sincere friends of religion and philosophy will give each other the hand, and will work in concert to encourage desponding souls and lift up burdened characters. 15* RESUME OF DOCTRINK. 347 LECTURE XYII. EESTJME OF DOCTEINE. Eeview of the doctrine contained in these lectures, and the three orders of facts on which this doctrine rests, with the relation of each one of them to the modern school that has recognized and developed it, but almost always exaggerated it. — Experience and empiricism. — Keason and ideal- ism. — Sentiment and mysticism. — Theodicea. Defects of different known systems. — The process that conducts to true theodicoa, and the character of certainty and reality that this process gives to it. Having arrived at the limit of this course, we have a final task to perform, — it is necessary to recall its general spirit and most important results. From the first lecture, I have signalized to you the spirit that should animate this instruction, — a spirit of free inquiry, recog- nizing with joy the truth wherever found, profiting by all the systems that the eighteenth century has bequeathed to our times, but confining itself to none of them. The eighteenth century has left to us as an inheritance three great schools which still endure — the English and French school, whose chief is Locke, among whose most accredited representa- tives are Condillac, Helvetius, and Saint-Lambert; the Scotch school, with so many celebrated names, Hutcheson, Smith, Reid, Beattie, Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart;^ the German school, or rather school of Kant, for, of all the philosophers beyond the Rhine, the philosopher of Koenigsberg is almost the only one who belongs to history. Kant died at the beginning of the nine- Still living in 1818, died in 1828. teenth century ;* the ashes of his most illustrious disciple, Fichte,* are scarcely cold. The other renowned philosophers of Germany still live,' and escape our valuation. But this is only an ethnographical enumeration of the schools of the eighteenth century. It is above all necessary to consider them in their characters, analogous or opposite. The Anglo- French school particularly represents empiricism and sensualism, that is to say, an almost exclusive importance attributed in all parts of human knowledge to experience in general, and especially to sensible experience. The Scotch school and the German school represent a more or less developed Dpiritualism. Finally, there are philosophers, for example, Hutcheson, Smith, and others, who, mistrusting the senses and reason, give the supremacy to sentiment. Such are the philosophic schools in the presence of which the nineteenth century is placed. We are compelled to avow, that none of these, to our eyes, contains the entire truth. It has been demonstrated that a con- siderable part of knowledge escapes sensation, and we think that sentiment is a basis neither sufficiently firm, nor sufficiently broad, to support all human science. We are, therefore, rather the adversary than the partisan of the school of Locke and Con- dillac, and of that of Hutcheson and Smith. Are we on that ac- count the disciple of Reid and Kant ? Yes, certainly, we declare our preference for the direction impressed upon philosophy by these two great men. We regard Reid as common sense itself, and we believe that we thus eulogize him in a manner that would touch him most. Common sense is to us the only legitimate point of departure, and the constant and inviolable rule of science. Reid never errs ; his method is true, his general principles are incontestable, but we will willingly say to this irreproachable ' In 1804. a Died, 1814. ' This was said in Hi 8. Since then, Jacobi, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, with so many others, have disappeared. Schelling alone survives the ruina of the German philosophy. 348 LECTURE SVENTEENTII. Bi:SUME OF DOCTRINE. 349 1 * r genius, — Sa'pere aude. Kant is far from being as sure a guide as Reid. Both excel in analysis ; but Reid stops there, and Kant builds upon analysis a system irreconcilable with it. He elevates reason above sensation and sentiment ; he shows with great skill how reason produces by itself, and by the laws attached to its exercise, nearly all human knowledge ; there is only one misfor- tune, which is that all this fine edifice is destitute of reality. Dogmatical in analysis, Kant is skeptical in his conclusions. His skepticism is the most learned, most moral, that ever existed ; but, in fine, it is always skepticism. This is saying plainly enough that we are far from belonging to the school of the philosopher of Kcenigsberg. In general, in the history of philosophy, we are in favor of sys- tems that are themselves in favor of reason. Accordingly, in an- tiquity, we side with Plato against his adversaries ; among the moderns, with Descartes against Locke, with Reid against Hume, with Kant against both Condillac and Smith. But while we acknowledge reason as a power superior to sensation and senti- ment, as being, par excellence^ the faculty of every kind of knowl- edge, the faculty of the true, the faculty of the beautiful, the faculty of the good, we are persuaded that reason cannot be de- veloped without conditions that are foreign to it, cannot suffice for the government of man without the aid of another power : that power which is not reason, which reason cannot do without, is sentiment ; those conditions, without which reason cannot be developed, are the senses. It is seen what for us is the import- ance of sensation and sentiment : how, consequently, it is impos- sible for us absolutely to condemn either the philosophy of sensa- tion, or, much more, that of sentiment. Such are the very simple foundations of our eclecticism. It is not in us the fruit of a desire for innovation, and for making our- self a place apart among the historians of philosophy ; no, it is philosophy itself that imposes on us our historical views. Jt is not our fault if God has made the human soul larger than all systems, and we also aver that we are also much rejoiced that all systems are not absurd. Without giving the lie to the most cer- tain facts signalized and established by ourself, it was indeed necessary, on finding them scattered in the history of philosophy, to recognize and respect them, and if the history of philosophy, thus considered, no longer appeared a mass of senseless systems a chaos, without light, and without issue ; if, on the contrary, il became, in some sort, a living philosophy, that was, it should seem, a progress on which one might felicitate himself, one of the most fortunate conquests of the nineteenth century, the very tri- umphing of the philosophic spirit We have, therefore, no doubt in regard to the excellence of the enterprise; the whole question for us is in the execution. Let us see, let us compare what we have done with what we have wished to do. Let us ask, in the first place, whether we have been just to- wards that great philosophy represented in antiquity by Aristotle, whose best model among the modems is the wise author of the Essay on the Human Understanding. fhere is in the philosophy of sensation what is true and what is false. The false is the pretension of explaining all human knowledge by the acquisitions of the senses ; this pretension is the system itself; we reject it, and the system with it^ The true is that sensibility, considered in its external and visible organs, and in its internal organs, the invisible seats of the vital func- tions, is the indispensable condition of the development of all our faculties, not only of the faculties that evidently pertain to sensibihty, but of those that seem to be most remote from it. This true side of sensualism we have everywhere recognized and elucidated in metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and theodicea. For us, theodicea, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, rest on psy- chology, and the first principle of our psychology is that the condition of all exercise of mind and soul is an impression made on our organs, and a movement of the vital functions. Man is not a pure spirit ; h 3 has a body which is for the spirit sometimes an obstacle, sometimes a means, always an inseparable 1 350 LECTURE SEVENTEENTH. companion. The senses are not, as Plato and Malebranche have too often said, a prison for the soul, but much rather windows looking out upon nature, through which the soul communicates with the universe. There is an entire part of Locke's polemic against the theories of innate ideas that is to our eyes perfectlv true. We are the first to invoke experience in philosophy. Ex- perience saves philosophy from hypothesis, from abstraction, from the exclusively deductive method, that is to say, from the geometrical method. It is on account of having abandoned the solid ground of experience, that Spinoza, attaching himself to certain sides of Cartesianism,* and closing his eyes to all the others, forgetting its method, its essential character, and its most certain principles, reared a hypothetical system, or made from an arbitrary definition spring with the last degree of rigor a whole series of deductions, which have nothing to do with reality. It is also on account of having exchanged experience for a sys- tematic analysis, that Condillac, an unfaithful disciple of Locke, undertook to draw from a single fact, and from an ill-observed fact, all knowledge, by the aid of a series of verbal transforma- tions, whose last result is a nominalism, like that of the later scholastics. Experience does not contain all science, but it fur- nishes the conditions of all science. Space is nothing for us with- out visible and tangible bodies that occupy it, time is nothing without the succession of events, cause without its effects^,, sub- stance without its modes, law without the phenomena that it rules.* Reason would reveal to us no universal and necessary truth, if consciousness and the senses did not suggest to us par- ticular and contingent notions. In aesthetics, while severely dis- tinguishing between the beautiful and the agreeable, we have shown that the agreeable is the constant accompaniment of the beautiful,* and that if art has for its supreme law the expression of the ideal, .t must express it under an animated and living form * Fragments de Philosophie Cartesienxe, p. 429 : De9 Rapports du Carte- nenisme et du Spinozisme. • Part 1st, lectures 1 and 2. ' Part 2d. KESUME OF DOCTRINE. 351 which puts it in relation with our senses, with our imagination, above all, with our heart. In ethics, if we have placed Kant and stoicism far above epicureanism and Helvetius, we have guarded ourselves against an insensibility and an asceticism which are con- trary to human nature. We have given to reason neither the duty nor the right to smother the natural passions, but to rule them ;\ we have not wished to wrest from the soul the instinct of happmess, without "which life would not be supportable for a day, nor society for an hour ; we have proposed to enlighten this instinct, to show it the concealed but real harmony which it sus- tains with virtue, and to open to it infinite prospects.* With these empirical elements, idealism is guarded from that mystical infatuation which, little by little, gains and seizes it when it is wholly alone, and brings it into discredit with sound and severe minds. In our works — and why should we not say it ? — we have often presented the thought of Locke, whom we regard as one of the best and most sensible men that ever lived. He is amonsr those secret and illustrious advisers with whom we support our weakness. More than one happy thought we owe to him ; and we often ask ourself whether investigations directed with the circumspect method which we try to carry into ours, would not have been accepted by his sincerity and wisdom. Locke is for us the true representative, the most original, and al- together the most temperate of the empirical school Tied to a system, he still preserves a rare spirit of liberty, — under the name of reflection he admits another source of knowledge than sensation ; and this concession to common sense is very impor- ttint. Condillac, by rejecting this concession, carried to extremes and spoiled the doctrine of Locke, and made of it a narrow, ex- clusive, entirely false system, — sensualism, to speak properly. Condillac works upon chimeras reduced to signs, with which he sports at his ease. We seek in vain in his writings, especially in the last, some trace of human nature. One truly believes him- PartSd. 352 LECTURE SEVENTEENTH. RESUME OF DOCTRINE. 353 self to be in the realm of shades, ^er inanla regna} The Essay on the Human Understanding -produces the opposite impression. Locke is a disciple of Descartes, whom the excesses of Male- branche have thrown to an opposite excess : he is one of the founders of psychology, he is one of the finest and most pro- found connoisseurs of human nature, and his doctrine, somewhat unsteady but always moderate, is worthy of having a place in a true eclecticism.* By the side of the philosophy of Locke, there is one much greater, which it is important to preserve from all exaggeration, in order to maintain it in all its height. Founded in antiquity by Socrates, constituted by Plato, renewed by Descartes, ! idealism embraces, among the moderns, men of the highest renown. It speaks to man in the name of what is noblest in man. It de- mands the rights of reason ; it establishes in science, in art, and in ethics fixed and invariable principles, and from this imperfect existence it elevates us towards another world, the world of the eternal, of the infinite, of the absolute. This great philosophy has all our preferences, and we shall not be accused of having given it too little place in these lectures. In the eighteenth century it was especially represented in differ- ent degrees by Reid and Kant. We wholly accept Reid, with the exception of his historical views, which are too insufficient, and often mixed with error.^ There are two parts in Kant, — the analytical part, and the dialectical part, as he calls them.'* We admit the one and reject the other. In this whole course we have borrowed much from the Critique of Speculative Reason, the Critique of Judgment y and the Critique of Practical Reason. These three works are, in our eyes, admirable monuments of ji •i * On Condillac, 1st Series, vol. i.j passintj and particularly vol. iii., lectures 2 and 8. « We have never spoken of Locke except with sincere respect, even while combating him. See 1st Series, vol. i., course of 1817, DUcours dP Q-jt'oerture^ vol. ii. lecture 1, and especially 2d Series, voL iii., passim. " See Ist Series, vol. iv., lectures on Reid. * Ihid.^ vol. V. philosophic genius, — they are filled with treasures of observation and analysis.* With Reid and Kant, we recognize reason as the faculty of the true, the beautiful, and the good. It is to its proper virtue that we directly refer knowledge in its humblest and in its most elevated part. All the systematic pretensions of sensualism are broken against the manifest reality of universal and necessary truths which are incontestably in our mind. At each instant, whether we know it or not, we bear universal and necessary judgments. In the simplest propositions is enveloped the prin- ciple of substance and being. We cannot take a step in life with- out concluding from an event in the existence of its cause. These principles are absolutely true, they are true everywhere and always. Now, experience apprises us of what happens here and there, to-day or yesterday ; but of what happens everywhere and always, especially of what cannot but happen', how can it apprise us, since it is itself always limited to time and space ? There are, then, in man principles superior to experience. Such principles can alone give a firm basis to science. Phe- nomena are the objects of science only so far as they reveal some- thing superior to themselves, that is to say, laws. Natural his- tory does not study such or such an individual, but the generic type that every individual bears in itself, that alone remains un- changeable, when the individuals pass away and vanish. If there is in us no other faculty of knowing than sensation, we never know aught but what is passing in things, and that, too, we know only with the most uncertain knowledge, since sensi- * For more than twenty years we have thought of translating and pub- lishing the three Critiques, joining to them a selection from the smaller pro- ductions of Kant. Time has been wanting to us for the completion of our design ; but a young and skilful professor of philosophy, a graduate of the Normal School, has been willing to supply our place, and to undertake to give to the French public a faithful and intelligent version of the greatest thinker of the eighteenth century. M. Barni has worthily commenced the useful and difficult enterprise which we have remitted to his zeal, and pur- sues it with courage and talent. 354 LECTURE SEVENTEENTH. bility will be its only measure, which is so variable in itself and so different in different individuals. Each of us will have his own science, a science contradictory and fragile, which one mo- ment produces and another destroys, false as well as true, since what is true for me is false for you, and will even be false for me in a little while. Such are science and truth in the doctrine of sensation. On the contrary, necessary and immutable prin- ciples found a science necessary and immutable as themselves,— the truth which they gave us is neither mine nor yours, neither the truth of to-day, nor that of to-morrow, but truth in itself. Tlie same spirit transferred to aesthetics has enabled us to seize the beautiful by the side of the agreeable, and, above differ- ent and imperfect beauties which nature offers to us, to seize an ideal beauty, one and perfect, without a model in nature, and the only model worthy of genius. In ethics we have shown that there is an essential distinction between good and evil ; that the idea of the good is an idea just as absolute as the idea of the beautiful and that of the true ; that the good is a universal and necessary truth, marked with the particular character that it ought to be practised. By the side of interest, which is the law of sensibility, reason has made us recognize the law of duty, which a free being can alone, fulfil. From these ethics has sprung a generous political doctrine, giving to right a sure foundation in the respect due to the person, estab- lishing true liberty, and true equality, and calling for institutions, protective of both, which do not rest on the mobile and arbitrary will of the legislator, whether people or^monarch, but on the na- ture of things, on truth and justice. From empiricism Ave have retained the maxim which gives empiricism its whole force— that the conditions of science, of art, of ethics, are in experience, and often in sensible experience. But we profess at the same time this other maxim, that the foundation of science is absolute truth, that the direct foundation of art is absolute beauty, that the direct foundation of ethics and politics is the good, is duty, is right, and that what reveals to us rI:SUME of DOCTRINE. 355 these absolute ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good, is reason. The foundation of our doctrine is, therefore, idealism rightly tempered by empiricism. But what would be the use of having restored to reason the power of elevating itself to absolute principles, placed above ex- perience, although experience furnishes their external conditions, if, to adopt the language of Kant,* these principles have no ob- jective value ? What good could result from having determined with a precision until then unknown the respective domains of experience and reason, if, wholly superior as it is to the senses and experience, reason is captive in their inclosure, and we know nothing beyond with certainty ? Thereby, then, we return by a detour to skepticism to which sensualism conducts us directly, and at less expense. To say that there is no principle of causal- ity, or to say that this principle has no force out of the subject that possesses it, — is it not saying the same thing ? Kant avows that man has no right to affirm that there are out of him real causes, time, or space, or that he himself has a spiritual find free soul. This acknowledgment would perfectly satisfy Hume ; it would be of very little importance to him that the reason of man, according to Kant, might conceive, and even could not but con- ceive, the ideas of cause, time, space, liberty, spirit, provided these ideas are applied to nothing real. I see therein, at most, only a torment for human reason, at once so poor and so rich, so full and so void. A third doctrine, finding sensation insufficient, and also discon- tented with reason, which it confounds with reasoning, thinks to approach common sense by making science, art, and ethics rest on sentiment. It would have us confide ourselves to the instinct of the heart, to that instinct, nobler than sensation, and more subtle than reasoning. Is it not the heart, in fact, that feels the beau- tiful and the good ? Is it not the heart that, in all the great cir- cumstances of life, when passion and sophism obscure to our eyes * Part 1st, Lecture 8. 356 LECTUEE SEVENTEENTH. the holy idea of duty and virtue, makes it shine forth with an irresistible light, and, at the same time, warms us, animates us, and gives us the courage to practise it ? We also have recognized that admirable phenomenon which is called sentiment ; we even believe that here wUl be found a more precise and more complete analysis of it than in the writmgs where sentiment reigns alone. Yes, there is an exquisite pleas- ure attached to the contemplation of the truth, to the reproduc- tion of the beautiful, to the practice of the good ; there is m us an innate love for all these things ; and when great rigor is not aimed at, it may very well be said that it is the heart which dis- cerns truth, that the heart is and ought to be the light and guide of our life. To the eyes of an unpractised analysis, reason in its natural and spontaneous exercise is confounded with sentiment by a multitude of resemblances.^ Sentiment is intimately attached to reason ; it is its sensible form. At the foundation of sentiment is reason, which communicates to it its authority, whilst senti- ment lends to reason its charm and power. Is not the widest spread and the most touching proof of the existence of God that spontaneous impulse of the heart which, in the consciousness of our miseries, and at the sight of the imperfections of our race which press upon our attention, irresistibly suggests to us the confused idea of an infinite and perfect being, fills us, at this idea, with an inexpressible emotion, moistens our eyes with teai-s, or even prostrates us on our knees before him whom the heart reveals to us, even when the reason refuses to believe in him ? But look more closely, and 'you will see that this incredulous reason is reasoning supported by principles whose bearing is in- sufficient ; you will see that what reveals the infinite and perfect being is precisely reason itself;^ and that, in turn, it is this rev- * Lecture 5, Mysticism. ^ « .^ ' ir a This pretended proof of sentiment is. in fact, the Cartesian proof itself. See lectures 4 and 16. RESUME OF DOCTRINE. 357 elation of the infinite by reason, which, passing into sentiment, produces the emotion and the inspiration that we have mentioned. May heaven grant that we shall n^ver reject the aid of sentiment ! On the contrary, we invoke it both for others and ourself. Here we are with the people, or rather we are the people. It is to the light of the heart, which is borrowed from that of reason, but re- flects it more vividly in the depths of the soul, that we confide ourselves, in order to preserve all great truths in the soul of the ignorant, and even to save them in the mind of the philosopher from, the aberrations or refinements of an ambitious philosophy. !We think, with Quintilian and Vauvenargues, that the nobility of sentiment makes the nobility of thought. Enthusiasm is the principle of great works as well as of great actions. Without the love of the beautiful, the artist will produce only works that are perhaps regular but frigid, that will possibly please the geometri- cian, but not the man of taste. In order to communicate life to ' the canvas, to the marble, to speech, it must be born in one's self. It is the heart mingled with logic that makes true eloquence ; it\ is the heart mingled with imagination that makes great poetry. Think of Homer, of Corneille, of Bossuet, — their most character- istic trait is pathos, and pathos is a cry of the soul. But it is especially in ethics that sentiment shines forth. Sentiment, as we have already said, is as it were a divine grace that aids us in the fulfilment of the serious and austere law of duty. How often does it happen that in delicate, complicated, diflScult situations, we know not how to ascertain wherein is the true, wherein is the good ! Sentiment comes to the aid of reasoning which wavers : it speaks, and all uncertainties are dissipated. In listening to its inspirations, we may act imprudently, but we rarely act ill : the voice of the heart is the voice of God.\ We, therefore, give a prominent place to this noble element of human nature. We believe that man is quite as great by heart as by reason. We have a high regard for the generous writers who, in the looseness of principles and manners in the eighteenth century, opposed the baseness of calculation and interest with the 358 LECTURE SEVENTEENTH. beauty of sentiment. We are with Hutclieson against Hobbes, with Rousseau against Helvetius, with the author of Woldemar' against the ethics of egoism or those of the schools. We borrow , from them what truth they have, we leave their useless or dan- gerous exaggerations. Sentiment must be joined to reason ; but reason must not be replaced by sentiment. In the first place, it is contrary to facts to take reason for reasoning, and to envelop them in the same criticism. And then, after all, reasoning is the legitimate instrument of reason ; its value is determined by that of the principles on which it rests. In the next place, reason, and especially spontaneous reason, is, like sentiment, immediate and direct ; it goes straight to its object, without passing through analysis, abstraction, and deduction, excellent operations without doubt, but they suppose a primary operation, the pure and simple apperception of the truth.' It is wrong to attribute this apper- ception to sentiment. Sentiment is an emotion, not a judgment ; it enjoys or suffers, it loves or hates, it does not know. It is not universal like reason ; and as it still pertains on some side to or- ganization, it even borrows from the organization something of its inconstancy. In fine, sentiment follows reason, and does not precede it. Therefore, in suppressing reason, we suppress the sen iment which emanates from it, and science, art, and ethics lack firm and solid bases. Psychology, aesthetics, and ethics, have conducted us to an order of investigations more difficult and more elevated, which are mingled with all the others, and crown them— theodicea. We know that theodicea is the rock of philosophy. We might shun it, and stop in the regions— already very high— of the" universal and necessary principles of the true, the beautifuK and the good, without going farther, without ascending to the principles of these principles, to the reason of reason, to the source > M. Jacobi. See the Manual of the History of PUhsopliy, by Tennemann, vol. ii., p. 318. ^ 1 4. o o«ri