OUTLINES
OF.
PHILOSOPHY
AND
LITERATURE
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY
AND LITERATURE
22417
V83
093
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY
AND LITERATURE
me Podolphe
BY ALEXANDER VINET
A
ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER
148 STRAND, london
1865
•
PRINTED BY J. AND W. RIDER, LONDON.
NOTE BY THE PUBLISHER.
THE reader will bear in mind that this volume
is composed of extracts from the various works
of M. Vinet. These extracts are very skilfully
put together by the Editor, M. Astié; but in a
book thus constructed, some instances of repeti-
tion and of abrupt transition are unavoidable.
If
even there should be a slight discrepancy between
passages brought from different works into an un-
intended proximity, the reputation of M. Vinet, a
writer distinguished for his clearness of style, ought
not to suffer from this.
380254
↓
CONTENTS.
PHILOSOPHY.
FIRST SECTION.
PURE PHILOSOPHY.
I. Reason-
CHAPTER I.-INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
1. Different Acceptations of the Word-Value and Pro-
vince of Reason
II. Truth-
•
1. Its Definition; its Absolute and Inflexible Character-
Truth and Truths
2. Truth-Falsehood-Error
3. Truth-Beauty-Happiness
III. Philosophy-
1. Its Definition, Disinterested Nature, and Mission
2. Its Limited Sphere-Philosophy and Tradition
I. Psychology-
CHAPTER II.—METAPHYSICS.
1
4
7
8
9
11
•
1. Psychological Principles: Soul and Body-Appetites –
Affections-Speculative and Religious Element
13
2. Sentiments: Instinct-Good Sense-Sensibility — Can-
dour and Sympathy-Enthusiasm-Admiration-Se-
-
16
renity-Intimacy-Affection
3. Facts: Character and Will-Imitation and Habits-Uni-
versality-Genius, Talent, Work-Contemplations and
Observations-Youth
23
viii
CONTENTS.
II. Logic-
1. Logic and Dialectics: Definition - Different kinds of
Logic-Dangers attending its exclusive Use
2. Some Principles of Logic: Identity, Certainty, and Evi-
dence-Axioms-A-priorism-Synthesis and Analysis—
Vicious Circles-Ideas and Facts-Theory and Prac-
tice-Principles and Consequences
3. Problem of Cognition: Cognition, its Nature and Limits
-Means of Knowing-Reasoning, Intuition, Reason
and Faith-Intellect, Will, Conscience, Morality, Sen-
timent, Love
III. Miscellaneous Thoughts
•
CHAPTER III.-HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
I. Theoretical Philosophy-
Philosophical Systems and their Value: Rationalism
Christianity and Stoicism; its Principle-Deism
Manicheism-Pantheism-Scepticism-Eclecticism
II. Practical Philosophy-
Evil: Matter-Mind-Utilitarianism, Pessimism, and Op-
timism-Eudemonism, Happiness, and Duty
III. Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century—
PAGI
36
42
56
92
99
112
•
Its Principle (Common Sense); its Mission; its Prejudices 131
SECOND SECTION.
APPLIED PHILOSOPHY.
CHAPTER I.-RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
I. Relations between Christianity and Philosophy-
1. Nature of the Problem: Insoluble Objectively- Con-
flicting Claims-Services rendered to Christianity by
Philosophy
2. Rational Character of Christianity-Rights and Limits
of Reason-Necessity of Faith
•
3. Agreement of Ideal Philosophy and Ideal Christianity-
Dangers of Speculation
•
:
II. Christian Philosophy
136
143
157
171
CONTENTS.
ix
CHAPTER II.—PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
I. Truth-
1. Its Destiny on Earth; Truth, Position, and Force
2. Laws of the Progress of Truth-Truth and Necessity-
Logic and Fiction
3. Men and Truth
11. History-
PAGE
175
183
•
•
186
1. Its Definition : Fatalism-History and Historians-Sym-
bolism-History, Ancient and Modern Conditions
favourable to Historical Writing-Signs of the Times . 191
2. Historical Principles: Providence, Necessity, Thought
and Action, Theory and Practice-Revolutions, and the
Right of Individual Resistance .
3. Progress: Material-Moral-Perfectibility-Discoveries
III. Of Peoples-
1. Great Men
2. French and English-National Pride
3. The European Crisis and Christianity
CHAPTER III-SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
I. Social Principles-
1. Christianity and Society: Duties towards Society-Mo-
rality-Humanitarianism and Christianity
2. Liberty and Social Questions-
(1.) Liberty in General: its Excellence; its Perpetual
Tradition-Liberty, Order, Obedience-True and
False Liberality-Christiauity and Obedience
(2.) Different Liberties: Religious and other Liberty-
Liberty of Conscience, Worship of the Press-
Tolerance and Intolerance
(3.) Social Questions: Equality and Christianity-
•
Property-Rich and Poor
3. Manifestation of our Convictions-
(1.) Definition-Necessity of Manifestation
(2.) Manifestation and Enlightenment-Manifestation
Independent of Perfection-Advantage
•
(3.) Fictions and Opinions-Effect of Manifestations—
State Church
II. Social Institutions-
1. Relations between the Individual and Society-
(1.) Individuality: Its Definition Excellence In-
alienable Character-Individuality-Personality
-Individualism-Objections
200
214
225
230
234
243
249
268
278
288
•
296
299
305
X
CONTENTS.
(2.) Individuality - Society-Christianity-Liberty-
Responsibility - Individuality and Socialism
Man and Humanity
(3.) Actual State of Society-Socialism-Nationalism
-Pantheism
2. Church and State-
(1.) System of Union between the Two: Its Origin―
Catholicism-Protestantism-Socialism-Effects
of the Union both on Church and State
•
(2.) Existing Relations
(3.) Separation: Importance of the Question-Proofs
in favour of Separation-The Nature of Man and
of the Gospel-Protection and Persecution-The
Individual and Society with regard to Religion
-Objections against Separation-The True Rela-
tion of Church and State, and their Results
3. Politics-
(1.) Politics aud Christianity-Right and Duty-Rela-
tive Character of Political Truth .
(2.) Functions and Mission of the State-Thoughts
on Politics
(3.) Governors and Governed-Theocracy-Democracy
-Government of the Middle Classes-Of Small
Political Societies.
III. Education-
1. Education and Christianity - Thoughts on Instruction
and Education-Education of Things and of Books-
Public and Private Education
2. Books and Writers for Children-Popular Schools-Clas-
sical Studies-Mathematics
3. Education of Women-Their Mission-Marriage
PAGE
314
330
347
366
•
371
404
410
414
422
437
·
444
LITERATURE.
FIRST SECTION.
LITERATURE IN GENERAL.
CHAPTER I.-GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
I. Characteristics—
1. Definition and Mission of Literature
2. Literature and Society
3. Literature and Various Sciences
II. Literary Emotion-
1. Its Nature
PAGE
457
459
·
459
463
466
·
2. Function of Thought
3. Emotion, and Ancient and Contemporaneous Literature. 467
III. Of Various Literatures-
1. Ancient Literature .
2. Christian Literature
3. Classical and Romantic
CHAPTER II.—LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
I. Grammar—
468
472
•
475
1. Grammar and Literature
2. Language: Necessity of Studying it
Authors-Idiom of a People and its Civilisation—
Respect for Language
482
Thinkers and
482
3. French and German
II. Style-
1. Style, Logic, and Language-Translation
2. Rhythmical Unity
•
3. Substance and Form
488
489
492
•
493
III. Language-
1. Fixing and Innovating
495
2. Classical Language and that of Men of the World
495
1
xii
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER III.-LITERARY PRECEPTS.
I. The Writer-
1. Originality and Individuality
PAGE
497
2. Objectivity and Subjectivity
499
3. Progress in the Writer himself
501
II. Literary Precepts-
1. Meditation-Inspiration- Taste-Timidity- Simplicity
-Power of Creating
504
2. Love in Literature-Love of Nature-The True and the
Beautiful.
506
3. Literary Precepts and Miscellaneous Observations-Rage
for Reading
510
III. Literary Criticism-
1. Theory and Practice
519
•
2. Precepts
520
•
3. Mediocrity: the Part it plays
522
•
I. Art in General-
SECOND SECTION.
POETRY.
CHAPTER I.-ART.
1. Its Definition-Object-Mission-Condition
2. Art and Nature
3. Architecture and Music
CHAPTER II.-POETRY.
I. Poetry in General-
1. Its Definition-Source-Unity and Diversity-Cause-
Seat and Mission
2. On the Disinterested Nature of Poetry
•
3. Poetry and Scepticism
II. The Poet-
1. The Poet
2. The Poet and the Man
3. Method of the Poet
III. Poetry, Art, and Science-
Philosophy, Eloquence, Music, History
•
•
523
526
•
527
528
543
546
553
•
557
•
559
564
CONTENTS.
xiii
CHAPTER III.-DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
I. Dramatic Poetry-
1. Drama and Poetry - French Tragedy-Corneille and
Racine
PAGE
•
572
•
576
•
579
2. Theatrical Taste-Its Cause and Effects-A Theatrical
People
3. Eloquence of Dramatic Representations
II. Epic Poetry-Lyrics-
•
Lyrical and Dramatic Poetry compared - Introspective
Poetry-Comic Poetry-Satire.
III. Religious Poetry-
1. Poetry-Religion-Christianity
2. Poetry and Morality
•
583
•
591
598
•
601
3. Sacred Poetry-Hymn Writing-Its Condition, Indivi-
duality
THIRD SECTION.
ELOQUENCE.
I. Eloquence in General—
•
1. Its Definition-Eloquence and Truth-Spoken and Writ-
ten Eloquence-Eloquence and Individuality
2. Its Method, Rules, Medium, and Means
3. Eloquence-Poetry-Philosophy-Rhetoric
II. Pulpit Eloquence—
•
1. Necessity of Art and of Study—Authority
2. General Precepts-Familiarity and Prattle
3. Facts and Ideas; two Opposite Excesses-Sermons-
Conferences - Homilies - Eloquence of the Reforma-
tion-The Bible and Pulpit Eloquence
604
610
618
619
628
632
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY
AND LITERATURE
·
FIRST SECTION.
PURE PHILOSOPHY.
INTRODUCTION.
I.-REASON.
Different acceptations of the word-Value and
province of Reason.
REASON, which was originally truth in the object,
almost as soon came to signify truth in the subject.
In this sense every man is under absolute obligations
towards reason; it is for him the supreme authority
on all subjects; for how should he deny the nature of
things? To whom could he appeal from the nature
of things? There is, therefore, a sense in which we
are right in saying that we must refer solely to reason,
that is to facts, to what is, to truth. And so far as
our subjective reason in its primary elements is also a
fact, a nature of things, there is the same necessity in
a certain sphere of thought to believe in our reason;
I mean the reason of humanity in its first and irre-
sistible premises.
Reason cannot, in an absolute sense, be opposed
B
2
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
to reason. It is plain that if reason be capable of
nothing, it is not even capable of proving its own
impotence. If it demonstrates that it is nothing,
it must have some power of demonstration.
We are wrong in speaking of reason misled, reason
corrupted. In itself it does not get corrupted. It is
the elements on which reason operates that are
corrupt. But it is also true that just as reason alone
cannot pervert, so neither can it redress alone; the
results that we expect from it depend upon its first
premises.
Reason has only one principle, but it has more
than one voice; there is the logic of all the world,
and there is the logic of genius.
Reason is not the efficient cause of any of the
sentiments that may arise within us: all that it can
do is to lead us into the presence of facts; it then
retires, and it belongs to those facts to modify us.
Conscience and reason accept truth, and do not
create it; truth is given-given as a sovereign fact,
as a divine thought, not as a deduction of our intel-
lect; given as a fact that our faculties are to elabo-
rate and explore, but would never have discovered.
In a word, reason and conscience are the touchstones
of truth, and not, as in other spheres, the very source
of truth.
Human reason is a great and beautiful thing, and
probably the ruins by which it is surrounded-ruins
of an innocence which it dominates and cannot
restore-make it seem still greater; but what is it in
INTRODUCTION.
3
the presence of the Divine reason? what appreciable
and definitive superiority can it confer upon those
who devote themselves to its culture over those who
have not the leisure to do so? Of what real use is
it if it do not lead us to feel the want of a higher
reason, if it do not thrill at the very idea of seeing
itself completed, and in certain respects replaced, by
the Divine reason?
The fallen nature of man has far more perverted
reason than reason has perverted nature. But, at
the same time, just as reason alone could not pervert,
so neither can reason alone redress. It is not an
inflexible, infallible, and constant rule.
Because every truth does not necessarily and in-
stantaneously obtain the adherence of every man, it
is concluded that reason is nothing, either for him
in behalf of whom a demonstration is attempted, or
for him who attempts it. But this conclusion could
never have been arrived at without previous reason-
ing. Reasoning has preceded the abandonment of
reasoning; faith in reason has preceded the denial
of reason. There is nothing more ancient than
confidence in individual reason; there is no more
universal conviction;-can the partisans of common
sense cite any other more widely diffused?
Reason recognises, compares, combines facts; it
creates none. Facts are its fatal limit. It is not
the creator omnipotent, it is only omnipotent in
creation.
4
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
II.-TRUTH.
1. Its definition; its absolute and inflexible character-
Truth and Truths.
What is truth for man? Is it the knowledge of
all things? This has been affirmed, at least impli-
citly, and this we deny. Truth for man is human
truth; a truth proportioned to his nature. Truth for
him is a faithful representation of things, with regard
to which he has been endowed with the means of
knowledge. The limits of his knowledge are the
limits of his nature. To wish to overleap these
limits is to rise in rebellion against our own nature.
We have got accustomed in society to give too spe-
cial and narrow a limit to the word truth. It is gene-
rally looked upon as only the conformity of the repre-
sentation to the thing represented; but truth may
reside in facts as well as ideas. The conformity of the
means with the end, of the action with the principle,
the life with the idea, this too is truth: what we
call virtue is nothing else than truth in sentiment
and action. In moral matters truth is not separated
from life: truth is life, and if it remain in the thoughts
instead of passing into the life, it does not deserve
its name.
When it is asked whether I am in the
truth, the question does not refer to what I know,
but what I am.
Truth is the most absolute thing in the world: we
do not say the truth of my country, of my school, of
INTRODUCTION.
5
LO
my time; for truth subjects to itself all countries,
all schools, and all times.
Truth is, from its very nature, inflexible; it opens
out a career which we must follow to the end, or not
even enter upon. There where the road becomes
dangerous (and there is always a point where it does
so), the majority retrace their steps, but the lover of
truth pursues his journey; he knows that there is no
victory and no prize except at the end of his course.
Every truth joins on to some other that continues
it; and this, as truth, joins itself to some other
again: thus it proceeds in every direction to the in-
finite, while error, joining on to nothing, stops short
in darkness, and dies on the road.
Every power, as well as every truth, reveals an
antithesis; and in the moral and intellectual world
every spark results from a collision.
The peculiarity of truth should be to make two
extremes tend towards and blend in each other.
Must we then, whether owing to dialectics or simple
idleness of mind, be always and incurably sectarian?
Each sphere of truth is guarded by a sphinx,
armed with an enigma, and ready to devour the im-
prudent wight who takes it up and does not guess it.
Each of these enigmas has for its point the reconcil-
ing of two contradictory truths,—an expression which
contains a paradox; but this very paradox sums up
our whole destiny.
All truths are but the different aspects, or different
applications, of one and the same truth.
6
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
In the labours of thought everything impels us
towards the infinite, that vast ocean into which
reason without a guide plunges and loses itself. All
questions, well understood, are but fragments or
parts of the great problem, and we cannot take up
one without taking up all.
The truth of each idea lies only in its combination
with other ideas.
In many subjects the elements of truth exist;
nothing is obscure, nothing wanting, excepting the
eye that shall bring these elements, like two fragments
of a torn manuscript, into juxtaposition.
A special, isolated truth, to which has been com-
mitted the direction of a whole life, necessarily ex-
tends itself over that whole life-exaggerates itself, so
to speak, and, improperly applied, ceases to be truth.
Isolated, it has neither self-comprehension nor self-
control; like a single word preserved out of an effaced
phrase, it gives no meaning, it teaches nothing. This
is because in morality truth is one. Before the
central point where all special truths converge be
seized, not even those truths are possessed; at all
events, no legitimate and certain use can be made of
them.
There must be a key to all problems—a primary
knowledge, by means of which all is known. Truth
is one since man is one; truth is one, or has no
existence.
Man unaided has never met more than a part of
truth.
INTRODUCTION.
7
2. Truth Falsehood-Error.
Man has never deceived himself utterly; in his
grossest errors some shred of truth remains.
We cannot disabuse of any error, save by extend-
ing a hand to it on that side by which it is truth ;
for every error has a true side, and sympathy is the
first condition of a useful reprimand.
Truth in general is a good, error an evil; falsehood
spread, authorised in society, wrongly considered
an oil that is to soften its springs, moderate its fric-
tion, and render its motion less creaking, is, on the
contrary, a rust that corrodes it: falsehood is of all
things the most anti-social.
When we are wrong, we are never half-wrong; and
the logic of error is more inflexible than that of truth.
Happily for us, and whether we will it or no, error
always stops short half-way. Perfect consistency is
only permitted to truth.
((
"When we are right," says a celebrated man, we
are always more right than we believe," which is
tantamount to saying that when we believe a true
thing we never believe it enough, never trust to it
enough; consequently, never see all that may be
urged in its favour, even dare not see it.
We cannot merely take whether of truth or error
in proportion to our will or our taste. Error, like
truth, is bound to be consistent. It may indeed
stop half-way if it will, but for all that, the conclu-
sion it tries to avoid is involved already in its pre-
8
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
mises; the conclusion must be imputed to whoever
lays down those premises.
No falsehood is barren: error is logical as well as
truth. A false principle inserted in the laws dyes
with its own hue the aggregate of institutions and
manners, the whole mass of a people. A materialistic
law does not need to be executed in order to be fatal;
it is enough that it exists. The people who have made
it, or allowed it to be made, has thereby inoculated it-
self with a mortal poison: principles so soon as they
are adopted become facts.
It is only truth that is fruitful; it is only-if we
may venture thus to express ourselves-truth that is
real, that is to say, that can produce real results.
Every system that rests on a fiction, on an unreality,
can but lead into a defile whence there is no issue,
and in its tortuous progress reach the right road only
to cross it in various directions, but without stopping
at or following it.
It is only moderate errors that are formidable.
3. Truth-Beauty-Happiness.
Security, abundance, order, peace, are, no less than
certainty and hope, the fruits of truth. No good thing
is absolutely lacking to us; all we want is to know
our blessings. It is ignorance and error that make
us unhappy; it is in knowledge that we are poor.
Truth will enrich us: truth is another name for
happiness.
All that appears to us beautiful is not, I confess,
ค
INTRODUCTION.
9
good; but God has willed that all that is good should
be beautiful, and originally these two things had
only one name. Beauty is a part, a form of truth.
III.-PHILOSOPHY.
1. Its definition, disinterested nature, and mission.
The great name Philosophy, of which the meaning
has so much varied, is familiarly applied now-a-days
to every chain of ideas that runs in a chain of facts.
It is evident that the word idea is to be taken here
in a quite objective sense, and that we are not treat-
ing of ideas conceived by this or that mind (which
would still be facts), but of those which are included
in facts, and expressed, as it were, by submitting those
facts to pressure. An idea is, however, the idea of
some one; and to tell according to what general law,
or in what direction the course of events tends, is to
tell the ideas of some one who dominates things as a
whole, is to affirm God.
Philosophy has the observations of phenomena for
its starting point, and for its goal the assignation of
them to principles more and more general, to laws,
and, were it possible, to one only law, which would
have to be sought for between the Divine will and
secondary laws. Philosophy, in its various applica-
tions, embraces matter, spirit, morals, our social
relations, our relation to the infinite, and the produc-
tion of the beautiful in art.
10
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
The object of all truly scientific study is to find the
immutable in the mutable. This in itself is to say
that such a study, although far from repudiating
immediate utility, cannot make it an end.
Philosophy, taken in its greatest simplicity, is only
an elevated good sense, which, not pretending to know
everything, is bent upon knowing well those objects
the knowledge of which has not been denied to it.
Names and appearances are nothing to it; prejudice
forms the basis of none of its judgments; number and
time cannot in its eyes transform error into truth; it
neither believes nor denies anything by chance or
lightly; not trusting to a first glance, it seeks for
difference beneath similarity, and similarity beneath
difference, alternately uniting what the vulgar sepa-
rate, and separating what they unite. While all facts
are isolated to the inattentive eye, they bind and
connect themselves beneath the gaze of philosophy,
which, following as far as it can the chain that unites
them, attaching itself in everything to the essential
and rejecting the purely accidental, comes to recog-
nise one same nature, same principle, same origin in
objects that at first seemed to have nothing in com-
mon; and thus it reduces the innumerable facts of
the moral and physical order to a small number of
thoughts, and these to a smaller number still, gravi-
tating towards the unity that it will never reach, but
towards which a mysterious force ever constrains it to
aspire. In a word, philosophy differs from common
reason in that it applies itself to penetrating
INTRODUCTION.
11
through the exterior or hull of things to their prin-
ciple, or at least to that idea which shall of itself
explain the greatest possible number of facts, and
before which philosophy, fault of breath, perforce
halts. Where must it halt? What is its legiti-
mate sphere? This question is more important to it
than any other. Philosophy does itself no less honour
in recognising its boundaries than in extending its
inquiries. It reigns in this apparent abdication; it
is its glory to know how to limit itself, as in the moral
sphere it is the glory of the will to be able to stop
short in season and to practice self-control. But
that philosophy may know what it can and cannot
do, it measures its means with its end, and being
unable to place all its greatness in verifying its
knowledge, it places some of it in verifying its igno-
rance, and, so to speak, "in knowing certainly that it
does not know."
2. Its limited sphere-Philosophy and Tradition.
To philosophise is essential to the condition of the
man who has not yet been taught by the Gospel to
ignore. Unity-that need of the human mind-will
torment it so long as, being a stranger to the most
excellent of all unities, it shall seek outside of itself
the order it does not find within. In this sense the
last word of philosophy is not spoken, and never will
be. Never will this torment of the mind come to an
end save for those who, enlightened by revelation,
12
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
.
have learnt to say, "Secret things belong to the
Lord, but the things that are revealed belong to us
and our children."
If philosophy as a science does not inspire us with
very much confidence as far as the great problems of
life are concerned, it is otherwise with philosophy as
a method, or with the philosophic spirit.
Philosophy calls itself the independence and the
sovereignty of the human mind, and looks upon
tradition as its bondage and degradation. But neither
of the two consider that their forces combined will be
found too much for so gigantic a task as the uprooting
of this great tree, or even its pruning; and conse-
quently it costs them little to conquer their mutual
repugnance; philosophy leaning willingly on tradi-
tion, tradition willingly referring to philosophy-that
is to say, philosophy not disdaining to share the
prejudices of the multitude, and the multitude not
refusing to borrow some arguments from philosophy.
At Colosse, heresy had this double character-it was
a compound of subtle reasoning and unauthoritative
precedent against the plenitude of Jesus Christ
there was alleged both a pretended nature of things
and the opinion of doctors.
Might not philosophy be called the treadmill of
the human mind?
METAPHYSICS.
13
CHAPTER IL
METAPHYSICS.
I.—PSYCHOLOGY.
1. Psychological principles: Soul and Body-Appe-
tites— Affections-Speculative and religious ele-
ment.
THE union of the soul and the body appears to me
essential and indissoluble. Man without a body is,
in my opinion, man no longer; and God has thought
and willed him embodied, and not otherwise. We
may remark, that God in the first place formed man of
the dust of the earth (he was, therefore, man already);
then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,
and that being who was beforehand man became a
living soul. According to this passage we cannot
doubt that the body, or a body, is essential to human
personality, and to the very idea of man. But it is
also said that dust returns to dust, and the spirit to
God who gave it. The spirit is here represented as
the whole of man, because the body, as we see it, is
in fact only a condition of his existence: the cor-
poreal principle, the invisible form of the body,
endures; man remains in death indissolubly body
14
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
i
and soul; the body that we see decay, and which
we call the envelope of the soul, is also the envelope
of the true and imperishable body. The union con-
tinues through the apparent separation; but although
perpetual, it is nevertheless only a union, not a unity;
the spirit is not body, nor the body spirit; other-
wise we could not stop there, we should have-
leaving human existence and embracing the whole
universe in thought-to say, that there, too, body and
spirit are but one, that there is one only existence,
one only being; we should no longer be able to affirm
that spirit moves and dominates the world, but that
the world is spirit and spirit the world, that matter
is eternal, and that God has not created.
Who, then, can comprehend matter without mind,
or explain the material infinite, except by the spiri-
tual infinite? That such ideas should ever have been
treated as paradoxical is one of the greatest signs of
our fall, for they are the first postulate of all thought,
and, if I may so say, the primary reasons of our
reason. We are more creatures of spirit than of
matter, and of the infinite than the finite.
Man has to be born in physical destitution that his
mind may the better feel the moral power that shall
grow later: the manger of the Lord is for all—it
is the image of the flesh.
Appetites are tendencies in man to subordinate to
himself whatever is not that self; to concentrate
himself in self, and to become his own end.
Appetite is the desire of happiness under all its
METAPHYSICS.
15
forms; under the form of fear as well as that of
hope.
Affection is the impression that, according to our
nature, we receive from objects. An abundant source
of activity, it is nevertheless passive. It remains
asleep or dead until some other element awakens it.
We might have called it passion if we had not feared
to cast an unjust slur upon it. We distinguish
between two kinds of affection. To the first class
belong compassion, sympathy, general benevolence
affections which have been admirably designated by
the name of humanity. These are virtual, for special
occasions are required to give us the consciousness of
them. The affections of the second class, on the con-
trary, once aroused become the permanent spring of
our life; these are our various loves, friendships,
patriotism, and lastly, the love we distinguish by no
epithet.
Speculative Elements.-The speculative elements of
human life belong exclusively to that part of ourself
which sees and perceives, and would never wish to do
anything but see and perceive-in a word, speculate.
Appetite, affection, duty, sociability, positively require
action. Speculation, on the contrary, requires nothing;
it is its own end; it is scientific, inasmuch as it
occupies itself solely with collecting and verifying
facts, as it is philosophic when it searches for their
primary idea. It is poetic when, through the real,
it pursues the ideal; guided by that esthetic con-
science which keeps the impress and memory of the
16
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
beautiful, as the moral conscience does of the good;
the living exemplar of a world where all facts should
be types. The ideal has its place in every mind, but
there are but few who possess their thought in dis-
tinct form.
Lastly, there are in man elements of a mixed
nature. One word names them-the word religion.
Faith itself is a moral state, a work, a virtue. Wor-
ship has the same character. To adore doubtless is
to contemplate, but is not prayer the most active of
our actions? In no sphere is the conjunction of these
two forces so completely brought about; nothing calls
forth so sonorous a harmony between the different
chords of the human lyre.
Speech, labour, the family, and the law, are the
four pillars on which man is based both before and
after the fall: same foundations, same characteristics.
Life belongs to that portion of our being which
obeys, hopes, and loves.
2. Sentiments: Instinct-Good Sense-Sensibility-
Candour and Sympathy-Enthusiasm Admira-
tion-Serenity—Intimacy-Affection.
Instinct is but a mathematical point, capable of
taking the most opposite directions when prolonged.
The most noble instincts are not by themselves
able to secure our steps here below, and in order to
attain its perfectionment and true value our soul
needs the discipline of sorrow and of duty.
METAPHYSICS.
17
Good sense cannot suffice for everything, though
unfortunately it pretends to do so.
Good sense, in all times, is upon certain subjects
both very bold and very new. On these subjects it
is much rarer than intellect, nay, at certain moments,
it even borders upon genius. Sometimes genius is
needed to attain to good sense.
Some of the greatest
revolutions that have marked the progress of the
human mind have only been the reinstatement of
good sense.
Nothing is so new as pure good sense; for even in
those who appear its heroes or its oracles, it is covered
over, if not with a layer, with at least a fine dust of
prejudice.
We all stumble in different ways, and nevertheless
this world, all made up of men deprived in a measure
of sense, is divisible into men who have good sense
and men who have it not; what does this come to but
to saying that we must draw a distinction between
different spheres? There is one in which, without
lack of good sense, all the world makes mistakes, all
the world talks nonsense, and often superior minds
do so more than any others, because they take up a
greater number of questions, and because prejudice—
that nursery rhyme with which children are put to
sleep-does not suffice them. But good sense—that
correct sentiment, that tact of reality-brings back
superior minds, and does not bring back others.
He who has only received impressions without
ever correcting them, has not lived.
C
18
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
2
Sensibility is far more an element or a condition of
good sense than its enemy. Good sense (take note of
the phrase) is a sense, a sentiment, a just sentiment of
reality. And without confounding it with sensibility,
may we not pronounce the maxim a strange one which
insists upon a cold heart being essential to a judicious
mind? Might it not be as well said that in order to
judge correctly of external objects we ought to have
dull hearing, short sight, and a gloved hand? Passion.
dazzles, sensibility enlightens; the heart is a light.
We often see men endowed with keen natural sen-
sibility arrive at a kind of hardness as they advance
in years.
Nothing touches us so much as a fervent expression
on the part of a man who, from a sense of duty, is
sparing of such.
Sensibility, of which so many would make a virtue,
is after all only a talent.
Sentimentality is, perhaps, to sentiment much what
mysticism is to religion, a something more delicate and
intimate, more dreamy and vague, a shadow of mys-
tery, a reflex of infinity thrown over our affections;
a soft and timid chord which gradually swells out
of silence to form a harmony with the principal
chord already struck. This mysticism of emotion is
perhaps its sensuality as well, and too often true sen-
sibility melts and runs off into these passive delights,
these effeminate self-indulgences of the soul.
Candour is to the soul what spontaneity is to the
mind; when one is candid one cannot fail to be pro-
METAPHYSICS.
19
found. The expressions of children are often most
profound. It is certain, that to an upright mind all
things present themselves more purely, being unem-
barrassed by formulæ, provided only that such a mind
combine force with uprightness.
Candour on certain subjects is very like audacity.
Sympathy is the gift of identifying oneself with all
sentiments, entering into all situations, however op-
posed to our own the former may be, however foreign
the latter; sometimes, indeed, all the more when there
is contrast than when there is harmony. This gift does
not of itself constitute a talent for dramatic poetry,
but it is the condition and basis of it. It almost
suffices alone for eloquence, and gives charm and
power to the lessons of the moralist.
Two causes render the mind penetrating, sympathy
and antipathy, benevolence and malevolence; what
there is of best in the soul and of most acrid in the cha-
racter: but the penetration of love is perhaps the most
searching and profound. Hatred is penetrating, in-
deed, but it is also purblind; not only does it preclude
from seeing what is, but it makes us see what is not.
Even hatred itself does not exclude a sort of sym-
pathy, and the unhappy penetration with which it
seems endowed depends in great part upon this.
Sympathy is that intelligence of the soul, that
mysterious gift of identification with all existence,
that intimate and rapid logic, by means of which we
divine the secret of every individuality, whether per-
sonal or collective.
20
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Suspicion may from time to time have certain
advantages in the dealings of life; it has occasionally
talent, but then it has too much, and overshoots
the mark it aims at. Sympathy, on the contrary,
is the first condition of true penetration; it is by
it alone that we get at the heart of the situation
and discern its secret recesses, and above all its
approaches.
Grace has so much in common with sweetness of
disposition and of manners, that one is almost sur-
prised when a graceful spirit is not allied with
benevolence of character.
I believe that whatever subordinates our whole life
to a thought, a pursuit, the object of which promises
nothing to our egotism or to our passions, may claim
the name of enthusiasm.
Does a soul that feels an enthusiasm for what
is vulgar differ essentially from a vulgar soul?
This is a question, and I, for one, feel disposed to
answer it affirmatively. I deplore deplorable aberra-
tions, and a prodigality so irrational; but I cannot,
as a general rule, deny value of some kind to a pas-
sion which has nothing selfish, nothing at least
grossly selfish about it.
But I may be permitted to prefer the enthusiasm
that does not mislead to that which does the enthu-
siasm that elevates to that which degrades. I will
go further: although both the one and the other
reveal in the soul the same want, the same principle,
I cannot help attributing more value to the soul
METAPHYSICS.
21
capable of the first enthusiasm than to the soul sus-
ceptible merely of the last-to the moral being which
yearns towards the true infinite, than to the one
which rushes towards the finite disguised as the in-
}
finite. I recognise, as does Pascal, three orders of
greatness, the moral, the intellectual, and the mate-
rial; and between the first and second of these I
measure an infinitely greater distance than between
the second and third.
What difference is there sometimes between en-
thusiasm and pedantry? Can you possibly tell me?
And yet I am at the same time carefully putting
aside those elements which, mingling with enthu-
siasm, would transform it into fanaticism.
Enthusiasm for what is great lies at the basis of
our nature, and never makes itself so keenly felt as in
childhood. It is the flower and the poetry of virtue
that fills the imagination of children and enchants
them. Later the flower falls to give place to the
fruit, poetry becomes prose. The fair dreams of vir-
tue resemble those high mountains whose bold shapes
attract our gaze, and to the summit of which imagi
nation raises itself without effort. But when it
comes to climbing them in reality, slowly and labo
riously, we are soon discouraged. Life is not spent on
the heights where grand and sublime actions are ac-
complished; virtue is composed of a long and uninter-
rupted series of small sacrifices, and requires that firm
and tranquil resolution which does not run after duty,
but holds itself ready for whatever God shall impose.
l

22
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
།་
A
The soul is soon satiated with what is untrue, and
then disgust is proportioned to enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm corresponds with the infinite; but
sometimes it addresses itself really to the infinite,
and sometimes it cheats its own wants, and deceives.
its own principles, in lending to finite objects the
character and privileges of the infinite. Ancient
Egypt used to deify an ox, or even the vegetables of
its garden; we in one way do the same.
Admiration and enthusiasm tacitly contain an
avowal of inferiority.
Admiration becomes youth, and gratitude all ages.
Is it true that admiration and renown prevent
affection? that we love less in proportion as we
admire more?
The pleasure of finding fault is a poor pleasure;
that of admiring is as keen as it is pure.
I would not venture to affirm that all minds of
the first order have been serene; but the majority
and the greatest among them have possessed this
high quality. Greatness is serene, sublime, peaceful.
Just as there is in the atmosphere a limpid zone
which clouds do not enter, so in the moral world
there is a region that storms cannot trouble, or into
which at least they but rarely penetrate.
Intimacy and ease only spring up in the domain
of the immaterial. The thought of the Infinite is the
closest of all bonds; and two souls can only inter-
penetrate and blend in God.
Between strong and congenial natures intimacy
METAPHYSICS.
23
soon brings about familiarity; that is, the decorous and
noble freedom which well becomes brothers. Fami-
liarity has such great advantages that we must needs
take measures to establish it where it does not come
of itself.
It is not by the intellect that two beings touch;
they might communicate thus for years without be-
coming intimate; but the heart is the true me in
each man, since it is his heart, or the employment of
his heart, which constitutes his worth in the judgment
of men, and classifies him eternally in the judgment
of God. Now the heart is inexhaustible.
Man numbers the want to be a father and a hus-
band amongst his moral wants, and there are men
whose life is not complete unless they have been able
to love some one or other with a paternal love; such
give themselves sons by adoption, who are the sons
of their soul, but as completely sons as though
they had been begotten. There are affections that
become paternal, and others which, in virtue of the
moral nature of those who feel them, become con-
jugal: souls too marry, souls too beget children.
Everything is not material; everything is not in-
stinct and habit in these holy relations.
3. Facts: Character and Will-Imitation and Habits
-Universality-Genius, Talent, Work-Contem-
plations and Observations-Youth.
When one is really anything one is so always;
24
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
and if even we wished to efface this original impress
we should still be powerless to do so; but by willing
oneself to be thus, by contemplating oneself as such,
one exaggerates oneself, and roots oneself more firmly
in one's peculiar faults.
A man is strong only when he has in his character
some strongly marked antithesis. A faculty without
the opposite faculty is not a power; it is a subjec-
tion: there is no true power except a self-contained
one, and we can only contain and rule ourselves inso-
much as one of our faculties is balanced by its opposite;
that alone completes which acts as a counterpoise.
There are certain games in which an object is only
kept in equilibrium by a rapid and continuous move-
ment; this is an image of certain characters.
But sometimes a character is conquered and neu-
tralised in certain points by means of the character
itself; and it may also be so by the influence of a
fact producing a dominant affection. We may apply
this to the phenomenon of conversion. I do not here
speak of the conversion of the mind, but of the true
conversion, of that of the heart, the result of an affec-
tion which gives a new life to the soul. This con-
version can only be accomplished by a fact, not an
idea. The pardon of God accepted by the heart can
alone produce such a revolution. Nevertheless, the
pristine forces of the moral being subsist still, inas-
much as they are compatible with this affection. If
the idea absorbed the man, and identified him with
it, there would be an end of his individuality
METAPHYSICS.
25
of character. A perfectly holy creature would have
no character in the ordinary sense of the word.
His whole soul would tend to God; his whole being
would be disposed to identify itself with the Divine
nature. Holiness is the very character of God; Jesus
Christ has no character; his individuality, if I may
venture to use this term, is nil outside of the perfec-
tions that we attribute to the Divinity. It is other-
wise with the apostles; in them we meet again with
individuality, though, as it appears to me, it is least
marked in St. John. In one sense, perhaps, he is no
nearer perfect holiness than his colleagues; in another,
however, his individual character is as it were lost,
absorbed, annulled in the living impression of Jesus
Christ.
A character is the collective product, the moral
unity, resulting from a combination of dispositions in
one and the same subject, whether humanity, people,
or individuals. I know, indeed, that the most com-
mon idea is that of determining character according
to action: it seems natural at the first glance to
recognise the tree by its fruit. This method, however,
may fail to lead us to the truth, so considerable is
the influence of external circumstances on our actions.
Character can only be immediately deduced from
action under certain rules and certain reservations.
The aggregate of actions-the life, in a word-resem-
bles an ample drapery thrown over a statue: it indi-
cates its form in a general way; but for all that, much
reflection and much art would be requisite to draw
with exactness the body thus covered. But do not
26
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
vices and virtues, it may be asked, enable us to judge
of a character? We answer, that in an absolute
manner they do not. Considered nakedly and in
themselves they are not the character; vices may
have been contracted, and virtues too, by influences,
not solely derived from character.
Character is composed of distinct, prominent, per-
manent features, which reveal themselves throughout
the whole duration of a life, and determine and ex-
plain it as a whole. These features are affections, but
simple, elementary ones, neither compounded nor de-
rived. In order to discover their primary elements
we should have, I believe, to study them, and as it
were catch them alive in young children. Later on,
how much life may transform itself by its natural
propensities!
Character is an organism of affections which act
on each other in such manner that the aggregate, the
unity, which springs from their combination shall
not be a sum total, but a result. It is with it as with
chemistry, the elements of which reduce themselves
to a very small number of simple substances, which,
by their blending, create other substances that are
new and individual, but no longer elementary.
A great theatre is not always assigned to great cha-
racters and great minds; the most eminent have not
always the power, and sometimes even they have not
the will, to enlarge their sphere of action. There are
consequently more great men than appear or are sup-
posed, which does not however mean that there are
many.
METAPHYSICS.
27
All the world helps him who helps himself.
A soul only wills one thing at a time.
We must belong to ourselves before we can give
ourselves away.
Nothing in human society so rare as people who
know how to will: the world is full of good inten-
tions, but all these good intentions put together are not
worth one single will. I wish leads to nothing; I
will is alone efficacious. It sometimes seems as though
firmly willing sufficed to itself, and could dispense
with means. The fact is, it creates them; it educes
them from out the most unfavourable circumstances:
this is because it has been given to will to modify
the world, as it belongs to the Word to create it.
Two immaterial forces have given rise to all that is.
Will, of itself alone, has created results which ap-
parently appertained only to wealth or genius. It
forcibly associates in all its designs weaker but
more enlightened wills. Genius without will has
created fewer marvels than will without genius.
The one thing important as rare, is will; it is this
which invents and multiplies means; which renders
weakness strong and poverty rich; which, in short,
creative in its way, can make nothingness fertile, and
call things which were not as though they were.
There are wills so sluggish, natures so inert, that a
mass alone is capable of detaching them from the
soil; but once so detached they move with a rapidity
proportioned to their previous inertia.
Imitation and habit are two forms of obedience.
28
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Imitation subjects us to the example of others; habit
binds us to our own actions, and chains our present to
our past. These are in themselves two passive dis-
positions, the power of which we can more or less
evade, but never absolutely deny, and without which
it is doubtful that society could endure, even if with-
out them society could ever have formed itself.
Man is in one sense a bundle of habits; but this
expression needs explanation. Without a counter-
poise it is certain that habit crushes intelligence and
moral liberty; it is therefore necessary, before all,
that man should possess principles, virtues, affections.
Habit is not in itself the full and nutritious ear
of corn; it is merely the tie that binds the sheaf
together and prevents its scattering. Nothing regu-
lates the mind so much as a life internally submitted
to rule, however agitated by external events. The
soul may preserve its equilibrium in the midst of
shocks and vicissitudes, but it must infallibly lose
it in the vagrancy of an aimless existence, unbridled
by education, and whose irregularities have given free
scope to the caprices of imagination.
Habit is only truly good as a complement.
There are cases where we may even consider our-
selves happy to meet, in the place of absent good,
with a habit which is not absolutely evil, and which
diverts from it. This is especially felt in national
life.
The same agent that is worthless as a monarch
may be precious as a minister. Habit enlisted in
METAPHYSICS.
29
the service of good is one of the great forces of our
feebleness. There is perhaps no will so strong, no con-
science so constantly on the alert, as to be able posi-
tively to dispense with it. Indeed, it might not be
always possible, with regard to each of our actions,
to refer to a sentiment that inspires, or a reason that
dictates. It is said that to scale mountains is easy
to love but even love has its moments of lassitude,
and in these habit draws us along the gentle incline
that it has formed. Nay, who knows if habit be not
a subordinate element of love itself? What is cer-
tain is, that affection is the starting point of habit.
Habit does not replace goodness, but goodness can
hardly dispense with habit.
In one sense universality is always rare; and,
moreover, there is more than one kind. There is a
certain universal capacity which we might as well
call universal incapacity. In all cases the univer-
sality of talent is as much a chimera as universal
monarchy. This, in its full extent, would be the crea-
tive faculty, which can never have been conferred on
any one, and of which history furnishes no example.
Talent supposes individuality, and the notion of
individuality implies that of limitation: we are as
much individualised by what we lack as by what
we possess. Sometimes there is even a disjunction
between the most analogous and proximate styles:
a man may excel in satire and be worth nothing in
epigram. But we are speaking here of universality
of intellect, of the gift of understanding all subjects,
•
30
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
and speaking on all without falling into absurdity. At
a certain elevation of genius this universality is pos-
sessed; Leibnitz, Haller, Bacon, dominate all spheres of
thought. There is another less glorious and yet rare
and precious universality, such as that of Fontenelle.
He does not include in his grasp the whole aggregate
of human faculties, but he has a clear and easy insight
into all things, and has cultivated a great many.
In all things economy is the mother of liberality.
Another element of wisdom, and, if I may so speak,
one of the marks of the philosophic character, is to
know how, without dispersing oneself imprudently, to
depart on occasion from one's own profession or career.
I delight in the man of special pursuit who general-
ises; in the meditative man, led by the desire to oblige,
even in the most commonplace way, who gives up
his meditation-begun hymn, and separates himself
from it with a sigh, perhaps, but without hesitation.
In general, the life of almost all of us is an abstrac-
tion; in order the better to be the man of a certain
position, or a certain character, each of us ceases to be
man; the species prevails over the genius: the artist
is artist; the theologian theologian; the politician
politician: now, what is wanted, is that each man
should, as it were, be all men at once. Human life is
only true on these terms. It will be understood in
what sense we say this, after having said elsewhere
(as you may perhaps remember), that one can only
be anything in this world on condition of not being
everything.
METAPHYSICS
31
A man who is at once superior and complete may,
nevertheless, only rank in the second class, and yet
his merit be the rarest of all merits.
There are facile geniuses, and there are laborious ;
and we do not sufficiently recognise the advantages
of the latter, nor the burden that weighs on the former.
They are limited by their very facility, of which they
never make all the use they might; while effort
impels the latter far beyond the limits that seemed
to have been assigned them. I speak here of art and
perfection. In human affairs, where quickness is so
great a point, results are often assured to facile talent.
Never has a man's genius guessed the whole of a
science; never has genius absolutely supplied the
place of observation or experience.
Talent is the paper money of genius; genius alone
is not easy to negotiate. Everywhere, and above all
in France, talent is necessary to genius.
Patience, whatever Buffon may have said, is not
genius; but genius, devoid of the assistance of
patience, does not reach its proper height.
Every man of genius has a fixed idea which blends,
and always will blend, with everything he does;
whatever melody he sings, the same motive-now
distinct, now disguised-runs and murmurs through-
out the musical work; and what, indeed, is the whole
inner life, whether of the artist or the man, but a more
or less copious variation on one given motive? But in
proportion as genius becomes impoverished or embar-
rassed the fixed idea becomes more prominent, the
32
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
motive is more distinctly observable; and those num-
berless musical intentions which, like bushy and
flexible foliage, twined around it, becoming gradually
more and more sparse, allow it to appear alone in
its stiffness and monotony.
It is with genius as with the bird, when once
impregnated by thought the result is lifelong; but
the first eggs alone enclose a living germ, a future
inhabitant of air; those that come later are also eggs,
no doubt, but the mother's downy breast warms
them in vain; they can produce nothing living;
they do not multiply the bird: prolem sine patre
creatam.
Talent does not consist in overlaying a subject with
foreign spoils, but in drawing out of it all that it
had really contained, unknown to any one.
Talent may seduce, it may render everything spe-
cious to prejudiced eyes, but in itself it proves nothing.
Talent cannot replace instruction. There is no
more treacherous hope than that which a man founds
on the consciousness of his talent. Nothing can be
more rapid than his downfall unless he support his
talent by acquired funds. Many distinguished natural
gifts have been wholly lost, while second-rate talents
have, by labour and industry, arrived at results which
seemed reserved for genius alone.
The most powerful ideas, lacking a common bond,
only impair each other, and this in proportion to their
strength. Minds must be singularly strong indeed to
turn to profit what is not one, or does not of itself
METAPHYSICS.
33
F
reduce itself to unity. Struck in turn by a crowd
of impressions that neutralise each other, they are
captivated by none and fix to nothing.
However powerful genius may be, it is weak against
the soul when the soul has not lost the habit of
living, or when an individual religion, uniting itself
to the most sensitive portion of the conscience, has
given it all independences in one single dependence,
and the most precious of liberties in the most glorious
of servitudes.
The economy of time is the principal element of
all great successes and all glories.
Under whatever aspect we may view the question,
work-activity if you will-is an element of success,
and we may believe that, given an equality of talent
(since after all facility is not talent), the ad-
vantage will always be on the side of effort against
facility.
Let us beware of confounding contemplation with
observation. This last is an activity which takes
possession of its object, which analyses and dissects
it; in contemplation, on the other hand, we might
say that it was the object itself which took possession
of the soul and modified it.
Vagrant thoughts are always deleterious. Chris-
tianity makes us think, and not dream.
When nature has combined in the same man a
very strong character and a meditative mind, we can
hardly expect that the soul will take the side of the
mind against itself. The legal expression of the dead
D
•
34
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
carrying it against the living finds no application here.
When life is energetic it subjects thought to itself.
Whether at the onset or in the course of speculation,
the soul, always present and always attentive to its
interests, contrives to gain its suit.
Exclusively contemplative lives are not neces-
sarily the most internal, the most profound, the most
true; neither do lives exclusively of action, even
were this action entirely of thought, possess all these
advantages. To live with oneself is not to think;
and to act is not essentially a getting out of self.
Youth has for its portion all audacities, even the
most just and most holy. These are necessary things
that would never be done if youth did not do them:
mature age may continue admirably, but it begins
little.
Too often an unhappy childhood is the prelude and
presage of a sad maturity.
What one has least of all in the years of early
youth is a thought of one's own. We live, then, of the
life of all the world; we have the spirit of our time,
our party, our school; and although we may have, more
than we ever shall again, the agreeable sense of self-
dependence, it is nevertheless certain that this age
is not that of really personal inspiration. Hence we
may conclude that there is danger in presenting our-
selves very early to the eyes of the public.
There are men who, taken possession of in youth
by some great and powerful thought, carry it with
them throughout the whole of life as a torch which
METAPHYSICS.
35
is to lighten its night, as well as that other darker
and deeper night, the night of death. For all who
believe, their faith itself is this idea; but within the
range of a common faith many attach themselves to
some particular aspect of the truth, in which the
whole truth reflects itself, or from whence the whole
truth is deducible.
Those who, between the ages of twenty-four and
thirty-four, modify none of their opinions, are worthy
of much admiration or much pity.
There is no age, there is no situation in which the
only rule of the soul is quietly to follow its inclina-
tion. Reason insists upon whatever is human
weighing and measuring itself: "We must not see,
feel, hear everything."
The discipline most favourable to the freshness and
health of the soul is a regulated and even an austere
life. It is only strong souls who are susceptible of true
tenderness. The life of the soul wears and dissipates.
itself in emotions which should only hold that place
in existence that accent does in language. Who knows
better how to love than the man of virtue and duty?
For him at the decline of life there blooms a second
youth better than the first, a fresher, though less lively
youth than that of early years. The treasure of the
heart carefully husbanded overflows then of itself.
Confirmed in the right way, and sure of always
walking therein, the eyes are permitted to glance over
perspectives long denied them. We make haste, we
thirst to live, we take our seats as new comers, full
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་
of innocent and reverent wonder, at that banquet of
life where so many have been seated from their dawn;
the soul, for once indulgent to itself, opens to all pure
impressions, associates itself with all worthy tastes,
sympathises with all noble aspirations, and this late
youth puts to shame the precocious age of many
souls, gifted perhaps by nature, that the abuse of
emotions has reduced to premature impotence.
II.-LOGIC.
1. Logic and Dialectics: Definition-Different kinds
of Logic-Dangers attending its exclusive use.
Logic is but one part, the formal and instrumental
part, of truth. All truth is logical, insomuch as it is
truth; but there is a logic concealed in the very
nature of truth, even when it does nothing but affirm
or state itself; and there is another, ostensible, ad-
vanced, actual, so to speak, the employment of which
counts for much in the eloquence of a discourse: for
to discourse and to reason are synonymous terms.
When we have given to logic the place of reason,
we lose the very sense of elementary truths, and the
very instincts of nature.
When you only possess a truth by a logical process
it is pretty much the same with it as with a well-
corded and well-sealed box, enclosing precious or
delicious things, of which you have neither the sight
nor the touch, which you cannot enjoy by any of your
:
METAPHYSICS.
37
senses. You may, indeed, affirm without untruth that
you hold these, since you hold the box that contains
them; but to speak thus is a virtual abuse of lan-
guage.
Nothing so terrible as logic in irrationality.
Under an aspect more or less disguised, logic or
reasoning pervades human speech. The most delicate
logic is the law, and makes the beauty of the simplest
narratives. Logic is at the root or in the nature of the
most impetuous oratorical displays; and how, indeed,
should it not be so, since our most instinctive and
intimate impulses are mixed with logic? What else
is a witticism often but a sally of logic? The finest
things in every style are the expressions, or obey the
law, of a superior logic; for exactness and inexactness
are not the sole differences between one man's logic
and another; there is a scientific or sublime logic, as
there is a vulgar and superficial. Logic is often
inspired or suggested by something better than itself,
and as there are solid arguments, so there are touching
arguments as well. Logic is not anterior to every-
thing; it is preceded by facts and by the impressions
that facts produce, though I do not mean to say that
logic is always a stranger to the most apparently
simple impressions. Sublime facts and influences
render logic sublime, but it retains its character, and
gives to discourse not only a particular form, but
energy.
If logic may be defined as a necessity of the inner
man, each element of our being has its logic, since
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
each contains the germ of a necessity.
The heart
and conscience have their logic as well as the under-
standing; for each of these portions of the inner man,
so soon as a principle is acknowledged or felt, imme-
diately claims its consequence as a sacred debt. Now
when these three necessities concur on the same point;
when, added the one to the other, they weigh on the
will with the weight of the whole man, how should
the will resist the whole man, or how should it not
be absorbed beforehand in what wholly absorbs the
man? This is tantamount to saying what the Chris-
tian preacher, armed with this triple logic, should
become; what the vivacity of his language, the
urgency of his appeals; with what force a doctrine,
in which all the knots are so closely drawn, should
lay hold of souls; of what importance that preaching
must be which, by a happy necessity, includes in each
discourse the whole counsel of God.
One in their principles, one in their aims, dialectics
are not solely, however, the art or the talent of con-
cluding; they have two forms or two applications: to
distinguish, and to deduce, make up dialectics. Those
even who would define them as consisting of the
second of these processes, acknowledge that dialectics,
considered as the art of proving, have their first con-
dition or beginning in their exact and scientific
decomposition of words. We only compose well
after having decomposed.
We may be rigidly dialectical and yet lack good
sense; and Pascal is right to distinguish, as he does
METAPHYSICS.
39
in two places, between the geometrical method and
common sense.
Pascal holds that logic, which is an abstraction, may
shake everything; and further, he holds that in our
present condition an unfortunate tendency inclines
us to scepticism which does away with intuition, as
well as to fatalism which does away with liberty, with
this only difference, that the tendency to fatalism
affects all men, while only thinkers are led away by
that towards scepticism. He acknowledges that, in
certain subjects of extreme importance, the weakening
of intuition, and, above all, of moral intuition, affords a
wide scope for the irruptions of logic, savage and
implacable enemy, that pillages our best convictions,
and seats itself with effrontery by our very hearth to
count over the booty it has gained. Pascal considers
that we only possess by a precarious title our most
necessary and best founded beliefs; that even their
evidence does not guarantee them against the insults
of doubt; and that a great number of those things that
we only believe with our souls are really not believed
by us at all. Conviction and doubt are not only two
attitudes of the mind, but two states of the soul; and
so long as the soul is not restored there will be many
truths which we shall not believe firmly, or shall only
believe with an inert faith, incapable of reacting
against the assaults of logic. Now, God has not
intended logic to govern human life, and its nobility
consists not in believing upon proof, but believing
without proof; or if this language offends you,
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
believing upon other proofs than those of reasoning.
Suppose a being made up only of intelligence, you
may calculate that for that very reason he will
be profoundly and incurably sceptical, and you may
infer that men of whom logic is the habitual instru-
ment-logic, as it were, the trade (a geometrician,
for instance, like Pascal), will ill defend against
abstract reason those truths the force of which lie
not in being demonstrated but felt. If I do not feel
that good is good and evil evil, who is there that can
ever prove it to me?
Pure dialectics neglect nature, or the substance of
things. They stop short, so to speak, at a first stage,
where the mind requires, and does not obtain, a fresh
relay. There is a secret retreat into which they do not
penetrate, nor of themselves have ever penetrated. It is
given to philosophy to cross this mysterious threshold;
but why? Because philosophy is something more
than dialectics, which have been so often mistaken
for it, and which are little more in relation to it than
the bow is to the lyre.
It is difficult, moreover, when we give ourselves up
to dialectics not to be led away into proving too
much: by dint of rigidity we arrive at sophistry, and
reasoning ends by banishing reason. This is singular,
and at first hard to be understood.
When you apply figures or algebraical signs to
measure or weigh a substance, you are sure that these
signs, which have nothing substantial and are perfectly
and in all cases identical with themselves, will not con-
•
METAPHYSICS.
41
duct you to a false result. It is not so with dialectics;
they may lead you with imperturbable precision to
consequences which, narrowly looked at, revolt you,
and which you instinctively reject as the eye and the
lungs do foreign substances. How comes this about?
It is because, separated from their substance, a true
and a false formula are equally indifferent to us, and
thus, no internal repugnance warning us, we very
easily mistake the relative for the absolute, one point
of view for another, the shadow for the body, words
for things. Both conversation and books are full of
this qui pro quo. This does not happen in subjects
which entirely relate to the intellect, and whose
wholly abstract nature is perfectly simple and ab-
solutely invariable; but nothing is easier, nothing
more common, in subjects where the same word is
necessarily susceptible of several ideas, and has not
the character of figures or algebraical signs. In such
subjects, unless we constantly hold fast the substance
of the idea, we do not get the idea; we lose it on our
way, and perhaps at the beginning of the way, much
as (if such an illustration be permitted me) a postil-
lion riding his horse and turning his back to the
carriage, may chance to leave it on the road, and
arrive at the journey's end with nothing behind him.
This cannot happen in an algebraical calculation,
where the separation of the sign and the thing signi-
fied never takes place where the horse never leaves
the car on the road.
In reasoning upon moral
matters, it is a condition of safety to keep incessantly
42
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
testing the substance of ideas, so as to assure our-
selves that what we have got hold of at the present
moment is indeed the same thing that we held a short
time before.
Dialectics end by reconciling the mind to enor-
mities. It becomes callous, as does the hand that
has too long grasped a too hard tool. There are
truths and errors to which we soon cease to be sensi-
tive; and we often find that, with all this logical
dexterity and potentiality, the judgment is not only
less delicate, but less correct, than that of persons.
who make more use of common sense than of scien-
tific deduction.
2. Some principles of Logic: Identity, Certainty, and
Evidence-Axioms-A-priorism-Synthesis and
Analysis-Vicious Circles-Ideas and Facts-
Theory and Practice-Principles and Consequences.
Identity is the character of demonstrations in
the exact sciences; thus, when I lay down that two
and two are four, I say nothing else than that two
and two make two and two.
The mathematical and the judicious mind are two
distinct things.. Might we not cite some
famous mathematicians, who in any other sphere than
that of their favourite science in the ordinary
conduct of life-have been anything but sensible
and well-judging? A geometrical intellect which is
nothing more, often proves a great embarrassment in
METAPHYSICS.
43
the midst of the realities of life, and applied irrele-
vantly, as too often it is, it leads with strict precision
and admirable method to the most palpable absurdities.
Why is it that mathematical propositions are so
rigidly precise? The reason is, that they are only
identical propositions, the subject and the attribute of
which but express under different signs one and the
same idea, or, if you will, the same value. The
attribute of a mathematical proposition is not a
quality, not a manner of existing which we discover
in the subject, it is the subject itself offered in a new
form. When I say, Two and two make four, I do not
by this last word describe a property of two plus two,
I simply give a new name to two plus two.
No one in mathematics speaks of an axis which has
but one pole, or a line with only one end: in morals
and politics this is daily done. The way in which
law and duty are discussed is a striking instance of
this. One is spoken of as though it did not suppose
the other, the first, more especially, as though it did
imply the second.
Pride is stronger than reason; pride contradicts
evidence as it would deny at need the daylight at
noonday ;-wonder after that at anything, and assign
if you can limits to human folly.
At a certain degree of evidence silence is becoming,
and a demonstration becomes almost an insult.
To insist in all matters upon evidence would be to
will the degradation of our intellect.
Certainty is not evidence. This word, which has
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
been too freely used, designates a quality of the ob-
ject; the word certainty expresses more particularly
a condition of the subject. Evidence is in the idea
or the fact; certainty is in the man who pronounces
upon that fact or that idea. Certainty is merely the
repose of the mind that has ceased to doubt; evidence
is the character possessed by a truth when it spon-
taneously presents itself to any mind that does not
refuse to become acquainted with it, just as the light of
the sun strikes my eyes if I will only open them, and
even penetrates through the veil of the closed eye-
lid. In this sense, which is indubitably that de-
manded by etymology, evidence is a rare thing, a
quality which belongs but to a limited number or
certain order of truths, and which the truths most
important to man do not present.
Evidence relates to the general and settled organi-
sation of the human race, and certainty depends, up
to a certain point, upon the different and variable
states of individuals.
Thus there are a great number of truths with respect
to which we may obtain the most satisfactory certainty,
which we could not deny without falsifying our
conscience and our reason, and yet which lack the
character of evidence. Amongst, and even at the
head of these truths, stand those which form the
object of our religious faiths. These truths re-
late to the invisible world; nothing appertaining to
them strikes our senses, nothing imperiously and at
once forces our conviction. We may prove them to
METAPHYSICS.
45
our own selves, we may demonstrate them to others,
but they do not demonstrate, or rather do not show
themselves; it is ours to make out of the arguments
that establish them a closely woven chain, in the
links of which our reason is bound, and as it were
taken captive.
There is nothing really universal but logical axioms,
and these are not true because they are universal,
but universal because they are true.
In spite of appearances and established prejudice,
we believe that in certain cases the à priori method,
if very pure, very candid, and very complete, is
better worth than statistics, and should precede them.
There are facts which have not, and never will have
statistics. It is better to prove their necessity than
to prove their existence.
There are not two methods: a method excluding
analysis is false, and leads to nothing. Synthesis is
but a play of ideas unless preceded by analysis
(Ancillon); and further, no one will allow that they
employ any other. Every one claims to set out with
observation, to decompose objects into their elements
and to show the relations of them; every one, in
short, analyses, but many analyse very ill.
In point of fact, we must not too severely condemn
a vicious circle; the lives of wise men are full of such,
and no one, I believe, will dare to sneer at the sight
of a sceptic on his knees beseeching the Being of
beings to prove to him His existence.
No one is finally modified except by facts. Argu-
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
ment itself has no other object than to bring our will
into relation with some fact with which we had not
before come into immediate contact. This method, al-
ways inferior in power to the presence of facts, shows
itself more especially insufficient when we desire to
convince, not thinkers by profession, but the multitude.
The mass of mankind are only to be reached by close
firing; in order to be intelligible to them we must
appeal immediately to their passions or palpable in-
terests, or to the primitive sentiments of human nature.
The pure and simple appearance of a fact of such
a nature that the soul cannot contemplate it without
being thereby modified, is stronger than all argu-
ments. It is facts that are our masters. He who
wishes to rule over us ought either to create new facts
or to bring known facts within our grasp. If you
can neither do the one nor the other you can pretend
to no empire over our will; if you have only effete
facts to bring forward you may as well be silent.
This has been the problem to be solved by every
religion that has aimed at laying hold of human will,
and more or less all have grappled with it in propor-
tion to the value of the facts they have produced,
combined with the intensity of the belief that these
have obtained.
Abstract principles, it is said, meet facts, and are
broken up by this collision. Good. But you must
take into consideration that this may also be said of
the most inviolable precepts of Christian morality.
Try to govern a state upon those principles.
METAPHYSICS.
47
Basis
That which is first in the thought of philosophers
-the ideal-is not first in the order of facts.
and principle are not synonymous with birth and
beginning. The ideal has no date, having no exist-
ence in facts, but in the mind of the philosopher to
whom it presents itself as the end of things and their
perfection. The ideal of any institution is not the
motive by which that institution was created, nor is it
present to the mind of those by whom that institu-
tion lives and endures. Even allowing that an ideal
was their starting point, the true ideal of the thing is
elsewhere, and reveals itself later. The ideal is the
idea to which the institution gives rise, not that from
whence the institution rose. It is the conception or
expression of a law sought elsewhere, and higher
than in the institution itself, and authoritatively apply-
ing itself thereto. Never was an institution born of its
ideal; but all institutions gravitate and aspire towards
it. The human mind makes the world in proportion
as the world makes itself. But we must not hence
suppose that there is nothing in common between the
ideal and the real. Far from this being the case,
he who should thoroughly investigate the two would
end by finding in the one all the elements of the
other: the same principles are the basis of both; but in
the real they act without revealing themselves, in the
ideal they have become self-conscious. This difference,
however, is so considerable, that the same institution,
taken in its real and its ideal spirit, becomes two insti-
tutions, of which the one is unintelligible to the other.
48
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
must set out,
Each man may act individually according to the ideal
that he has formed for himself; but in a general ar-
rangement it is not from the ideal we
but towards the ideal we must tend. We beg here
to be permitted an expression, which, though inexact,
will help to make us understood. One can no more
do violence to the conscience of an institution than of
an individual.
Philosophy has acknowledged that, in an absolute
sense, the idea precedes the fact. The human mind,
anterior to any experience, holds within itself a cer-
tain number of moulds or matrices, without which
facts could either not penetrate it at all, or would
remain without form, which comes to the same thing.
On the other hand, without experience those matrices
or moulds would remain eternally barren. They are
the primary ideas, the primary and fundamental attri-
butes of which all others are composed. These attri-
butes or predicates only wait, so to speak, for subjects;
but without them no proposition, no judgment can
open out in the human mind.
Just as, in the interests of the flowers and fruits it
is destined to bear, it is good that a tree should not
branch out as soon as it emerges from the ground,
but that for some time longer it should send up to-
wards the sky its straight, bare stem, where the sap
collects, rises, and elaborates itself for the advantage
of the branches; so in all subjects it is good that the
generative idea, before it brings forth after its kind,
should in the first place fortify itself, and to that end
METAPHYSICS.
49
should gather itself into itself, concentrate, fathom
itself. What it produces later will be all the more
vigorous and strong. Anterior to all generation-by
which I mean all application and detail-the idea
exists in the condition of a germ; during which time
it combines under the notion and the aspect of unity
what will subsequently only appear as separated and
differentiated: it is only complete then, only then
does it contain and impart its whole secret; and by
its aid attentive man may reascend, not half-way
merely, but to the very summit, to the full principle
of the virtue enjoined, of the vice denounced, the
error pointed out, the snare discovered to him. In
this secret, in the knowledge of this intimate prin-
ciple, which is the philosophy of every subject, resides
at least a portion of the strength of pastoral instruc-
tion. This strength, if one knows how to dispose of
it, is not reserved as a privilege for the instructed or
cultivated listener merely; it may be made use of for
the most simple, as several of the teachings of our
Lord serve to prove. I would then, generally speak-
ing, have the preacher to fathom the parent idea of
his subject before he takes up its details, and while
proportioning himself to the wants and the capacity
of his hearers, to make of that idea a starting point
whence those hearers shall spontaneously set out, or
more easily follow him through the different branches
of that main line.
Every order of facts corresponds to an idea, or
resolves itself finally into an idea, which is, as it
E
50
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
were, the rational sum of those facts: now this idea
in general is so far from indifferent that it has, on
the contrary, an intrinsic value that each particular
fact has not. The fact is often only the manifesta-
tion or symbol of the idea; it is pre-eminently the
idea that has a true value; it is the idea that we
must have: doubtless this should be in order to
realise it, but on the other hand it would be in man to
realise it empirically if we had neither the conscience,
nor the conviction, nor the tone of this idea.
The pure idea has a form and extension; but it
has neither consistency, colour, nor taste.
We must not deceive ourselves as to the value of
words; synthesis, rightly invoked as the most crying
want of our age, is not beyond these same conditions.
It too has its basis in facts-in well-observed facts;
but it combines, reconciles them, fertilises them thus;
extracts from them a living idea; is, in a word, posi-
tive, while analysis confines itself to playing a quite
negative part. Synthesis is the instinct of humanity
and the seal of genius; but however mysterious and
divine its principles, it differs essentially from that
immediate intuition which some authors have attri-
buted to the earliest ages of the world, and which,
growing, we are told, weaker and rarer from age to
age, has at length found its deathbed in the cradle of
our method.
·
The idea springs from facts; it had, if I may so
say, to be lived before it could be conceived; but,
once conceived, it justly claims to govern life, or
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51
rather life rightly ranges itself under its sovereign
control. Our instinct warns us that what we are is
not the measure of what we ought to be; that we
have to seek our rule outside of ourselves; that our
will cannot be the law of our will; that it must be
in the first place regulated according to the idea, to
truth, which must be something other than the Ego.
But if the idea itself have issued from the Ego, if it
be only the expression of it, if it reproduce all its
characteristics, how can it serve us as a rule? Each
one aspires to order his life upon convictions; but if
these convictions be only his own will disguised, in
what a vicious circle is he constrained to turn!
It seems a law of our destiny with respect to
theory and practice, that one must always overflow
the other; that effects exceed cause, so that in some
sort the effect becomes cause of its cause; that is to
say, that the idea excites and even exaggerates the
sentiment that gave it birth.
The word system is decried: but that matters little;
we can only rule our life upon a system; he who
has none lives by chance. A system is only a prin-
ciple surrounded by its consequences; and it is
equally foolish to pretend to live without a system,
as without the consequences of the principle that one
has accepted.
A strange distinction is drawn between principles
and their application, as if the application of a true
principle could be false, or as if a false principle
could have true applications.
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
We do not allow that certain proved and even
grave inconveniences convict a system of falsehood,
seeing that in a corrupt world the best of systems
cannot be unattended by inconveniences.
We do not allow that we can fairly charge to a
principle the difficulties and hindrances that attend a
return to that principle if it has been long mistaken
or forgotten; or if the contrary principle, organised
long ago in society, has penetrated all its parts and
modified all its elements.
We do not allow that a principle should be aban-
doned because its rehabilitation presents difficulties,
and leads us, even certainly, to foresee dangers. The
greatest of all dangers (greater, I maintain, than all
others put together), the most inexhaustible source
of difficulties, lies in the mistaking of the principle :
all that contradicts man's nature and God's law,
all that is contrary to moral order, is more opposed,
more prejudicial to eternal order, than any reform
that brings humanity back to truth, were it through
the most violent convulsions.
I have never understood that species of disdain
which is now-a-days affected for theory, which is con-
tinually opposed to practice, as though it were its
natural contrast. It is true that whenever those in
power take possession of all realities, and are mas-
ters of the practical, theory becomes the refuge, the
consolation, and the dream of the weak. Neverthe-
less, what is called theory is nothing else than truth
itself: theory is inflexible as truth, and the proud
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53
derision of those who do not require it to authorise
their pretensions, deprives it of none of its rights or
of its authority; it survives all the usurpations of
violence, and all the sophisms of injustice, and in
the midst of abuses, nay, of disorder itself, presents
itself majestically as the indelible type of all that
ought to be.
The written essay, say some, has one immense
defect, that of overlooking human nature and facts:
and we recall here an expression of Catherine the
Great to a theorist of a different school to mine.
"You work," said she, "on paper, which endures
everything; and we unfortunate monarchs have to
work upon human flesh." This thought has misled
many. All is not flesh in man; there is even in the
natural man a soul with which we have to reckon,
and from which there is something to expect. We
must, no doubt, take man as we find him; but we
must not leave him there. This expression of Cathe-
rine's, taken in an absolute sense, is a protestation
against principles, against the invisible, against the
ideal,-against God. Let us take count of facts, but
let facts also take count of principles.
The multitude of theories is perhaps only one
proof the more of the dearth of principles.
The craving to be, or to seem, original is more
easily satisfied by the creation of singular and exclu-
sive systems than by gathering up on the highway of
good sense correct and interesting ideas of detail.
It is very true that good sense itself systematises, in-
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རྗ
asmuch as it connects its counsels with general ideas
or with principles; but this course does not bestow
the name of inventor on those who pursue it.
It is not necessary to press us hard to obtain our
admission that all that is true is useful, and that the
positive results of a theory are the natural counter-
proof of its truth.
A principle is not to be moderated; it rigidly
exacts all that is due to itself, and has never failed
to do so.
It were as easy to make a river flow back toward
its source as to prevent this principle (of the reli-
gious indifference and incompetence of the state),
once consecrated by facts, from engendering all its
consequences.
It should be understood that it is by no means in-
different whether we set out from a true or a false
principle, and that the road from error to error is
shorter than that from truth to error.
A principle may long suffer with impunity if it
suffer silently; and we are hardly aware of the injury
done to it till that injury becomes our own, when, the
principle having become flesh of our flesh, it is no
longer it that suffers, but we ourselves. But this
moment comes for all truth whatever; one day it
becomes a part of a living and feeling being; it be-
comes a personal right, a personal property, and this
new character invests it with an evidence and a neces-
sity which, in its condition of pure idea, it could have
with difficulty obtained.
METAPHYSICS.
55
We start from the maxim that all that is false is
bad, that all that is erroneous is dangerous. Who
could controvert this? Who, even did he not mani-
festly see the bad results of the bad principle, could
fail to presuppose, to conclude them beforehand,
unless, indeed, he imagined that a bad tree could
bring forth good fruits?
The consequences of a principle are irresistible
only in logic; in life they are not realised without the
special concurrence of the will. Principle is the raw
material of actions; without it no action: but al-
though this raw material be organised, though it be
in itself an animated germ, yet life and action
do not spontaneously flow from it, and the prac-
tice of religious morality is none the less in its
totality a deliberate action.
It is a common saying that we may agree in prin-
ciple and differ as to its application: this is not true
with regard to immediate applications, without which
the idea would eternally languish in the condition of a
mere idea. Between those who admit and those who
reject these, there is, whatever may appear, all the dis-
tance between one principle and another; and a dis-
cussion as to applications of this order between the
former and the latter is the right, if not the only
way, of coming to an understanding upon one point
at least, that of having previously misunderstood
each other. In the absence of this test it is but too
easy to attach, without at all suspecting it, a different
meaning to the same term.
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Logical consequence, which undergoes eclipse in
individuals, endures none in the masses. Take a mul-
titude, and you will see that the idea that has been
inculcated upon it produces all the results of which
it is susceptible; and, indeed, it is only then that we
can know the true bearing of ideas.
The extreme logic of an idea is its true descrip-
tion. We must at once carry out an idea to its ex-
tremity in order thoroughly to know it; and very
often it is by stopping short on the incline, by im-
posing upon themselves arbitrary restrictions, by, as
it were, falsifying themselves, that great errors, which,
had they divulged their last consequence, would have
scandalised the whole world, have, by concealing it,
proved almost edifying.
3. Problem of Cognition: Cognition, its nature and
limits-Means of knowing-Reasoning, Intui-
tion, Reason and Faith-Intellect, Will, Con-
science, Morality, Sentiment, Love.
In all the most important cases the intimate sense,
when consulted, gives back in one man the same
oracle as in another; but unless we go back thus far,
unless we touch this sensitive point where truth does.
more than reside, we remain in a region of uncertainty,
where everything may be contested or maintained
with almost equal plausibility.
Every cognition of man must be a human cogni-
tion. He knows that only of which he is conscious,
METAPHYSICS.
57
or that which can, without effort, be directly referred
to a fact of consciousness. For it is to misapply
the word to pretend that beyond this limit we
still know thought may, indeed, in venturing into
these spaces, go on out of sight, linking abstrac-
tion to abstraction; but it no longer knows, nay,
it no longer thinks, since we only think upon
notions. I can give no name to such opera-
tions, but they are certainly neither knowledge nor
thought.
The mind of a finite creature, being unable to have
any consciousness of the infinite, can have of it no
knowledge that depends on consciousness. I do not
mean that in one sense we have not a consciousness
of the infinite. The infinite is synonymous with
existence. Existence, in the fulness of the notion, is
the infinite. The finite implies non-existence, and
by this one fact of our having the sentiment of ex-
istence, we have that of the infinite. But we are
none the less essentially finite beings, and as such,
the true consciousness, the true knowledge of the
infinite, is irrevocably refused to us.
To tell us that things are, because we think them;
that it is our thought which causes them to be-I say
to be what they are, this is outside of the premises of
your consciousness and of mine; this connects itself
by no link to any part of consciousness, and conse-
quently remains out of the sphere of knowledge. One
may, indeed, find words in which to express such a
proposition, and seem to be saying something, but,
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
in fact, one says nothing; and the human mind, as it
is constituted, is incapable of giving any real meaning
to this combination of words. For what, after all, is
the sense of a word except that which, in some way
or other, makes it sensible to us? In the last analysis,
to know is to perceive; to know, according to the
etymology of the word, is the act by which an object
unites itself to our spiritual being. We cannot
absolutely separate these two elements-knowing
and feeling. The error of those whose mind pro-
duces such strange theses lies not in believing them-
selves to have got hold of the truth, but to have got
hold of an idea.
Man knows nothing in itself and absolutely, but
only in its relations with other things, or in its
modes, which also are relations. These relations are
the true object of human knowledge; and if we
were wise, if we took our own measure, this know-
ledge would suffice us. But to this our pride will
not consent. It aims at knowing the unconditional
and the absolute, without perceiving or allowing that
such a pretension involves a contradiction in terms,
since knowledge is itself a relation. Knowledge
must always divide the subject and the object, the
knowing and the known;-permanent and irremedi-
able duality this; negation of the absolute in the
very search after it! Here the mind of man hardens
and irritates itself against this immense difficulty.
It persists in the pursuit of a unity in which all
relativity must expire. Sometimes it absorbs the
METAPHYSICS.
59
universe in itself; sometimes it, in some sort, annihi-
lates itself not to hamper the universe; lastly, it
reduces it to a thought, which thinks itself, which
creates everything, even God, and of which the
thought of the philosopher himself is but one
moment: subject and object are no longer to be
distinguished; to know is to be; to think is to
create; all duality, all relation disappear. Man is
satisfied; he has found the absolute, and this absolute
he names God. And this is called knowledge! But,
we repeat again, to know is, whether directly or in-
directly, to get a consciousness of something or other
-no knowledge without consciousness! Now here
consciousness is wanting. We have words, we have
a purely logical construction; we may say to our-
selves that, if the reality answered to the formulæ
found, we should in fact have unity, have the abso-
lute. But is this really so? Do you know?-nay,
do you even think anything? No; for this is not
possible even as an attempt: it is less than an error;
and when I try to discover what it resembles, I can
find no other comparison than those feverish dreams
in which all substances are confounded, and which
no words can narrate.
In truth, not to consent to the limitations of our
nature is to pretend to the Infinite, is to complain
of not being God, seeing that if we stop short of the
Infinite, of God, there must always be, even in the
highest ranks of the creation, some attribute, some
advantage to long for.
60°
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Science has never dried up any but arid natures,
in others it turns to marrow and to savour.
Universality of talent is a chimera; but at a cer-
tain elevation in the order of thought one has the
intelligence of all things-nay, this universality is
the mark of great minds.
Strictly speaking, to know any one thing well,
we should know everything; and this is why, in
all the truth of the term, knowledge belongs to
God alone: an exclusive speciality is but a learned
ignorance.
Science does not detract from simplicity: he who
has seen much has felt much, and talent purifies
itself through knowledge as through a fine sieve
which only allows the most limpid water to pass.
In every reality, in every accomplished fact,
there are two distinct things, two things that
may be called concentric-the essence of the fact,
and its formula. We may become acquainted with
the fact through either of these: acquaintance with
it through the second is knowledge, through the first
sight. To know is to be acquainted with the formula,
which is always more general than the fact; to
know, therefore, is to class. To see is to penetrate
through the formal envelope into the certainty of
the fact, and, consequently, into its individuality; it
is not to class, but to name. One of these acts be-
longs to the intellect, the other exclusively belongs
to the soul. The intellect knows only abstractions
and forms, the soul sees beings and substances; the
METAPHYSICS.
61
intellect knows only genera and species, the soul
discovers individualities; the intellect knows, the
soul sees.
One thing is certain, that if ancient science were
not a seer, she claimed to be one, and that from
the very substance of thought she attempted to
compose a world. Modern science has substituted
for the wings of Icarus a pair of crutches, bearing
the names of observation and induction, with which,
no doubt, she advances more securely. Nevertheless,
science would do wrong to attribute all its progress
to method. Behind the two instruments that we
have named resides a free force, a spontaneous
element of the human mind, which we can name,
but not define, and which impels to observation and
induction without being itself impelled. Observa-
tion is not the starting point of the mind; it is
the first term of an action, which has a higher
origin. This fact leaves the bases of experimental
philosophy untouched; it has nothing to fear from
it-scarcely, indeed, needs to take notice of it.
Whatever the nature and true name of that occult
power of which we speak, the foundation of the
new, as the only philosophy, stands firm as Bacon
laid it down, and Pope summed it up in the forcible
and simple line,—
"What can we reason, but from what we know ?"
Reasoning leaves truth external to us. To become
a part of our lives, a part of ourselves, it needs to
be quickened by faith. If the soul does not concur
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
with the mind, the most legitimate conviction will
lack firmness and vivacity. There is a courage of
the mind as well as a courage of the soul, and to
believe thoroughly in an absent truth implies a
force that all have not got. Do what we will, the
conclusions at which we have arrived, by a series
of logical deductions, will hardly produce upon the
mind the impression of reality. There will always
be a great difference between arguing and seeing,
concluding and experiencing. It appears as though,
after all, the spirit needs to see; as though there
were no other energetic and efficacious conviction
than what depends upon sensible impressions: and
here is the value of faith—it is a species of sight.
This force, which supplies the place of evidence;
which, as soon as man, adventuring himself into the
sea of thought, begins to lose his footing and feels
himself overmastered by the waves, takes hold of
him, raises, sustains, and enables him to swim
through the foam of doubt to the pure and tranquil
shore of certainty-this force is faith.
Reason appears to us the form or special function
of the mind; faith, a force of the soul, a fact rather
moral than intellectual. For if it be intellectual, why
not call it reason? The idea that we entertain of
faith may be summed up thus:-You have reason
to believe, and therefore you do believe. This reason
may, just as well as any chain of reasoning, be the
convincing evidence. Be that as it may, you believe.
Well, then, the attachment of your soul, its sur-
METAPHYSICS.
63
render to, its reliance upon, the fact that you hold
to be true-this is faith. Faith, reliance, fidelity
are but one!
It is customary to oppose reason to faith; rather
should we say that one completes the other, and
that they are two pillars, neither of which could
stand without the other. Man is pitied because he
cannot know, or rather cannot see anything, and yet
is compelled to believe; but this is to pity him for
one of his privileges. Direct knowledge does not
put into requisition the living energies of the soul;
it is a passive state unhonoured by any spontaneity;
but in the act of faith (for it is an act, and not a
state) the soul is in some sort creative; or, at least,
if it do not create truth, it brings it near, appro-
priates it, realises it; an idea becomes a fact, and a
fact incessantly present. Thought, leaning upon a
force of the soul, manifests all its dignity in un-
folding its true independence; man multiplies his
life, extends his universe, and attains to the perfect
stature of the thinking being. His dignity springs
not from knowing, but from believing.
Faith finds scope for itself even in facts of per-
sonal experience. Such is our mind-at least, such
has it become that it distinguishes between external
and internal experience, and that deferring unhesi-
tatingly to the evidence of the senses, it costs it an
effort to surrender to the evidence of the conscience.
It needs submission, and consequently a kind of
faith, to admit those primary truths that man carries
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
within his own breast, which have no antecedents,
bring forward no guarantees except their own con-
sciousness, which do not prove, but feel themselves.
Irresistible in their nature, it nevertheless requires
an effort on the part of some of us to believe in
them.
Faith is not credulity; the most credulous man
is not always the one who believes best: a creed is
lost all the more easily the more readily it has been
adopted, and the firmest convictions are very often
those which have cost most. Credulity is but the ser-
vile complaisance of a weak mind, while faith demands
all that the mind has of vigour and energy. Faith
is not the compulsory and passive adhesion of a
mind conquered by proofs; it is a force of the soul,
as inexplicable in its principle as any of those
native qualities which distinguish one man from
his fellows-a force which does not content itself with
accepting the truth, but which is possessed with it,
embraces it, identifies itself with it, and lets itself
be borne on thereby to all the consequences that it
points out and enjoins.
A vast gap stretches out in general between
knowledge and action: over this gulph a bridge is
thrown by faith, which, resting upon a given fact, a
primary notion, springs across the void and bears us
to the other side. Any experience whatever, physical
or moral, an external or internal view, whether of
observation or intuition, is the starting point, the
reason of faith; for we never believe without some
METAPHYSICS.
65
:
reason for doing so. This first fact neither exacts
nor constitutes faith; but its consequences, its logical
development, only takes shape, only become a reality
for man, by means of faith, which renders them
present to him, and constructs for him a world
beyond that revealed by personal experience.
What is the meaning of comprehension? It means,
to grasp the logical chain, the chain of ideas that
links together two or more facts; it is to convince or
assure ourselves by other means than experience; it
is to place ourselves mentally in mediate relation
with objects, immediate contact with which we cannot
have. The comprehension of the mind, then, is, pro-
perly understood, only a supplement to the inevitable
lacunes of experience. These lacunes of experience
depend either upon the absence of objects or upon
their nature, which has no point of contact with
ours. If neither of these two obstacles existed, man
would no longer have anything to comprehend, for he
would touch, test, taste all things. Reason in him
would be replaced by intuition. Wherever there is
scope for intuition there is no longer comprehension,
because there is something better; or, if you will
have it to be comprehension still, it is a comprehen-
sion of a new nature and higher order, which explains
everything to itself without difficulty, to which every-
thing is clear, but which cannot communicate itself
by words to the reason of another. Now such is
the comprehension of the heart.
There are truths of intuition which reside in the
F
·
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
soul, and cannot be grasped by the soul immediately.
In order to conceive and embrace them, reflection is
absolutely useless. All it can do regarding them is
to obscure and efface them. And it succeeds in doing
this, either by applying itself immediately to these
truths and seeking to analyse that to which analysis
is as repugnant as death to the living being, or by un-
wisely filling our mind with a thousand other thoughts
which have not originated in any first truth of the soul:
either way it ends by absorbing the moral in the intel-
lectual man. Now the intellect, by this indiscreet
avidity, deprives itself of its greatest treasure. It
had no more precious property than these very truths,
the tradition of which it has lost little by little.
With the notions of the soul it loses the material of
its best inspirations. “Great thoughts come from
the heart," not the mind. To the soul alone, there-
fore, belong the thoughts that reunite, to the mind
those that divide.
Few
Complication has penetrated everywhere.
people have an immediate insight into moral truth
such as nature has revealed it. Almost all men, even
the least cultivated, only see invisible things through
phrases. Intuition is very rare, ready-made phrases
are common and cheap. It is with these that three-
quarters of the world think on moral subjects. Sys-
tems come somewhat dearer; they are not to be made
at pleasure; but the rudest mind may employ phrases,
and believe itself to say what it repeats, and to have
seen what it says. Each repeats his phrase as the
METAPHYSICS.
67
+
pure and authentic result of his internal experience.
What do I say? Is not the age itself a great simple-
ton, that has had its phrase supplied to it, and goes
on repeating it emphatically, and believing itself not
only to be expressing an idea, but, moreover, its own
idea? We live on phrases, we live outside of our-
selves; the soul grows hollow, and there is no longer
any sap or circulation save in the outer rind that once
covered and now represents the whole.
A hollow, abstract mode of thinking accompanies
many people even through the most terrible hours.
Trouble, anguish itself, cannot separate them from
that artificial life; even then they only feel what
people have agreed to feel, and only say what is con-
ventional.
The mere phrase obstinately holds its ground on
lips trembling with passion, or pale with approaching
death. Nothing has any longer power to throw us
out of our artificial, assumed existence, to our proper
and real one.
The careful observation of facts implies, I will not
say a beginning of faith, but a preliminary acqui-
escence in the possibility of the facts that we have
got to examine. There are facts that we deny before-
hand, because they contradict our principles: it
remains to be known whether these principles them-
selves, founded, perhaps, upon too small a number of
observations, may not themselves need to be re-
formed.
The à priori argument implies the use of the
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
à posteriori, facts having been required to form it;
and if the pure à priori exist, it can only be in those
general and primary sentiments which are the basis
and condition of human nature.
The reason that refuses the restraints of conscience,
and the conscience which will not listen to the
counsels of reason, are equally unworthy of their
name.
But these two forms are distinct, and conscience is
no more a product of reason than reason is a part of
conscience.
What are the relations between the intellect and
the conscience?
The first is the instrument of the second; but for
the rest there is no essential relation between these
two forces.
All the syllogisms in the world, all the efforts of
the most vast intellectual powers, could never origi-
nate in the soul the least sentiment of justice and
injustice, the least notion of duty. The intellect may
fertilise this germ-indeed, this fertilisation cannot
take place without the intellect; but the germ pre-
exists.
Again, it is not a necessary effect of intelligence to
develop and perfect the moral sense. To hold that
it is, we should have to forget that numbers of the
most wicked men that have desolated the world were
men of genius.
Intellect comes to the help of morality if this be
willed, but this restriction says all.
METAPHYSICS.
69
There are intellects that logic renders ferocious;
one of these is no longer a soul, but a dialectical
apparatus. Thought, too, may brutalise if separated
from feeling, conscience, and evidence. This is the
impression we sometimes feel from the contempla-
tion of those mighty logicians whom we admire with
terror. Let us believe neither in the senses nor the
intellect, but in the soul.
It is not by the intellect alone, nor by the intellect
first of all, that we can judge of things pertaining to
the moral order. That we may know these we are
provided with a special sense-the moral. The intel-
lect may subsequently intervene as an auxiliary-it
observes, classes, compares our impressions, but does
not produce them; and it would be as unreasonable
to attribute them to it, as to pretend that we obtain
the knowledge of colours by the ear, of perfumes by
the eye, of sounds and of harmony by our sense of
smell. The things of the heart are only truly under-
stood by the heart.
No passion whatever could exert any influence upon
a notion of the mind did it not in the first place un-
dermine the feeling upon which the notion reposes.
This feeling once sapped, the notion totters and
crumbles away. There can be no conflicts but be-
tween things similar, between one feeling and another,
between egotism and affection. Corroded by its
dangerous neighbour, affection grows weak and poor,
and thus, as we have said, the type that the Lord had
engraved in the ground of our conscience effaces
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
itself little by little, and the rule of our moral judg-
ment gets confused and distorted.
There is a strict relation between the rectitude of
the moral sense and the correctness of the mind.
The first sometimes seems to give the second,-the
good heart produces the sound sense; nay, might we
not even say that it is one of its elements? On many
subjects this rectitude preserves from prescribed ad-
mirations and ready-made opinions; and makes many
deceitful illusions vanish away. It is true that a
purely conventional idea cannot last: it perishes by
the mere effect of time, apparently; but in fact, by
the slow and continuous action of error upon itself.
For the death of error is a sort of suicide: by placing
itself in opposition to facts it exposes itself to be un-
pleasantly struck at and undermined by these facts, as
the rock by the waves; and at the end of a century
nothing remains of such or such an opinion, without
our being able to say why, exactly, or how it was de-
stroyed. It would be sad, however, if this were al-
ways the case; if error always died of itself and was
never slain; if there were not found in some mind or
some conscience weapons for its destruction; if there
were not, in a word, in our nature a sufficient power
of truth for this glorious immolation. Happily a
healthy intellect, an upright heart, anticipates the
action of time, and proves that there are not only
realities but truths. Our modern men of talent ap-
pear too much inclined to leave it to time to set
things to rights, whether for or against them. Time,
.
METAPHYSICS.
71
indeed, is doubtless nothing; correctly speaking,
there are but men and things, existences and
actions seen from the point of view of duration;
time is nothing and does nothing; it is only the me-
dium of all that is and all that acts. And more,
there is always, together with what we have called the
suicide of error, some individual thought which helps
it to die, so that this death is the act of everything
and everybody; but to trust to this without choosing
personally to concur in it, is to remit, in an unmanly
way, the interests of truth into the hands of time;
and if you look closely, you will see that our
expressions are still too flattering, and that this
abdication of thought and conscience in favour of
that vague thing called time, implies a profound
indifference to truth, if not the actual negation
of it.
Does intellectual enthusiasm always carry with it
moral enthusiasm; does it necessarily lead to it; has
it any natural affinity with that admirable senti-
ment? Or again, does this love of abstraction, this
passion of thought, raise a barrier between our souls
and selfishness at all events, selfishness of the least
gross character?
It would often be the height of injustice to deny
that the position of the speculator is more exalted
than that of the practical materialist; that the atmo-
sphere he breathes is purer, and that a nation of
thinkers, could we conceive of such, would not pre-
sent so distressing an aspect, or bequeath to history
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
such blood-stained memories as another nation more
keenly and exclusively taken up with what we call
the realities of life. But do not let us go further, or
confound what is profoundly distinct.
Between speculative truth and moral life there is
not the continuity often supposed: the latter is not
the prolongation of the former; the two would remain
eternally separated without the introduction of the
moral sense, and the moral sense itself needs to be
restored.
It is permissible, nay, it is useful, in the labours
of thought occasionally to view our subject stripped
of its moral interests: to make abstraction of ma-
terial interests is to simplify the question without
perverting it; it is in a certain way to purify it.
But to lose all interest in the good, in our pursuit
of the true, is, in fact, to renounce the discovery
of the true, since what is good is inseparable from
truth. The true without the good is not true; the
good is the primary truth, the true par excellence,
the truth of the true. All other sacrifices enrich
us by that they take away-make us, as it were,
live more; this sacrifice-by which I mean that mood
which affects not to see in the good an interest, and
the supremest of all interest-this is a suicide.
The most false of all minds are those that apply
mathematics in the region of feeling.
The utility of the study of the exact sciences is
positive; they teach as precision a means that leads
us to truth: to find the right name and exact value
METAPHYSICS.
73
of all things may contribute to morality. Mathe-
matics are gymnastics of the mind.
Man is only what he ought to be in respect to his
fellow-man in so far as he is so in respect to his
Creator. But the wisdom of God is manifold in its
operations. Alternately it brings humanity back to
good sense by morality, and back to conscience by
the activity of the mind.
Philosophy is implicitly morality, and every system
of the universe is a system of life.
Is it philosophy that produces morality, or morality
that determines philosophy? Without at first an-
swering this question directly, let us remember how
rare it is that intellectual speculations are completely
exempt from moral influence; how psychological re-
searches, more particularly, must needs be exposed to
these; how perfectly recognised is the bearing of will
upon opinion; lastly, how seldom it is that thought
only springs from itself, only consults itself, and imper-
turbably traces out its own road through the sugges-
tions and seductions of the moral being continually by
its side. Those who will reflect upon the continual
attempts at usurpation made by the will upon
thought will not be disposed to reject as absurd the
supposition of a philosophy generated, or, at least, if
we might venture to say it, conditioned by morality.
Those, again, who ask themselves which is strongest
in man, feeling or thought; which most imperiously
determines his conduct, desire or conviction; which
it is that most irresistibly dominates his life; in other
·
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
words, that most makes him to be what he is, thought
or feeling; those who remark in addition that all
social theories, all institutions, have begun not by
being speculations but affections or wants, will not
be far from giving the preference to the supposition
that subordinates philosophy to morality. I believe
that it is far more easy to admit that a certain ten-
dency of the will leads to a certain theory regarding
the soul, the world, and life, than to admit that such a
theory, deduced from the pure speculations of the in-
tellect, has imprinted a certain direction on the will.
If it be objected that morality itself is derived from
certain speculative principles, and is at its basis
philosophy, I reply, What are these very principles
but moral facts, internal facts; in other words, senti-
ments discovered at the bottom of the soul—the
primary material, the substance of all ulterior specu-
lation? Would any one pretend that this coincidence,
or this relation between philosophy and morality, is
a fortuitous encounter, to which each doctrine has
developed itself independently, a sort of pre-estab-
lished harmony? Certainly not. We must then
admit an action of one of those disciplines on the
other; and this granted, it seems to me difficult to
hesitate in our choice.
The intellect of each may flourish while his in-
dividuality withers and dies. Neither thought, with
all its soaring, nor the passions in all their excess,
develop or manifest it. With all these one may
have no character of one's own. The soul only
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75
receives its proper name, its true personality,
from the conscience, that too much neglected
confidant, that too much ignored authority, to
which we must always listen if we would not yield
up our me to foreign and fortuitous influence, if
we would live our own life, and be our own selves.
By the life of pure intellect, in the movements
of natural affection, we have nothing that intrin-
sically distinguishes us from our fellows: these two
facts do not as yet manifest our personality in the
true sense of the word; faculties and instincts are not
us; we must descend deeper to find ourselves.
St. Paul has advanced nothing paradoxical, he has
but indicated a truth of advanced psychology, in
saying, “Thus, then, it is not I that do it (do that I
would not), but sin that dwelleth in me" (Romans
vii. 17). Thus even in sin the ego is distinct from
sin. And what is this ego distinct from sin, which
judges and condemns it, but the conscience? In the
same way, in man in general the ego is distinct from
the intellect and the natural inclination. So long
as we live only in these two positions of our
nature, we have but a superficial and eccentric
existence, and the actions that we consummate by
their agency are less actions than human phenomena,
of which our person is the sphere. Without a
moral excitation the intellect only acts externally.
It modifies our destiny, not ourselves; it characterises
us outwardly, not inwardly; it renews the form, not
the substance of our life.
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
There are men of high intellect whose personality
has outlines not more distinct than those of a cloud;
men who only receive their form from circumstances,
just as water only takes its form from the shape of the
vessel that contains it. A people composed of such
beings could not be compared to a library, but rather
to a collection of copies of one work differently
bound. In a land where convictions are rare and con-
science is not exercised, the passions alone diversify
the aspect by their different degrees of energy: the
stir they occasion, the sudden changes they bring
about, create individuality of situation; but true indi-
viduality is hardly seen except in the chiefs of this
general movement, and not always seen in them.
And let me add that when the absence of an inner
life has effaced individuality, the labours of the intel-
lect may, far from reviving, tend completely to extin-
guish it.
They do this by diverting more and more from
spontaneous intuition, and rendering it even more
superfluous. They lead us to assist at all things,
even our own life, as though it were a spectacle.
They draw our convictions from without instead of
receiving them from within. They take us out of
our nature, our country, and drag us far away from
the world of immediate impressions into the world.
of ideas. The inner life becomes an idea, a sphere
of ideas. One observes one's life to such a degree
that one forgets to live it; by dint of contem-
plating one ceases to see oneself. Internal inspi-
METAPHYSICS
77
•
rations, the oracles of the soul, no longer make
themselves heard: one has scarcely any instincts.
left: the first groundwork, the basis of moral ideas,
their starting point, is lost; we are no longer men,
we are all thought.
It is as unwise to substitute ideas for feelings as
words for ideas.
The reasons to be given in favour of defective
truth belong to the depths of the soul far more than
to the province of the intellect.
If you examine the matter closely you will see
that, contrary to the most accredited opinion, it is
feeling in man (want, if you will,-that first feeling,
the most obstinate of all), that is really the primary
fact, the generator of others; the source of the modi-
fication of the being, and especially of the ideas.
There lies the hidden germ of that personality that
blossoms out afterwards in the intellect, and forms so
many varied and fruitful systems. The source remains
concealed; tributaries bring in fresh water, but the
stream directs itself according to the first impulse
communicated by the will. It is thus that philo-
sophical systems, those fruits of the travail of the
human intellect, have been originally determined, or
at least conditioned, by the moral state of the peoples
among whom they have prevailed.
This involuntary preference that we give to intel-
lect over morality, and to the gifts of the mind rather
than those of the heart, is one of the characteristics
and diseases of our times.
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
By dint of working on our thoughts, contemplating,
living in them, we come to substitute them for our
feelings. For many of us, mere notions have taken
the place of affections, the mind that of the soul; al-
most the whole of morality has passed into intellect;
and the blood, forgetting its office of making the
heart beat, flows to the brain, organises there an
imitation of the heart, and constitutes it the centre
of circulation. Will men not understand that the
gradual substitution of the intellect for the functions of
the soul, ends by making those in whom it takes place,
involuntary comedians, dupes of their own drama?
People do not reflect that the cognitions which de-
pend upon a certain state of the soul alter with that
very state, and that a conscience lulled to sleep lets
all sorts of errors creep into the mind. They do not
see that our soul is no longer a mirror in which truth
at once reflects itself without our will having any-
thing to do with it, but an opaque surface on which
truth must be incessantly engraved anew; that, since
the fall, faith is so little independent of the will, that
the will, on the contrary, is an element and condi-
tion of it; that truth has no longer an irresistible
evidence, nor, consequently, the property of making
the same impression on all minds alike, and subju-
gating them all at one blow.
Independence is only one of the conditions of
good judgment. Truth-and when we have to deal
with the actions of man, moral truth-constitutes its
real worth. We want the whole truth with regard
METAPHYSICS.
79
to man and to principles; we demand, that while
right as to the value of facts, the judge should not
be less so in his estimate of the value of the laws he
applies. He is not sufficiently so if he be indif-
ferent, for indifference on such a point is the gravest
of all errors.
How alarming that expression of Pascal's, "The
will, organ of belief!" But how true also! That
which in the sphere of human opinion is called faith,
what is it but will applied to objects of speculation?
Has not the intensity of this faith for its exact mea-
sure the force of the will?
The sciences find their object outside of us, whether
in physical nature, which excites in us neither sym-
pathy nor antipathy, and leaves us in full possession
of our indifference, or in the world of moral beings,
which, without offering this advantage in the same
degree, at least only touches us indirectly and occa-
sionally. The will is kept apart, or at all events
scientific objects do not forcibly attract it within
their circle. Facts present themselves to our mind
in their objective purity, not surrounded beforehand
by the mists of our passions. Errors are indeed
possible; but there is one cause of error the less; it
is certain that error is less near, less imminent. We
have a fixed point, a firm platform afforded to our
intellectual operations. The degree of certitude of
our cognitions is so much the greater as their ob-
ject, in a sense, is further removed, more foreign
to us; and the chief weight of the evidence lies in
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
the sphere of purely rational facts; I mean those
of which the very material is furnished by rea-
son. Is it the same with the ideas of philosophy; I
mean of positive philosophy, of constructive philo-
sophy? Where shall we look for their starting
point except in the ego? and what is the pure ego, the
abstract ego? In geometry we admit the line without
breadth, but can we admit the ego without qualities,
without life? Does such an ego exist save in the head
of those philosophers who have dreamed it, and can
any deductions or conclusions drawn from it be more
than hypothetically true; or anything built on such
a basis be better than a castle in the air, a space in
space, a sea in the ocean? Or, if we grant to the
philosophic ego what we have just denied it, have we
a basis that is firm, immutable, and identical with
itself? Must not this concrete ego bring with it a
part of what life has endowed it with,-interests, pas-
sions, hatred, which we must needs reckon among pas-
sions; prejudice, which is a habit; in a word, a whole
moral condition likely to detract from the impar-
tiality of its research and the authenticity of its re-
sults? And who is there that can doubt that this
is the ego that has been present and active at the out-
set of philosophical research, so that each research of
this order necessarily begins by begging the ques-
tion; each makes its aim at starting; each in setting
out knows where it shall arrive; there never can be in
the philosophical world any real voyage of discovery;
the most sincere have had a prepossession: and this,
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81
at least, cannot be contested; in every one affections
and moral life are anterior to a formal philosophy, and
these affections, this life, are the ego in all its energy;
hence this ego will not, be sure, adopt a system of
philosophy according to which he would distinctly
see his affections denied and his moral being contra-
dicted: between the system and the ego evidence is
ready to interfere; the philosophical creed lets itself
be determined by the life; is it conversely so with
the life? J. J. Rousseau has somewhere said,
"Our
feelings depend upon our ideas." This is true in
its turn, as we shall see; but feelings would not
obey quite abstract, and in some sort, artificial ideas,
if an internal sentiment had not previously com-
manded that obedience. Besides, what is proved to us
by this philosophy, that constantly recommences and
never ends, that settles nowhere, that varies with
characters and institutions, except that instead of
being a creation of the intellect acting with sovereign
spontaneity upon the elements furnished it by neu-
tral materials, it is nought else than the varied suc-
cession of the soul's evolutions, fatiguing itself
by dint of diversified attitudes ?-in other words,
that the moral condition is the reality whose ener-
getic action gives rise, in the night of metaphysical
darkness, to a dream that calls itself philosophy; a
dream, I allow, full of significance and importance,
and one of the most solemn phenomena presented
by human life?
Shall we be told that this is to deny philosophy?
G
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Yes, if it be to deny it, to recognise that the starting
point of all metaphysical or ontological theories is
buried in impenetrable darkness; that in that dark-
ness, in place of the mystery it hides, we must neces-
sarily plant our ego, and that all philosophy is sub-
jective, taking that word in its widest signification.
If we deny philosophy, eclecticism, while piquing
itself on being a philosophy, has denied it before us:
it is to this negative value that the partisans of the
different systems in vogue in Germany really reduce
it; and, in fact, according to the report of its most
able professors, what is it but the summary of the
popular, or rather human beliefs that lie at the
basis of all systems; the statistics of those truths
of intuition or feeling that humanity has in all times.
held to be constant; and, finally, the general history
of the human mind, and not one of its creations?
We must not be deceived by the force and strict-
ness of dialectics displayed in the exposition of some
of these philosophical systems.
Dialectics are not
reasons; they are to reason what the bow is to the
lyre. They are not more at the command of truth
than of error, or even of folly.
Any given object can only be treated scientifically
when the acknowledged end of research is not di-
rectly marked out by the will; in other words, when
an inner impulse does not impel us toward one
conclusion rather than another. Even in studies
that have no essential connection with human inte-
rests and passions, this purely scientific character is
METAPHYSICS.
83
difficult to attain; in religious and moral science
it is constantly compromised, and very seldom pre-
serves itself intact.
The heart does not think, but in many cases it
determines the point of view from whence we think.
A lofty sentiment is like a high mountain, from which
we embrace a wider horizon. And how many great
thoughts are but great sentiments of which the mind
takes account! How many talents have been enlarged
by feeling how many minds aroused by a lively
affection!
There are animals provided by nature with for-
midable pincers, which, when they have been used to
seize any object, they have no power to relax again;
they vainly endeavour to do this, but the more they
try to let go their hold the more they squeeze, pierce,
and transpierce. Is this strength? By no means;
it is weakness. Such is will apart from truth-will
as merely will. We might call it a force, but this
were a pure illusion of our senses, and the effects
deceive us as to the cause. If you insist, however,
that it is a force, it must be added that it is a brutal
force.
There is an abyss between the faculty of judging
and that of willing-between the intellect and the
will. When the two are united this is not through
any essential affinity, not by their own act and deed,
it is by an intermediary, an intercessor, so to speak,
which recommends the cause of the intellect to the
heart. The conviction of the mind does not lead to
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
a corresponding determination of the will. If we
yield obedience to a chain of reasoning, this is only
because we find in our hearts the impulse to obey our
own conviction, or because argument has brought out
facts calculated to influence our will. More than
this, it is not always possible that our reasoning
should be understood, far less acted upon. In matters
of morality it very often happens that the clearest
deductions are not understood, because they do not
correspond to any feeling of the heart. In such a
case the most reasonable counsels are thrown away.
How, indeed, should you be understood when you
appeal to a notion that does not exist in the one you
are addressing?
Man is only to be determined ultimately by his
affections. To overcome one passion another must
be called up; one affection can only be destroyed by
another affection. But affections can only be excited
by facts-by facts, that is, which cause the vibration
of one of the two chords of every human soul, selfish-
ness or love.
Do not let us expect love of truth from a soul to
which all other loves are foreign; let us accept our
nature with all its needs and all its wealth. Let
us believe that a high degree of candour is com-
patible with keen affections and heart convictions,
and even presupposes them. A man of science
and probity, the illustrious Schleiermacher, has
declared that "exegesis, treated without a true
theological and Christian interest, is as useless as
METAPHYSICS.
85
it would be without the knowledge and spirit of
philology."
Apart from some natural affections inherent in
our blood, apart more especially from those of
the senses and personality, which of our feelings is
there that is thoroughly our own, that is thoroughly
ourselves? I know a man who, by dint of occu-
pying himself artistically with combinations of ideas
and combinations of words, has reached the point
of rarely being sure of the sentiment he feels:
he asks himself whether it is anything more
than a tune that gets performed within him, as
it were, by touching the spring of a musical box;
he groans no longer to find certain stars in his
sky; he congratulates himself whenever he unex-
pectedly feels his heart moved by a really au-
thentic exertion of pity, sympathy, or indignation ;
and he rejoices in one of these discoveries like
the woman in the Gospel over her recovered piece
of money.
Whatever takes possession of the soul takes pos-
session of the mind as well. Every sentiment has
its corresponding idea. Accordingly, it is a gene-
rally recognised fact, that every interest that stirs
our nature deeply creates, or rather awakens, intel-
lectual powers of which we were not previously
conscious. Helvetius did not set out from a false
principle in proposing to cultivate the mind by
the passions. It is certain that so long as a man
has not worked under the sway of an affection,
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
we do not yet know of what his intellect may be
capable.
The habit of yielding to our sensual tastes, the
exclusive pursuit of material enjoyments, enervates
and brutalises us; it, too,, is an abstraction, and the
most fatal of all: but may we not also be permitted
to say, that the abstraction which silences the pre-
possessions of the soul in favour of those of the
mind, enervates too, in its way, and in a sense bru-
talises us? Man all matter is contemptible, man all
mind appalling.
When liberty pretends to be more than a means,
all is lost in politics; when art becomes its own
end, all is lost in literature; and so it is too in
morality, when thought refuses to recognise moral
life either for its starting point or goal. The doc-
trine of the idea merely for the sake of the idea is
more false, if possible, than that of art for the sake
of art.
We must be preoccupied. The force of an indi-
vidual and a people lies not in the absence, but in
the existence of a preoccupation.
Individual or people, we are great only thus.
"Or in great thoughts," will you say? Yes; but
remember that "great thoughts come from the
heart." Besides, it remains to be proved that ab-
straction purifies the soul in proportion as it produces
a perfect vacuum around the mind; it remains to be
proved that these speculators, so free from any pre-
possession in favour of moral interests, are free from
METAPHYSICS.
87
it with regard to all besides, and that there remains
within them no place for low passions.
I cannot allow Voraussetzungslosigkeit, or, if you
will, excessive objectivity, to be a fundamental and
indelible character of Germany. But it has been
virtually carried away in that direction; and this
tendency does it injury. I know no more significant
display of this than the excessive admiration that
Goethe has excited, precisely in this character of an
indifferential or objective genius, and the eagerness
with which at one time Schiller was overthrown at
the feet of this idol. I cannot endure that one who
has loved and hated nothing should be himself so
much loved, and that the impress of genius should
be recognised in scepticism and impassibility. There
is a contradiction worse than strange in this enthu-
siasm, excited by the very absence of enthusiasm.
Aristotle used to wonder that any one could speak of
loving Jupiter, and I in my turn marvel that this
Jupiter of thought and art can be beloved.
""
In order that science should have all its purely
scientific character, Germany has too much separated
it from life; has too severely isolated the "savant
from the man; too much excluded the heart, the,
conscience, the interests, from scientific toil. In re-
fusing their concurrence the intellect has deprived
itself of its most legitimate. and indispensable aid;
it has laid aside, as it were, voluntarily, some of the
elements most essential to the solution of its pro-
blems. Never will science be cultivated with the
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
same exclusiveness in France: the national character
is invincibly opposed to it; it is rather the contrary
excess that may be apprehended. The French savant
does not abstract himself to such a degree from
humanity, life, and his own self. The most learned
among learned men remain men nevertheless-
more so, perhaps, than they wish. This stoicism of
German science, this fabulous and sometimes extra-
vagant impartiality of speculation, is not within our
reach, and in this respect we are more in the
condition for truth than the Germans in matters
where life has its own premises to supply. It is life
rather than thought which renders us unbelieving;
thought only comes in subordinately, and never
alone; elsewhere the inverse holds good. And if, on
some future day, realities, experience, urge us towards
the Gospel, it is not speculation that will hold us
back.
The more disinterested science has been, the more
it has served humanity. Seek truth for truth's own
sake, and all other things will be added to you.
Reason in each of us is more or less laden on some
one point or other with a sort of concretion that the
passions have collected there; beneath that concre-
tion the instrument of truth is found unimpaired, but
before it is freed from the foreign substance that sur-
rounds it, no certain use can be made of it. In point
of belief, a measure of uniformity only prevails
regarding truths to which every one can adapt him-
self; it is not so with other truths; there passions,
METAPHYSICS.
89
vices, cause everything to be believed or denied, as
the case may be, and both the one and the other with
a sort of sincerity.
The philosophy of no age whatsoever springs only
from philosophy; systems spring from morals, and the
direction taken by the intellect is explained by the
state of society. Speculative scepticism would be less
alarming were it not preceded and produced by moral
scepticism; sentiment receives to a certain point the
influence of ideas, but these are subjected to the far
more direct and energetic influence of sentiments;
the moral man imperiously determines the intellec-
tual, the intellectual man has far less hold over the
moral; thus when the question is to reconstitute
moral doctrines, although, indeed, the good offices of a
healthy philosophy should be gratefully accepted, yet
the success to be expected from it would be very inade-
quate were not some power more living, more closely
connected with the human wants, to interpose to raise
and reconstruct the ruined edifice of moral beliefs.
The intellect, having only to deal with ideas,
things abstract and insensible, has no call to exercise
charity. Charity thus applied would be suicidal.
The intellect which lives upon truth cannot refuse
itself this nourishment without dying; and who, I
pray you, would be profited by its death? It is the
man who is bound to be charitable; it is he who, in
attacking error, should spare the erring.
Passion is better qualified than argument to solve
great questions.
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Do what we will, we can never entirely escape
from our nature, and never have purely and simply
the philosophy of our thought, but more or less
that of our character—and always we have a cha-
racter; the absence of any prepossession whatsoever
would still be a character, and perhaps the worst
of all.
Modern idolatry has raised two altars, towards
which a crowd of worshippers keep pressing on;
one of these altars is that of matter, the other that
of the intellect. On both of these human victims.
are offered up; for all idolatrous rites are murderous.
The adoration of mind has its barbarities as well as
that of matter; the man of intellect finds his profit
in sparing nothing. He who shows most contempt
passes for the most sagacious. It has been truly
said that the heart is often intellectual, but that the
intellect has no heart. In the unbridled indulgence
of the mind, as well as in the unbridled indulgence
of the senses, the heart withers up, man becomes
cruel; nay, we must speak out, he even becomes
stupid! There are so many things of which we can.
only judge by the heart, that, if the heart be want-
ing, reason must necessarily talk nonsense. In
order to know the extent of intelligence conferred
by the heart, and to what degree the culture of the
mind may degrade the intelligence, just place a case
of conscience before the man of mere talent and
the man of piety. "Thy word, O Lord, giveth
wisdom to the simple. I looked thereon, and was
METAPHYSICS.
91
enlightened." And this is why, in our days, the
intoxication of intellectual triumphs alarms me
almost as much as the general tendency to material
self-indulgence.
Reasoning is only powerful in life through the
life itself; it less determines than is determined;
long discussions may fail to arrive at any conclusion.
The last word belongs to a less abstract authority.
It is little on certain subjects to have reason on our
side; if we have not the reason of the time and
circumstances, the logic of ideas, and the logic of
facts, equally haughty, equally imperious, run in
parallel lines, scorning each other; and in moral
matters, the moral condition decides everything.
The mind that reasons and concludes is nothing
without the soul that divines; the revelations of the
latter are the premises on which reason operates.
How can one understand the citizen without being
oneself a citizen? the believer, if one believes
nothing? the man, in a word, if one is not oneself
a man ?
The history of men is the history of human souls;
and the soul alone can comprehend the soul. We
cannot, therefore, conceive of the historian as of an
impassive intellect; the historian must be com-
pletely man. Nay, we should be even mistaken in
believing that the abstract love of the truth might
stand him in stead of all other human sentiments.
The love of the truth cannot exist in man to the
exclusion, or in the absence, of other human sen-
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
timents. He who has this passion has, necessarily,
others. Human morality is not the fortuitous com-
bination of independent elements; all virtues depend
upon one principle, and are at their root but one
and the same virtue. But more than this, the love
of truth is, of all these elements, the one which can
be least conceived of as isolated. It implies the
pre-existence of many others. It is, as it were, the
last result, the purest emanation, the most exquisite
perfume, of a soul which has not made an arbitrary
selection of certain virtues, but embraced them all
with equal reverence, if not with equal love of a
soul which loves virtue. The love of truth is, in
principle, nothing else than love of virtue, just as
the love of virtue is only the love of practical truth.
We must, therefore, infer by the side, or rather at
the base, of the love of the truth, other affections;
pure ones, no doubt, but in every case human.
Love is, perhaps, the most fertile principle of
knowledge; that previous knowledge which it im-
plies is, probably, very slight in comparison with
what it produces. It has, I allow, its excesses, its
illusions, its dangers; but it contributes to, far more
than it detracts from, the truth of history.
III. MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS.
Experience is not only a fact, it is an action. It
consists of the facts of our life illumined by reflec-
tion, or, if you prefer it, of reflection combining with
.
METAPHYSICS.
93
these facts, to give them their meaning, and link
them with their consequences. It is only when we
have reflected much that we have experienced much.
Pedantry is but a grave frivolity.
It is from those who do not know how to take
account of themselves that we must ask an account
of the nature of all. It is those who can hardly
speak that we have to interrogate the less they
have learnt, the more they know; and their very
darkness will be to you a light.
The individual may abstract himself, may sever
himself in twain; half of his being may ignore the
other half: every given age is essentially and invari-
ably concrete. The human race is the true man,
the complete, the typical man. Psychology has no
more certain basis than the study of the human
species in mass, as considered from age to age.
Such as are its manners, such its morality; such,
too, its philosophy!
The distinction drawn by Duclos-" There is a
great difference between the knowledge of the man
and the knowledge of men," is followed by these
words: "To know man it suffices to study oneself;
to know men, we must have practical experience
of others." I admit neither of these propositions.
I believe that, at bottom, these two knowledges are
by no means so distinct; the one is necessary to
the other, completes the other; and I cannot better
support my opinion than by quoting that maxim of
Vauvenargues "We discover in ourselves what
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
.
others conceal from us, and we recognise in others
what we conceal from ourselves."
Man is at bottom a serious being; whoever
speaks to him seriously is most likely to be listened
to. This remark applies especially to the working
classes, in which we can most easily distinguish the
primitive characters of humanity. The populace
are apt, if you laugh with them, to believe that you
are laughing at them. The masses are serious.
There are people who, in a new mood of mind,
perfectly forget what they said, and even what they
did, before they fell into it: the idea that they have
no longer, they believe themselves never to have had.
It is all one whether we bury our soul beneath the
vine-tree or a clod of earth, beneath a learned folio.
or a banker's book.
The soul may fall asleep in the tumult of business,
just as one is made drowsy by the tic-tac of a mill.
In studying the phenomena of internal existence,
we are almost tempted to admit in man two con-
centric souls, the outer of which is but the counter
proof or reflection of the other—a superficial soul,
which remains a stranger to obligation, obedience,
and will, but which can conceive of them all; which
receives the confidences of the true soul, holds the
clue to it, speaks its language, and, owing to this
intimate understanding, gives itself out and takes
itself for a soul, although it is only the light caused
by the soul on the intellect. Whatever be the
nature of this faculty and the secret of its relations
METAPHYSICS.
95
with life, we do not see in it the seat of religious
truth, since, while capable of admiring and depicting
it, it is not in a condition to experience and to
realise it.
No place in the soul can remain vacant; and on
the throne left and occupied by an angel, a demon,
be sure of it, will soon take his seat.
To be, I do not say acute and subtle, but merely
true, we must have, inwardly at all events, distin-
guished and analysed a great deal.
I believe that we do well to listen to those who
speak of what they love, and even to listen to them
with a peculiar interest.
We may have all kinds of courage, and yet not
that of the intellect.
Nothing endures in the soul which has not the
idea for its internal support; nothing lasts that is
purely passive. Nil citius crescit lacryma.
Whether we are in the clouds, or above them, we
alike escape from the vulgar gaze; and float as you
will in the azure and the light, those who no longer
discern you are sure to say that you are wrapped in
fog and míst.
To the generality of minds distance and the
echo are essential. We cannot picture to ourselves
that what we so familiarly handle should be extra-
ordinary; and if people came to announce as a great
man some one we daily elbowed in the street or
met in our walk, we should exclaim against it,
“Why, what are you thinking of? Is he not such a
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
:
one? How can a man we are so familiar with pos-
sibly be a great man ?"
Woe to him who has more intellect than he can
Knowledge helps us to support in-
support!
tellect.
How many very perverse men there are who do
no other harm than what they lead others to do!
That which has been most important and worthy
of remembrance in a man's life often gains all its
beauty only as a pious and secret memory; and in
this case at least the possession of a few can hardly
without deterioration become the possession of all.
In general, moderation is not very successful in
this world. La Rochefoucauld makes it out to be
the portion of the weak. But there are two kinds of
moderation—the negative and the positive. In an
epoch of torpor, force, passion, even a tincture of ex-
altation, is a sign of power and individuality; but in
a period of excess, of party, and violence, moderation
is a virtue which can only be preserved by a strong
soul.
There are secret folds in the human heart which it
will not allow any one but itself to touch with the
view of unfolding. This is why systematic and
scientific psychology will always remain far inferior,
as regards discovery, to a soul that, being endowed
with much inward life, involuntarily and ceaselessly
reflects itself.
The French mind possesses taste, movement, im-
petus, but little earnest spirituality.
METAPHYSICS.
97
י!
The French intellect, naturally impatient, and al-
ways in a hurry to conclude, sometimes wearies of
investigation, and permits itself premature inroads
upon the path of abstraction. The reins of argument
sometimes fall from the tired hands of criticism, and
from time to time we have to fear that the historical
faculty, like a new Antæus, may allow itself to be
lifted from the solid ground of facts, with which it
constantly needs to come in contact, and lose breath
and life in the formidable grasp of the Hercules
of speculation; and the disadvantage of the pre-
sent tendency to speculation is, that it connives, per-
haps unintentionally and unconsciously, at the fatal
progress of moral indifferentism. Under the auspices
of history, fatalist theories gradually become the uni-
versal doctrine.
General ideas are liberty itself in the domain of
thought; are thought taken seriously, and in all its
bearings; without these so much decried meta-
physics, we get to the bottom of nothing, we know
the cause of nothing.
A public feeling, if it be but a sincere feeling, is
always worthy of respect.
In philosophy and literature both, we meet with
systematic men. These may belong to two different
classes; some embrace their circle of ideas with a
breadth which allows them to comprehend that of
others; some attach themselves exclusively to their
own notions, but their exclusiveness is at one with
itself. Always there is a dominant unity; but in all
H
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times men of action have been woven of contrasts,
and far from enfeebling them, these contrasts have
been a condition of their power. The strength of a
scientific, synthetical, benevolent, peaceful intellect,
is far more beneficent and profound, but it only acts
from a distance; the force that immediately affects
us is that excited by men who lack this internal
harmony.
There may be much frivolity in abstraction. Fri-
volity does not become earnestness by being dull or
heavy; and hollow metaphysics form an admirable
envelope for trivial thoughts and vulgar feelings.
All simple ideas are not indeed great, but we may
affirm that all great ideas are distinguished by their
simplicity.
How many people believe themselves learned and
enlightened so soon as they have been rendered com-
petent to deny!
.....
MU
:
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
99
CHAPTER III.
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
I. --THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Philosophical Systems and their value: Rationalism
Christianity and Stoicism; its principle — Deism
- Manicheism-Pantheism Atheism-Scepti-
cism-Eclecticism.
CONSIDERED in its relation to morality, and as a
means of influencing our life, the direct value of
science amounts pretty nearly to nothing. We
shall learn nothing from systems as regards duty.
Philosophy, of which so much good and so much
evil has been spoken, has rendered great indirect
services to humanity, but has afforded it little direct
help hitherto. By it men have vainly attempted
to fashion a religion, or to reorganise humanity; it
has shown itself powerless to give one sentiment of
peace or one spark of joy.
Truth, not having been invented by us, belongs
less to us, and is less valued by us; but we hold to
our systems because they are our own work.
I fancy that logical sceptics must look down
somewhat upon the philosophy of rationalists.
Un
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Rationalism, which cannot kill a society already
formed, is fatal to one newly born; it is love and
not pride with which the world should provide
itself on the approach of the great distresses that
are preparing.
There are innumerable shades of gradation be-
tween that complete infidelity which rejects God
and the adoption of pure evangelical truth. We
class them all under the name of rationalism; a
degree of Christian faith still mingles with them in
divers proportions, and only ceases at deism; and
even from deism to atheism the distance is great,
for the heart, at least. It is the heart that must be
the starting point of the judgment that we form
upon men; a very different judgment to that their
doctrines deserve.
It was rationalism, not in the theological but the
general sense of the word, that created the "Emile "
of Rousseau. By this I mean the abuse of reason
in all things; rationalism, whose legitimate func-
tion should be to explain facts, ignores, distorts,
isolates them; distributes them differently to what
nature does.
Stoicism is that lofty and severe doctrine, the
peculiarity of which is to consider duty and virtue
as the only motive that should influence man, and
to take into account neither pain nor pleasure. It
pursues its end without deviating to right or left,
and holds difficulties and perils null and void. Up
ita a certain point, it is true, absolute obedience to
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
101
the rule of morality is beautiful in itself. It would
be the half of Christianity were Christianity capable
of division. But this obedience is not rendered to
God; it is at bottom only self-obedience. In this
system man becomes, as it were, his own God.
Humility has no part in it; stoicism enjoins a man
what he is to do, but neither shows him when he
fails nor the means of making up for failure. In
letting him ignore his own weakness, it robs man of
the help that he would else have found in God. The
true stoics have been so by temperament; they were
strong souls, in many respects attaining to great
heights, but, nevertheless, having weaknesses that
they were unconscious of, or caressed; and their
virtues were counterbalanced by pride. Voltaire
said of stoicism that "it swells the soul, and does
not nourish it."
(6
If Christianity did not exist, the stoics would furnish
some noble specimens of the human race; but how
their doctrine would increase the number of the
unhappy! As sole help in weakness, as sole consola-
tion in sorrow, they would but hear an inflexible voice
ceaselessly crying, "Advance! advance!" "But I am
infirm, wounded, paralysed !" Never mind! Thou
oughtest to do so." This is the only motive offered
by stoicism. Christianity, also, bids us advance ;
but it stretches out a hand to the halting; it raises
the powerless; it alone terminates and reunites that
ever open circle that no human doctrine is capable
of embracing.
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Stoicism, which will only admit duty for its object
and its motive, always involuntarily pursues another
end; it testifies to that inherent necessity of the
human soul to seek, if not its support, at least its
reward, out of itself. The eagle, without knowing
it, hatches peacocks' eggs: stoicism hatches pride;
I do not say the pride of the individual, but that
of the species.
Stoicism is man making himself God, in order to
have one. The stoic, indeed, does sometimes speak
of his gods, but in a sense which we must not
mistake. They are but another name for his ideal,
not the rule or primary reason of his will. The
stoic conceives of virtue under this notion of force,
not under that of obedience; it does not present
itself to him under the aspect of duty, but under
that of dignity, whether personal or collective. No
doubt that, remotely, an obscure sentiment of duty
may be found the source of this notion of virtue;
but the stoic conceals this from himself; and if, in
this religion of pride, the word duty be still pro-
nounced, it means a duty towards oneself, and self-
respect is not the motive and substance of all that
is right. In this religion there are appearances of a
permanent hostility, a war to the knife against the
will: these are mere appearances, for to obey one's
own self is not to obey at all; and duties, of which
we are the first and last term, are not duties.
Whatever be the rational and moral value of
stoicism, it has its partisans, and in each of these
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
103
its domain and its epoch. It is less a system and a
faith than the temperament of some strong spirits;
and in these it does not apply itself universally,
as does love: it only cultivates a portion of the field
of the soul; it is generally obliged to make itself
hard, in order to be strong; and, above all, on un-
expected occasions it is taught its own limits; after
having shattered rocks, it is itself shattered against
a grain of sand; it had not uniformly and equally
covered the whole soul; its brazen armour, its as
triplex, is always incomplete; it disappoints itself
cruelly; it does not bend, perhaps, but it breaks; it
never stoops, but it falls, and its falls are flagrant in
proportion to their height, for stoicism is but the
most spiritual form of pride; and "pride," says
Eternal Wisdom, "goeth before destruction."
We may say all this without contempt, without
depreciation, nay, even while humbling oneself
before stoicism. The believer who is conscious of
being supported, may admire those who endeavour
to support themselves; but he admires them with
alarm and compassion, for he sees their danger, and
he knows, at all events, that man, so tenderly taught
to say, "Thy will be done," has never been invited
to say so to himself. If there be a God, it is to
Him that this invocation must be addressed-fully,
absolutely, unreservedly.
The uneducated man is alternately deist and
pantheist, fatalist, and devotee, and all this beneath
the vague but constant profession of some faith or
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
other, traditional or authoritative. Thus the disease
of the learned torments the multitude as well, but
more obscurely, without name or formula; and just
as the learned, in the interest of thought, require
to be enlightened and healed, so does the multitude,
in the interest of life.
The immense majority of men can only have any
religious life at all under the form of positive
Christianity. A man who should prove an exception
to this rule, and feel within him a fervent need of
religion for himself and others, would in vain exert
the energy of his will, and the power of his elo-
quence, in the direction of deism; he would eternally
remain a teacher without a school, a captain without
soldiers.
The deism of our day is, more or less, tinged
with Christianity; this is why it does not, neces-
sarily, like that of antiquity, lose and dissolve itself
in fatalism. But whatever it may be, and even taking
it in its happiest examples, let us allow that the
faith of the deist is but an opinion-a very vague
and very vacillating opinion, which, as a motive of
action, does not equal the faith of the heathen. Let
deism have, at least, its fakeers, who, to please their
deity, submit to be crushed beneath the wheels of his
car, and then we will own deism to be a religion.
According to the generally admitted meaning of
the term, a deist is a man who professes to believe
in the existence of a God, but who does not trouble
himself much about serving or pleasing him-a man,
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
105
in short, who recognises the being of God, but with-
out adoring him.
The pantheistic instinct is found everywhere;
and you will be less surprised to hear me say this
when I have defined pantheism as the idea of
fatalism, combined with that of order and of unity.
Amongst many causes that favour this tendency,
we must number the spectacles afforded us by politi-
cal and social movements for the last half century;
the increasingly felt and extending powers of what
are called the ideas or spirit of the time; the enfeeble-
ment of the conscience that internal necessity which,
when called to resist external necessities (numbers
more especially), has pronounced itself incapable, and
thrown up the game; lastly, we must needs admit it,
a need to organise the social world as soon as possible,
and the impossibility of giving it for centre a per-
sonal god who is no longer believed in. When God,
whose name must remain, whether or no, is no longer
a person, how continue to speak of human per-
sonality? If the pantheistic doctrine were hostile
to individualism, it would be little to be feared; but,
on the contrary, it is favourable to it, and only
threatens individuality. Now the State Church has
not, it is true, sprung from pantheism, and seems the
older of the two in our societies, but it is none the
less true,-refer its origin to any time you like,-that
it coincides with pantheism, with which it has in com-
mon the implicit negation of individuality; hence
pantheism, if it cannot overthrow the Christian reli-
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gion, which is in the best sense the religion of indi-
viduality, will take care to uphold State churches:
the idea of the State, on which is based the whole
philosophy of the institution, the idea which we
have been combating is, after all, but a fragment of
pantheism.
That which pantheism and humanitarianism have
of true (and who can deny them their portion of
truth?) remains without force, nay, more, loses its
strength, being separated from its roots; and by these
roots I mean the Gospel, which, in recognising
humanity as a reality in itself, as a unity, and in
recommending it to our interest as such, rather
looks upon a single man as a complete whole, than
the whole world as a single man; the Gospel,
which, by filling and pervading everything with
the presence of God, forbids and makes it impossible
for us to transform everything into His essence.
Thus the portion of truth in these doctrines van-
ishes, and lends them no beneficial influence; the
false alone remains and operates. It operates as
the negation of the true, extirpating from the hu-
man mind those ideas which give force to the idea
of God and sanction to duty. It gradually dissolves
within the soul all that such ideas had of positive
and useful. It only leaves theories, so to speak, in-
stead of a solid substance, unembodied forms. Won-
drously adapted to our epoch, it secretly conspires
with its most decided tendencies. It relaxes and
unbinds, under the pretence of widening, the sheaf of
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
107
our convictions. It causes the evaporation of the
religious sentiment, under the pretence of purifying
it; and of the moral law, under that of ennobling it.
Were it only a simple philosophical theorem unre-
lated to the condition of society, it would tell little
upon morals. But as with the spring tides of ocean,
there is a conjunction here, one celestial body con-
curring with another, and what the doctrine alone
could not effect upon the age, it can effect aided
by that age, and most assuredly it will effect.
Manicheism is only an acute, acerbated, scoffing
atheism; pantheism is only an emphatic and solemn
atheism.
At the present time, I own, men deny Arimanes
and Satan. But we must affirm the one or the other.
Pantheism is no refuge from this necessity; it is
but a variety of manicheism. The earnest and con-
sistent philosopher will not believe in God if he do
not believe in Satan.
The majority of minds, in the free exploration of
doctrines, meet with a certain point where anxiety
and scepticism begin to reign; it is just where one
has acquired too much light to be contented with an
ancient prejudice, and has not yet enough to embrace
the whole truth. But the mind which has made any
progress in the path of free inquiry does not retreat,
can no longer resume its chains, or interrupt its
march; and, after having traversed that difficult
defile of Dante, through which each unshackled in-
tellect must pass, it finds itself with delight in that
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1
smooth, fertile, and vast plain of faith into which its
courage has led it.
Although we may arrive at a condition where all
is light, they are the unfavoured and unprivileged
who have never doubted.
If a Pascal have endured the anguish of doubt, I
think him none the less great for that. At all events,
there are certain subjects upon which we are never
thoroughly convinced till after we have doubted.
They are like those buildings of which only an earth-
quake could consolidate the foundations.
The doubts of an earnest mind seem to us more
edifying than the premature certainty of a light
nature, or the imperturbable assurance of an arid and
narrow mind, which has never had its disdainful
beatitude disturbed by anything.
To admit doubt otherwise than in the quality of a
method for arriving at truth, to present it to us as
though it were to be the normal and final state of
human intelligence here below, is to mistake the
conditions of that intelligence.
Scepticism is to the mind what irresolution is to
the character-a sort of incapacity for concluding, a
love of indefinite temporising, which considers con-
tradictory arguments without ever weighing them ;
in a word, a weakness or an indolence of the in-
tellect.
Scepticism, which at first sight seems a disease of
the mind, is in reality a disease of the heart.
Scepticism originates either in the corruption of
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
109
the political state, or in the degradation of the philo-
sophical spirit.
When once doubt enters into the sanctuary of the
soul moral ideas do not long remain firm; they yield
their ground before the floating impulses of sensibi-
lity, and thus men arrive, through the delicate enjoy-
ment of the heart, and the most refined pleasures of
the mind, at the sphere of which the ego is the
centre and the pivot, where sensibility borders on
sensuality, where moral well-being differs only in
degree from the physical well-being; in a word, they
arrive at epicureanism. Such is the natural and
almost necessary progress of scepticism.
A nation where the majority finds itself attacked
with the disease of scepticism feels the sap of life
oozing away, and if no salutary crisis remove it
from this condition it has only to await dissolution.
The doubts of the mind, when the heart is con-
vinced, are only a cloud mistaken for a wall: the
hand might, indeed, pass through the cloud and grasp
the desired possession beyond; but then the man
believes it to be a wall, and does not attempt to
do so.
Just as I fly from a libertine who preaches modesty,
I detest as I do the "gates of hell" a dogmatising pyr-
rhonism. The conclusion which it permits itself, be it
what it may, is exorbitant, monstrous, because it is a
conclusion; its faith, properly understood, is but a
stroke of despair, an accident, a catastrophe; there is
a whole infinite between pyrrhonism and faith. It is
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strange audacity to begin by breaking all the rounds
of the ladder by which we hope to hoist ourselves
to the housetop; it is strange wisdom to pretend to
prove anything whatever after having annihilated all
the elements of proof.
When scepticism dogmatises it, scorpion-like,
wounds itself.
If the flatterers of humanity are pitiable, what sen-
timent think you should they inspire who, in light-
heartedness, with a bitter enjoyment, satirise it, and
drag us, to the sound of sarcasms, and with shouts of
impious laughter, to the funeral of hope? What name
must we bestow on those who unnecessarily insult us
with the display of a disease without remedy, and a
misery without consolation? Certainly, if ever the
influence of the monarch of evil is clearly seen, it
is when throwing light on the most afflicting sides of
human life; constantly calling back our glances and
fixing them there, multiplying discoveries of our weak-
ness, and intoxicating our pride with the picture of our
wretchedness, he stops us at the limit which it is so im-
portant for us to cross, and represses the noblest of curi-
osities by that fatal sentence which already has sealed
the condemnation of the Just, "What is truth?"
It has been said that doubt is a soft pillow for a
sound head; it is not so, we fully believe, for a healthy
heart.
The same man often contains the obstinate sceptic
and the blind and deaf fanatic. Where presump-
tuous beliefs incorporate themselves so thoroughly
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
111
with the soul that they can no longer detach them-
selves, they become a preconception, a fixed idea, a
grave insanity that nothing disconcerts, that objec-
tions offend, that opposition strengthens, that time
hardens, to which everything serves as proof and con-
firmation.
We
The modern world presents to the observer a sin-
gular medley of frivolous scepticism and conventional
dogmatism. We say medley, and not conflict, because
this dogmatism has its sphere, and so also has this
scepticism. What ought to be affirmed is placed in
doubt; what ought to be doubted is affirmed.
Whilst a corroding uncertainty attaches itself to the
axioms of common sense, to the intuitions of con-
science, a peremptory certainty-an appalling cer-
tainty, Fontenelle would have said-consumes for
them (as fire burns the thicket) the most confusing
intricacies of the most formidable problems.
are surrounded by mysteries; mysteries are at the
very base of our life; the most common, the most
elementary things are at the same time the most pro-
digious; and yet not a doubt on these subjects, not a
question, nay, nothing which can lead us to suspect
that we have examined or reflected. It is toward the
luminous points that doubts run, and questions press.
A philosopher used to wonder that men wondered so
little; he had only to turn his eyes in another
direction to wonder that they wondered so much.
To give the thing its true name, eclecticism is but
the negative of philosophy.
T
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Eclecticism is only true as an instinct; it is vain
as a system, since it does not bring before us the
central idea, around which all the scattered elements
of the philosophy of humanity should group them-
selves, and live with one common life.
II. PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Evil: Matter - Mind - Utilitarianism, Pessimism,
and Optimism-Eudemonism, Happiness, and
Duty.
We are tired of hearing men talk of the force of
Christian doctrines and never of their moderation-
more miraculous, if possible, and stronger than that
very force. Outside of Christianity, both before and
after its appearance, the saturnalia of asceticism
have been almost as gross as those of materialism.
Forced to curse something, and not choosing to
curse himself, man has cursed his flesh; a clever
diversion, intended to spare the very victim which
God demands. Christianity could hardly have sur-
passed this useless suicide as already practised; it
never, wonderful to say, entertained such an idea for a
moment; at the first step it occupied the centre of the
true by establishing itself in the centre of the man.
From that position it embraces everything at a glance,
and dominates everything. The heart subjected, all is
subjected; and the submissive heart is a wise heart,
which no more permits arbitrary sacrifice than car-
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
113
nal indulgence. Matter, from having been supreme,
becomes a slave; but the man no longer dreams of
avenging his own wrong-doing upon matter. With
this idea that of expiation naturally vanishes; the
man expiates nothing: he loves, he obeys, he hopes,
he places himself entirely at the service and at the
mercy of God.
Absolute asceticism has engendered in the region
of the pure intellect crimes before which all other
crimes grow pale. There evil, if one may so speak,
takes occasion from nothing; depends only upon it-
self. Elsewhere nature serves as a pretext, here evil
itself is sometimes the object of a horrible desire. And
without dwelling on this dread excess, does human
malice require the connivance and excitement of the
flesh in those sometimes atrocious crimes to which.
pride, ambition, and fanaticism give birth? We
must, then, acknowledge that all evil does not reside
in matter.
There are sins which have so little connection
with the flesh that a disembodied spirit might com-
mit them; there are vices whose very spirituality ex-
cites them to fury. What is it that sins, I pray you, in
that man who only grants reluctantly the absolutely
necessary to nature; who seems to have crucified the
flesh with the lusts thereof more successfully than
the greatest saint; who appears insensible to pleasure
and even to pain, and is, nevertheless, so ready to
hate; whose revenge is implacable, whose resent-
ment is eternal, whose words are venomous, whose
I
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:
glance homicidal? What is it in him that sins if
not the soul, and the soul only? And do the
most sensual of men commit some of these sins?
And have not some of these sins the effect of pre-
serving us from others? When the flesh is engaged
in evil the soul is, doubtless, in a state of sin; but
when the soul is occupied with evil is not the flesh
often in a state of actual innocence? How deny these
facts, and on the other hand how reconcile them with
the opinion that all sin resides in matter?
You risk much in saying that it is matter that sins,
for matter being irresponsible, all the part in sin that
you assign to it is so much removed out of the sphere
of responsibility. And this part might possibly seem
to you so considerable that the share of the soul
would dwindle away. Is not the responsibility of
matter the favourite argument of libertines? Thus,
then, by a reaction, as strange as just, there is
materialism in this exaggerated spiritualism. Mat-
ter revenges your accusations by accepting them.
In taking upon itself the iniquities of the soul it
casts them off; it carries away with it your scruples,
and flies, like the scapegoat, to the desert, where you
will never reach it more.
Matter, in an absolute sense, is inert; it is no more
capable of sinning than of doing right. It is indif-
ferent. The most that we can assert is, that in our
fallen state it is weak-that is to say, too heavy to
lend itself to the movements, and too slow to follow
the impulses of the mind, if by that word we desig-
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
115
nate the organ of the true and the just. It is an
instrument which cannot act upon itself, and which
becomes good or evil according to the action that
the soul, or the immaterial principle, exercises over
it. It is this principle that corrupts it, and makes
it peccant; it is the soul that sins: the soul that
sinneth, says the Gospel, is that which shall die.
If the soul did not sin, matter would never sin;
or rather, indeed, it never does sin. It serves as an
instrument to sin just as it might serve as an instru-
ment to righteousness.
Unless we efface from the list of sins, and rank
amidst indifferent actions, all those bad actions in
which matter has evidently no part, we must allow
that the soul may sin without the concurrence of the
body, and thenceforth we must abandon the formula
that asserts evil to reside in matter.
St. John expressly assigns three roots to the tree of
evil: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and
the pride of life, which is also a lust; and in all
these three it is the soul which wills, pursues, and
does the evil.
The unity of evil is declared by the unity of its
name. In assigning to it one only name, we assign
to it one only principle. If evil were not one it
would not be evil. It is one as the good is one; and
doubtless no one will contest that if the good be not
one it is nothing. But where shall we find that unity
in good and that unity in evil, without which the
very notion of good and of evil escapes us and
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
vanishes away? We must reascend beyond subor-
dinate notions, and not stop short in particular forms
of good and evil. But how find a principle of unity
elsewhere than in the Being who is the very principle
of unity, and out of whose idea the very idea of
unity has no basis? Do away with the idea of God,
the unity of good dissolves; the idea even of good
has no longer any reason for existing. In a created
being good is necessarily a relation, for outside of
the Absolute Being all is relative. Good, then, is a
right proportion between the creature and the Creator.
But good in the moral creature implies the great and
impenetrable mystery of personality.
Humanity, or rather the intelligent creature in
general, is the Eve of God, with this immense differ-
ence, that God has not been passive, like Adam, in
the production of this collective Eve, but active, free,
and sovereign. We dare to see in humanity the Eve of
God, drawn from the substance of God as was that
other Eve from the substance of Adam, but invested
with spontaneity, with liberty, and alone able, in the
universality of things, to say I, as God says I, dis-
tinguishing itself at once both from things and from
God; separated from God in order to be able to
unite; and that over and above the involuntary and
passive unity there might be a voluntary unity,
whose true name is no more unity, but union,
obedience, love.
The difficulty is to say I after God without being
tempted to say I like God. The difficulty for the
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
117
being who can say, I am, is not to add, and there is
none beside me. The danger is the making oneself
God; for it is making oneself God to pass from liberty
to independence, and wish to understand that we only
belong to ourselves in order that we may give our-
selves away.
This danger arose at one precise
moment. Sin took occasion from the commandment
which had been given to constitute human morality.
Under the impression of the commandment, Eve,
that is to say humanity, conceived and gave birth, we
know to what,sin, no doubt, but even before sin, to
morality.
What was the object of man when he separated
himself from God by sin? It was the ego. But the
ego is at once immaterial and material. The body
is not merely a vestment, a husk; the body forms
part of the man, the body is one form of the ego.
Accordingly sin, like the ego, had two forms. But
still sin was one as the ego is one, and it passed from
the centre to the circumference, and not from the
circumference to the centre, which is the soul.
As soon as we attribute a part of evil to the soul
we must attribute to it the whole. Either it has no
responsibility, or it is alone responsible. You may
persuade the soul that it is soul and not matter that
is passive, but you will never persuade it that matter
takes the initiative and nothing more.
Crime does not merely spring from a judgment
more or less false: if in vice the judgment indeed be
concerned, still evil has its root in the heart; it is the
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY,
heart that has seduced the mind, and it is the absence,
or the false direction, of the moral sense that deter-
mines the false reasoning. Man has his basis not
in reasoning but in feeling; the majority of crimes
are committed without judgment, or against the
judgment of the criminal.
There are a thousand occasions where we have to
say, "This thing has been useful because it was
good," and not "It was good, because it proved
useful." If this answer was not sufficient, moral
order and unity of creation would be pure chimera.
We are not born utilitarian; we become so.
It is no longer said as heretofore that duty is pre-
judice; an arbitrary and factitious thing. Neither
is right attacked as formerly; it is no longer subor-
dinated to utility: people manage better now-a-days,
and confound the one with the other; they try to
show that a proper study of men's interests renders
a theory of rights superfluous. In a word, facts have
everywhere been substituted for principles, without
however denying, or discussing, these last; a thorough
confidence is entertained that the best way of getting
rid of a doctrine is not to attack it, but to raise
another which shall gradually render the former
useless, as a prop that supports nothing.
In most cases interest proves a poor compass.
Merely to seek our own advantage is not all; we
have to discern what is our greatest advantage,
the advantage which can never become a loss; and
in order to discern this, how much knowledge,
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119
what researches, what labour may not frequently be
wanted!
The supreme utility is to be just; and what is just
always ends by being of great social utility. God
has not willed that justice and public happiness
should be incompatible; far from it, He has united
the two by closest bonds. Could governments have
been sooner convinced of these truths history would
transmit to us fewer groans, and fewer cries for ven-
geance.
There is no medium: if against an absolute duty
some great interest may be alleged, so may a little
interest as well; if the interest of many, then also
the interest of the individual. If truth can cease
to be truth, this may happen at the shock of the
least inconvenience as well as in collision with the
greatest. If the useful be the criterion of the true,
this criterion must be instantaneous, immediate,
universal: if the useful be the criterion of the true,
it is not the true that is true but the useful; in other
words, if the true be not true in itself, there is no
truth.
Far be it from us even to make the useful the touch-
stone of the true. The true is not the useful, the
useful is not the true; but eventually, and viewing
things from a proper height, the true is useful, and
the useful is true. Man needs to be generally per-
suaded of this, and, such as he is, nothing would de-
moralise him more than to be obliged to believe that
the useful springs from the false as well as the true,
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
and that the true is as hurtful as the false. Let him,
on the contrary, be well assured that in itself, and
apart from peculiar interventions of God, evil is
never necessary, never useful.
The revival of utilitarianism amongst us is not
spontaneous; it is provoked by a general disposition
to scepticism, which itself depends in great measure
on that succession of political commotions of which
Europe has been the theatre. Badly armed against
a crowd of questions of conscience that events gave
rise to from day to day, and that the moral faith of
olden times would have summarily resolved, indi-
viduals, nay, states even, have been obliged to those
who came to tell them aloud what they had already
been only whispering to themselves, that there was
to be found somewhere else a safer and more conve-
nient criterion of the goodness of actions. Utili-
tarianism has enriched itself somewhat dishonourably
with the possessions of one proscribed; I mean the
moral sentiment banished from life.
Utilitarians themselves teach us that, rigidly speak-
ing, their system has no direct proofs. Their logic
reduces itself pretty much to this: conscience can-
not prove itself, therefore the reins of life fall into
the hands of life; a logical argument assuredly in so
far as it is true that conscience cannot prove itself,
but an argument which contains in itself an important
avowal, namely, that the empire of life only falls to
interest by right of disherison.
It is affirmed that it will always be impossible to
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
121
steer balloons, because, entirely surrounded as they
are with air, they cannot come in contact with a
denser medium which should partially remove them
from the power of the atmosphere. Applying this
illustration to the egotism which constitutes interest
the only master of human life, we find it difficult to
conceive, as a general thesis, that what is good for
impelling is good also for holding back; and the old
idea of opposing contraries to each other, conscience
to interest, the just to the useful, appears to us more
solid than this moral homœopathy, which has on its
side neither nature nor experience.
The great argument of utilitarians is that con-
science cannot prove itself. Now we affirm that
conscience can prove itself.
The word exists, therefore the thing exists. The
idea of right is in the world, therefore right is a
reality. Utilitarians tell us that men have invented
both the word and the idea; but it is not thus that
men invent.
There exists between the right and the useful the
same difference as between a law and a fact. The
right is a rule engraved in human nature by a crea-
tive hand, the idea for which the world of spirits
exists; the useful is a property of our organisation,
as subordinate to the right as are facts to ideas.
The right is the motive of our existence; the useful
is its condition. The right is God in us; the useful
is the ego of each one of us.
Man is pessimist if Christianity be not. Man does
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
not dislike to be spoken to about the misery of his
condition. In detail, and from hour to hour, we are
all pessimists, and it would be difficult to surprise us
in the very fact of contentment. Mme. de la Valliere,
in her cloistral solitude, used to say to visitors, "I am
not happy, I am content." We are, generally speak-
ing, at bottom neither happy nor contented. In
theory, and with regard to the universe, we most of
us hold that things as a whole go on pretty well;
and, pessimist in fact, we express ourselves indig-
nantly against pessimism. Optimism has zealous
champions, and in a certain sense with good right too.
Pascal himself was an optimist in the sense to which
we allude. He believed, as we do, in perfectibility,
in progress; but the happiness in which he as well
as we had faith, was in his eyes a superficial, relative
happiness; and on the other hand, he believed in a
deep, profound, radical unhappiness of human nature,
an unhappiness of which the impalpable and im-
material part is the true unhappiness in his eyes.
But if the true religion be pessimist, pessimism is
not the whole of religion; it must needs tend to-
wards contentment and even joy.
Optimists are only strong, or only appear so, in
thrusting aside God from the government of things
created, and in putting indifferent and insensible
nature into His place. They say that nature cares
for the species, and in no way for the individual;
and accordingly, partial or individual misfortunes
ought not to surprise us, for these misfortunes, we
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
123
are told, never affect species, and provided they be
spared all is well. Even in adopting the starting
point of philosophers we shall not, however, find
their system invulnerable. In the first place, what
do they mean by species? It is very possible that a
certain species of animal should one day disappear
from the face of the globe, exterminated by some
other species that nature itself has introduced for
this very extermination. Will they then allow that
nature has been wanting to itself? But let us lay
aside that objection, and go at once to the principal
vice of the system.
This vice lies in the name that it bears. It ought
not to be called optimism, for it establishes that all
is necessary, and not that all is good. It is vain to
show us that, dating from the starting point, the
sequence of effects is necessary and continuous; does
it follow, then, that all is good? It is strange that
these philosophers should reproach their adversaries
with the arbitrary application of the word evil, while
they apply the word good in the very same way.
Where do they find the standard of that good? With
what rule do they compare the whole of creation in
order to pronounce that whole is good? Goodness
means that which is conformable to the purpose or
the desire of some being or other; this notion is ne-
cessarily subjective. In order that an object be called
good there must be some one who finds it good; that
is to say, corresponding with his aim and desires.
Now has nature any aim, or does it form wishes?
any
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
All that can be said is, that the chain of the effects
nature produces is conformable to its first premiss,
or first fact. But by what right or upon what
grounds shall we assert that first premiss to be good?
I find it, I confess, more natural, as do the pessimists,
to take individual sensibility as the touchstone of the
order of things, and to say, "Creatures suffer; hence
all is not good."
Optimists should abdicate their borrowed name,
and content themselves by saying, "As far as we
can, we see all is necessary." Heart-breaking doc-
trine, but neither to be answered nor refuted by draw-
ing out a long act of accusation against nature, which
cares not for it, which does not even hear it, and
whose chariot, rolling incessantly in its inflexible orbit,
crushes under the same wheel its accuser and defender
both. But if the idea of God, drawn from the depths
of human consciousness; the idea of God, invincible
belief, inalienable attribute of our nature; the idea of
God, in logical order the first of our ideas, comes
to substitute its living faith for the dead idea of
nature; if the good pleasure of God becomes the
supreme necessity of the world, everything takes a
new aspect. What matters it that effects should ap-
pear to us linked with causes, details bound to the
whole by an adamantine chain? All this necessity
is absorbed and lost in the will of God. In presence
of that Eternal Being, in whom all is simultaneous,
immense, to whom all is present, infinite, to whom
all is one, shall we refuse to admit that each event
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
125
is at once the necessary sequence of a cause that He
has preordained, and the proximate result of an im-
mediate act of His will, so that the thing that He has
commanded ages ago, He still commands the moment
that it happens? In a word, shall we dare to deny
that special and most special providence is incom-
patible with the general providence? No; God has
prepared from eternity, or rather, He has embraced
in a single act of His thought, the infinite chain of
successive, combined, and interlaced causes which
bring about at this moment the falling of a hair from
my head, the escaping of a sigh from my breast; yet
it is by His express and immediate will that these two
accidents have just happened; He has willed from
eternity that this hair should fall, this sigh be heaved.
He is free and sovereign at each moment, as though
each moment He was recommencing the work of
creation; as though, instead of fixed and general
laws, He himself acted uninterruptedly in every
particular case; for though He has granted a consti-
tution to the universe, He is, nevertheless, an absolute
monarch still. Equally independent in the govern-
ment of moral creatures, He applies to each at every
moment the discipline, the disposition, that best suits
him; deals with the soul day by day, as though He fol-
lowed the maxim that "sufficient for the day is the evil
thereof." He prepares the trial for the soul; prepares
in the soul the prayer that is to conquer the trial, and
prepares to grant that prayer. When once God, the
God of eternity, and the God of the instant, is thus
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
placed in the room of necessity, we say no longer with
the optimist, all is well, nor with the pessimist, all is
ill; but we say, God reigns. We suffer, but we have
sinned; we suffer, but eternity, which belongs to God,
is also ours; the world groans, the whole creation
sighs, but God, who has not made sin, does not either
make suffering. There is a mystery here which He
will explain to us one day. What we do know is,
that all things work together for good to them that
love God. Let us lay hold on this word, and, re-
nouncing our fruitless researches, let us press forward
to the goal that He has set before us.
It is not only for the soul, it is for the mind as
well, that happiness is a necessity: happiness, then,
is part of truth. To claim it pure and unalterable
has, accordingly, nothing that dishonours us; and
the man most thoroughly liberated from the empire
of the senses-the most disinterested of men-de-
mands it in this sense no less vehemently than the
miser, the libertine, or the selfish. From this want-
an honourable want in this point of view-results a
more or less severe appreciation of human destiny,
which is submitted to our judgment upon the same
ground, and in the same way, as moral actions. Great
minds, indeed, have professed optimism; but optimism
is doomed. Natural wisdom and Christian wisdom
have agreed in condemning it. It is true that from
one same judgment they have drawn very different
conclusions; but this is all that separates them. I
am wrong in the very appreciation of facts they
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
127
have necessarily differed on many points; but it
is enough that they should have pronounced the
same verdict on the whole. An earnest philo-
sophy is naturally pessimist. Pessimism is one of
the doctrines, or one of the bases of the doctrine, of
Pascal.
At bottom, if we take any count of individual judg-
.ments, the whole world, in one sense or other, is really
pessimist. We may, indeed, as a general thesis,
affirm that all goes well; but who is there who is
contented even among the happy or rather, espe-
cially among them? Who is there that is contented,
except such as, like St. Paul, and in the same school
as St. Paul, have "learned to be content." Add up
all the miscalculations and murmurs, and tell us if
their sum be not pessimism.
It is a marvel peculiar to the Gospel that when
we attempt, from its point of view, to distinguish
the means it offers from the end it proposes, sacri-
fices from their reward, the present from the future,
earth from heaven, we can hardly do it, so com-
pletely one is the destiny of man, so much is truth
one, so much are duty and happiness-separated in
our mind by the effects of our fall-at bottom one
and the same thing. In the Gospel, the reward of
loving is to love more; the reward of seeing is to
see still better.
The soul is only fully happy when, united to its
principle, it forgets itself, sees no longer anything, but
its principle loses itself therein, and is, with regard
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•
to the God it loves, henceforth only a mirror, an
altar, or an echo.
The element of happiness contained in the Gospel
has nothing contrary to love, which, according to
the expression of St. James, "is the end or sum
of the commandment;" and on the other side, how
well has Christianity, by developing treasures of love
in the human heart, proved that it contained in itself,
together with happiness, and in that very happiness,
a fertile principle of benevolence and charity!
Nothing in the world, or out of the world, can
make a being, whose will is one with the will of
God, otherwise than happy by that very fact; such
a one would be so even in the dwelling-place of the
reprobate.
If the Christian religion be so far removed from
excluding or putting aside the idea of happiness that,
on the contrary, it begins by offering it; if this offer
be its first word and first fact, it is because it can, no
more than any other religion, help commencing thus.
Nay, if anything distinguishes it, in this respect,
from other religions, it is the being more gratuitously
liberal; it is the giving all to those who have given
nothing—securing all to such as have promised no-
thing. But its gifts are spiritual, invisible, drawn
upon eternity, and its exactions are present, imme-
diate, inexorable, unlimited. It does more than point
out happiness as the consequence of submission; it
places it in that very submission itself-obedience
is more than the means of felicity, it is that felicity.
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
129
Religion finds the love of happiness and the prin-
ciple of duty separated within us, and its mission,
its masterpiece, is to reunite these. Christianity
accepts the question as it is proposed. In promising,
in offering happiness, has it obtained love? or has
it, in offering happiness, closed souls against love?
This is the whole question.
We remit our answer to those other adversaries
of Christianity who complain so loudly and long
that Christianity is entirely made up of renuncia-
tions and sacrifices, and that, foolishly dispossessing
us of ourselves, it gives us over as a prey to the
first comer.
It is not surprising that Christianity should have
brought upon itself two such contradictory reproaches
-that of exacting too much, and that of exacting
too little renunciation.
Far from repudiating, in the name of Christianity,
these two reproaches, we accept them both-nay, we
even improve upon them. In one sense of the word
it is not enough to say that Christianity concedes
too much to interest, or that Christianity gives too
much to duty. Too much, a little too much, a great
deal too much! these are vague terms, for which we
would substitute absolute ones. We say, because it
is the truth, that Christianity grants everything to
interest, and grants everything to duty. And we say,
further, that this must needs be the case, since
Christianity, if true, must correspond with that which
is essential and ineradicable in human nature. It is
K
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
upon this nature that the reproaches directed against
Christianity should be laid. For it is of this nature
that it may be affirmed that it contains two opposite
principles, of which each is absolute; each claims to
occupy the whole soul.
If one wanted to wonder, or to be offended at any-
thing, it should be at this fact first of all. Yet no
one dreams of reproaching human nature with this
contradiction, because this nature is a fact that there
is no changing, and which must needs be accepted
as it is. But why should we wonder at what
is found in man being found in religion also? Why
should a religion be thought suspicious for reproducing
this phenomenon rather than for not reproducing it?
How is it that this fact, instead of leading us to
judge it false, does not make us presume it true?
Faith is not only the firm assurance that everything
will end well for him that believes; it is, in the first
instance, the adhesion of the soul to a principle. Now
a principle is not true because its applications are
happy; but they are happy because it is true: thus
a duty performed ever contains the germ of a happi-
ness; but it is not for this that it is a duty. It is
obligatory in itself and independent of consequences,
although it is impossible that its consequences should
not be good. The very word duty implies this
guarantee. No one, in the bottom of his soul, can
conceive a virtue that renders unhappy; sacrifice
has always its compensations, within or without a
man, sooner or later, here or elsewhere, it matters
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
131
not which; this compensation is certain, complete,
superabundant. One knows this, one feels it, but
he who would see it as well, would be but imper-
fectly impressed with the sentiment of obligation.
A false religion would get rid of the problem by
denying it; the true religion ought to recognise
and confess it. Her task, her triumph, her glory, is
not to obscure the terms of the problem, but to
reduce them to unity,-is out of these two feelings,
hitherto so diverse and so contradictory, to make one
feeling in our hearts.
III.—PHILOSOPHY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Its Principle (Common Sense); its Mission; its
Prejudices.
The contempt of man is at the bottom of all that
Voltaire has written on man and human affairs.
The philosophy of Voltaire is assuredly not the
true-nay, it is hardly to be called philosophy; it
is good sense, sometimes a high kind of good
sense; it is that commonplace wisdom of the re-
spectable people of all times, of the cultivated and
well-to-do, which steers between stoicism and epicu-
reanism-doubtless keeping much nearer to the last
than the first, but never abandoning itself entirely;
affirming nothing too strongly, not pressing hard on
any of the consequences of what it affirms-above
all, avoiding all dogmatic pretensions and a specu-
lative tone. If Voltaire enervates the doctrines of
-
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
the seventeenth century, he mitigates those of the
eighteenth, to which he always seemed to be saying,
Don't go so far;" or, "Don't go so fast!" His
philosophy is not materialist in the proper sense
of the word, it rather becomes so involuntarily and
in practice, rather than in intention. It expresses
modern civilisation, not in its extremes, but in what
it has of most agreeable and most generally ac-
cepted.
Voltaire's philosophy never rose above common
sense; and by this very circumstance he denied phi-
losophy, for philosophy consists precisely in laying
stress upon common sense in order afterwards to
transcend it. Voltaire has made the fulcrum the
end; he was the apostle of that class of generally
received ideas, and sometimes prejudices, which is
commonly honoured with the title of good sense.
The strength of Voltaire lay in giving to good sense
passion for its interpreter.
After all, there was a vengeance to be consum-
mated; a justice to get itself accomplished: there
were whole centuries to be expiated. Christianity, in
becoming an earthly power, had taken a corrupting
element into itself, and passed its own sentence of
condemnation. It needed to be sent back into the
desert. The whole work of Voltaire was a necessity
and a preparation.
The philosophy of the eighteenth century is a
reaction. It erases everything; gets rid of all tra-
dition and all authority. It desires to build a new
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
133
dwelling, but it would rather live out of doors in the
wind and rain than re-enter the old abode. It is
more bent upon destroying than creating. What age
has ever willed two things at once? Its character is
essentially negative.
Yes; prejudice, that great object of the detestation
of the eighteenth century; prejudice, a word by
which the philosophers of the day have so often
summed up all opinions that they did not hold; pre-
judice is the original sin of the philosophy of the
eighteenth century. It is by a prejudice, common
sense, instinct, appearances, vulgar opinions, that they
have killed all other prejudices.
All
One day perhaps we may retrace all the evil done
to the nations under this false name of good sense,
the born enemy of philosophy, religion, and enthu-
siasm; of all, in short, that raises individuals and
nations out of the dust. In morality it is called
interest, well understood; in philosophy, first ap-
pearances; in religion, materialism. All of corrupt
and mischievous belonging to the eighteenth century
got accomplished under the name of good sense.
of base and ignoble that the nineteenth century drags
after it towards its glorious future loudly professes
itself to be good sense. This good sense, the genius
of the dregs of society, the inspiration of the most
vulgar moments of life, has not always success-
fully disputed the world against its mysterious
rival, that sublime unknown, that illustrious un-
named, that wanderer without earthly origin, which
·
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has no other credentials to offer humanity except its
inimitable accent.
The human heart recognises this accent as having
heard it before in another world. At this voice the
masses arise, wondering at themselves; the invisible
and immaterial, like a powerful magnet, hold them
for some moments suspended in the void. But the
antagonist force, the good, or rather the bad sense of
human nature, has also its turn, has its hours of
triumph. And how much more universal is its
empire, how far more spontaneous the obedience
rendered it, how much more rapid the victories that it
gains! The stone does not rise without some resist-
ance; it feels none in falling: this is the natural
tendency of its movement; this is its good sense. In
certain times, on certain questions, pitch good sense.
against philosophy, good sense against devotedness,
against faith, the victory will be on the side of good
sense, unless, indeed, philosophy, devotedness, and
faith know how to be obstinately resolved.
Universal consent, in its purity, is prejudice raised
into a dogma; is brutal force put in the place of law;
is space and duration.
Do you see that man who, commissioned to light
on the summit of a tower the beacon fire destined
in the midst of night and tempest to guide distressed
sailors into port, mockingly places there, instead of
brilliant and far-shedding jets of flame, the paltry
lamp which an hour ago scarcely availed to light up
a corner of his own narrow room? such is the philo-
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
135
sophy of common sense. Must not a man have fallen
very low, must not his soul be very torpid, if not
quite dead, before he can seriously apply to religious
questions the narrow principles of mere common
sense?
•
í
SECOND SECTION.
APPLIED PHILOSOPHY.
CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
I.-RELATIONS BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND PHILOSOPHY.
1. Nature of the Problem: Insoluble objectively—
Conflicting claims-Services rendered to Chris-
tianity by Philosophy.
THE question of the relations and respective claims
of reason and faith, so often discussed already, is, we
think, destined to be so often again. By most authors
it gets insensibly confounded with a different one, that
of the relations between Christianity and philosophy.
We confess that we in no way understand this last,
taken in its generality. What is philosophy? All
the world is agreed that it is free-thinking; human
thought in the greatest spontaneity of which it is
capable. But what is Christianity? In itself one
thing only, it is twenty different things according to
different minds. It ought then to be stated first of
all, and this is almost always omitted, of what Chris-
tianity men purpose to treat. Then the question pro-
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
137
poses itself in the following terms: Does philosophy,
or liberty of thought, naturally arrive at such a given
Christianity? But it will still be necessary, and this
is difficult to define the liberty of free thought. Biassed
thoughts are not free, and thought may be biassed in
more than one way. If some in thinking freely, or
wishing at least to do so, harmonise from point to
point with Christian dogmas, may it not be said that
they have unconsciously taken for starting point what
they call the term? And if others, equally free-
thinking, do not arrive at these dogmas, may not this
be because, without knowing it, they were resolved
not to arrive there? To the Christian who philoso-
phises and continues to call himself a Christian, it
will be objected, you wind your Christianity on the
reel of philosophy; to the philosopher who becomes
a believer without abjuring philosophy many will
exclaim, your Christianity is but your philosophy,
under cover of an evangelical nomenclature. The
evolution in either sense may alike have a great
value subjectively; but an objective value is al-
most invariably denied it. Nevertheless, those
who have made or undergone the same evolution,
are well entitled to consider their respective ex-
periences as the counter-proof and verification of
each other.
We believe that a sincere philosophy must uncon-
sciously tend towards Christianity; we hold that it is
constrained by a kind of magnetic attraction to invert
the task assigned to it by M. Cousin; after having
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endeavoured to raise Christianity up to itself it will
end by lowering itself to Christianity, for as for
taking a third part, and trying to ignore and make
abstraction of Christianity, there is no likelihood of
that.
Besides its intrinsic worth, besides its numerous
uses, besides its appearing to us to have finally
brought over to the Gospel more souls than it has
detached from it, we do not overlook the fact that
no one becomes a Christian without becoming a
philosopher; and this simple and profound philo-
sophy, that each believer unwittingly draws from
Christianity, has a great deal to do with the solidity
of his faith, with his understanding of religious
things, with the consistency of his piety, and the
unity of his life.
If by religion be understood a positive revelation
of the designs of God with regard to the human
race, and by philosophy that speculation which, em-
bracing all questions and all problems, seeks for the
unity of the great whole and the secret of God, we
confront with each other two absolute pretensions—
two systems of general regulation of our thoughts
and actions; nor must we shrink from saying that,
taken at this height, religion and philosophy recipro-
cally deny each other.
Philosophy has no alternative; it must either
accuse itself or religion of falsehood. So soon as it
recognises religion as true, it must needs confess
that religion knows more than it does; the religion
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
139
that did not know more than philosophy would
necessarily be false.
If philosophy adopt religion for the starting point
of its speculations, it then deserts its own peculiar
principles, and absolutely changes its character.
Purely intellectual as, at all events, it pretends to
be, free from direct interest in the good as in the
useful, it consents to take its premisses from religion,
which is an affair of the heart and conscience; and,
by so doing, it impregnates itself with a foreign
element, it renounces all individual existence, it
obscures beforehand the results to which speculation
may lead it.
In a philosophical point of view, Christianity, that
men pretend to call overpassed and obsolete, is
greatly in advance of the age; and it will always
be so, for it is the first and last philosophy.
In the appreciation and in the history of religious
events we must at least accept the religious element
as a fact, as a phenomenon of the human mind, as
a part of human nature, as deep, at all events, as all
its other properties and other tendencies-nay, deeper
than all others; for what is religion if not the search
or the knowledge of a first principle; not an abstract
one such as satisfies philosophy, but one living, per-
sonal, related to all the faculties of our being at once,
and the necessity of which must be far more univer-
sally and keenly felt than that of the abstract prin-
ciple? This last, in fact, only interests philosophers;
the former interests the whole world, philosophers
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
included; and they must needs allow that the dis-
covery of such a first principle, and of the means
of entering into relations therewith, constitutes, if it
be possible, a far more complete philosophy than
theirs. We cannot, then, forgive them, when they
relate a religious event, for insisting with all their
might upon some hidden cause more profound than
the religious sentiment itself, and only seeing in that
religious want the form of some other want, or the
accident of some phenomenon still more important
and real. Because men, gradually emptied out, as it
were, by the habit of speculation, may come at last
to feel no want of God, they would be very wrong to
imagine that others feel none; on the contrary, let
them acknowledge that this want is the most con-
stant, most universal, and most unextinguishable
that human nature possesses, and that in every
history in which religion appears, if it be not the
only, it is the first that we must assume.
Without having the least inclination, or expe-
riencing the least necessity to depreciate philosophy,
we hold that the noble flights it has taken, the
beautiful developments it has received, should not
lead us to overlook so many errors, so many uncer-
tainties, so much anguish, of which the traces and
the testimony are to be found in that very chosen
band, of whose works philosophy loves to compose
the trophy of human reason. Such enormous dis-
crepancies weigh in the balance; and we may confess,
without incurring the reproach of pyrrhonism, that
+
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
141
not only “in order to present to the human mind
an indispensable complement of truth," but to con-
secrate, to confirm the most elementary truths that
philosophy had discovered, the Incarnation, and all
connected with it, was of absolute necessity.
Philosophers themselves are men; and if philo-
sophy had conquered in them all evil personality, it
would have left nothing more for religion to do,
unless religion be a solemn amusement of the imagi-
nation and the heart.
We must not condemn philosophy, or else we must
be silent about the religion which assumes it, leads to
it, and would create it did it not exist. Accordingly,
St. Paul has not condemned it; and when he warns
his disciples against a "science falsely so called," he,
by so doing, implies the existence of a true science
Now philosophy is a part of science, or rather the
very science of science. How, besides, could he have
condemned it without condemning himself, seeing
he so frequently and happily makes use of it? We
should in vain attempt to deny it; the writings of
St. Paul, and those of St. John, are full of the
highest philosophy; and, let us be well understood,
we do not only mean to say full of sublime truth,
but full of that philosophy that we have tried to
characterise, which rises from appearances to reality,
from the accident to the essence, from the particular
to the general, from changing facts to immutable
principles.
Philosophy has been much slandered, and I am
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
in.
not going to defend it; but I shall venture to say
that, in one sense, it has rendered service to the
Gospel. In applying itself to penetrate into its
interior, to study the relations of its parts, its inti-
mate texture, its system, it has gradually made an
example of that philosophy which, making abstrac-
tion of the nature of things, impresses the most
arbitrary character on religion, and necessarily ends
by attributing to faith a merit, that of bondage
and voluntary blindness. We have lost nothing in
understanding that which could be understood, that
which was made to be so; for there is often no
medium between misunderstanding and ignoring. A
good number of those who did not believe have
thereby gained faith; those who already believed
have been happy to see how profound on all sides
is that foundation of those hopes of which they had
hitherto seen one side only. They had said with
joy, "I know in Whom I have believed!" they now
say, with no less joy and gratitude, " I know in what
I believe !"
Let us observe, in a general way, that these
too absolute attacks upon reason, far from serving
the cause of religion, are extremely unfavourable
to it.
The unbeliever is, above all, an unbeliever in him-
self; man, in order to believe in himself, must, first
of all, believe in God; let God reveal Himself that
is to say, communicate Himself to us-scepticism
and despair will absorb themselves in His breast;
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
143
the one point is to find God, who is the peace and
the security of the intellect, no less than the peace
and security of the heart. It is He who will teach
us alike when to trust in our. reason and when to
distrust it.
Heterodox science has its own earnestness. If I
denied earnestness to an absolutely unbelieving
science, how, step by step, could I fail to extend this
exclusion to all the intermediate shades between
absolute incredulity and orthodoxy. And again I
may, indeed, know what absolute incredulity is, for
there is such a thing; but orthodoxy is always, and
necessarily, relative, and there is but one way of
defining it—which is to say, orthodoxy is what I
believe and you do not.
2. Rational character of Christianity Rights and
Limits of Reason-Necessity of Faith.
The essential opposition pointed out between
reason and faith is not a reality-they are two
powers reigning in two distinct domains. Thus,
those who will have it that Christianity is only
faith, and those who insist on its being all reason,
are equally mistaken; it is both—it occupies thought
and feeling; it alternately submits itself to, and
withdraws from examination; it has its obscu-
rities and its light. The theologian is bound to
prove that he is well informed; he ought to win
for the Gospel the respect of reason, but he is
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
not bound to put the Gospel upon the level of
reason.
Christianity, a Divine operation, is also a rational
one, and rational precisely because Divine.
When the grace of God has opened a heart to the
full comprehension of the evangelical mystery, that
heart must end by finding the Gospel divinely reason-
able; but previous to that moment when the man
receives new eyes and a new being, I prefer that
the Gospel be taken for folly rather than wisdom.
Wonderful, yet true: Christianity modified as
the world likes it is less comprehensible, for it is
actually absurd, and yet it appears more clear.
Complete Christianity is the only rational, the only
logical, and yet this it is which appears incompre-
hensible.
Strange! When it is reasonable, Christianity is
impotent; and like in this to one of the most won-
drous creatures of the animated world, if it loses its
sting it dies.
If Christianity be reasonable, it is with so high and
unforeseen a reason, that human reason needs some
time, some effort, and perhaps some grace from Heaven
to rise to its tone. From the very first, and in all
times, this sublime reason has passed for foolishness;
and the especial folly in the eyes of the world and
the wise of the world is to take these most reasonable
doctrines seriously.
Human reason is competent to test the authenti-
city of a revelation; and if the task imposed on it
1
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
145
•
•
with regard to this seem above its strength, it is not
reason that we have to quarrel with.
What we have denied, and still deny, is the com-
petence of human reason, destitute of the help of
revelation, to throw light on the great question of our
destiny, and to re-establish unity in our inner life;
it is its capacity of telling man what he wants to
know about his soul, his true condition, and God;
it is its power of laying "any other foundation than
that is laid, Jesus Christ." Let these questions be
discussed with us; let it be proved to us that reason
can fill the post we affirm it cannot fill. Let reason
be employed for this purpose, we on our side will
employ it too; but do not let us be accused, at the
very moment that we are reasoning, of hating reason,
and while we are philosophising, of being enemies to
philosophy.
The Christian excepts against reason when it pre-
tends to engender or produce truth. He does in his
sphere what the true philosopher equally does in his;
for the latter admits, in virtue of and by the authority
of an internal revelation, facts, for the discovery of
which reason is of no avail. The philosopher has
not got to demonstrate à priori the facts of this in-
ternal revelation-a revelation without antecedents, a
principle anterior to all other principles. The theo-
logian, for his part, recognises in revealed facts a
principle superior to all other principles; he too does
not prove these, for to prove would be to create them.
By acting thus he does not deny reason; on the con-
L
146
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
trary, he makes use of it. And here we may observe
that reason that is to say, the nature of things-
will always be for us whatever stand-point we assume,
the criterion of truth, and the fulcrum of belief. It
must always be the case that the truth without,
measure and compare itself with the truth within
us; with that intellectual conscience which, like the
moral conscience, is clothed with sovereignty, pro-
nounces sentences, knows remorse; with those irre-
sistible axioms that we have within us, which form
part of our nature, which are the support and, as it
were, the ground of our thoughts-in a word, with
reason. Every doctrine is in this sense bound to be
reasonable; which does not, however, mean that every
doctrine is bound to be accessible to reason.
prevents reason from accepting what transcends it.
Nothing
The field of religious ideas, when we traverse it in
the footsteps of natural reason, is only the field of
problems and contradictions. The farther we pene-
trate the greater the darkness, and we end by losing
even those primitive notions, those instinctive beliefs
we possessed before. This is the experience of all
systems, all schools, and all ages. The history of
philosophy teaches us that these researches, when we
incautiously surrender ourselves to them, lead to ter-
rible questions—to the very edge of the abyss. It is
there, face to face with the infinite, that man sees
realities dissolve, the most universal certainties vanish
away, his very individuality become a problem. It
is there that he sees the external world, and thought
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
147
itself, observation and observer, man and God, swal-
lowed up from and lost to his terrified sight in the
immensity of a horrible chaos. It is then that, seized
with mysterious horror, he looks round with restless
gaze for the world of finite beings and intelligible
ideas, which he wishes he had never left. Thus his
religion, made up of thought alone, proves to have
neither enlightened, nor converted, nor consoled him ;
and he finds himself as far from the goal as he was
before these laborious researches.
In the establishment of the relations of man with
the Deity, reason may be regarded as the instrument
of the religious sentiment; conscience is its seat.
Reason may conduct man from induction to in-
duction up to the belief in a God; but it is conscience
that receives this belief, and is amenable to its law.
Reason adopts religious ideas; conscience is the seat
of the religious sentiment.
Reason may and ought to guide us in the applica-
tion of this sentiment, but is not this sentiment itself.
It does not teach us what conscience teaches; and
conscience on its side is unable to instruct us in what
reason reveals.
To enlighten, to modify, to produce conviction,
such is the office of reason. It belongs to conscience
to make us act conformably to that conviction; the
one is necessary to the other. Nothing in the world
is more fatal than reason without conscience, or con-
science without reason.
Nations, like individuals, cannot be modified, still
*
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less regenerated, except by facts. Reason will not do
as well as motives; syllogisms are inferior to ex-
amples, and in this region the true conviction is con-
tagious. Instead of seeking, arms in hand, to establish
the right of a fallen power, show that it is not aban-
doned; prove by its benefits that it deserved not to
be so; bring forward actual witnesses of its dignity
and excellence; be seen, in your own person, you
alone standing beside its banner, pressing it lovingly
in your hands, raising it above your head.
This, believe me, is the unanswerable argument; this
is the earnest of victory; this is its beginning.
It may indeed be asserted that philosophy lacks
no means of proving the necessity of all the duties
imposed by evangelical morality. Nevertheless, to
get these accepted and accomplished, the Supreme
Master of men and their Divine Educator has had
recourse to the power of facts. The Gospel itself
is less a doctrine than a fact, and whenever we aim
at reviving some moral convictions in the heart (I
say in the heart, for elsewhere it is a theorem and
nothing more), we shall need to conform to the ex-
ample God himself has given. It is with morality
as with motion—and with good right, since morality
is to the soul what motion is to matter: the philoso-
pher who best proved motion was he who, in the very
height of the discussion, rose and began to walk.
Whosoever pretends to draw from reason and from
nature the true and complete system of the relations
of man with God; whosoever does not present religion
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
149
to us in a book that has emanated from God, deceives
himself and us. Yes; religious truth must be found
in a book, in the authentic archives of a revelation
added to or substituted for the teaching of nature.
We ought at least to listen to one who announces
himself as the bearer of a book of God, whereas no
trust is due to one who produces nothing of the kind:
there is a reasonable prejudice in favour of the first
the second does not deserve a moment's audience
Why is this? Because the former comes within the
terms of a probable supposition, and the latter sets
out from a gratuitous assumption that nothing sup-
ports and that everything contradicts.
This is not a paradox, but a truth of common sense,
and the contrary opinion rests on a mistake which it
is easy to explain.
Nature seems to us to have a voice of her own; but
it is not enough remembered that she would have none
had not the Gospel spoken. She speaks to us through
the Gospel, and we believe that she speaks to us
directly. But what does she say—what has she ever
said, to those that the Gospel has not converted, or at
all events modified? What is she to such but a great
enigma, or another name for inflexible necessity?
What does she tell them regarding the character of
God, His intentions, His will concerning man, His
system of governing moral creatures? Nothing dis-
tinct, nothing conclusive, nothing that one can call a
revelation. Men believe that the world creates us a
heart to explain the world; they do not discern that
?
150
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
it is our heart which interprets this world to us, and
that the nature of this interpretation depends on a
quite other cause than the contemplation of sensible
phenomena. In the midst of Christian influences
they know not how to assign to these influences
their proper part, to deduct it from the impression
they imagine themselves receiving from nature
alone, and reduce nature's part to its true value,
which is nil if by this value we meant the capa-
bility of filling up the abyss hollowed out by evil,
the power of constituting life, the supreme govern-
ment of the will; in a word, that miraculous and
yet necessary equation between our desires and our
destiny.
What causes us to attribute to nature an extent
and energy of teaching power of which she is in-
capable is, that we are not very fastidious about that
teaching. We should be more so if it was made to
include all the elements that we have just enume-
rated. It would then be very decidedly felt that God
was not revealed; that He can only be so by some
means, subsequent or superadded, in nature and
reason—that is, by a book, a Bible; it would be ac-
knowledged that the pure and rational notions that
we had believed to owe to ourselves (first error), and
had judged adequate to the wants of human life (an
error equally great)-that these notions, unless they
be closely attached to that revelation which is their
stem, are but effects, never causes have indeed beauty,
but no intrinsic virtue. Alas! the most vulgar super-
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
151
stition has more, because even in its falsity it cor-
responds with a truth inherent in us-the necessity
that God should speak, and the impossibility that He
should not have spoken. For this is the hypothesis
of the whole human race. Humanity expects the
Word, throws itself on all that offers any appear-
tance of it, spells and repeats it in the grossest
imitations. Humanity demands a god-man, and an
historical religion; humanity never was, never will
be deistic.
Who then is in error? Is it humanity, or some
few beaux esprits? Is not humanity cleverer than all
clever men put together?
One would say that for some people the longer and
less direct the way from the premiss to the conclu-
sion, the more conviction loses its plenitude; as
though it fatigued itself in those windings, and arrived
exhausted at the issue of the argument. Often at
the end of the most logical deductions an obstinate
doubt will intrude-a singular sort of doubt, bringing
forward no proof, not seeking to justify itself, but for
all that, throwing a cloud over the most carefully
acquired convictions. And when it does not spring
from within, it springs from without. Diffused
in the crowd that surrounds us, it assails us with the
mass of all foreign incredulities. No one knows how
hard it is to believe in the midst of an unbelieving
multitude. Here it is that a noble exercise is open
to faith, and here that its grandeur appears. This
faith in contested truths, when it is calm, patient,
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
and modest, is one of the essential attributes of all
the men who have been "great in the order of
mind."
There is one thing that is too much forgotten,
namely, that faith in the Gospel implies little faith
in the teachings of pure reason.
The Gospel does not offer itself as a brighter light
added to our natural light, but as a torch to dissipate
our darkness, as the day succeeding to the night. It
does not merely imply; it declares that all were out
of the way, that there was not one wise; no, not one.
No one believes in the Gospel without believing that,
before the Gospel, humanity was in the dark, and in
a dark so much the more dangerous that it was here
and there traversed by lightning flashes, which en-
couraged man to set out on his perilous way, whereas
a more profound and impenetrable night would have
constrained him to immobility, and kept him from
nearing the abyss. There is this remarkable fact
which we must not overlook. The Gospel, by its
light, exercises a retroactive virtue over our past
darknesses; it makes them visible to us. He who,
before he was a Christian, believed himself sure of
many things, learns thenceforth how little worth the,
as it were, gratuitous and anticipated certitude he
had; he becomes a sceptic retrospectively, not in the
present, but in the past, which is yet another way of
paying off arrears.
We may believe more or less well according as we
understand more or less well. This looks like a bold
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
153
paradox, but its explanation is easy. In religion, as
in everything else, it is absurd to pretend to under-
stand everything. As we proceed from cause to
cause, the moment must come when we shall have
to say, This is, because it is. If we are only to be
satisfied upon the condition of understanding every-
thing, it is plain that we shall not believe. Now,
not to believe is not to know; we must, then, believe
in order to understand; but this being well under-
stood, we add, that we must understand in order
to believe well. If under the name of faith you
mean a principle that renews the soul, faith must
be a comprehension; that is to say, a reciprocal
penetration of the subject and object. The Gospel
invites us to contemplate truth; but wherefore,
except that we may understand it? There are in
religious truth hidden things that pertain to God,
but also things revealed, which are our share.
Although the Lord's ways be not our ways, there
are things that we do not really believe unless we
understand them. In every case, to fortify our faith,
we must apply ourselves to understand. It is not
enough to have reached the extremity of truth with
the extremity of our finger; we must embrace it, en-
fold it in our arms, and clasp our two hands beyond
it in adoration.
The ideas of Christianity are not Christianity; and
we must here observe, that if from real living Chris-
tianity we almost unwittingly descend to the ideas
of which its system is composed, we must needs re-
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
mount as naturally from these ideas to the life which
is its essence.
The Gospel, like all other facts, may furnish mate-
rials for a science; but before being a science it is a
fact; it is an action of God; and it is less important
to explain than to experience this action.
Our soul does not discover but recognise truth :
thus it judges upon evidence that a juncture impos-
sible to chance, impossible to calculation, must be
the work and secret of God, and then only it is
that we really believe. Let us recapitulate: the
Gospel is believed when it has passed for us from
the rank of an external truth to that of an in-
ternal, and if I may so say, of an instinct; when
we hardly find it possible to distinguish its reve-
lations from the revelations of our consciousness;
when it has become in us a fact of our conscious-
ness. And these characteristics are so far from
giving it the least leaning to fanaticism, that it is
these characteristics, on the contrary, that distin-
guish and secure it therefrom. Fanaticism is a per-
fect stranger to this excellent logic of faith; it can-
not allege, either to itself or to others, any of this
intimate experience, that unexceptionable verification
of facts by facts. The fanatic is blind; he believes
because he does not see: the Christian believes be-
cause he has seen.
If the certitude of faith-if the right to be a
Christian, depended upon knowledge and intelli-
gence; if we were Christians only in so far as we
:
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
155
were in a condition to answer all the objections that
science might create or intelligence formularise, there
would be very few Christians indeed; nay, strictly
speaking, there would be neither Christians nor Chris-
tianity.
A Christian may say to himself, that with more in-
formation than it has been possible to him to acquire,
a certain objection that now seems to him perplex-
ing would have seemed frivolous. He may say to
himself, "I shall probably be troubled by an objection
that is at bottom groundless, at which a clever person
would laugh, which never would have been proposed
to one less ignorant than I. Is it just that I should
let myself be overthrown by a phantom, and that I
should stake my peace, my strength, my spiritual life,
against an adversary who on his side risks nothing,
and knows his game perfectly?" No, no: but I hasten
to add that there must be here neither idleness nor
cowardice. We may only refuse one mode of combat
to accept another. He who retreats before one enemy
must confront another. He
He has to justify him-
self from this apparent want of courage. He must
put himself into a condition to oppose internal evi-
dence to external objections. In default of his words
his life must become a refutation of heresy, so that
heresy, contemplating his conduct, may begin to doubt
itself, and to question whether that same Jesus
Christ, from whom this man evidently receives grace
for grace, may not indeed possess that glorious ful-
ness that hitherto it had refused him.
156
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
In morality and in religion both, the certainty of
truth is far more important than the refutation of
error.
Christian certainty is something different to intel-
lectual certainty. Doubt is a state of nothingness,
a state of temptation through which we have all
passed! When the life grows feeble, the faith is
feeble. Faith creates the life, but the life supports
the faith. Faith is light; when it is not this it sinks
to the rank of mere belief.
Philosophy awakens no principle of life and reno-
vation in the people: faith alone has this privilege;
it is by faith, human or Divine, that a people lives
and moves.
Prejudice in the world, and in philosophy party
spirit, in vain resemble faith; faith possesses its
object, touches, feels, tastes it, becomes united with
it; but neither authority nor syllogisms will give us,
with regard to those truths of which the soul is the
judge, a certainty immoveable by the assaults of rea-
soning. Even the best reasoning can only produce
evidence with the concurrence of the soul, and we
have seen doubts rise a thousand times, hideous and
sarcastic, at the term of a deduction of which the
diamond links formed the most perfect chain. That
massive tower that you had seen on the horizon was
only a cloud.
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
157
3. Agreement of Ideal Philosophy and Ideal Chris-
tianity—Dangers of Speculation.
In spiritual matters, the philosophical and the reli-
gious spirit assist each other to penetrate to the root
of subjects interiora rerum.
The knowledge of spiritual things ought to be
something analogous to the reunion of all the senses :
sight, touch, nothing should be wanting. Since the
fall, to know has no longer been synonymous with to see;
seeing has appeared the more excellent, and men have
come to saying that we can only know God on con-
dition of seeing Him.
Happy the man who receives truth by all his
faculties at once! for whom it is at one and the same
time the solution of the problems of the mind; the
quenching of the heart's thirst; the accomplishment
of the vast hopes of imagination; lastly, the quieting
of a troubled conscience. It is the whole man who
is sick; it is to the whole man, to all his wants, that
the Divine source of redemption addresses itself.
And perhaps certain systems, excellent and pure in
intention, have too much neglected (or should I say
despised?) those sides of human nature, the cure, the
restoration, the regular development of which enter into
the idea and the conditions of the regeneration of the
moral being. And yet men have been perfectly right
in giving the rectification of the moral sense for
fulcrum to this general renewal. Nothing is more
logical and more effective. Love, the crown of the
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work, could not initiate it. It could not be at once
end and means. How should we offer to God what
we do not possess?
If knowledge be vain without the affection it is
destined to produce, affection is imperfect, carnal,
mixed with impure elements, without the knowledge
destined to give it its proper character. Individual
Christianity is the development in the heart and
life of certain ideas and certain facts that, in the
Gospel, have nothing vague or equivocal about them.
There is no uncertainty in the thoughts of God;
there can be none in their expression, especially
when that expression is that of the truth that saves
us. Too much care could not be taken to preserve
the ideas to which God has entrusted our regenera-
tion from all that might have rendered their bear-
ing indefinite or their conclusions problematical.
Nothing in the Word of God is obscure in itself;
nothing is so save by the fact of our nature: but
the truths by which we are to be regenerated and
saved everywhere appear definite and distinct. Thus
the religious task imposed upon us is not to render
more clear any of the fundamental dogmas of the
Gospel; this would be to hold a candle to the sun;
we are only bound not to darken them: and be
sure that in this sphere whatever is obscure becomes
so by our own fault, whether we have wished to add
our thought to that of God (as is especially the case
with Protestant rationalism), or whether we have
failed to give sufficient attention to the truths of His
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
159
Word to obtain exact knowledge (as is very common
in the catholicism of the multitude).
Whatever man may do in other respects, whatever
he may pretend to, he cannot prevent his life ruling
and measuring itself according to his knowledge or
his ignorance of eternal things. Visibly or invisibly,
positively or negatively, he refers everything thereto.
Of necessity he must have principles. According to
what God is or is not, and according to what God
may be, so man will be this or that. Such as his
belief is, such is he.
Although we are incapable of inventing the truth,
there is within us something capable of recognising
it, uniting itself thereto, becoming incorporated with
it. If the re-establishment of a perfect harmony
between our faculties, of the whole man with himself
and with life—if this sentiment of plenitude and con-
tinuity be an illusion, where is truth? There is just
as good reason to accuse of deception those native and
universal beliefs to which M. de Lamenais would
reduce religion. These are evident neither on better
authority nor in a fuller degree.
In matters of religion, it has been said, we must
either not make any use of reason-which is impos-
sible, or, to the last, refer ourselves to its authority
-which contradicts the idea of a revealed religion.
The alternative is hard, and the dilemma would be
unavoidable if it related to one and the same use
of reason. Assuming man to be fallen, it does not
belong to him to invent a method of restoration;
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
his very fall implies the impossibility of this; but
this method once revealed, why should he not be in
a condition to appreciate, on one hand, the adaptation
of the means to the end, and, on the other, the com-
patibility of this method with the laws of that rea-
son with which he must needs compare all, though
it cannot measure all. If the author (Lamenais) did
not believe in the reality and certainty of this cri-
terion, he could not bring it forward.
But since he admits it as revelation, he must, at
all events, allow it as a criterion; and therefore let
us be permitted to employ it, in order to learn
whether this religion, which knows more than reason,
has anything contrary to reason; by which word we
do not only mean the first logical principles, from
which all, even the most divergent minds, set out, but
also those first data of morality without which a man
is not a man, but a brute. If I had every sense
except that of sight, and God were to bestow on
me that additional faculty, it would be no benefit,
but a bitter mockery, and consequently I could not
believe Him the source of it; if my fingers found
angular or pointed what my eyes announced as
smooth or rounded; or, to speak in more general
terms, if the testimony of one sense did not agree
with that of another.
If my eyes only serve to deceive me, I shall keep
them shut, or confine myself to darkness. Now
revelation is to reason what sight is to touch, or
touch to sight.
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
161
Lamenais had very possibly met Christians who
said, "Believe that God has spoken, and do not
examine or rather, do not appreciate in any way
-what He has said." But this opinion is but an
opinion. We, for our part, say that it is impossible
to find in a religion that comes from God, any-
thing repugnant to the first principles of reason;
and we equally say that, if we did meet, in a religion
professing to be Divine, with anything of the kind,
we should be led not to believe it Divine, for the
principles that such things contradict are more evi-
dent than any of the historical proofs on which
religion rests; and further, as this religion insists on
being believed with the heart, as it requires the
adhesion of the whole man, as without that it would
not really be a religion, it is impossible that it
should say the contrary of what our conscience says,
and that it should, at the same time, exercise
over us that regenerating power which is the seal
of a Divine religion. An appeal to my admiration
is also an appeal to my judgment; and he who
consents to admire by so doing consents to judge.
It is not in every sense that "God's
God's ways are
not as our ways, and His thoughts as our thoughts."
We could neither admire nor even discern the
justice of God had it nothing in common with our
justice, nor His goodness had it nothing in common
with our goodness. To say that God is perfectly
just and good is to say that He perfectly realises
the idea that we form to ourselves of justice and
M
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goodness. It may be that a veil covers, at certain
points, that goodness and justice: "God is in
heaven, and we are on earth." But it is what we do
see that enables us to judge of what we do not see.
If there be invincible obscurities, these are not
peculiar to Christianity; they are found identically
in deism; and to avoid them, we must either pene-
trate before the time into the inaccessible light of
heaven, or draw back as far as atheism, where
particular obscurities disappear in the general dark-
ness.
Some ask their own intellect for information about
God, forgetting that we can only see God by God's
own light, just as we can only see the sun by the
sun. To see God, the intellect should be full of
God, imbued and penetrated with God. With such
an interior eye it would see God; but without it, it
cannot, however penetrating it may be, know or find
God. Yet nevertheless, such is its presumption, that
it wants to know respecting God not merely what
can be known, but also what cannot. Here the limit
is laid down by the Scriptures, which declare to
philosophers and Christians, "That which may be
known of God is manifest in them" (Rom. i. 19).
There does, then, exist that of God which cannot be
known; but this the pride of reason will not ac-
knowledge—it forgets that, beyond the light, there is
night and the abyss.
Is it then, in general, a sin to desire to know?
Not so; but it is a sin to crave to know what God
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
163
•
has commanded us to ignore. Even did the means
•
not to avail ourselves
Where the means are
of knowledge exist, we ought
of them, if forbidden by God.
wanting, the wish seems to be only simple folly; but
it is something more. There is in the very desire a
principle of insubordination and discontent, which
'cannot be innocent. To mistake our limits is not
always a simple error; it is only pride that can lead
us to mistake certain limits. And the more unrea-
sonable, the more insane the mistake, the more it
betrays our pride, which alone can mislead our
reason to such an extent. Now these limits may
be defined in a word. If God has given up the
world to men's discussions, He has never intended to
give Himself up to these; there is an abyss between
these two knowledges, as between us and God: "that
which may be known of God" (Rom. i. 19), as the
apostle expresses it, has been manifested to us by
God himself in His works, in which "His eternal
power and glory do appear" (Rom. i. 20); but to
know what God is, we must be God, and to desire
that which appertains only to God is to make our-
selves God.
If a superhuman knowledge of God had been
essential to guarantee to you the certainty of all
your other knowledge, God would have given it
you, and it would have ceased to be superhuman, or
rather it would never have been so. You feel, indeed,
at bottom, that what conscience and religion teach
you respecting God is perfectly sufficient to the end
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
you allege, and that life and science organise them-
selves very well around this notion; yet this notion
is imperfect according to you. Yes; because you
want to know God as God knows Himself: but if
you only lay claim to a human knowledge of God,
you have a knowledge perfect in its kind; and in
this respect you have neither to complain of nature
nor of religion.
Between speculation or pure thought, and good-
ness, there is a whole abyss, and it is not thought
that will ever fill it up.
Pure abstraction-I mean thought without feeling
-does not lead to truth, and the entire absence of
all bias that it affects involves a false position.
We may, without any danger to truth, make
abstraction of material interests, they need not
enter into the account at all; but it is impossible
to do the same with moral interests. On the con-
trary, this prepossession is essential to the research
of truth. It is not permitted us to be indifferent
here.
The habit of abstraction hardens, brutalises. There
is more true enthusiasm in those who are in a hurry
to conclude.
Thought for thought's sake is nothing better than
art for art's sake.
The force of an individual and of a nation; lies
not in being free from prepossessions, but rather in
having them. We must be partial to something
or other.
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
165
The evil consists not in being interested, but in
being so in what does not deserve our interest.
It is important to remark that, unlike other reli-
gions, the Gospel only admits the speculative ele-
ment under the title of support and auxiliary to
the practical. Not only, as you may easily conceive,
is no dogma passive, but the exposition of the dogma
stops short precisely, I might say abruptly, at the
point where the practical, thoroughly satisfied, would
have nothing to gain from any ulterior development.
It may be that a perfectly connected, because per-
fectly true religion, has delighted some minds like a
perfect syllogism; it may be that the complacency felt
at being able to reason out one's religion has led to a
little too much reasoning; it may be that we have
too much tried to draw it, body and soul, out of the
abstraction of dialectics, and that, the effect adapting
itself to the cause, we have procured a certain
number of conversions rather intellectual than moral.
It may even be that we have attempted to perfect
the Divine logic; that to cut out a smoother and more
direct path for Christian reasoning, we have sup-
pressed, at all events by our silence, certain inspired
passages (and, consequently, certain truths) that God
had set as a snare to the pride of logicians; it may be,
in short, that a little of the rationalism so vehemently
attacked by the orthodox may be one of the charac-
teristics of our modern orthodoxy. But this abuse,
of which we must not underrate the importance, is
very far from counterbalancing in our preaching the
·
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
incontestable merit of a more systematic teaching
—a merit of which the practical consequences should
make us feel the value.
Philosophy and lofty sentiments have less connec-
tion, than is often supposed with Divine truth; and
it is not by dint of human wisdom that we rise to
understand the wisdom of God.
You must keep your heart in safety; you must
reserve within you certain principles that no discus-
sion has the right to infringe or even to agitate.
Whatever may happen as to the rest, and what-
ever the issue of the discussion, so much remains
irrevocably acquired by your conscience: God is
God; I must live for Him; love Him above every-
thing; do His will, His whole will, and nothing but
His will. You have arrived at these convictions by
the very road that some pretend you ought not to
have taken; these convictions have struck their root
in the very mystery that you are obliged to discuss.
This is of absolutely no consequence: they are true
in themselves; they are henceforth evident to you;
the diminution or destruction of the mystery of your
faith would, no doubt, do them mortal injury by up-
rooting them from your heart; but they can no longer
be uprooted from your mind: after all, before all,
they are truths. You know this. Well then, say
to yourselves: After, as before, all discussion, this is
true, this is necessary; all that contradicts or weakens
it is necessarily false; I shall accept nothing except
these immutable truths; if they are not a touch-
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
167
stone to discover truth, they will serve as a touch-
stone to reveal error.
Let us mutually warn each other of the danger of
turning into speculation what has been given us to
live on; and of, so to speak, pillaging truth to benefit
our curiosity. Let us admire, indeed, but let us also
render thanks; admire, but humble ourselves; ad-
mire, but ask above all knowledge, for the love that
edifies. But let us never weary of saying to our-
selves, and proclaiming to others, that the Gospel is
divinely reasonable; that it is wisdom amongst the
perfect, and adapted alike to give wisdom to the
simple and simplicity to the wise.
The intellect only enables us to appropriate the
idea of things, not their impressions, their reality.
And if it suffices in science, properly so called,
which has for its object only the ideas of things and
their logical fitness, it does not suffice in the sphere
of those facts whose object is to enter into imme-
diate contact with the living forces of the soul,
and which, without that contact, would lose their
character and even the reason of their existence.
No doubt, in this sort of knowledge, as in every
other, the understanding has functions to fill; but
truth does not stop short at the mirror the under-
standing presents, it passes through it to reflect itself
in the innermost mirror of the soul; and we may say
of truths of this order, that they are only perceived,
only understood, inasmuch as they make themselves
felt in that part of ourselves which is the seat of
W
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our affections, and consequently the true centre of
our life.
If religion be something more than a science, if it
be life flowing from a fact, it is clear that it does not
appeal to the mind alone, and that whoever only sees
in it the mass of ideas that it contains, remains out-
side of the truth. Or even if he gave all possible atten-
tion to each of these ideas, to their mutual relations,
to their totality-even if he daily made some new
discovery in that domain, all this would not advance
him a single step towards truth; what he had learnt
might, indeed, be exactly true, but it would not be
the truth.
It is very evident that in itself reasoning does not
lead to feeling; and when thought is too much preoc-
cupied with the idea of a fact, the idea is retained and
the fact escapes. It is the same as with a man pre-
vented by the sun's light from seeing the sun. In vain
the number and beauty of the ideas connected with
Christianity; this very beauty and number become a
snare that prevents our advancing beyond, and the
interest of curiosity prevails over all others. In vain
do these ideas come so near to truth that they seem its
very substance: this new snare is more dangerous than
the first; were they farther removed, were they even
quite foreign to the truth, this illusion would not be
possible; and hence we have had occasion to observe
that the occupations most unconnected with Christian
speculation, provided they do not oppose Christian
morality, are less likely to distract the soul from
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
169
what should be its first object here below. It is often
far better, as regards the religious life of the heart,
to be a merchant, an artist, a geometrician, than a
theologian.
The exclusive application of the intellect to reli-
gion not only fails to bring us nearer to the truth,-
that is, to the life, but it actually tends to remove
us farther and farther from it.
The habits of thought are not less tyrannical than
others, and a time comes when change is impossible
even to the strongest will. Let us trace the moral
history of a man given up to the tendency we have
described. Earnestness of spirit certainly failed not to
accompany his earliest steps; it is scarcely possible to
suppose that from the very first he only saw in religion
an object of philosophical speculation. His first in-
tention, no doubt, was to appropriate it to his own soul,
and submit to it his life, but this impression was super-
ficial and fugitive; thought, thoroughly fascinated,
threw itself upon this rich booty, and turned it entirely
to its own account. This inclination became dominant
and tyrannical; everything that was destined to be
the aliment of the soul became the feast of the intel-
lect. Each gain of the mind was a loss to the soul,
which, more and more out of court, more and more
condemned to inaction, lost its elasticity by want of
use. The man having contracted the habit of seizing
hold of all things by their intellectual side, gradually
grew incapable of grasping them under any other as-
pect. Singular fact! he went on learning ever better
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
and better how to give account of the effects of truth
upon the soul, and became ever more and more in-
capable of experiencing these effects himself; he
spoke, he wrote perhaps on the order of grace, and
his heart grew more and more hardened against the
influence of grace; in all his religious considerations,
the idea of the thing, presenting itself before the thing,
interposed as an obstacle between the fact and him ;
ere long he had nothing of all these facts but their
phantoms, which faithfully represented their form and
colour, but did not contain their substance. He felt
this, and grew uneasy; he determined to make reli-
gion, so long his study, at last a business, and his
business; he sought to place himself under the action
of truth, and in a state of dependence upon it, but by
force of habit his mind always came to substitute itself
for his conscience; seeking vainly for a religion in this
system he could only find a system in this religion.
In his anguish he would fain have forgotten, have
ignored; he envied the credulity of the simple, of chil-
dren; he would have given all his science for a single
sigh of theirs, and all his intellect in exchange for
their hearts, for his had ceased to beat, his had become
mind. He would have wished the whole of Chris-
tianity to be blotted from his memory, the very exist-
ence of religion to become unknown to him, so that,
presenting itself to him anew, it should act upon his
soul, made young once more, with all the energy of a
new truth and an unexpected blessing. Fruitless
wishes: one cannot regain the eye one has lost, nor
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
171
recover the faith which is the eye of the soul. Strange
condition, in which one both believes and believes
not; in which the faith of the mind helps one to feel
the necessity of the faith of the heart; makes us be-
moan its absence, yet cannot bestow it: state of light,
indeed, but of a light which does nothing but make
our darkness visible; ignorance in science, error in
truth, unbelief in faith, malediction under the form
of a blessing; contradictory, insane state, for which
we should reproach the Divine Power as for a cruel
mockery, if indisputable evidence did not constrain
us to impute it to our own selves!
II. CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY.
The system of Christianity, that is to say, the rela-
tion of its facts with each other, and of all of them
together to one common fundamental idea, to one
single end; the comparison of this religion with
human nature, on which, if we may so speak, God has
taken its measure and traced its plan; the alternate
explanation of Christianity by nature, and nature by
Christianity; the definition of the Christian spirit, and
its application to the details of life; the comparison of
this system with all other systems, each of which,
unable to hold or to give account of every fact, left some
large deficiency that Jesus Christ has filled up, some
immense difficulty that He has blotted out; in a word,
the reconciliation by Christianity, and by it alone, of
all the contradictions, all the distracting dualities of
which life and our very nature seem formed,—here
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
is enough to give you an idea, though a very feeble
one, of the infinite speculations in which the study of
Christian philosophy may involve an observing and
meditative mind.
Christianity, which denies the sufficiency of philo-
sophy in these matters (of theodicy), has not been
able, in bringing forward a solution, to take the atti-
tude of philosophy; has not untied, it cut the knot:
but the knot was living, and it has bled.
Philosophy in religion is an instrument, a method ;
we have not got to do so much with a given philoso-
phy, a philosophical construction, as with the philo-
sophic spirit, by means of which we class, generalise,
abstract, find out the true relations of things;
remount from appearances to reality, from pheno-
mena to principles; embrace the whole. This spirit
helps us to discover the philosophy of religion,
that is to say, the relation to each other and to the
centre of the elements that compose it, and its rela-
tion with the world and with life. It is by the aid
of this spirit that we grasp and point out the secret
harmony that exists between all things; between
religion and nature or human life; and in human
life between individual and social existence; between
art and reality; between thought and action, liberty
and order; between particular affections and general;
between instincts and duties; between the interest
of the present and the thought of the future. Here
philosophy appears not as an object, but an instru-
ment.
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
173
When we speak of the philosophy of Christianity,
we seem to speak of something extraordinary, remote,
accessible to few minds; and yet to say that Chris-
tianity is philosophical is but to say, in other words,
that it is consistent with itself and with our nature;
that it is human, simple, logical, practical. Thus we
cannot better bring into relief the philosophy of the
Gospel, nor enter better into the spirit of the times,
nor better serve the cause of the religious movement,
than by causing the morality that abounds in the
Gospel itself to abound in our preaching. The Chris-
tian pulpit has in this respect a position to regain,
and till this is done the preacher does not know what
may be its authority and power in an epoch like
ours.
The speculative philosophy of Christianity is the
study of the speculative ideas of which Christianity
is the expression. It teaches the principles to which,
in the human mind, Christianity attaches itself.
Practical philosophy shows to what consistency of
life Christianity leads.
The first is analytical or retrogressive; it goes back
to principles. The second is synthetical and progres-
sive. With regard to the former, Christianity is the
term; with regard to the latter, the starting point.
Practical philosophy is not morality; morality traces
duty, practical philosophy gives us the fact. The
one is a code, the other a history.
Christianity, in many of its elements, is capable of
assimilating itself to the manners of any people what-
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
soever. Up to a certain point it may become popular.
Some of its principles have, in their concurrence with
the interests of humanity, an evidence resembling
that of those interests themselves. There are Chris-
tian instincts in the world as it is; were we to look
very closely, we should find evangelical traditions at
their basis, but they are none the less instincts, so
closely are they assimilated to our being. We have
many of this kind. There have been ages and na-
tions that did not believe what we imagine must
always have been believed. Worldly evidence ends
by attaching itself to things acquired.
If it be useful to the man of the world to discover
by comparison the falsehood and the incompleteness
of his actual representations, it is not useless to the
man of the Gospel to recognise what of just and
true existed in those very representations that formerly
were his; and the triumph of Christian philosophy
hardly consists more in revealing to us the error of
our former judgments than in showing what it is that
reunites our two epochs and continues the former in
the latter, or makes the latter remount to the former.
It is well to show what, under the influence of grace,
as under the action of a Divine graft, becomes of
those forces that grace does not destroy, those wants
that she does not deny.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
175
CHAPTER II.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
I.-TRUTH.
1. Its Destiny on Earth; Truth, position, and force.
RELIGIOUS truth, and all truth, indeed, resembles a
vast building in which during many years one single
story is occupied; the proprietor, who has but recently
entered upon it, living there alone. But he will have
a son who, when he is grown up, will settle down in
his turn, and occupy the second story; that son will
also have a son, in whose favour he will by-and-bye
dispose of the third story; and then the whole large
house will be found open, inhabited, animated.
During a long period, however, you might go and
knock in vain at the third or even the second
story; no one would answer you, the door would
open only on the ground-floor.
Thus there are
different stories or stages of truth: the most general
form the ground floor; in the others, when the
time is come, lodge more special truths; till then,
if you wish to see anything of these, you must apply
at the ground-floor, where they dwell with their
parents, around one same hearth, blended in one family
►
▼
.
•
176
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
'
circle, not having as yet set up house for themselves.
It is thus that the reprobation of slavery, or the doc-
trine of personal freedom, remains for a season impli-
cated in some more general truth, from which, with
the help of time, it will disentangle itself. It is thus
that the mutual independence of Church and State,
nowhere explicitly taught, is everywhere taught
implicitly, because it springs from another more
abstract, more profound, and, if you will, more theo-
logical truth. The whole question is to know whether
an honest logic, a loyal spirit of consistency, will or
will not deduce it.
Truth is not unknown, is not a stranger; each one
knows her by sight, each one preserves some memory
of her. No one, indeed, has lived in intimacy with
her, but on each she has let fall a look that penetrates
to the soul; and this tender, piercing, melancholy
look, this luminous look, which is a ray, accompanies
us, pursues us, and casts a faithful light athwart our
darkness. Each age, each man has received from her,
in this profound glance, some utterance that he recalls
and repeats; nowhere complete, nowhere established,
she has stamped her impress everywhere; in all insti-
tutions, all prejudices, in the most different customs,
there is something of her still; the human race, society,
live only on her memory; it is the salt that preserves
them from entire dissolution. And yet to see how
men receive her as she goes on reclaiming some new
fragment of her inheritance, would one guess that she
had a sort of foothold among them, and that they
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
177
have more or less given her wages?
"She came unto
her own, and her own received her not."
We know the precise day when He who is the
truth, the whole truth, ascended Calvary to shed His
blood there; but for ages past, partial truth, sometimes
under the form of a principle, sometimes already per-
sonified in a man, has been climbing with laborious
but even steps, its own mysterious Calvary.
Truth is a suppliant which, standing on the thresh-
old, constantly struggles towards the hearth whence
sin has banished her. As we pass and repass by
that door that she never leaves, her sad and imposing
form fixes for a moment our careless gaze. Each
time it awakes in our memory I know not what
vague recollection of order, glory, happiness; but we
pass on, and the image gets effaced. We have never
been able entirely to repudiate truth; we retain
some unconnected fragments of her; just as much
light as our enfeebled vision can bear; just what is
proportioned to us: for the rest, we reject it, or we
disfigure it till it is no longer recognisable, keeping
however (and this is one of our misfortunes) the
names of things we no longer possess. Truth, moral
and social, resembles one of those tombstone inscrip-
tions, over which everybody passes on their way, and
which goes on getting daily more and more effaced, till
some friendly chisel comes to deepen its letters in the
worn-out stone, so that all the world is obliged to ob-
serve and read it. This chisel is in the hands of a
small number of men, who keep obstinately bent
N
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over the ancient inscription, at the risk of being
pushed over and trampled down on the marble by the
inattentive feet of the passers-by; that is to say, this
truth fallen into oblivion, this duty become obsolete,
finds a witness in the person of some man who has not
been contented to believe, without further examina-
tion, that all the world was right merely because it
was all the world.
Evil cannot justify evil; the true, the right, have
no conditions; it is always time to return to them,
and we must return without looking to right or left;
we must return upon the faith of God, who can have
attached none but happy consequences to a true prin-
ciple, and who cannot fail to be our guarantee.
Every true principle knows very well where to
locate itself. Up to the decisive moment it may
seem to float in the void, to be nowhere and every-
where. But the right time comes; it incarnates it-
self, becomes man, and you find that while you
believed you were only dealing with formula, you
were attacking and piercing hearts.
It is no such slight matter to wound truth.
These wounds do not kill; they cause to live. Truth
only assumes a life external to its own, a place in the
world, a rank in history, at this price; but by paying
this price she obtains all these. How beautiful she
gathers around her
is when threatened! How she
unknown lovers, and suddenly raised up cham-
pions! It is at the moment that men seek to snatch
her away from us that we feel, it may be for the
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
179
first time, by what deep roots she clings to our
hearts.
An absolute principle can neither be satisfied nor
violated by halves; we may not accept evil and ex-
clude its effects. The utmost we can do is to colour
the poisoned fruit; there is no possible way of cor-
recting its bitter and pernicious juices.
A principle being once acknowledged, we cannot
beforehand measure out its way and count its steps,
tell out its whole rights and exigencies, and only con-
cede a proportionate part of them. A known right
is a conquered right. We may only tell half the
truth; but that half, when it has been told, will not
submit to be only half realised.
Truth, the mind's true country, can never be ab-
jured, or even silently disavowed, with advantage to
any position.
Truth exists; it has its reason in itself; it presents
itself as an end accessible, and worthy to be pursued;
it broods over life; demands to enter into it, not by
its effects, but in its own person; not by reaction and,
as it were, accident, but directly; not for the love of
its temporal results, but for itself; not as means,
but as an end; not only into the life, but, above all,
into the heart.
This is so true that I can
There is no essential relation, no natural affinity,
between truth and force.
find in nature no term of
me to illustrate the idea.
alike than truth and force.
comparison that will help
Fire and water are more
Contraries even have
f
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more of mutual relation, for the one informs us of
the other's absence; but between force and truth
I see no point of contact, no connection whatever;
the one never suggests, or implies, or replaces the
other. Force may coincide with truth, truth with
force; but this union is only accidental, and we are
bound to confess that it is rare. The result is, that
when we insist on giving force for a support to truth,
we make them as it were contract an adulterous mar-
riage, which turns to the dishonour of both. The
honour of truth is to triumph by its own energy; the
honour of authority is to understand this principle, to
leave a free path to truth, to have faith in its power,
and consequently never to offer, or rather impose upon
it, the deteriorating assistance of material force.
The history of all ages affords a peremptory con-
tradiction to those who imagine that ideas can be
killed. Persecution is a grafting. Inutiles ampu-
tans falce ramos, feliciores inserit. This Latin means,
that persecution recruits for the enemy.
We may affirm that an idea remains powerful so
long as it has not been refuted; and there is for it
only one mode of death, namely, succumbing to the
efforts of reason. We have instances of ideas having
perished beneath the stroke of a rigorous demonstra-
tion. Those ideas will never reappear. But such as
have been attacked by external force alone retain all
their life, even if contradiction have not communicated
to them a new degree of energy.
On all sides thought escapes; the narrowest egress
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
181
suffices it, the least success leads it to all triumphs.
It only asks the intercourse of man with man; it
finds in the most limited relations a fulcrum powerful
enough to lift a world; it works against force; it only
yields to itself; only submits to truth.
If there be any idea consecrated by experience it is
that of the force of repulsion, and of, so to speak, that
elasticity of the human mind which constrains it to
revolt against all attempts at compression. Con-
tested in all times by frivolous minds, it has in all
times derived a new force from the testimony of facts;
and it is, if I may venture so to express myself,
steeped in blood and tears, and surrounded by a train
of sorrowful memories, that it presents itself to us from
age to age; always too sure to be misunderstood, and
always pertinacious in reappearing because it is
the truth. The human mind is a free essence:
liberty is its peculiar characteristic, is an inde-
structible element of its nature. It knows that it
may abuse its liberty; but it also knows that it can-
not live without it. To forbid, to dispute this, is to
attack it in its very essence; it is to will the anni-
hilation of its nature. It is of small consequence
in its sight that such an attempt should have for its
end the establishment of the truth. It refuses even
to truth the right to establish itself at the cost
of liberty. What do I say? It cannot recognise
truth under the attributes of force; light thus offered
confuses rather than illumines it; it confirms itself
more and more in prejudices that the voice of per-
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suasion and the intrinsic power of truth would have
surely dispelled; it struggles like a maniac in chains
that it would have voluntarily borne; it passes
rapidly from assistance to hatred, and from en-
lightened zeal to blind fury.
Sophisms may seduce; reasons may convince: pro-
mises and threats have no power over thought. It
can only be modified by itself; it recognises no
superiority but its own; it resists all foreign force;
it is by its nature constrained to be invincible; it
would be easier for man to lose his self-consciousness
than the want and the sentiment of his intellectual
liberty. He may yield, bend, abjure his ideas, ana-
thematise them, publicly dispute them; but thought
is never the accomplice of apostasy; and when the
sight of chains has forced Galileo to proclaim the
immoveability of the earth, the rebel, thought, only
cries so much the more vehemently within him,
“E pur si muove ?”
He whose thoughts were scattered by the tumult
of the world, folds back upon himself, and grows
concentrated so soon as that noise is over. Removed
from the sight of the common actualities of life,
deprived of that bridle that discussion would have
put upon his impetuous spirits, alone with his
imagination, he yields it up to gigantic thoughts; he
delights to cherish vast and chimerical plans in his
oppressed soul: if, in the course of his vague medi-
tations, he reaches the truth, he soon goes beyond
it; and, so much the more free as you believe him
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
183
enslaved, drawing a fresh intellectual audacity from
the means that you have taken to repress his natural
audacity, he is destined to prove to you that no
constraint is competent to deprive the human mind
of that liberty and activity that the power of the
word has developed therein.
2. Laws of the progress of Truth-Truth and
Necessity-Logic and Fiction.
When we submit the progress and action of truth
on earth to laws, we reserve, as may well be supposed,
the sovereignty of God, from whence truth emanates.
God, the source of law-God, the law of laws, is
Himself subject to no law. But just as in the
government of the universe He develops from one
first impulse, includes in one single act of will, all
the most varied effects, all the infinite multitude
of accidents and beings, all the junctures, the com-
binations, all the seeming chances which are to our
human sight only a successive engendering of neces-
sities, of which the first alone belongs to the Divine
will; just as the first fact was big with an innume-
rable posterity of more particular facts, that God
not only distinctly perceived, but particularly willed,
so that it was for all these consequences that the first
fact took place, and not these consequences for that
fact, so in the government of the moral world each
fact, although springing from another fact, depends
immediately on God, and each of the incidents of
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
each fact, each combination of one fact with another,
each of the meetings that have occurred, and of the
influences that exert themselves between moral indi-
vidualities, is directly imputable to the will of the
Sovereign Master of all. He wills every moment
what happens every moment, though He has before-
hand linked facts one with the other; though the
infinity of phenomena and infinity of details of
each of these are only the continual flow of one
same thought, and though all that has been willed
separately and for itself has been willed at once,
as it has been thought at once, and viewed at a
glance.
There is one sense in which truth knows no laws
except its own, is never overcome, never retarded,
and always triumphs. It always realises itself, either
in the free submission of the moral being or in his
chastisement. The believing and the unbelieving,
the saints and the ungodly, equally do it honour.
Error, which combats, affords it at the same time, at
its own cost, a striking confirmation; it is its natural
counter-proof.
The fall of heavy bodies is not subject to more
rigorous laws than the course of the idea in the
human mind and in society. A principle bears all
its consequences within itself, as a plant does all its
posterity. Men may choose the time to agitate a
question; they may defer proposing it; but, once
proposed, they cannot prevent the questions it con-
tains proposing themselves one after the other. The
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
185
lawsuit grows by pleading; the original causes dis-
appear; the primary subject of debate is forgotten;
men pass rapidly from the accessory to the principal,
from the accident to the substance, from the how
to the why. A question of servitude or of boundary
will devour an ancient fortune; and a whole exist-
ence, engaged in the perilous debate, is no longer
to be found at its conclusion.
Truth and necessity only make one, and the logic
of the ideas lay beforehand in the facts themselves.
God has granted us no nobler spectacle than that of
times when these two logics reunite. Nothing is
so indefatigable, obstinate, and powerful, as a prin-
ciple. It gradually brings all thoughts into captivity
to its obedience; and even before it has subjected
thoughts, it has subjected facts. As everything is
connected in a true system, as the whole truth is
included in each particular truth, one point gained,
the whole is gained.
If truth were, all of a sudden, to appear in the midst
of our social organisation, the whole edifice, indus-
triously constructed and cemented by falsehood,
would crumble, would vanish in the twinkling of
an eye; but at the same moment, by the necessity
of existing, society would rebuild its dwelling on
new falsehoods at a new expense.
Strange situation! we have need at once of
truth and falsehood! We only own one of these
wants, but we seek to satisfy them both; the one
as the want of the life, the other as the necessity
186
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
of the moment. Looking at the social world, it
seems as if with less truth, just as with less false-
hood, it could not possibly subsist. A delicate blend-
ing of fiction and reality seems to be the first
condition of all social organisation.
society aims at a perfect end
elements.
This is because
with imperfect
3. Men and Truth.
Truth in the mind of man is like quicksilver in
the hand. Hold it as tightly as you will, always,
and without knowing how, you will find that some
of it escapes you.
All that man can do is to deny the truth, he
cannot destroy it, and most certainly he will not
always deny it.
Each truth is at some distance from our mind;
it needs time to reach us, and no one can fix its
time; no one can trace out its way.
In one sense, whatever Fontenelle may have said,
it is by the thick end that truth enters best, or
rather that it enters at all.
Mystery and underhand proceedings never charac-
terised the friends of truth.
It
Most of the friends of truth love it in the same
way that Frederick the Great loved music.
used to be said of him that, properly speaking,
he was not fond of music, but of the flute, and
not indeed fond of the flute, but of his flute.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
187
If it be right and necessary, when meaning well,
to return often to the charge, we must each time
return to it with new or newly polished weapons,
with fresh arguments, or arguments presented under
fresh aspects. One is not supposed to have said
a true thing twice unless one has said it in two
ways. Repetition without variety, either in point
of view or expression, rather weakens than con-
firms.
The heart of man wants to attach itself, and can
never attach itself to pure theories, nor even to
interests. The truth which the people doubtless
need, and which is not assuredly the nourishment
of the philosopher alone, must be a tangible and,
if possible, a personified truth. It must incarnate
itself in order that they should recognise and adore
it. You will never get the heart of man to love
abstraction; and he will do nothing well unless he
loves it.
The truth that we have diminished, revenges itself
by diminishing us.
Great questions at the present day meet the fate
of the early Christians; they are thrown to the
beasts!
It is remarkable that the majority of minds which
have given a strong impulse to human thought
have been far from scientific. There is about them
much that is abnormal and adventurous; they do
not belong to troops of the line, they are partisans,
guerrilla chieftains; but they are the men to employ
188
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
in making discoveries.
On the other hand, we
must allow that their discoveries are sometimes
imaginary.
A good cause is often so ill defended that it tells
in favour of a bad; and the example of the learned
has not always recommended learning.
New ideas which are not correct resemble fruits
that rot before they ripen.
Under the name of love of truth we often find clas-
sified a mere ardent desire of knowledge, or a species
of lofty curiosity. The love of truth is something diffe-
rent; it may be found in minds that are little greedy
of knowing, and tolerably content to ignore, but
which the false revolts and the true delights. Pascal
is at the head of noble minds like these.
he loved concrete truth, or truth of every order; but
his energy of thought might have weakened, never
his love and his need of truth.
No doubt,
Although man has been in all times a liar, yet a
marvellous providence forces him to introduce by
degrees some measure of truth both into his institu-
tions and his customs.
In the advance towards truth nine steps are the
half of ten.
It is with truth as with prayers in Homer's sub-
lime allegory. Just as prayers, lame as they were,
could come up with swift-footed violence at the
foot of Jupiter's throne, so in the world we live in,
lame truth overcomes winged error; for it is truth
that limps, and error that has wings.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
189
The regular march of mind does not exhaust all
errors before it fixes itself in the truth.
He who only accepts truth as a legacy may in-
deed protest that he believes it, but most certainly
he does not.
Absolute good, absolute truth, should be put before
the gaze of humanity; we only draw near to them
in proportion as we believe in and contemplate them;
and faith in perfection is the same thing as faith
in truth.
Faith in truth, I mean in the intrinsic value, the
force of truth, is a rare virtue, a religious virtue; for
it implies religion, and religion implies it. Nay, it
is already almost a religion, since he who believes
in truth believes in something more than space, time,
and all the forces of the universe. Truth is the
thought of God; it is God in the world.
This
The grandest of conceptions is the preference of
truth above all things. I say truth, since for each of
us our opinions or our conviction is the truth.
principle of conduct is the instinctive glory of Chris-
tian ages to it modern history owes its princi-
pal characters and greatest interest; and for a long
time past the general conscience does homage to the
disinterestedness that ranks a thought higher than
an empire.
Through varying fortunes, through evil repute and
good repute, truth goes on her way without hurrying
herself, or without loitering on the road. If she does
not arrive, so much the worse for the world, not
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
for her. If she arrive late, this is because the
condition of all truths of a moral order is to advance
slowly.
The world, sooner or later, ranges itself with a
thrill on the side of truth. The memory of witnesses
for the truth always ends in being honoured. The
madmen of the past are the sages of the future; if
their name perishes, their testimony endures. And
what more do they want? Does not their best part
survive them ?
The double marvel that we see in the world is, that
though there are not indeed two opposite truths on
the same subject, one for the heart and one for the
mind, yet the very truth that the heart rejects enters
in by way of the intellect, and the truth that the in-
tellect rejects enters by the door of the heart. Thus
necessity very often subserves, though with bad grace,
the interests of truth.
Things come only in their own proper time, that
is, after having been long wanting.
Neither facts alone (we may say this to our honour),
nor principles alone (we must own this to our shame),
suffice for the establishment of truth in this world;
but by their mutual aid she gets a footing and takes
root.
The human mind is indolent and fantastic. It is
in no such hurry to multiply truth by itself, ideas by
ideas. It lingers, muses by the side of a truth, then,
stimulated by circumstances, it bounds and rushes
Its two modes of motion are to crawl and to
on.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
191
leap. At least, this is its wont in the domain of
speculative truth and moral interests. After long
delays, it devours space, and the better to redeem
lost time, it fails not to overleap itself and pass by
the goal.
It is true that many different circumstances may
throw sincere minds into extremes, and for some
time the axis of truth will have but one pole for
them; but if they are disinterested, never fear, the
two elements, of which only one appears at present,
are both alike safely preserved in their hearts.
All men who exclusively love one half of truth
are of the same race in spite of the marked differ-
ences that may divide them. They are of the race
of narrow hearts and narrow minds. Each of them
is the enemy of his own cause, and the auxiliary of
his enemy.
II.-HISTORY.
1. Its definition: Fatalism-History and historians-
Symbolism History, ancient and modern-Con-
ditions favourable to historical writing—Signs of
the times.
History in its highest signification is but the
manifestation of the idea of progress, whether we
refer that progress to the nature of things and the
course of time, or whether we seek it in what
Bossuet calls the development of religion, or, lastly,
whether we view it as a result of these two causes
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
combined. In all these cases, progress can only be
the advance of the intelligent world towards truth,
which exclusively and infallibly contains goodness.
If the law of progress do not exist, there is no mean-
ing in history nor in the world either, and each alike
is only fit to be thrown aside as mere rubbish.
The philosophy of history, applicable to realised
facts, has no legitimate application to our intellectual
and moral determinations, and its only province is to
explain, not to judge.
If in the destinies of humanity as a whole, or
even of a single nation, the weight of individualities
is but little felt; if in so vast a calculation their
value is hardly appreciable, they do for all that tell
in the limits of a given century; and the historians
of the fatalist school, who are very right in an ex-
tended horizon only to take count of general causes,
and to refer results immediately to laws, are wrong
when they transport their system within narrower
bounds. Nothing prevents them, or rather nothing
excuses them, from assigning to human liberty, to
diversity of character, and to special providence, a
part, and a considerable part too, in the production
of events. Let them abstract these on a less limited
scale; they may do so without endangering the
dogma of divine liberty, while in dealing with the
annals of one or of a few centuries, their method
compromises at one blow, together with the liberty
of man, the liberty even of God.
Of all natural laws, those of history are con-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
193
fessedly the most difficult to determine; but if we
succeed in doing this, we obtain a kind of historical
psychology, a science of the phenomena of the social
soul, which is a real enlargement of the domain of in-
dividual psychology, since these manifest and establish
certain facts which we cannot study in an isolated soul.
Histories are not history. The man who only
looks at external facts and their dates knows nothing
of true history, of that which brings to light
springs hidden beneath the variety and the succes-
sion of external facts. The serious task of the
historian is to dig below appearances with a view
to discovering the secret significance of these vicis-
situdes, the real laws by which events are ruled.
For there are indeed such laws; an attentive obser-
vation finds out the characters of permanence or
analogy under which, given the same conditions, the
same facts will be reproduced. In this respect the his-
tory of humanity connects itself with the great whole
of natural history; that is to say, from the ana-
lysis of particular facts we may also deduce the gene-
ral law which combines and explains them. But the
integrity of historical judgments has been very often
deteriorated by the inevitable influence of success.
Fortune is a great corruption of truth: how many
actions that pass for great and illustrious have be-
come so only by the aid of this "prestige," and how
different a hue they would have received from a
different result! It is true that success is the proof
of a skilful method of obtaining a certain end, but
0
194
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
it proves nothing as to the value of that end; nor,
again, is it any absolute proof of skill, since per-
sonal success is always complicated with foreign
wills and circumstances. Nothing indeed is more
difficult than to judge correctly of the man that suc-
ceeds. How much renown, perpetuated during cen-
turies, has crumbled away when tested by the simple
good sense of a better-grounded judgment of men and
actions! This has even been carried to excess.
•
If the rights of objectivity are anywhere to be
extended to the utmost-if the personality of the
writer is anywhere to be effaced, it is assuredly in
history. Even the subjectivity without which the
history would neither be a work of art nor a phi-
losophical work, only lets itself be seen, does not
display itself. It blends with everything, and boasts
of nothing still less does it indulge in loud excla-
mations for fear of being forgotten.
Do what you may to prevent history being a poem,
it is necessarily one. We have the historian him-
self blent with his narrative—a soul mingled with
facts-a sort of contemplative providence arranging
human destinies by an after-thought. In vain
would the historian seek to separate himself from
facts; whatever form he may have adopted, what-
ever method he may follow, he cannot do this. He
must be a poet, do what he will. In relating he
will create. History and epic poetry are constantly
touching and pursuing each other.
History is the experience of others: the expe-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
195
rience of others touches us but little; the repetition
of the same situation, being disguised under an
inexhaustible variety of forms, hardly allows the
prejudiced mind to apply the rules it may have
deduced from preceding cases: the moment for this
application never comes; we relegate it to the past,
we project it on the future; passion makes us
believe our own case unexampled; we constantly
plead some extraordinary circumstance, seeing that
what we have ourselves experienced always seems
extraordinary,—and we bequeath to our posterity
the eventual profit of a study of which we, for our
own part, can make no use.
Events are the real judges of events, and-purely
moral questions excepted-history only gets itself
written under their dictation.
There are stars of the first magnitude that have
only become visible to us after six thousand years.
The same thing sometimes happens in the fir-
mament of history; we need a whole age before
the light of a certain brilliant but distant star
reaches us, and how many of its rays are lost on
their way!
Each age, each individual brings with him new
light. This is more particularly the prerogative
of certain epochs. Every judgment must then be
subject to revision, not to be reversed, but to be
better explained, and to acquire in some respects a
new meaning.
Symbolism is true. Who would deny that the
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
succession of facts in the history of a people is,
at the same time, a succession of ideas, or if it be
preferred, of intelligible forces, and that each of
these ideas or forces has had its moment of efflor-
escence before fructification? Now this moment
is not only the most poetical, but it is also the
most true; and the imperfection, the vagueness of
form, is only the index and measure of its ingenu-
ousness; it is a coloured mirror, in which the
future contemplates and does not as yet recognise
itself. Is the historian to forbid himself to signalise
these moments, to sketch their symbols, to indicate
the hour when a new force, still without any self-
consciousness, and yet yielding to the necessity of
blossoming forth, puts on in haste the first form
that presents itself, and comes, half-clothed and
eyes shut, to knock at the door of the future? It
will be said that this is poetry: it is not actually
so; it is the confluence of poetry and philosophy.
Was the one ever complete without the other? and
is not history also an epic? But symbolism has
its laws as well as subjectivity, and where the
share of intuition is greatest, that of reflection
should be greatest too, for fancy and exaggeration
are constantly there, watching the moment when
the half-opened door may allow them to slip into
the house.
With the ancients history was simple because
existence was so. Without complicating itself, it
could still omit nothing: hence a portion of its
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
197
beauty; hence its epic character. This does not
imply that external life was not even then composed
of more elements than history reproduced; there
were at that time, as well as now, arts, trades,
commerce; but those things and many others were
more unconnected with the political movement:
other elements did not even exist; the idea of
society, in the modern acceptation, had not ap-
peared in a word, history written by those antique
pens sufficed to its task and mission. In our modern
literature it long went on following the old road,
where, however, it failed to meet with and collect
all its essential elements. In a vast whole, where
everything had its use and contributed its weight
to the general movement, it only seized one order
of facts; in an immense web it only saw one
thread; for a long time it was nothing but the
history of dynasties. It was only little by little
that what made up part of the life of societies came
to form part of history as well, and that at length
the history of men became the history of man. This
progress has since gone on rapidly. Voltaire, who
wondered at the narrow range of his predecessors,
would wonder at all that his successors have intro-
duced into the domain of history. Indeed, it would
be difficult to say what it does not embrace, since it
embraces the whole of man, and that all in his
nature of most intrinsic and mysterious, all that his
thought can conceive of most abstract, most outside
of the region of business and politics, has obtained a
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
right to be signalised as cause or as effect in the ex-
position of social destinies.
In the appreciation of men and facts much breadth
of mind is requisite in order to see; much philosophy
to explain; much faith to say everything. Even
with all this, perfect truth in history is an inacces-
sible height.
But above all, one must be man, a complete
man, to write the history of human things, we must
not have half of our soul insensible and paralysed.
If we must not ignore the inferior conditions of our
existence, neither must we ignore the Divine in
human life and history; we must believe in spirit.
It is an advantage for the historian to have seen
the events he narrates, but the advantage is not
equal in the case of all. Vision in the true artist
and the true historian is so little an affair of the
mere eyes, that one who was absent may have seen
better than another who was present. There is a
more profound insight than that of the eyes, or even
of the mind; there are things that one sees with the
soul, and this insight, well understood, is a life
History is the explanation of facts. Now the side
by which we understand facts is that by which we
dominate them. A world understood is a world con-
quered. If facts are stronger than men, this is only
while men do not possess their secret; intelligence
puts them in possession of it. The degree and cha-
racter of the civilisation of any given epoch is shown
not by its history but by the manner in which it
F
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
199
writes history, were it but as to the choice of the
objects that it introduces into its narrative. This
is the settling of accounts between the present and
the past; the final balance left in the hands of the
present by the past; the heads of Janus turning to
look each other in the face.
History, without doubt, must sum up the mass of
facts it is in its essence, as a German writer points
out, only an abbreviation. But to give a summary
or an abridgment under an abstract form is not to
make facts known even to the reason. An intelligent
knowledge of facts can never absolutely dispense
with immediate perception. You can never make
others understand facts that you do not show; and
you do not show them in summing them up: how-
ever faithfully you may express their idea, it will
never be vividly seized, will never become the pro-
perty at once of the intelligence and the soul, if you
have not illumined it by details that affect the
senses.
Sometimes we look upon times of political dis-
turbance as most favourable to the composition of
history: this is an illusion. The narrative may be
more animated, but it will be less true.
A peace-
ful light better enables us to distinguish objects
clearly than the vivid glare of the lightning.
the same way, the writer who labours in a season of
political stagnation has far more chance of grasping
the reasons for the past and the probabilities of the
future.
In
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I
Humanity cannot do all things at once, and, gene-
rally speaking, we do not see it facere celebranda,
celebrare facta.
In order to range a fact amongst the signs of the
times we must study the time itself in the aggregate
of its most general and undeniable symptoms; the
time enlightens us as to the significance and value.
of a fact as much as that fact itself serves for an
index to the character of the time: if the text be
not complete without the word, the word, to be intel-
ligible, needs the text.
Every one may discern some decided tendencies in
the period in which he lives, and amongst them some
tendencies more decided than the rest. But if he
hasten to name his century after that particular
tendency, there is every chance that he will be
mistaken.
2. Historical principles: Providence, Necessity, Thought
and Action, Theory and Practice-Revolutions,
and the right of individual resistance.
The spectacle of the evils that afflict man and
society is crushing to the soul. It absolutely re-
fuses to bear this cross alone and unaided. God
must bear it with us. Strong in the idea of a
recompensing and avenging God, a God who, from
His dwelling-place on high, looks down on all the
children of men and spies out all their ways, the
believer does not indeed lose his sadness, the subject
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
201
of which still subsists; but this sadness is no longer
overwhelming. All mysteries are not cleared up; but
from the place of His dwelling God looks down, God
watches this is enough. In the midst of universal
disorder perfect order is guaranteed. Since this
is so, what objection, what complaint have we to
raise ?
Under the empire of the living God, order-but
an order whose secret escapes our mortal sight-may
be confidently hoped, certainly foreseen, enjoyed
beforehand; it already exists, perfect and entire, in
the very fact that God exists and reigns. But in a
world without a God-I mean without a God that
looks on and heeds; in a world with no other god
than the phantom of pantheists-what earnest soul
could fail to be crushed by the very aspect of
humanity, and constrained to choose, as soon as
possible, between the despair that kills the body
and those consolations of materialism that kill the
soul?
We must not be afraid of saying that the thought
of a world without a god who punishes, is a thought
of despair. The spectacle of his vengeance consoles
because his vengeance is justice; and without faith
in justice the human soul is as incomplete as the
body itself without the soul. The chastisements of
God not only alarm, they also reassure: they reassure
in alarming; they assert the presence of God: now
God present is the soul's all.
We must not fear to lower the idea of God in sup-
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posing that in the accomplishment of His designs
He has regard to the nature of objects, although He
probably wills to confound our imaginings by seek-
ing His means where we should but have found
obstacles.
Too many persons, even among Christians, let
themselves be "guided by their hopes."
Providence cuts the knots that we are slow to
unravel; and when they are cut, we seek inquisitively,
and pretty easily find, how we might have unravelled
them; that is to say, the thing done, and done with-
out us, in spite of us perhaps, we refer it to prin-
ciples, and make it rational and premeditated, instead
of, as it was, accidental. We give the first moments
to necessity, the last to reason. Such is the constant
course of the human race, and it does it little honour.
Why must the party of expediency and calculation
have its representatives among Christians whose
mission in the world is to substitute in matters
of religion and morality the question of truth and
pure principle to that of calculation and expe-
diency?
The result aimed at by some is generally brought
about by others often indeed by those whose
wishes it disappoints, and who have done all in their
power to avert it. Providence has reasons, and good
reasons, for making them the servants of a cause
they disavow. It thus proves to man that his way
does not depend upon himself; although, if we look
closely, he is the fabricator of his own destinies.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
203
His responsibility remains, and his sovereignty
vanishes away.
We must not forge God's signature at the bottom
of acts that His holiness disavows.
Let us always pronounce with respect and love
the sacred name of Providence, while ever remem-
bering that the future, that progress, that duty, are
also Providence!
Whatever has existed was necessary, in so far
that all that exists has its reason for being, and that
this reason having prevailed over all the reasons
for its not being, all existence, by its very fact,
implies necessity. In this sense all errors, even the
most monstrous, have been necessary. But does this
mean that they had the right to be; that it was
well to embrace them; that those who did so failed
in no duty, nay, rather fulfilled a duty in thus em-
bracing them?
Let us own that, since the commencement of
human society, Providence has permitted many
things, and that if we are bound to honour and
maintain all thus permitted, our respect would
necessarily have to attach itself to the most opposite
things.
In our opinion, it is impossible to take note too
often, or rather too constantly, of the finger of
Providence; and we know some who abstain from
pointing out this Divine intervention in any par-
ticular page of history for fear of seeming to exclude
it from pages where nothing extraordinary arrests
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the human glance. In a word, it is in the name
of faith and of respect for Divine things that the
men of whom I speak recommend the greatest
discretion in the use of this means of Christian
instruction and edification.
It was a God alone who could say, "I am come
to bring fire on earth." Sublime paradox, that none
but a God could utter! It was only a God who
could know that He was about to create on the
earth two antagonist worlds. He beheld all vices,
all hypocrisies, taking shelter beneath the cloak of
Christianity; He knew that the worst of all corruption
is the corruption of the best things, and the worst of
all persecutions that of true Christians by false. Yes,
the Gospel has forced human nature to exhale all its
evil: but will any one therefore assert that Christi-
anity has been injurious to society? One word
is enough. Do we live for time or for eternity? Is
the direct object of Christianity, better to organise
the society of earth, or to prepare the society of
heaven? Do we consider Jesus Christ simply in
the light of the inventor of the principles of equality
and social fraternity? If we do, let us reject a reli-
gion which becomes the occasion of incontestable evils
to society. Or else let us accept it as the educator
of the soul for heaven; and in that case let us
look upon it as fully justified from whatever offences
men may please to charge it with.
There are principles that need space to manifest
their whole character and develop all their results.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
205
A negative principle, more especially, requires to be
observed in a large mass of assembled individualities.
In general, there where all the world suffers, all
the world is more or less guilty.
Good does not get done of itself: it requires
efforts; and it does not always find, in the wills of
those to whom it is proposed, that firm support
of immediate interest, that mainspring of personal
hope or fear, alone endowed with the talent of im-
provisation. In all things "the spirit is willing,
and the flesh weak." The spirit itself (if by spirit
we understand the public reason) is slow.
then, even among the intelligent, or rather, espe-
cially among them, prudence interferes, and wants to
compound matters.
And
It seems written in the book of national destiny
that, in the advance of social facts, thought and
action shall never move with equal step; thought
invariably limps breathlessly after action, or action
after thought each is alternately too slow or too
precipitate. This incurable disease of society,
springing as it does from an incurable disease in
human nature, is a fertile principle of political
disturbances.
Social theories as well as philosophy affect spon-
taneity. They pique themselves upon originating
in an examination of the nature of things; that
is to say, of the true relations of man with man
and of the individual with society. And yet all
facts militate against this claim. They even lead
蠱
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us to believe that pure speculation would not have
found these theories, would not even have sought
for them. They have only made their appearance
in the world subsequently to the facts that rendered
them necessary.
The history of ideas is not that of liberty. Under
this new point of view man produces himself as
instrument. He is seldom, perhaps never, wholly
conscious of what he does. And although a social
truth lies at the bottom of all struggles, yet this
truth, under its general and absolute form, only
manifests itself to the generation which comes when
the struggle is over. Posterity alone knows why
the conflict took place, and would tell it, were that
possible, to those by whom the conflict was carried
on; for no theory has appeared in the world an-
terior to facts; it is the facts that have engendered
the theory: thus it is that all social truths, created
one by one both by necessity and opportunity, have
come down to us; thus it is that our children will
know better than we what it was we really aimed it.
It is only God who knows beforehand what He wills
and what He does.
The religion of memory, the worship of the past,
will be appealed to in vain; they are powerful only
when the affections of the present correspond with and
justify them; without this they are mere perfumes,
which we inhale, but which do not nourish us.
Every man by whose thought or will the face of
the social world has been changed, may be compared
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
207
to a vessel transporting always through tempests
a rich cargo of gold, silver, rare fabrics, or precious
stones, from one continent to another. The vessel
knows not what it bears, but it is none the less
the bearer of all these treasures. Living vessels that
we are, we know indeed that we have a freight, and
we believe ourselves acquainted with its nature and
value; but on these two points we are always wrong.
"Luther," wrote a clever woman,
would pro-
bably have excommunicated himself at the outset
could he have beheld himself as he was when he
reached the end of his career."
((
Each epoch in its turn agitates some fundamental
question. But it is rare that an epoch gives their true
name to the questions that occupy it.
The greatest
problems have appeared in the world under fictitious
titles. We may have seen a whole people un-
necessarily enthusiastic, apparently, about given ques-
tions, but sometimes these are only frivolous in
appearance, or they are more serious than those
who discuss them.
No epoch, till it is over, is thoroughly aware of
what it has done or willed. The secret thought
of parties, the ultimate reason of their movements,
escapes themselves. No one can judge except of his
individual intentions.
Man always does more or less than he intends; he
either falls short of his mark or overshoots it; he
exaggerates or conceals from himself the bearing of
his actions: perhaps he has not always the clue
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or the measure of his own intention.
There is only
one thing that he can know with exactness-his
duty, and that is enough.
Men of genius and the best methods seldom
synchronise; the methods are wanting to the men,
the men to the methods. Is it not the same too
with institutions which also are methods?
Those who honour calculation only, calculate ill.
It is in enthusiasm that the force of society and the
guarantee of its future lies, and when enthusiasm
shall once have dried up in its midst, calculation will
not save it.
A negative evil, an evil without form or name,
is the most serious of all. The dumb and passive
presence of a false principle is a central blight, an
intimate misfortune, of which all others are but
signs and effects; only what is neither to be seen.
nor heard has no existence for the multitude.
Societies are most deeply indebted to those who
have resisted them in the name of truth and thought.
Everywhere society has, more or less, aimed at
becoming the conscience of all; but everywhere too
rebellious consciences have been found to protest
against this, and to maintain the principle of per-
sonal conviction, without which man abdicates his
moral nature, his quality of a responsible and conse-
quently a religious being.
Most assuredly it is not we who shall ever dis-
pute the right that laws have to be respected. But a
natural distinction presents itself. An unjust law is
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
209
to be respected by me, although unjust, when it only
affects my interest; and my fellow-citizens, equally
aggrieved, owe it the same respect. But an immoral,
an irreligious law-a law that would compel me to
do what my conscience and God's law condemn,
must be defied when we cannot get it revoked. This
principle, far from being subversive, is the vital prin-
ciple of societies. It is the struggle of good against
evil. Suppress this struggle, and what is there to
hold humanity back on that inclined plane of vice and
misery down which so many combined causes vie with
each other in pushing it? It is from revolt to revolt,
if you choose to employ this word, that societies go
on perfecting themselves, that civilisation gets estab-
lished, that justice reigns, and truth flourishes.
Whenever a deadly principle, ignored, or negligently
guarded against, or even favoured by authority,
spreads among a people, the opposition it meets with
in the zeal of a few individuals is the vital principle
destined to conquer it.
The law of antiquated societies is to arrive at regu-
lation by arbitrariness, and at simplicity by its opposite.
Storms in the atmosphere are not more necessary
to the economy of our globe than storms of thought
to human society.
The path of the human mind is like a giant's
staircase, each step of which needs to be subdivided;
failing which, humanity now loses breath, now falls
back and bruises itself.
It is from shock to shock that nations advance.
P
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Now, in these national shocks, everything being
unsettled and open to question, and the people
returning for the time to a state of nature, it is
impossible and useless to lay down rules. A revo-
lution only receives rules from itself; a revolution is
not an action, but a fact; not a regular act of civil
life, but a phenomenon. There must inevitably be one
moment, at least, when society lives without laws,
one moment given up now to violence, now to moral
or intellectual preponderance, but always, at all
events, to force. A new order of things is not long
forming; but between this new order and the old
there is a gap, a solution of continuity, a space
where the thread of traditions gets interrupted, and
where the authority of laws dies down.
Influenced by the recollections of a thousand
generous revolts which have asserted in our world the
rights of God over the pretensions of men, the rights
of truth over the pretensions of error, in short, those
of virtue over vice, I have said, and I still say, that
it is from revolt to revolt that societies go on to
perfection, that justice reigns, and truth flourishes.
Although history teaches that almost all the great
questions that have agitated society have had a
violent solution, yet it is the duty of social man
to start from an opposite hope, to spare society too
sudden transformations, and to smooth the incline by
which humanity advances to new destinies.
To take out of the life of nations the persistence of
thought, and the obstinacy of conscience, is to refuse
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
211
any morrow to society, is to open out a deep and
silent tomb to civilisation.
The true protectors of society, those to whom it
owes what it retains of coherence and unity, are
those very men with whose names history connects
memories of conflict, persecution, and martyrdom.
Resistance to the injunctions of society, even
when most disinterested, most conscientious, is still
resistance; its aspect is dangerous; the authority of
the law suffers from it more or less; selfish passions
avail themselves of its example; the spirit of revolt
has precedents to quote, and this is an evil. But
compare it in thought to that other evil, a general
indifference to truth, a general torpor of the con-
science; imagine a society that never meets with any
resistance to its will, whatever laws it may break,
whatever obligations it may impose; and then tell
us whether such an obedience be not a much greater
evil; whether there be not in this wholly external
unity a far more active principle of decay than the
one you have discovered in individual resistance;
and whether those generous oppositions, which on
each occasion seemed as though they relaxed the
social bond, did not on the contrary tighten it, and
give to society its highest possible degree of co-
herence. For it is essentially in the vigour of its
morality that the force of any society lies; and the
more conscientious men it numbers in its breast,
ready to resist a human law, the moment it enjoins
what God's law forbids, or forbids what God's law en-
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joins, the more faithful, submissive, devoted citizens
will it possess. Why is this but because the same
principle that in certain cases commands disobedience,
in general commands submission; because conscience,
that binds us to the Divine law, binds us with propor-
tionate force to the human; because, in short, the less
one is disposed to yield when God would have him
resist, the more ready will he be to yield when God
requires yielding. The most independent will be
found the most submissive, be sure of that; but do
not depend upon the most blindly, most servilely sub-
missive one, who yet does not rank God's will amongst
the motives of his conscience, persevering in fidelity
when his immediate interest counsels the reverse,
and he believes himself able to disobey with im-
punity. He who only obeys man, without regard to
God, obeys ill, and will not always obey. Anarchy
has no recruits to hope for in the ranks of conscien-
tious men; it makes numberless recruits amongst the
partisans of implicit obedience. Slaves to-day will
be rebels to-morrow.
There is not one of my readers who has not some-
times said to himself, or who may not so say, Here
is an action, there is another, others, that I could on
no pretext, for no price, at no command, allow myself
to commit unless my heart failed me, or I forgot
that there was a God; and if I did such an action I
should know very well, and I should. say to myself,
that I had been wrong; and if I were to allege in its
favour the authority of man, I should reply to myself
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
213
that we must obey God rather than man; and if I
sought to persuade myself that I had been constrained
to it, I should still feel that nothing ought to have
constrained me; and if I tried to console myself by
remembering that at least I blamed my own action,
I should be obliged to own that the more I blamed
the less I ought to have done it. Which of my
readers, I ask, or who is there outside of that narrow
circle, that would dare to say, I do not know what
the State may enjoin, I do not inquire, but whatever
it be, I will do it, even if I blame it? No one would
say this. I should be much less surprised to hear
some one say, Whatever the State commands I will
do without blaming it;-but then he must needs
add, because there is no God, or because the people
is God. And do not despair of hearing this, for
everything is said now-a-days.
If every one listened to and respected his con-
science, an institution would never absorb indivi-
duality; would never stand forth as a monument of
prejudice and of the tyranny of opinion.
I thoroughly repudiate the idea that good morality
dispenses with our obedience to human laws, simply
because they are unjust; and I only exclude from
a right to be obeyed laws that would compel us to do
what conscience and the law of God condemn.
In the moral order, the sentiment of a want is
equal to the want itself. A general discontent is
justified by its own existence; and if this uneasiness
were without foundation, it would itself be a pro-
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
found evil, a more serious ill than the imaginary
evil it reveals. Something, in any case, needs to be
recast; either the social state or the spirit of those
who complain of it.
3. Progress: Material-Moral-Perfectibility-Dis-
coveries.
The consciousness of humanity never gives back
any of its conquests.
Does the human mind, then, make no final acqui-
sition; and might we fairly task with rashness one
who should declare the re-establishment of slavery
to be impossible? We do not "twice see the shore of
the dead ;" an error does not die twice; which is say-
ing, in other words, that it does not revive.
We speak of the progress of the human mind, of
its rapid ascent; it is of its indolence that we ought
to speak. The most simple, most necessary truths
have had to surmount a thousand obstacles; and it is
only through the strait gate of necessity that they
have penetrated the heart, and passed thence into
the mind. This universal, this oft-repeated fact
proves the tendency of humanity to give feeling the
precedence of thought.
There is no great moral and social result which
has not been prophesied by the consciousness; no
truth whose advent in the world has been absolutely
unexpected; no revolution in things of which thought
has not prepared the way. The force of things is
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
215
not all; abstractions count in history; and if you pay
attention to it, their presence, their action, is a part
of the force of things.
To view the matter à priori, I somewhat doubt as
to this constant order and this identical return
of the same phases. Has each one of these phases,
in virtue of its nature, but one single antecedent and
single consequence possible? Can religion indeed,
only end in poetry, and philosophy in the exact
sciences ? In order to do this, it would at least be
necessary that what is called religion, poetry, philo-
sophy, should be everywhere and always identical;
then only might we safely presume that each of their
returns would have the same counteractions and the
same consequences. Neither does the argument à
posteriori appear to us more convincing. "Civilisa-
tion," it is said, "revolves in the same circle." Now
this cannot possibly refer to the whole world, which
has never been one, and whose tendency towards this
unity, which it will no doubt eventually attain, only
dates, so to speak, from yesterday; indeed, it can
hardly refer to the civilisation of Europe, of which the
moral solidarity, still incomplete, is of comparatively
recent origin. It must then be in one and the same
country that we look for this phenomenon. But even
supposing that all these same elements were to surge up
one after the other, must it be necessary in the same
order? Are the general conditions, is the starting
point, more particularly, everywhere necessarily the
same? Do Greece (and in Greece each of the different
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
elements of which it was composed), Rome, India, the
United States of America, present these phases in the
same order? Do not mighty causes of interruption or
divergency rise up beneath the hand of Providence ?
But even were the order pointed out to be indeed
fatal, I do not see much interest in presenting it
under the aspect of its fatality, and especially in
viewing the restoration of religion as a mere affair of
dates, and a question of change of parts. Religion
will not reflourish because it is its turn to do so; it
will not owe its renewed credit to the discredit or
decay of poetry, philosophy, or the exact sciences; it
does not need that any of these should remove to
make place for it; all these noble daughters of
the human intellect, having had religion for their
nurse and second mother, cannot always be, as is
supposed, incompatible with her; and it seems to
me that if we must speak of phases, it is permissible,
in addition to all those that are signalised, to predict one
other, which shall bring into correspondence with the
new democracy a new civilisation, a phase where we
shall see the religious development concur, or at all
events coexist, with all other developments. How-
ever it may be (for we will not prophesy), it would
have seemed to us more interesting to show how the
actual state of things in general, in free and highly
civilised countries, has constituted religion the first
necessity and last refuge of the rising genera-
tion.
We are forced to acknowledge that the human
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
217
mind advances more regularly than had been at first
supposed.
In matters of philosophy and of thought, in general,
the human mind advances by antithesis and reaction;
it is like the pendulum, whose oscillations are con-
stantly from left to right, and right to left. But the
pendulum remains fettered; the value of one of its
oscillations is perpetually compensated by that of
another, while the action and reaction of the human
intellect do not completely balance each other; there
always remains a surplus of some kind, and these,
added up, form the sum of the progress of the human
mind. At first sight man seems to undo as fast as
he does; but if we embrace a wider field, we shall
convince ourselves of the real and progressive march
of society. Does it, however, advance on the good or
the bad side? This is another question.
The renewal of all things must needs come from
the renewal of hearts. A renewed heart embraces the
whole truth, without discerning beforehand all its
parts, or foreseeing all its developments. We cannot
but admire, and nevertheless, comparing it with the
supreme end of human existence, we must not very
highly value, any progress other than this. If it were
possible—which we do not believe that, by the force
of things and of intelligence, society could, as a society,
rise far above all utopias whatever, without becoming
a kingdom of God, without giving birth to a kingdom
of God within it; if we could not trace in the
terrestrial city the first lineaments of the holy city;
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
if this magnificent frame, ever enriched by some new
magnificence, were to wait for its picture in vain, we
could not long continue to interest ourselves in so
futile a glory, and the irony which we should find at
the bottom of all would pierce our heart. Thanks be
to God, it is not so; our existence has a reason, and
Jesus Christ has taught us why this ancient estab-
lishment of society has been permitted to endure.
We are not dreaming of condemning all these
works, these admirable developments of human
industry. I, for my part, subscribe to all their
marvellousness; I would not have one taken away.
What I do want removed is the violent anxiety that
they occasion, the material fanaticism that, laying
hold of men by education, flings whole generations
beneath the chariot-wheels of its divinity; the new
slavery which binds no longer bodies, but souls, slaves
of the soil. I am shown, or promised, laborious,
economical, comfortably-circumstanced populations;
I am told to applaud, and how, indeed, should I not
applaud the happiness of such? But if everything
is cultivated in these populations except their con-
science; if their happiness, chaining them to the earth,
gradually stifles in them the flame of moral life, why
then I heartily wish them the loss of so fatal a felicity.
I invoke salutary and regenerating misfortune upon
their future; for prosperity spreads out life on the sur-
face, and sorrow alone concentrates us, and restores us
the consciousness of our true me. He who suffers
most, lives most, and if there be a happiness that
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
219
!
produces the same effect, it is an original happiness
of the soul, which is itself essentially that profound
life we seek for.
Material good, which is sometimes a conse-
quence and a sign of progress, does not constitute
it. And if it be pursued in another spirit than
the spirit of justice and charity, there may be gain,
profit, relative amelioration-there cannot be social
progress.
At bottom, this question of perfectibility is
a capital question; and between those who, tho-
roughly understanding, resolve it in an opposite
manner, there must necessarily be the greatest and
gravest of divergences. It is true that one might
disbelieve in perfectibility, and yet be no better
Christian because of that disbelief; but it is impos-
sible to be a Christian and to believe in perfectibility.
If man's intimate nature, if the general direction of
his being, changes with time and civilisation—if man
becomes essentially better in proportion as humanity
grows older, why then we must leave off talking of
the fall and of redemption. This single stone removed
makes the dome crumble; and yet we have seen
Christians, sincere Christians, do more than incline
towards this system.
Was it that they were carried away from their
religious system by the strongest evidence ?-away
from a doctrine by facts? In other words, can it be
that the first premiss of Christianity is contradicted
by an impartial examination of the world and of
220
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
humanity? It belongs to the earnest spirits that
may be found outside the pale of Christianity to
examine this question, resolved so precipitately in
one way or the other by prejudiced and frivolous
men. All that we now wish to say is, that there is
certainly a progress, a progress which may be called
moral, inasmuch as it affects manners and customs,
which we may describe as follows:—more of justice,
more of humanity, more of respect of man by man:
but to allow all this is not to allow that man is
better; to have granted all this is not to preclude
oneself from maintaining that man is exactly the
same as he was on the morrow of his fall, and that
Adam is born anew in each man that the eternal
decrees call to this life of trials.
Nay, more than this, this progress, to which we
have conceded the name of moral, is not always real,
even in the restricted sense which we do not contest.
Institutions, laws, advance; society as such is im-
proved, individuals are not; society has, so to speak,
virtues which are foreign to its members; it breathes
a spirit which is not theirs, and the boasted progress
may perhaps be reduced to this ;-social institutions,
such as ages have made them, exact or actually imply
greater or different virtues than of yore.
That man should always be man; that the same
causes should necessarily produce the same effects;
and that, consequently, there is in one sense nothing
new under the sun, is a truth than which none is
more true and few so important: the lessons of expe-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
221
rience and of the philosophy of history have no
other foundation than this axiom. But the exagge-
ration of this truth is not less prejudicial than its
oblivion. It is impossible that everything should
repeat itself; and the course of time, providence
itself, or the Divine liberty, introduces into gene-
ral questions elements which we must know how
to discern, else the study of history will be only a
snare; and it is just the intuitive promptitude and
accuracy of this discernment which has in all times
constituted the characteristic difference between
statesmen and historians. Historic sense and poli-
tical tact, which appear so nearly related, are more
different than is supposed, and circumstances have
more to do than history in the formation of
great politicians. Morality alone is constant and
perfectly equal to itself, because it is absolutely
necessary that the immutable should exist some-
where.
All progress leads to discontent; it is not
misery that plants the standard of revolutions.
What is progress, then, to be always a subject
of alarm? Will it always rouse some confused idea
of crime and impiety? Will it always find a great
number of the most honourable members of society
distrustful of and almost in league against it? Yes;
so long as the progress of the human heart—that
heart which, according to the Scripture, is desperately
wicked, and whose wickedness taints all things does
not correspond with the progress of laws, arts, and
222
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
even morals. Humanity seems to forget that the
first inventions, the first progress, occurred in the
family of Cain.
Nothing in God's eyes is progress in humanity
except what restores in humanity the image of God.
The Christian too, who sees all with God's eyes, in
God's light, gives the name of progress to nothing
else; for society, being neither external to humanity
nor to the plan of God, must tend towards the same
end to which man is summoned to aim: we may
very easily deduce from this that equality is, in the
eyes of the Christian, neither the whole of progress,
nor even an essential part of the true progress, but
at most (and this remains to be discussed) one of the
consequences, or one of the signs of true progress.
For a man who has become the equal of all other
men is not for that reason more like to God; and a
society where the most absolute equality was estab-
lished would not by that alone correspond any better
with the divine idea.
If from one age to another man be equal to man,
still there is progress in society, progress in thinking
-a very slow progress, I grant: and how, indeed, could
man, panting beneath the burden of sin, keep pace
with his desires? The double misfortune of his
condition is, that he lingers in the mud of error, and
when he moves forward his stride is not measured ;
he does not so much walk as precipitate himself, so
that we might say of the progress of society what
science teaches us respecting the walk of the phy-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
223
sical man, that it is a succession of constantly
checked falls.
The condition of moral truth in the world is this:
it is not innate therein; it does not emanate there-
from; it reflects itself more or less in this world
because of its admirable adaptation to our nature
and the nature of things, the whole having sprung
from one idea; in a word, it realises itself much more in
facts than in hearts, in the object than in the subject.
The social world is, perhaps, more advanced in
Christianity than the individual. Thus I am struck
with admiration when I consider the paternal pro-
tection that in our country surrounds the accused
prisoner. I affirm, that if a man in his daily practice
rigorously followed the rules of penal justice he would
be in a completely Christian condition.
The progress of moral truth in humanity is rather
objective than subjective, rather in our manners than
our hearts; and thus, for example, institutions become
more just without men being less unjust. I grant
that institutions react upon sentiment, and that the
habit of being just becomes, like all habits, a second
nature; but what I do not allow is, that equity in
law and softness in manner indicate a proportionate
restoration in the secret depths of the heart.
Each age brings with it its novelties; but nothing
is new in an absolute sense, nor can anything be so.
Everything in humanity, as also in each nation, is
the development of a primitive character, the logical
deduction from a first premiss. It is thus that side
224
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
by side with civilisation, which is the subordination
of the interest of each to the interest of all, the
sacrifice of a bad liberty for the sake of a good,—side
by side with this civilisation, which began the same
day as the family, an opposite principle, that of a
silent insurrection against social servitude, has per-
petually murmured, growled, or roared in the midst
even of the best regulated societies, and from their
earliest origin. The most evident, the most acknow-
ledged necessities have not been able to subdue this
impatience of all control, this inextinguishable want
of a savage independence. The most civilised
amongst people and individuals have connived at
this secret protestation of the barbarous element.
Happy in bearing the yoke of civilisation, men have
liked to give themselves the inconsistent satisfaction
of breaking it in idea. I know not what foolish
pleasure has been found in ruining, in impairing, at
least, the foundation of the edifice on which our head
rested. Arts have become, by almost general con-
sent, the accomplices of this strange tendency. It
has enlisted in its service a considerable portion
of our literature, which portion has been just as
welcome to the public as any other. The public has
equally encouraged destructive and conservative
literature.
The sovereignty of God is evident; but I know
not that it is anywhere so much so as in those dis-
coveries which, one after the other, have renewed
the face of the globe. We must not speak of chance
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
225
here; if there be a God there is no such thing as
chance.
Nothing happens but what is necessary, with the
one exception of sin. Nothing gets added to a
thing complete in itself: humanity only grows and
develops itself till it has reached its perfect stature.
The world of man is a picture that the Divine artist.
is perpetually working at. He will only lay aside
His mysterious pencil at the last day; until then,
this immense canvas, that seems to us to be already
full, offers blank spaces to the Eternal eye. Each dis-
covery, each revolution, serves only to fill up these.
We are not speaking here, it will be understood, of
moral perfectibility, but of the general destinies of
humanity. In whatever period he may be born, each
man, before his conversion, is the old Adam still;
the last sinner will have no advantage over the first;
but yet the world has never ceased to renew itself.
History proves that, with the exception of a few
attempts made by a small number of absolute mo-
narchs, useful innovations have hardly ever imme-
diately originated in high places; if this has ever
been the case, it has been so only as an exception
and an anomaly.
III-OF PEOPLES.
1. Great Men.
We often hear rather indiscreet talk about men
who are in advance of their age, and who impress
their individual character on whole generations.
226
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Now these are generally men who have better un-
derstood, more precisely defined, and more energeti-
cally expressed the dominant opinions of their own
epoch. They have brought forth that with which
their century was big; they have concentrated in
the burning-glass of their genius rays of truth which,
dispersed in the world, had not yet been able to kindle
it. But their genius-a strong and faithful expression
of a time and country that has made them what they
are is not immense, as is the genius of humanity.
Men as they are, they have done the work of men-
a partial, limited, relative work. If any being, isolat-
ing himself from his country and his period-nay,
further, from his individuality-divine the fact, the
idea, the dogma that shall stir, convert, vivify men
of all times and countries,
such a being is
no man; he is a God.
It is neither one man alone who can mislead a
whole age, nor one alone who can restore it.
One man can only succeed another on condition
of not resembling him.
Men are what their age and its ideas permit them
to be.
We must not mistake here; the individual does
not invent, he finds; he teaches his people less than
he is taught by them. All become his disciples, but
he, in the first place, was the disciple of all; it
is their own thought that he has revealed to them;
what is peculiar to him is the having pronounced
the magic word, and while giving to his contem-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
227
poraries the consciousness of their instincts, to have
at the same time given them a will;-an immense
gift this; for to give a will is to give life; it is to
engender, to become a father. But, however, it is
with this species of generation as with all others,-
if there is a father there must be a mother as well.
The paternal element is the thought of one only; the
maternal is the instinct of all. Thought has made of
that instinct a determined will, a fixed resolve, and
from that moment the nation has lived.
All the world believes in him who believes in him-
self; and in a moment of general anxiety, his auda-
cious hopefulness often proves the best of resources.
In estimating the chances of success of an idea,
how little a few individualities count for When an
idea does not stand upright by its own vigour, no talent
is able to support it; when it has a force of its own,
there is no fear of its being unaided. Talents will
come, for it is written that the strong shall be helped.
At the present day there are so many great
men that there are none. It is impossible ade-
quately to celebrate so many glories :
"One wrongs the other, and his Reverence still
With a new saint encumbers his discourse."
But this is not the only cause of the difference
between our age and that which preceded it; it is
not because we have too much to admire that we
have left off admiring, but rather because we have
admired too much. The eighteenth century exhausted
228
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
itself thus: not choosing to be fanatical it became
enthusiastic; it admired right and left. Compared
to ours, that incredulous age was credulous to an
excess it had faith in its men, in its productions;
ours believes little in any man or any thing; it
believes in force, adores force. Now force being at
the present time everywhere and nowhere-its last
personification having been him who was surnamed
the man of destiny, our enthusiasm, unless it goes.
back to him, turns into a vague and listless con-
templation. The eighteenth century, fatal as its
demolitions were, did nevertheless, whatever it may
have said, believe in liberty, in individuality; we,
for our part, believe in necessity. How then should
we be enthusiasts, and what have we to oppose to
those long triumphs of the eighteenth century, if
not the bewildering succession of a multitude of
ephemeral popularities?
The memory of great men is the treasure of the
nation that has produced them.
Eminent men do one work, and their memory does
another often, indeed, their memory is the most
durable and best portion of their work.
Of all the advantages to which our ambition as-
pires, celebrity is the one that has the least connec-
tion with happiness.
In no career can one be a great man without
courage.
It is most dangerous to wish to reduce the whole
life of a great man to one only and persistent idea.
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
229
No doubt, there has been no great existence that has
lacked unity, but this unity resides more in the soul
than in the idea. The soul enters into life in full
activity and in its prime; and one may say, in a
general sense, that it wills from its first onset all
that it will ever will. But thought is progressive ;
it does not embrace its whole horizon at the first
glance. It takes possession of it gradually; by in-
creasingly large portions, by a comprehension ever
more keen, by an impetus ever more rapid; it has
grasped its whole destiny long before reaching its
last term; but we may affirm, upon the faith of
history itself, that great men have only acted by
successive inspirations; that their plans have ex-
tended with their conquests; and that there is not
one of them who, in beginning life, marked out its
sequence on an immutable plan, and according to a
single idea.
I repeat that there was unity there nevertheless,
powerful, triumphant beforehand, but obscure and
without self-consciousness, and rather in the condition
of a tendency, of a passion, than in that of a distinct.
and firm design. The historian-true prophet of the
past, carrying himself back to the starting point of
the great man, perceives what the great man him-
self did not perceive in himself, an idea, the faint
lineaments of which indicate nevertheless the whole
definite and wide proportions of the future great man.
The immaterial individual shapes itself slowly in the
course of life, as the physical individual does in the
230
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
mother's womb; life is a long gestation of the moral
being. But in signalising to us the moral element
that dominates a whole life, the historian will, I
think, guard against attributing, by a kind of retro-
spection, to his hero at his début, the designs that he
probably only fully conceived when far on in his career.
He will recognise that it is with the great men of
action as with poets, who, in a sense peculiar to
themselves, know not what they do, and do it perhaps
all the better in consequence, for the true force of
their genius is in the soul, and the soul is not given
to theorising.
2. French and English-National Pride.
No people bend more willingly under the yoke of
fashion than the French. To follow the fashion is a
duty in France.
A witty and speculative people consoles itself for
the loss of its liberties by the liberty of the intellect.
This has always been the case with the French.
Woman in losing modesty loses all at once. Even
at the present time the disasters of France, the im-
perfections of its civilisation, are in great part ex-
plainable thus.
The character of the French requires a serious
monarch, we are told by Montesquieu. May we
venture to add, that it requires a serious God?
Elsewhere religion, even Catholicism, can humanise
without compromising itself; in France, a sacred
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
231
barrier will always separate, in every department,
the serious from the familiar. Elsewhere they min-
gle; in France they exclude each other. Paganism
itself would be grave in this country; and it was so.
Grace and amenity did not prevail in the religion of
the light and frivolous Gauls. Each people gives to
its ruling tendencies some counterpoise, which it
especially seeks in its religion, while at the same
time proportioning it to its stature, and accommo-
dating it to its character. It was natural, therefore,
that the priests of Gaul should be Druids. The
same instinct still makes itself felt in French Chris-
tianity, whether it be Catholic or Protestant.
A nation of clever and heartless people would be a
nation of egotists-prudent egotists, you will say;
but just because of this universal prudence, the
egotism of each individual would encounter barriers
which his passions would chafe at, being unable to
overleap. Prudence would probably change into
cunning; vices would assume a scientific form; so-
ciety would present fewer revolting aspects; but
withered in its very roots, it would soon have no sap
to send into its different branches, and beneath the
ardent light of an ever clear sun we should see it
shrivel and die.
One observation which will occur to those who
study the history of the two countries is, that in
England honour has never had the same influence as
in France. In the English we see on one hand a
display of coarseness, of impudence in evil, and on
232
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
+
the other we have to admire an austerity and eleva-
tion in good. Interest and conscience are the two
standards in England. There is nothing inter-
mediate between these two motive. powers.
In France, on the contrary, the gulf between in-
terest and conscience is admirably filled up by honour.
We must own that this principle may lead to a thou-
sand hurtful and evil things; nevertheless, originally,
honour had for its function to replace conscience.
Once when conscience defaulted, honour came for-
ward as its next of kin and representative. Later,
morality having separated itself from conscience, and
virtue retiring, honour remained almost alone.
We may praise our country with a good grace, for
it is not quite the same as praising ourselves; but
we can censure it with a better grace still; it makes
us seem modest.
National pride-identical to itself in all countries
alike, and presenting no differences but those of form
or intonation, bearing the impress of vanity in France,
of scorn in England, and of roughness in Germany—
national pride has constantly repudiated all foreign
judgment. Nothing more intractable and less rea-
sonable than a pride that can say we, and which
seems to be only exacting in behalf of others.
Abuses seem greater the more our light augments,
and in fact they are more intolerable when they
wound not only interests and rights, but the public
conviction; in short, one might say that towards the
end of their reign their venom becomes more acrid,
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
233
their pretensions more exorbitant, either because
this is so in point of fact, or because contrast leads
us to believe it so.
The best institutions as to solidity and duration
are not the most in conformity with theory; faith
preserves them better than reason, and the most
rational are hardly consolidated till the convictions
of the mind have become the property of the soul;
and the citizen, no longer ceaselessly searching for
the reasons of his obedience, obeys by a lively and
involuntary impulse, the principle of which is none
other than faith.
It is not the peoples who reason best that are the
strongest; and the force of man, speaking only of
force, lies more in his conviction itself than in the
validity of the proofs on which he bases it.
The ideas of a people, or of humanity at large,
are never mean.
Distrust the aspirations and hopes of a people
willing to ignore its ancestors; it is but the present,
or the near and material future, that interests it;
with noble and holy hopes it has nothing to do.
Woe to the epoch which aims at shaking pre-
judices without confirming morals in an equal
degree!
Perhaps for moments of crisis and enthusiasm
a few enlightened men may suffice; but without
information universally diffused and wisely dis-
tributed, a nation cannot organise itself, and has
no guarantee for its permanence or importance.
234
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
A multitude is often more easy to deceive than
a single man; and amongst falsehoods it is the
coarsest and most improbable that are the most
readily believed, for the popular imagination can
bear nothing mediocre; and in everything it is the
enormous that captivates it.
Each people cultivates one truth at the expense
of all others; but it is always on a people that
the administration of that truth is conferred, so
that, considering it as part of the whole of humanity,
each people may be said to be the head of a school,
or, so to speak, a system.
3. The European Crisis and Christianity.
The world goes its own way, and thinks it works
its own will; but it is working, far more than it
believes, the will of God, and promoting the cause
of the saints: the world speaks of civilisation,
riches, liberty; God gives it without stint all these
things which ought to lead man to repentance ;
but He as unhesitatingly takes away what He gave;
He heaps up clouds and tempests in clear and
shining skies; He makes accumulated blessings to
produce calamity; He destroys, as He created, in
order to create in Christ Jesus more souls to good
works.
Religion, which contains in itself true nature and
the truly natural, constantly tends to bring back civili-
sation to its true conditions, and approximates it to
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
235
nobleness in proportion as it removes it from artifice;
for if coarseness be ignoble, the artificial is scarcely
less so.
In remounting from century to century we shall
find that all the great phases of humanity corre-
spond with or lead to a great revolution of religious
thought.
Religion sustains humanity above the abyss; an
abyss which we must either see or have seen, in order
to adore the hand that holds us suspended above it.
Christianity still preserves the world from the
wrath of God. It is, perhaps, with reference to its
propagation that events thus crowd, and nations
are shaken by a fearful crisis. A few light-minded
unbelievers will not cause the Most High to repent;
and the immense importance of circumstances will
not prove a false measure on the part of Providence.
The multitude is panting, as it were, with an
instinct that does not deceive it. In the midst of
unchanging nature, beneath a serene and genial
sky, when no external cause, as it seems, provokes
social convulsions-in a word, in a state which may
be called normal and regular-each one is saying,
This cannot last; this must come to an end!"
All the world is waiting, listening; men sleep, arms
in hand; they dream of war after having argued
in favour of peace; it seems that all situations are
doubtful and tend to become defined; that all
relations are strained and tend to break loose.
((
It is the present detaching itself from the past;
236
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
the new régime replacing the old; the chrysalis
opening to free the future it imprisoned. All this
is by no means clear: similar transformations have
been pretty nearly always going on. As all social
progress proceeds by successive leaps, each of which,
after having exhausted itself, is replaced by a new
leap, it is probable that we are in the very crisis
of one of those vigorous movements by which, as
by knots, we measure the speed of the vessel of
humanity. But what is the character of this move-
ment? Towards what shores does the vessel sail?
What is the veritable accomplishment of the des-
tinies of humanity? Faith tells us that man only
casts anchor in eternity; that eternity is the port,
and that the vicissitudes and revolutions of the visible
are subordinated to God's purposes with regard to
the invisible world. Philosophy assigns no definite
term to the development of human destinies; in its
opinion, a gradual, unlimited perfectionment of the
social state is the whole destiny of the human race:
an ever more energetic action, a harmony ever more
complete of the elements of that perfection, such
is the eternal asymptote of our species. At the
head of these elements our age has placed liberty,
a term under which equality is clearly understood,
alternately as guarantee and as result of this liberty.
Religious wars, properly so called, proceeding from
an immaterial principle, only modified the social
state in virtue of that principle and in the proportion
that it enjoined. The war that we are now sup-
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
237
posing, fraught with materialism in the masses,
materialistic up to a certain point in its very prin-
ciple, has for its last term, and perhaps its final aim,
a far more thorough remodelling of society. The
harrow of '89 encountered a stone which obliged
it to recede; but this was only to drive with fresh
impetus against the obstacle, and thrust it out of
the way. Internal convulsions would increase the
intensity of the calamity; the question being no
longer of territorial wars, but of the war of two
principles which have no geographical boundaries,
which do not so much excite nations against nations
as each nation against itself. There are two closely
intertwined Europes, in short, which seek to free
themselves from each other's grasp. Representatives
of the two principles that divide them, two giants
provoke, and will perhaps hurry on the decision,
which cannot be arrived at without them.
The evils with which the world has been flooded
in the name of religion, have had their source in
the eminently correct idea that religion alone gives
the true signification of each man and each society ;
that there is in us nothing more profound, nothing
that more decidedly determines what we are; and
that our declaration of what we believe, is, at the
same time, and inevitably, a declaration of what we
wish to be. Putting aside every leading mind, it
is not surprising that the social power should have
been everywhere more or less tempted to regulate
the belief of the laity or the teaching of the priest-
238
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
hood. Neither can we wonder that the priesthood
should have essayed, by the assistance of the State,
to dominate a fact of this importance.
Superficial observers of events (and these form
the majority) assist unconsciously at an immense
religious operation of mind in all parts of our con-
tinent; they do not see that everywhere Europe
gravitates towards a religious solution of the diffi-
culties of civilisation, and that the problem which
occupies all serious men is how to re-establish,
between the internal and the external, between
thought and facts, a balance that has been long
since destroyed. Now this third term required, this
dominant and reconciling term, is most assuredly
neither man nor material things-it is God; it is
religion. It is wonderful how religious preoccupa-
tion grows together with that respecting political
theories and industrial progress. This fact can
only be denied by those who either do not look
about them at all, or who only look on one side.
Even where nothing has broken out openly, a
very average attention may discern a silent but
incessant fermentation going on. True, this is
quite unconnected with anything else, if we are to
believe men who have read the history of the
revolution in England, treated by a dozen different
authors, without perceiving that it was religion
which made not only that revolution, but we may
say England herself, such as she has appeared
for the last hundred and eighty years. And
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
239
if it come not to pass in the time of these men
themselves, their sons will assuredly see a new
Europe emerge out of the revolution that is slowly
going on in the general mind, and which they hold
to be a mere isolated symptom. A more attentive
and internal study of England, Germany, and even
of Italy, might give them much material for
thought.
The religion of the Cross nowhere appears out
of proportion with civilisation; on the contrary,
however civilisation may advance, it always finds
Christianity ahead of it.
There is not one of the principles of Christianity
which has developed all its consequences; not one
of its precepts which has afforded all its results;
not one of the moral germs that it has sown in
the world which has borne all its fruits.
Christianity, even at this day, which to us seems
so advanced a one, is very probably far from
having yet produced all its effects in the conscience
and life of humanity-from having expressed its
whole thought and uttered its last word. In one
sense it said its whole say at once; in another it
has still much to say, and the world will only end
when Christianity shall have said all.
Everything relating to social truth, which is now
an axiom, was for a long time a problem. The true
problem is to find out how such truths ever could
have been problems. In all other kinds of science
and art the human mind advances more rapidly.
240
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
It is slow only in the research of the good-the
right. It only deduces laboriously, and after much
investigation, the immediate consequences of an
acknowledged principle. Perhaps we are still at
the present day, after eighteen centuries of Chris-
tianity, involved in some enormous error which
Christianity will one day teach us to blush at, as
it does now at torture, slavery, and constraint in
the matter of religion. The reformations that take
place owe much less to the strength of conviction
that demands them, than to a certain force of things,
which makes the very obstacles that seemed to
render a cause impossible, concur to bring about
its success. The last blow given to abuses is often
dealt by their defenders. Those who wanted to
do the good, see it effected by others who had no
such intention. Truth is stronger than its adver-
saries, for it conquers them-stronger than its cham-
pions, for it dispenses with them. Everything in
events conspires for the truth; and on the part of
man almost everything conspires against it.
Instead of being founded by Christianity, modern
society owes it origin to the Church of Rome. This
form was necessary, we are told, and we are challenged
to devise any other under which Christianity could
have established itself in young Europe. But what
then? Is there no other method but what we can
imagine? and are the limits of our conceptions limits
to God? There are two necessities: the one absolute,
the other relative. Assuming infidelity, the prevailing
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
241
of the flesh over the spirit, and the Church resolving
to walk by sight, no doubt all that took place was
necessary; but is this the stand-point Christians
ought to take? and because they cannot imagine how
things could have been brought about without this
iniquitous blending of the spiritual and temporal,
without the sword and stake, are they justified
in concluding that everything occurred according
to absolute necessity, that is to say, according to
truth and according to God? They are accustomed,
we know, to call us rash; but in what can rashness
lie, if not in forcibly dragging the wisdom of God
along the track of human passions, and making Him
will retrospectively all that we have willed?
If history taught me nothing whatever of the
agitations of human thought previous to the Gospel,
I should infer them from the very presence and
truth of the Gospel; I should say that, if the Gospel
were true, the world before its advent must needs have
been sceptical or pyrrhonian, for three reasons which
make up one-the absence of redemption, its felt
necessity, and the impossibility of foreseeing it.
Civilisation is not a deep and radical change of
the heart of man. It encloses the passions of the
heart in a net, but it does not kill them; it covers
the savage, it does not do away with him. The
savage-the man of nature, if you will-is ready to
reappear whenever the occasion offers or the temp-
tation is presented. Civilisation has not absorbed
the brutal element in the heart of man, the "pars
R
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leonina" of which Horace speaks. Civilisation ren-
ders its explosions less frequent; it stops up the ways
of egress; it rolls a stone to the mouth of the cave
of Cacus; but Cacus is still there. It bridles all
hatreds except religious hatred.
We cannot believe the Gospel without allowing
that there have been universal errors.
We need only to have somewhat studied the
opinions of different eras in the books that record
them, to be thoroughly convinced that, in an order
of things where the moral element prevails, human
prevision is worth very little. Some minds prophesy
the past admirably; the future has few confidants.
It is true that Divine prophecy leads the glance
of faith on towards the future, and even towards a
definite point; but this is from a great distance, and
the intermediate is left undefined, in order that
the believer may be encouraged, and yet not too
much so; and that the consciousness of truth, duty,
and right may ever remain for him the first and
sovereign prophecy.
If posterity has the great advantage of pronouncing
the oracles of truth, the religious spirit has the
distinguished prerogative of anticipating and pre-
dicting the judgments of posterity. On moral ques-
tions, it knows from the very first what posterity
will repeat later.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
243
CHAPTER III.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
I.—SOCIAL PRINCIPLES.
1. Christianity and Society: Duties towards Society-Morality—
Humanitarianism and Christianity.
THE first punishment of every soul and every so-
ciety without God is to be no longer able to depend
upon anything. This first belief carries away with it
all beliefs; this primary truth withdrawing from the
sphere of humanity, leaves the barrier open and the
field free to the most appalling imaginations.
The primitive bases of society, moral laws, natural
affections, truths fused with the great truth, being
thus detached from their centre, descend ignomi-
niously to the rank of problems. Everything, even
the execrable, may be defended; everything, even
the indispensable, denied. Interest and necessity
may still keep up the old combinations, but in the
intellect everything is loosened, scattered, lost.
In proportion as the idea of the good God, and of
our Father in Heaven, is strongly grasped and keenly
felt, it opens and softens the heart; it fills it with
benevolence and gentleness; it disposes the soul to
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mercy and succour; it creates a human interest in
each; it founds sociability on a moral and sincere
basis. Christian beliefs are alone capable of dilating
hearts, of interesting man in man as such, of
realising universal fraternity. In assigning to them
these effects, we are justified by their very nature as
well as by experience. Every Christian heart has
loved humanity. No man who does not love it is a
Christian. These two truths are proof against all
attack.
A society that does not understand its religion or
study its own language does not come within the
terms of true civilisation.
No one is contented but the believer; the believer
is however contented, and in giving the principle
of contentment to a people, one would give it the
balance or arrears of happiness-give it something
better than happiness.
A Christian people is a people of Christians, for
it is not the people, it is the individual who
believes, hopes, loves, and obeys. Public piety, so
called, is made up of the piety of private individuals;
and just as a family of pagans cannot be a Christian
family, so a people cannot be Christian if it be com-
posed of families that are not so. Everything is real,
substantial, in the kingdom of God, and fiction has
no place there.
One feels that the change in the relations of man
with God has involved one in the relations of man
with man; that society-a condition willed by God,
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
245
and without which man is only half created-does
not exist in its true sense; that it is only made real
by the communion of spirits in one thought; and
that the first effect of religion is to organise such a
society.
Our first duty towards society, if you are abso-
lutely bent on resolving the whole question into
this, is to be exacting and severe towards ourselves;
and he who thoroughly knows what all the world
should do, but knows not, or chooses to ignore, his
own obligations, is a less valuable member of so-
ciety than he who knows little about the duty of
others, but exactly knows his own, and does it as he
knows.
A reform of the whole is illusory unless a reform
of individuals correspond therewith. The collective
work may concur with the individual, but the action
of the latter upon the former is far more important
and certain. The contrary opinion is one of the
capital errors of this enlightened age.
In
Never, we think, has it been more plainly shown
than now how necessary are religious convictions
to give consistency and strength to morality.
decisive circumstances, in affairs where an alarming
degree of responsibility accumulates on one man,
faith is necessary to righteousness. 'Do your duty
and trust to God!" this cry of the old Horace only
finds an echo in the soul that believes in God,-that
is, in a living God. It is difficult to be perfectly
just without believing that God will see to con-
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sequences—will take upon Himself the results of our
justice. Now this is a faith which respectable worldly
people have very little of, and yet everything proves
that it is to such a faith as this that nations and
individuals owe their real strength. At this very
time, if we inquire what countries will best, come
what may, resist the convulsions to be brought about
by the conflict of opposing principles, we believe
them to be those, whatever their political theory
or distinctive government, in which religious faith,
even though it be not pure, still serves as a basis
and support of the moral faith, which, without it,
would be reduced to a vague, wavering, uncertain
instinct. Strength is not, and will not be found, in
the best organised, but in the most moral, that is, the
most believing. It is, then, urgent to restore the
basis of morality; to give once more a religion, that
is to say, the Gospel, to our populations; to preach
it everywhere with fervour and fidelity, in season.
and out of season, before God preaches with His
thunder.
Religious faith, if it depart, takes with it moral
faith; oaths have no more solemnity; actions are
judged by success; liberty is but the isolation of
individual wills, an organised defiance, and the con-
secration of egotism; public calamities are alike.
without dignity and without consolation: in a word,
the absence of religious convictions withers up so-
ciety, gradually reduces it to dust; and revolutions,
by which believing nations sometimes strengthen, and
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
247
multiply their resources, may very easily prove fatal
to nations without faith.
When the great idea of God brooded over society,
from that idea-vividly realised by some, vaguely
admitted by others-proceeded and spread over the
world a crowd of firm, living, uncontested moral
convictions-pure streams, where even those that
knew not how to ascend to their source might at
least quench their thirst. Men lived in a world of
realities; they walked with bold step on ground that
did not give under them; they fell asleep full of con-
fidence in a moral world, and as sure of finding it
again when they woke as the sun in the sky. Now-
a-days everything yields, vanishes beneath our feet,
our hands, our glance. One would buy the slightest
axiom with gold; one would embrace as a saviour
he who should fix once more in our soul the com-
monest of moral commonplaces; one would rejoice to
believe in one's own soul at least, till one came to
believe in God.
If you want to see public relations founded on
something besides necessity, animated by something
better than the febrile movement of passion or the
violent impetus of circumstance, in a word, quick-
ened as a healthy body is by pure blood, you must
require these grand effects from religion alone. A
society without religion is a body without soul.
A people at once without affections and habits,
improvising its wisdom day by day, unfurling its sails
to catch the wind of every system, exhausting its
.1
.
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S
moral force in the fatiguing alternatives of enthu-
siasm and disappointment-this, we repeat, is a melan-
choly spectacle. Who would not give back habits to
such a people? But who would hope to root them
in any other soil than that of moral conviction? And
where could such a conviction be found save in the
domain of religious faith?
Humanitarianism is philanthropy in the mass,
and hope on a great scale; it is the worship of hu-
manity, devotion to its future, and more immediately,
it is the pursuit of a better distribution of social
advantages. There are, moreover, two humani-
tarianisms, one of the head, the other of the heart;
we have already given our opinion of the former,
and would now assure the second of our sympathy.
It is mistaken, we feel convinced; but if error ever
were beautiful, there could be no more beautiful error.
Humanitarianism is harsh to the individual ;
Christianity is indulgent. The one strips indi-
viduality to clothe humanity, and does not succeed
in so doing; the other, in the interest of all, occupies
itself lovingly with each, encourages, protects, en-
riches, and establishes general happiness upon the
multiplication of individual felicities. It does not
drag man as a victim to the altar of the humani-
tarian Moloch; does not immolate him to the trans-
cendental interest of an abstract being, of an idea
having no contact with his heart; does not expect
the impossible from him; asks for his heart instead
of snatching it from him; pays him magnificently
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
249
for what it obtains from him-makes the best part of
his wages to consist of his very sacrifices; enriches
him by his losses, and rewards him for having loved
by the delight of loving. This grand solution of an
insoluble problem, this transformation of a fatal
duality into a beneficent and marvellous unity, is the
masterpiece of the Gospel, its triumph, its incom-
municable privilege; nothing can deprive it of this
glory, not even universal neglect. This glory would
still shine forth in the fruitlessness of our efforts
to found what it alone can found; it would in-
sure its triumph in our final confusion, and in the
day of the revelation of all things each of its rays
would become a thunderbolt to crush our blindness
and our ingratitude.
2. Liberty and Social Questions.
(1.) Liberty in general: its Excellence; its Perpetual
Tradition-Liberty, Order, Obedience-True and
False Liberality-Christianity and Obedience.
The love of liberty is the need of eminent minds.
A sincere love of liberty was never an ordinary
thing. Even in the present day we may say of it
what La Fontaine has said of true friends, "Nothing
more common than the name; nothing more rare
than the thing."
Yes; liberty is the mother of every good thing:
yes; truth, piety, virtue, delight themselves in liberty,
vice and crime in slavery; and wherever conscience
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and thought are free, there is a crowd of chances
in favour of good. We do not mean to say that
liberty will infallibly insure us all these blessings,
for man is not good; but we do say, that with liberty
we shall get rid of a thousand evils.
It is by increasing in man the sentiment of his
personal weight and responsibility that we increase
his worth. Man is only at his best when he is as
completely free as consists with the freedom of
others being equal to his own.
The tradition of liberty, be very sure, is perpetual
as that of truth. There never was an epoch where
liberty, which is one of the truths of the social order,
had not its representatives and witnesses.
Those who would impose on the human race their
own stationary or retrograde instinct are mistaken if
they imagine that the wish for liberty has not
descended into the mass of minds; and all the
more thoroughly penetrated them, that the object
it invokes hides itself under splendid clouds. The
liberty that so many echoes call for is not the liberty
that we shall get, but whether in good or evil, the
liberty we shall never have. Never mind! it is
liberty! the most beautiful word in any language
if there were not that of love; a word which must
seem attractive to every man, since it is the name of
a thing that every man, whether from good or bad
motives, wants, and to which the dignity of man
is incontestably attached. "When once," says
Bossuet, we have found means to catch the multi-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
251
tude by the bait of liberty, it follows blindly, pro-
vided it only hears the name." It is in the name
of liberty, or of glory, that the masses have been
convoked; and when both these words of command
have been spoken at once, they have not required
any articulate direction-they have set out on their
march.
But, on the other hand, let not the opposite party
be misled; there is in this nothing more than an in-
stinct. Liberty is far from being, as a principle,
so much loved by the masses, as men imagine. Our
publicists, who have, generally speaking, too little
acquaintance with the people, because they come
too little into contact with them, are not aware that
political ideas, after having easily penetrated the
highest strata of society, which are the thinnest,
sink much less readily through the inferior strata,
which are the thickest. In these classes there is,
generally speaking, very little consciousness of what
is thought and done on the surface, consequently
very little political consistency; of all liberties, that
of the soil is the only one they ever well understood;
and so it is even in our day, with a few exceptions,
which we must look for exclusively in the countries
that enjoy a decided moral culture, which is in prin-
ciple only the culture of the religious sentiment.
Elsewhere we must not hope from the populace for
any great constancy in a conflict which has not the
defence of the soil for object; and, above all, we
must expect, in the case of reverses, to see this
www
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populace ready for masters as well as for libera-
tors.
Separate the idea of liberty from that of its end,
which is our individual perfecting, the good of society,
and the glory of God, and what is left to you under
this name? Nothing but a savage instinct.
Woe to him who sees in liberty only a means of
oppressing the liberty of others! Woe to him who
loves only his own liberty!
Liberty cannot subsist alone; she requires for auxi-
liary either action or danger, or principles that render
her respectable.
Liberty will protect truth only.
Religion and literature are two liberties.
All intellectual and moral movement produces more
or less agitation; all development of liberty is more
or less stormy; and those who, following the example
of the noble Pole, prefer a perilous liberty to a tranquil
servitude, resign themselves to these inconveniences
as to a necessity. The liberty of the press, of in-
dustry, of trade, of education-all these liberties, like
the fertilising rains of summer, come to us borne
upon the wings of the storm! Temporary crises are
the almost indispensable condition of all social im-
provement; they make victims, but yet without this
liberty, of whose rough and sudden movements we
are afraid, we should fall back to the level of those
nations whose hereditary degradation excites our pity.
A liberal Government, indeed, ought, and can, prevent
rights being compromised; but to seek to hinder any
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
253
idea from reaching a people and agitating their mind,
is as insane as to try to hold back the winds from
crossing the frontiers, or to subject the birds of the
air to custom-house dues.
If all perils belonged to liberty, and perfect tran-
quillity were the portion of servitude, I should still
prefer liberty; for liberty is life, and servitude death.
But if history does indeed attest that the giving
birth to liberty be generally difficult and fraught
with anguish, it equally attests that liberty, once
established, is the only guarantee of the repose of
nations. As liberty is the satisfaction of all rights,
liberty is order, and order produces peace. The best
way of stifling murmurs is to take away all pre-
text for them; the only way of preventing revolu-
tions is to revolutionise. A people has never de-
manded more than it really needs; nay, it is so
little disposed to go beyond that limit, that often it
voluntarily stops short of it, preferring for long a dis-
astrous repose to disturbances that might better its
situation. But one way or other, sooner or later, right
must assert itself, and then come times of deplorable
struggle, for which liberty is made responsible, while
in truth it is despotism that should bear the blame.
We know, as well as others, what gloomy ideas
this word liberty revives; we know that in many
ears it sounds as the signal of civil discord, and
it is not without a degree of apprehension that one
ventures to proclaim it! But is not this timidity a
weakness? What word is there that has not been
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dishonoured? What word fallen from heaven does
not recall earth's crimes? What, indeed, is there so
liable to abuse as holy and sublime things-religion,
philosophy, liberty? It is because they are great
that they may be made the pretext for great evils.
The human soul refuses to be carried away by any-
thing low ever seeking the way to its native home,
it is liable to be seduced and influenced by every
appearance of grandeur; it requires to find a glory in
whatever it loves. What then! because the name of
liberty has been inscribed by profane hands on
the banner of rebellion, shall despotism henceforth
alone claim Divine right, and liberty pass but for a
capricious and presumptuous human invention ?
The love of liberty is either an eminently social
sentiment, or the most anti-social instinct ever known.
With some it is a generous enthusiasm; with others,
in appearance also an enthusiasm, but in reality a
selfish passion. With some it is the surest guarantee
of order; with others it is almost tantamount to dis-
order.
There are two ways of desiring liberty.. It may be
wanted either as an interest or a principle. These
two points of view do not indeed exclude each other,
but they are quite distinct. The vulgar liberal is a
man to whom society is irksome, who impatiently
endures its constraint, who regrets all that he sacri-
fices of individual to general convenience, who aspires
after the absolute independence of his own will. I
will not go so far as to call him a savage; his reason
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
255
may teach him to yield to necessity; he may be a
worthy man; but for all that I look upon him as a
vulgar liberal. With less culture, or more defective
education, he may on occasion become an instrument
of anarchy, for to him society is but a necessary evil.
The liberal of higher tone is a man to whom society
appears the end, the order, the normal condition of
society; and being eminently social, it is in the in-
terests of society that he demands liberty. It is
to ennoble society that he assigns as large a part
as possible to individuality. It is for the good of
society that he repudiates all useless, vexatious, or
sacrilegious restraints that may corrupt association,
and deprive it of its charms. He desires society,
union, harmony, and hence it is that he desires
liberty. In a word, liberty seems to him an eternal
law of human nature, a powerful method of improve-
ment. These two men, by uniting, may produce im-
mense results; but the palm belongs to the one who
rests on a moral idea. In my opinion, such a one is
still rare, nor will he be common till culture-not
only intellectual, but far rather moral and religious—
shall itself have become common.
Spiritualism is liberal; liberalism is spiritual. Ma-
terialism leans with all its weight towards tyranny;
and if in our day there be anything that menaces
liberty, it is not, as of old, superstition; it is not the
sour zeal of a few bigots, neither is it the imperious
and despotic statesman (liberty would know how to
resist all this); it is the anxiety, the passion for
256 OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
material well-being. Its tendency, let us be assured,
is in favour of tyranny.
Liberalism gradually lowers the barriers which, by
dividing the surface of nations, limited their glance
to intensify their affection. It lays down general
ideas, which, being true and human, are generally
acceptable, and sooner or later will be everywhere
accepted. It unites nations, but it effaces them. It
takes no account of traditions, they fetter it; nor of
particular symbols, having itself but one; nor of the
religion of memory, knowing only the religion of
hope. Connecting itself with no visible fact, hav-
ing no point of contact with anything historical,
admitting none of those individual and contingent
elements which are the only things by which the
human heart is really touched, it remains, despite the
beauty of its theories, arid, as is everything abstract;
cold, as is everything general, until Christianity,
taking the place of absent patriotism and extinguished
local affections, becomes a fatherland for all souls
exiled in a desert of light, and, as it were, remakes
for them (by hopes that belong but to itself) a past,
traditions, a moral bond, in short, where they may
descend and rest.
Liberalism in elect natures corresponds with senti-
ments equally noble and profound, with which the
soul may live and nourish itself. In such souls it is
justice, charity, dignity, reason; it is the whole of
social truth. Patriotism has something of fortuitous
and arbitrary; and like all particular attachments, it
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
257
divides love into fractions; the idea of liberalism
wears an impress of necessity and universality; the
patriot sees the nation in the man; the liberal sees
the man, the man above all, in the nation, looks upon
him not as a chance companion at life's table, but
as the host, the guest, the client of God, as His image
and ours, as God and ourselves in others. No doubt
that, thus conceived and felt, true liberalism is a more
beautiful thing than patriotism; and looking upon
it in this sense we are in advance of the foregoing
century. But this is not the sense of the multitude,
which will long require to keep up its warmth, and
practise itself in loving, by means of those particular
affections which are more within its reach.
Wherever the Divine ray has not descended, libe-
ralism is merely an affair of logic or pride, and it is
very far from making up to the soul for personal
attachments, local preferences, or even the prejudices
of habit. So long as the liberalism of the masses be
not Christian, it will but be a coarse syllogism, a
barren thing, a confederation of egotisms, in spite of
appearances, and even a retrograde step towards
savage life; in a word, the ruin if not the salvation.
of humanity; its shame if not its glory. Such as
it often shows itself, it neither softens, purifies,
nor elevates the heart; it is not like patriotism, a
development, an extended application of family
feeling; far from drawing the soul closer to the
natural objects of affection, it removes it farther off,
and dissipates it; by diffusing it over an indefinite
S
258
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surface it prevents its fixing on any given point; it
hollows, empties it out, withdraws its living sap; it
fills the place of attachments by opinions, and substi-
tutes bitter passions for affectionate enthusiasm.
There are two kinds of liberalism; the one selfish and
savage, of which all the world is capable, and has the
germ in itself, whose principle, if we look at it closely,
is much the same as that of despotism; the other, in-
tellectual, generous, truly social, is the fundamental
idea of modern civilisation and the condition of all
true progress. These two liberalisms have so many
symptoms in common, that we may for a long time
confound the two: but there is one sure way of dis-
tinguishing between them; it is to question them
both on the subject of religious liberty-the one de-
tests, the other honours it. Whence comes this?
From the fact that the one, which is only selfish-
ness, cares nothing for religious liberty, self-abnega-
tion and generosity being requisite to defend it in
all cases whatever; while the other, and only true
liberalism, which in liberty loves a truth, not an
interest, flies at once to its defence, as to that of
every other truth of the same order: it is enough
in its eyes for it that it should be a truth.
The respect of any man or any people for religious
liberty is the exact measure of their love for liberty
in general. Whosoever loves not religious liberty, in
reality loves no other; for if he does not love the
one which is a possession of the mind, not the body,
it is a sign that in all others it is only the body or
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
259
the material, and not the spirit, that he cares for; it
is not a right, a truth, a principle that he defends,
but merely an interest, and merely his own interest:
his liberalism, in short, is nothing more than egotism.
Liberty will be loved as a pure virgin, and not as
a courtesan. I cannot honour with the name of
liberal a man to whom liberty of thought is insup-
portable. And this liberty being, historically and
logically, the starting point of all others, the title of
liberal is ill suited to a people that does not respect
it, whatever its opinions or its institutions may be.
Let the eye of a false orthodoxy and a narrow
exegesis refuse if they will to read the proclamation
of liberty in the Divine message of the Gospel; the
whole volume repudiates their rash assertions. At
the base, along the front, on the summit of the ma-
jestic edifice raised by the Christ, everywhere there
shines the word at which degraded humanity re-
joices-Liberty!
Christianity is the immortal seed of liberty here
below.
Whatever political opinions a man or a people
may hold, religion, if they be Christians, should bring
them back sooner or later to the doctrine of liberty.
Jesus Christ, the benefactor of nations, as of in-
dividuals, has irrevocably established in human so-
cieties the reign of law and that of liberty, which in
fact are one and the same. That the future is secure
to them we will not doubt; and we may continue to
hope, as much as the moral condition of humanity
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will allow, for a living society, instead of a dead
one.
In a temporal point of view liberty is the dower
that the religion of Christ has brought to States: a
dower payable in many ways, and not yet entirely
paid, but of which humanity on the very day of
wedlock touched a portion on account; and by a
providential coincidence, the barbarians, whose inva-
sion synchronised so marvellously with that of the
new faith, were in no way socialists. If the senti-
ment of personal independence which swelled in
- their breasts was not identical with that individu-
ality which can only exist as a creation of God, at
least it was not opposed to it, and the two had many
points in common.
The Gospel has been unintentionally calumniated
when charged with inspiring apathetic resignation.
Let facts reply. The liberty of modern times is en-
tirely Christian; religion itself is a liberty. Christi-
anity is a burning leaven cast by Divine goodness into
the mass of the world. Was it, peradventure, in de-
spite of Christianity that so much energy, invention,
political and intellectual activity, characterised the
leading nations of the West at the epoch of their
greatest religious fervour? Those who speak thus of
the religion of Jesus Christ know nothing about the
subject. When they have studied it with half the
attention they bestow on a chimerical theory, or on
the comparative merit of free trade and protection,
they will see that religion, that axis of the moral
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
261
world, has, like every axis, two poles-submission
and liberty, activity and resignation, dignity and
humility, ardour and patience, the present and the
future, the visible and the invisible, the ideal and the
positive, the inhabitant of earth and the inheritor of
heaven.
Ever since the world's early days the battle has
been going on between servitude and liberty. Sixty
centuries are but one great day during which the an-
tagonists have only taken a few moments' rest. The
victory has been secured to liberty ever since the
great chief of humanity placed Himself at the head
of that sacred battalion, whose strength lies far more
in the blows it receives than those it gives.
Liberty requires a religious basis; it is difficult, not
to say impossible, to give it any other which is
rational and firm. All social truths, properly in-
cluded, are in the same case; religious truth is the
only firm foundation for any of them.
Liberty is perhaps less easy to organise than vic-
tory; to moralise it is still more difficult.
We have a confession to make; we are not yet
able to comprehend how France, with such a mass of
liberty as she has chosen to burden herself withal, will
be able securely to tread her precipitous way so long
as religion shall not have laid firm hold upon the souls
of her citizens; and for a people without faith, we can
conceive no repose, no check except despotism. Only
think of it a little: so much liberty and no belief!
the consciousness of rights separated from that of
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
duties! so much of interest, so little of affection!
What a combination! what risks! what a future!
Neither need any try by way of reassuring them-
selves to quote similar cases; there are only alarming
parallels to be found. Liberty without faith has
made nations crumble away; and if at the present
time there are free people who can support their
freedom, who enjoy it, who find in it the incessant
renewal of their vigour, and who have nothing to
fear from it, these are people that believe. Every-
thing convinces us that French liberty is pre-
carious; that it is threatened by itself; that it will
neither be able to consolidate nor govern itself so long
as it cannot oppose to the experiments made by am-
bitious men of every class, to whom so wide a career
is opened by the state of things and minds, the co-
hesion of an enlightened and truly civilised people,
united in a community of moral conviction. (Writ-
ten in 1832.)
God protector of liberty. (See Jeremiah xxxiv.)
As there is no public spirit except in countries
where individuals are not excluded from all participa-
tion in the administration of society, so the religious
spirit can only develop itself powerfully under the
auspices of liberty.
Facts, I am well aware, have placed religion in
opposition to liberty. The apparent alliance of Chris-
tianity with despotism has established in the general
mind the most deplorable prejudice, and the past has
in this respect continually laboured to impoverish the
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
263
future. But the two parts of human truth tend to re-
unite, and they will do so; neither the facts of yester-
day nor those of to-day weaken this hope in me. Man
will no longer be internally divided on this subject,
nor will society be at variance with herself; and if in
all time the best friends of religion have been the
best friends of liberty too, the time will doubtless
come when men will not think themselves obliged to
mistrust religion in proportion as they love liberty.
But unfortunate legatees that we are, we groan under
the weight of the obligations that our ancestors have
bequeathed to us; may our posterity, on the contrary,
enjoy the possessions that we have accumulated for
them!
Society will only be thoroughly alive and beautiful
in proportion as an increasing majority shall have in-
dividually accepted and harmonised these two tenden-
cies, towards order and towards liberty. But we must
not suppose that two principles can reconcile them-
selves, or dispense with a third principle, which har-
monises by comprehending them both. In order to
love the two distinct things called order and liberty,
and to love the one in the other, we must love some-
thing higher than order and liberty, which shall con-
tain the two, and be their living unity. All other
harmony is impossible and chimerical.
For us, however, obedience is not a means, but an
end; not a part of progress, but progress itself. No
principle now-a-days is less in favour than this, and
hence the principle of liberty declines, for the two
264
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
And
are narrowly united, and when the one has vanished
nothing will remain of the other but a name.
where is obedience to be learnt now? Nowhere, if it
be not in the family-the type at once of religion and
the State; the school of the citizen and the Christian;
the common centre of two lives; the wondrous insti-
tution without which all others, either higher or
wider, seem impossible.
Liberty is but the beginning of the undertaking,
the pedestal of the statue, the basis and condition
of obedience. Liberty is the means, the obedience of
the heart and the will is the end; liberty is necessary
in order to obey; without liberty obedience cannot
exist, there is no purpose in the word. But if liberty
has neither meaning nor end except through obe-
dience, the two are correlative ideas; they are, as it
were, the two poles of one axis; and we can only
assert that God glorifies Himself in the creation of
a free being, while presupposing that the free being
will use his liberty to obey God.
It is alike by the heart that we are free and
that we obey. Do not speak of an obedience with
which the heart has nothing to do; speak boldly, on
the contrary, of an obedience of which the heart bears
the whole expense, when any other way of obeying is
become impossible.
There is no true enmity, no real and profound di-
vergence of views, except beween the good and the
wicked. These are, in point of fact, the two parties
into which the world is divided. All the first class at
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
265
bottom wish the same thing; all the second have
the same designs. All worthy liberals desire order;
all worthy conservatives desire liberty; and con-
versely, all bad men, under whatever banner you may
find them ranged, mortally hate both liberty and order.
Liberty draws her whole dignity and value only
from her union with obedience. A liberty that
does not obey is a pure non-sense, for it is in order
to obey that we are free.
The spirit of submission and the spirit of inde-
pendence, alike well applied, are the two elements
that compose the perfection of social life. The man
that knows not how to submit is unfit for society,
and so is the man who cannot resist; he who can do
both is the truly social being.
Order in society is but another name for justice,
reason, and law; tyranny is the sovereign dis-
order.
Men will doubtless, according to their era, and
also according to their own character, now insist
more upon what regulates the movement, and now
more upon the movement itself; but whoever loves
order without loving liberty, does not really love
order; and whoever loves liberty without loving
order, does not really love liberty.
The man who reveres nothing is not a social being.
Societies that exaggerate the principle of liberty, or
replace the law of right by the law of number or of
force, perish or degrade themselves by the absence of
all reverence. Despotic states, where man is not re-
266
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
vered as man, and where power is so much the less
honoured as it is the more dreaded, commit the same
fault, and undergo the same chastisement. But all
other reverence is bound up with reverence for God,
which is the supreme reverence. Religion and reve-
rence are one and the same; and in every sphere one
of these terms may replace the other. It is incon-
sistent to revere anything when we do not revere God;
and this inconsistency, possible as an individual ex-
ception, is impossible as a rule. All true reverence is
abolished in a society where God-the very reason or
principle of reverence-is not revered. I may add,
that what man in such a society reverences least and
despises most, is man; and here, indeed, he is rational.
But this is as terrible as rational. There is still
something to hope from a being who reverences him-
self, whatever he may have done; there is everything
to fear from one who at bottom despises himself.
And how should man not despise himself if separated
from God?
Impartiality and moderation are always blamed
for being reactionary.
He who would derive obedience from Christianity
may easily do so; nor need he who seeks to deduce
liberty therefrom find any greater difficulty: both
alike are to be found there, and indeed how should
they not? But party spirit mutilates truth by only
conceding to it one pole; and it is evident that the
half of a truth is an error; that a thesis apart from
its counterpoise is necessarily perverted; that certain
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
267
juices, separated from the element that tempers them,
change from a wholesome beverage to poison; that
liberty isolated from order is no longer liberty but
anarchy, and ere long tyranny; that order detached
from liberty is order no longer, but supreme disorder.
We cannot raise relative ideas to absolute without
beholding them annihilated by their very triumph.
But those blind ones who cannot see such simple
truths as these, or those worthless ones whose in-
terest it is not to see them, have never more than
one of two words on their lips; they only tolerate in
a doctrine the element that is serviceable to them;
they will not understand how a system or a religion
should claim to combine the two solutions; and fol-
lowing the preconceptions of their own mind, they
reject or embrace that religion or that system for
love of one only of its principles, or in hatred of one
only of its elements.
For the world, liberty springs from itself, and sub-
mission does the same;-false and fatal genealogy this,
in virtue of which liberty is but licence, and submis-
sion cowardice. For the Christian, on the contrary,
submission springs from liberty; that is to say, being
delivered from human fears he freely makes to charity
all the sacrifices it requires; for the Christian too,
liberty is the offspring of submission, because, being
the servant of God, he is slave to no man, and even
when obeying some human order, it is virtually God
whom he obeys.
Christians hold in their own hands the solution of
268
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
the social problem and the double principle of liberty
and obedience both. This, in a social point of view,
is the salt with which they are to salt the earth.
If in other times they have taught liberty to the
world, they have now got to teach it obedience.
(2.) Different Liberties: Religious and other Liberty-
Liberty of Conscience, Worship, of the Press-
Tolerance and Intolerance.
It is only those to whom the duties of conscience
are immaterial who take little trouble to inquire into
its rights.
To whatever party we may belong, we must allow
liberty of conscience to be a great moral idea, an
idea linked with the most elevated conceptions of
philosophy; and he who is able to make it
prevail ought to be numbered amongst eminent
moralists.
The respect for conscience is a religious sentiment.
We must be ourselves religious to reverence the
religion of others; and the more religion we have,
the more we shall revere it.
He who does not find the supremacy of conscience
in the Gospel is sure to find persecution there.
If religious beliefs be not self-evident, that is to
say, if their falsity or their truth be not of a nature
to strike of itself the mind that considers them, it
certainly results that opposite opinions, be they what
they may, equally lack this self-evident character,
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
269
for their self-evidence would necessarily imply the
falsity of the former. And if these contrary opinions
lack this self-evident character, what right have they
to lay their yoke upon the religious beliefs with
which they do not agree?
Whatever idea we may form of political associa-
tion, and the bases of its administration, liberty
of conscience and cult always remains out of the
question; for whatever the hypothesis, it is impos-
sible to conceive the least relation between political
science and that of the infinite; between politics and
the faith of the heart; between the police and the
conscience. It is only in the depths of the conscience
that the right of individualism begins-an absolute
exclusive right, which is only responsible to God.
All other liberty consists in freedom to do (within
the limits of order and of the laws) what pleases us,
what is agreeable to us, what affords us some enjoy-
ment or profit, or what, at all events, we believe
capable of affording these. Religious liberty is the
liberty to do what pleases God, or, at least, what we
believe pleases Him; it is the liberty of serving Him,
of fulfilling our duty, not only when it is agreeable
to us, but disagreeable; in a word, it is the liberty
of obeying. It is a disinterested liberty, the only
disinterested, and consequently the noblest of all.
This liberty is not like other liberties. It is dear
to those who avail themselves of it; others it dis-
pleases. Nay, I will go further. I have as yet met
with few people who did not feel some impatience
270
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
at seeing the Deity adored in a manner to which
they were themselves unaccustomed this always
vexes, I know. We must either be very reasonable
or very conscientious not to feel tempted to impose.
silence on those who permit themselves to think
differently from us on such subjects as these.
What is proclaiming liberty of conscience but
the declaring that religious conviction is a sphere
into which the civil power ought not to penetrate;
in other words, the separation of the civil from the
spiritual?
Religious liberty is the keystone of the arch; with
it everything else falls and crumbles away. In all
constitutions whatever, it is the seal, the mark of
true liberalism; it indicates the highest degree of
civilisation and the triumph of moral ideas. Wherever
it is wanting, we much doubt whether liberty be
either understood or loved.
Religious liberty is not only a right, but an im-
perious necessity of human nature; it is a law
before it passes into laws. National codes may pro-
claim, may register; they do not make it. They
may oppress it, but can never destroy.
To conquer consciences by terror, to strike them by
hope, or to mislead them by falsehood, are equally
grave outrages against Him who has created these
consciences, and reserved to Himself the empire over
them. It is a sacrilegious crime to place either an
individual or a mass of men under the alternative of
renouncing temporal advantages or denying their
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
271
consciences. And the always merely apparent unity
procured by these means is an impious unity.
The early reformers may perhaps have laboured
unsystematically, but they did not, they could not
leave any precepts that forbade their first plan
from being altered; and if they have not expressly
guaranteed religious liberty with all its consequences,
they have done even more than this, for their work
is the living proclamation of the principles upon
which that liberty rests.
It is not so slight a thing as you may imagine
to abandon the cause of religious liberty; it is to
renounce all liberties at once.
Liberty of conscience is not only the faculty of
choosing between one religion and another, it is also
essentially the right of adopting none, and remain-
ing a stranger to all forms and establishments that
the religious sentiment may have introduced into
society. This notion is inseparable from the idea of
liberty. Liberty is the right to appreciate by and
of ourselves, to weigh (librare), and to choose. Now
this right no longer exists where, out of different
systems, you are compelled to choose one.
Liberty of conscience is our right to establish
our relations with duty, in the way that we hold to
be the most fitting. It is the right of allowing no
other judge of this intellectual and moral inter-
course except our own conscience. It is the right
to choose between believing and not believing;
between adoring and not adoring. It is the perfect
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
independence of the social man in matters of belief
and religious profession.
The nations that enjoy religious liberty will always
prevail over the rest. There is an active and uni-
versal stimulant in the sentiment of liberty which
enhances man's courage by elevating him in his own
eyes. There results from it a moral energy and a
vivacity of thought which render man eminently
qualified for the cultivation of all the advantages with
which nature has surrounded him. This is doubtless
one of the causes of the prodigious development of
commerce and industry in certain Christian coun-
tries.
There is a natural and permanent league between
the adversaries of one liberty and the antagonists of
the other. Their alliance is established beforehand:
it may manifest itself more clearly at certain epochs,
but it was founded upon the nature of things.
From Christian liberty is deduced an obligation
upon all powers and all persons, calling themselves
Christian, to respect liberty of conscience, not only
in Christians, but in those who are not yet so.
How can religious liberty be a question for
Christians? But let us lay aside Christianity and
its doctrines, and ask how those who have the faintest
idea of what religion means, those who in principle
at least place the glory of God and the interest of
eternity above everything else, can help revolting
against those gross ideas which degrade heavenly
things to the level of human, and wish to submit to
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
273
the inspection of a secular police the outpouring of
our religious feelings, the expression of our celestial
hopes, and the communion of our prayers?
It is the glory of Christianity, it is the sign of a
general advance in the understanding of the Gospel,
that its disciples should be found in the first rank
of the defenders of religious liberty.
When a cult shall be neither a deception nor a
seduction it will have the assent of the most philo-
sophic minds, which, being no more able than the
people at large to evade the laws of an organisation
common to the whole human race, need, as the rest of
us, a religion that supports us. The primitive Church,
with all its simplicity, did not reject all solemn rites,
its Head having traced a rule for it in this particular,
by instituting the Holy Communion, which contains
the authorisation and all the elements of a public
cult.
The liberty of conscience once fully admitted, it
would be inconsistent and contradictory not equally
to admit the liberty of worship, which is the im-
mediate application and first use made of it.
Liberty of conscience is nothing without liberty of
cult.
Religion, taken in its purity, is a feeling that seeks
to extend itself by sympathy. If it do not penetrate
hearts, it is nothing; if it merely subject a certain
extent of country to certain consecrated forms, it
has gained little indeed; but if it has won our minds
and souls, then it has all its claims satisfied, and
T
274
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
reigns indeed. Now, what is it that it requires for
this? Nothing more than liberty to plead its own
cause and produce its titles. Confident of its own
valid claims, it only requires the opportunity of setting
them forth in the eyes of all: it does not even exact
that inimical voices should be hushed; it is its
interest that all opinions should be expressed as
freely as its own, knowing that there is no true faith
without conviction, nor conviction without exami-
nation, nor examination without comparison. It asks
therefore only for what all opinions equally require,
liberty, and thus believes itself sufficiently protected.
:
If liberty of conscience be the right of the indi-
vidual, liberty of worship is the right of communities.
It is the power they demand of assembling under
the guarantee of publicity, and the protection of the
law in order to carry out the services of the religion
they have chosen, and to maintain by these common
celebrations the common faith and zeal.
Political liberty only attains its whole value as
guarantee and rampart of civil liberty.
The liberty of the press will work out its own des-
tiny single-handed. Born later than any other, though
at its own appointed hour, it is none the less natural,
nor less providential, nor less necessary, nor less
indestructible than other liberties. Having entered
elementally into the life of civilised nations, nothing
can ever expel it thence. We need not, in order to
defend it, assert that it does no harm; a liberty which
does no harm is almost a contradiction in terms;
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
275
liberty is innocent in God alone. The liberty of the
press does harm, no doubt; perhaps it will go on doing
less and less, but it will always do some. Other
liberties, long removed from the pale of discussion,
have also had in their time very baneful conse-
quences; there is not one of which the suppression
might not have been demanded under the same plea.
It is far better to trust to Providence, which, in the
moral as in the physical world, has, in preparing ne-
cessities, provided beforehand their place in the
gene-
ral order; for just as there cannot be a right contrary
to right, so there can be no necessity contrary to a
necessity. That which is necessary is good, and
will finally be recognised as such. Instead of de-
claiming against a liberty that bad men make a bad
thing, let us on our part make it a good one.
If ever toleration can find a noble opportunity for
exerting itself, it is towards the intolerant.
The word toleration, moreover, is very admirable
when it describes the disposition of the charitable
man to endure in others, doctrines or conduct that
he himself condemns. This virtue, like all other
virtues, is a sacrifice, since its effect is to leave in
existence what we would fain see destroyed. And
it follows clearly, that this virtue is beautiful in
proportion as the sacrifice is great; that is to say,
as our principles are strong, and our beliefs vital.
The unbelieving and the indifferent would not, it
appears to me, have either any difficulty or any
merit in being tolerant; and yet they are not always,
276
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
and, moreover, cannot easily be so, since they have
no room for abnegation in the matter. As to States,
since they are not individual personalities, or moral
beings, they cannot have virtues, and toleration on
their part is only a political measure which but half
satisfies the claims of society.
Toleration is an insufficient palliative, a remedy
concealed in the depths of generous hearts in times
of fanaticism and oppression; but its presence an-
nounces the absence of liberty, and its name, how-
ever fair it may seem, is an insult to the rights of
humanity. Woe to the people where one is reduced
to preach and to invoke toleration! Formerly that
word, pronounced by philosophers, heard compla-
cently by kings, might make a sweet and consoling
impression on the souls of men, but now-a-days it
no longer suffices, and the public conscience, grown
more exacting, will only listen to the word liberty.
Philosophers have appeared to believe that infi-
delity is naturally tolerant, and inclined to respect
religious liberty, as well as liberty of thought in
general. I, on the contrary, believe it to have a
great tendency towards intolerance: the enemies
of positive religion may, indeed, in times when their
own free-thinking is threatened, raise their voice
with that of the champion of religious independence;
between these two parties, however, there is only a
community of perils, not of principles, and the
majority of deists and indifferentists are then de-
fending not the interest of society, but their own.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
277
Their impatience at the manifestations of a posi-
tive faith, their clamour against undertakings in
which charity combines with piety, their bitterness
against all eminently religious men, may enable us
to guess what their actions would be if on some
unhappy day power fell to their share. On this head
we have gained our experience, and have nothing
more to learn.
If there be a formidable intolerance, it is that
of incredulity, or of dead faith. We have seen (and
we have groaned over it) Christian communities
condemning men, although they cast out devils in
the name of Jesus; we shall see infidels and for-
malists condemn others just because they cast out
devils in this name. Tolerant to indifference and
lukewarmness, they reserve their intolerance for
zeal and living faith. And singular fact-this is
not because they believe themselves possessed of the
deposit of truth and the real rule of morals, but, on
the contrary, because they feel that they lack these,
and cannot bear others to possess a treasure of which
they have deprived themselves.
The Gospel has its own intolerance, although it
does not sympathise with persecutors, and breathes
the most complete religious liberty; the Gospel, we
say, has its intolerance, since it holds as a foe who-
ever is not its friend.
How often have I seen, bearing the burden and
heat of the day, and bending beneath his Saviour's
cross, a man to whom intolerance would hardly
278
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
grant the title of Christian! Wrestling with old
foibles so hard to uproot, bent by the habits of a
busy life, retaining the visible impress of the chains
that once bound him, and inveterate manners and
customs still betraying the old man, nevertheless,
he had heard the call of grace, and, according to the
measure of strength given him, he was travelling out
of this "valley of the shadow of death" by a steep
and painful path, wet by his sweat and his tears.
Jesus is the most tolerant of beings, because He
is the most holy.
(3.) Social Questions: Equality and Christianity-
Property-Rich and Poor.
Society should tend to realise between men all
such equality as is consistent with justice; equality,
if not this, is at bottom inequality, for what is
called equality would be better named proportion.
All inequalities which are at once artificial, arbitrary,
useless, and excessive, may be regarded as evils, and
we ought to consider it a good that each one here
below should be all that he is qualified for being.
Christianity agrees with natural philosophy and
rational politics in demanding, if not as a very great
advantage for those interested therein, at least as
essentially conformable to the idea of justice, the
employment of all means not spoliatory or inimical
to the fundamental laws of human nature, which
appear adapted to lead each man, by means of work,
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
279
to the greatest amount of prosperity consistent with
the measure of his strength and the nature of his
faculties.
Human equality, according to the idea that we
instinctively attach to it, is a still ruder thing than
human justice, itself so desperately rude. If the
question regard happiness (as it ought), it is impos-
sible to make the shares equal, impossible to measure
them. Thus, in respect to equality or inequality, we
can but deal with material well-being, the only one
that is pursued, aimed at, coveted by all alike. This
kind of happiness is susceptible of proof and mea-
surement. The question is to know whether society
should apply itself to rendering all its members
equal in this particular. We believe that society,
which, were it still theoretic or philosophical, would
have another end in view, cannot, from the stand-
point to which it reduces itself, avoid gravitating
towards an order of things in which the indus-
trious man shall never want the necessaries of life,
and where the desire of a better condition, when
favoured inwardly by the faculties of the individual
who feels it, shall no more meet outwardly-that is,
in social institutions-with invincible obstacles.
We may represent to ourselves a partisan of
equality and a champion of liberty as reaching the
same moral elevation. Both these ideals may be
loved with a savage love and in a spirit most hostile
to civilisation; but if we consider these two pursuits,
these two affections, as exemplified in history, the
280
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
one appears nobler than the other, and there is no
reciprocal solidarity between them. The love of
liberty is not generally united with the sentiment
of envy; the love of equality is often only its ex-
pression or its disguise. The pursuit of liberty leads
to that of equality; the love of equality may ally
itself with the hatred of liberty. The equality that
is possible under despotism is one of the consolations
(shall I say one of the charms?) of the slavery of
such a rule. Civil liberty, less ardently desired by
many than political, in every case demands the
latter as its guarantee and complement.
Political liberty might be more justly called a
power, and then the stern moments of the political
well-being of individuals, considered with reference
to the whole, would be liberty, power, and equality.
Let us, however, preserve to the two first-we may
do so without inconvenience-the common name
of liberty.
A minimum of liberty, a minimum of equality,
are essential; no political society is endurable, or
even conceivable, without a certain degree of both.
Society itself, as society, is the consecration of the
two. But neither the plenitude of both, nor even
the highest degree of liberty and equality compatible
with the existence of society, can be presented as
absolute truths independent of time and circum-
stance. What in these respects is just and good, and
consequently true, at any given epoch, was not so
at a preceding epoch. Apart from the minimum
*
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
281
of which we have spoken, and which to us appears
determined by the eternal and inviolable right that
each man has to be a man, there only remains a
relative truth. Full liberty, complete equality, may
be at certain times revoltingly unjust and false.
Property, society, liberty, three terms closely
united; each is comprised in the other two, and each
comprehends or implies the other two.
There are two such different ways of receiving
the doctrine of equality, that, according to the one,
it is indeed equality that you wish and seek for,
while according to the other, it is, on the con-
trary, really inequality.
The double desire of ruling and being ruled seems
to be more ancient, and to lie deeper, than the desire
to be equal.
To whom, in point of fact, have we got to prove
human equality? To none, for all the world believe
in it. But to whom must we teach the love of this
principle, the practice of this truth? To all the world.
The important thing to ascertain is not whether
equality triumphs in opinions and laws, but whether
it triumphs in men's hearts; if it be loved for its
truth and holiness; loved with a pure and religious
affection.
Sin, which I allow renders inequalities hurtful, and
perhaps exaggerates them, is not, however, their prin-
ciple. So soon as one man is born with more talent
and in more favourable circumstances than another
(and this depends on the will of God), that man
282
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
possesses means of outstripping and surpassing others.
Hence inequalities of every kind. Since they are
the works of God, it does not belong to us to blame
them, and it is impossible that they should be evil.
:
By Divine appointment there is in this world of
ours, bread for all hunger, clothes for all nakedness, a
consoler for every affliction, a satisfaction for every
want the balance would have been exact if we had
not disturbed it; it is not God who is in fault, it is
ourselves. He had only instituted or permitted in-
equality in order to give us room constantly to
remove or soften it. Even without removing it,
there is, here below, life and happiness for all; but
instead of placing the whole happiness of individuals
in their own personal position, and making it depend
upon their free will, God has placed a portion of it
in the hearts of others. God has willed that we
should be mutually indebted to each other. He has
laid on the rich and the poor, the strong and the
weak, the learned and the ignorant, a necessity for
meeting, for seeking each other out. He has decreed
that the re-establishment of the equilibrium should
be our work; it was not He who disturbed it, but He
has left us the choice between restoring or disturb-
ing it still further. I know well that it is disturbed.
In departing from God man has departed from his
fellow-man; charity does not proportionately fill up
the gaps left by distress; the abundance of these
- abundance, I mean, of every kind-does not
supply the destitution of those, so that there is
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
283
on earth far more misery than God willed there
should be.
The grand leveller is Christian love.
The Christian consents to inequality, but it is
equality that is sacred in his eyes. In this sense he
goes farther than the worldly man most zealous for
equality. For if in those who have received more
graces than he, he honours remarkable monuments
of the power of God, he also humbles himself before
those whom he has outstripped.
There is an essential equality between men; the
Gospel consecrates it. There are accidental but ne-
cessary inequalities between them; these the Gospel
accepts. Or rather, let us say that the heart of the
Christian loves this equality and consents to these
inequalities.
All love proceeds from some joy; the love of
equality from the joy of salvation.
The principle of equality weakens with the reli-
gious sentiment, just as that sentiment weakens when
it is left to itself; but when God powerfully protects
religious ideas, when He renders Himself present and
sensible to a people to such a point that the whole
existence of that people is, as it were, interpenetrated
with religion, then there is nothing to fear for the
principle of equality. A religious people will always
pay it homage; and the feeling of equality that it
entertains will always be proportioned to its senti-
ment for God;-for the same reason that all haughti-
ness is brought low in God's presence, all high things
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bow down, and all lowly things are exalted, in
an order of things where everything is done in the
presence and name of God, and where God manifests
Himself by miracles and by special protection.
In the absence or contempt of religion, nothing re-
mains to protect human dignity and the principle of
equality, but an instinct which is too vague, and a sen-
timent which is too feeble, to make head against a pride
which becomes ferocious when it is not dominated.
The sentiment of human equality is always in
exact proportion with the sentiment of God's pre-
sence; because we want a basis for man's respect for
man, and this basis can be no other than God, and it
is not possible, because not just, to continue to reve-
rence man when one has ceased to reverence God.
We claim purely and simply for every man the
right to be man; and here it is that we find the
long-sought principle of human equality.
We are equal, in that we are equally subject as
men to one supreme law; a law more necessary, more
essential to our human condition, than the very neces-
sity of dying.
What real and essential difference can we imagine
between two creatures who, both equally and without
any intermediate agency, correspond with God? And
what inequality can we imagine between them if not
that of obedience?
Christians are not first equals and then brothers;
they are first brothers, and then, because they are
brothers, they are equals.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
285
A coarse notion of commerce leads us to believe that
the gain of one party of necessity involves a loss for
the other: an idea injurious to the providence of God
-an idea which can only have sprung from the decline
of primitive faith-an idea which at its very origin is a
sin! The progress of intelligence has already begun
to dispel these prejudices, and to draw peoples nearer
to each other; but instruction can no more do every-
thing in one direction than ignorance can in another;
and just as ignorance would not have sufficed to
isolate nations if, in the sentiment of God's father-
hood, they had found that of their mutual brother-
hood, so science is unable, merely by connecting men
through their interests, to make them truly and in
their hearts neighbours one of another. Interest and
good sense do not suffice to create that universal
fraternity that no external cause could have destroyed
or weakened, if the internal and Divine principle on
which it was founded had not first of all been over-
thrown in the heart of man.
The Gospel nowhere tells us that men are equal:
a truth that it doubtless does not deny, but which,
as it were, it ignores, so much is it beneath the
point of view and the spirit of Christ. But it
tells us that we are members of one body, all ac-
cepted, all necessary, all subordinated to the same
Master, in whom is found the principle of our
common life.
For a large number of those whom we continue
through habit to call members of the social body,
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there is a great deal of isolation, and society, as far
as they are concerned, is very much like a desert.
It is necessary that society, under the auspices of
an enlightened charity, should more and more become
a living and spontaneous force, and that the most
unfortunate should at last be able to feel that they
do in fact belong to it, as limbs belong to the body.
We are tending, it seems to me, to this result, and
I believe that we shall eventually reach it. The
solidarity of all with respect to all, that Christian
idea that certain seek coarsely to parody, is gradually
penetrating all consciences, and when once convic-
tion and honest will are present, is it likely that
means should always fail?
Even without philosophy, the most simple observers
may assert, putting the extremes on both sides out of
the question, that poverty has charms wealth never
knew; the number and facility of enjoyments are
compensated by their keenness; farther removed
from the gifts of fortune, poverty remains closer to
those of nature; to it alone the intimate sweet-
nesses of family life disclose their whole secrets, ex-
hale all their perfumes; in default of other treasures,
those of love open out more widely; hearts are nearer
to each other in a narrow dwelling; less diverted, less
called away by the world, one gives oneself up more
undisturbedly to duties that are delights; mutual
services, less facile, but more direct, more personal,
are also better appreciated. Baucis and Philemon
were "happy not to owe to a domestic the pleasure
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
287
or obligation of the attention they mutually paid
each other." This is not romance, but history; but
that which is above both history and romance is the
declaration of eternal truth, which has openly given
the preference to the condition of the poor.
There is an enmity, secret or open-but at all
events necessary-between the poor and the rich;
not because these are rich and those poor, but be-
cause they are all men, and "shapen in iniquity."
This is the only reason why this inequality should
be a disorder, and this has been the cause of its
excess. But for this unfortunate moral condition,
wealth and poverty, confined within proper limits,
would both alike be blessings under two forms. The
Gospel, which has not disguised from us to which
of these states the greatest danger attaches, has
afforded means to neutralise in both the venom that
corrupts them: the rich Christian oppresses, offends,
despises no one; the poor Christian knows neither
impatience nor envy; and each, without formally
changing situations, realises the touching aspect of
society inaugurated by that expression of Jesus
Christ, "The poor ye have with you always." The
world holds another language; it says to the rich,
"The poor ye have always against you;" and to the
poor, "The rich shall always be against you." Thus
the rich corrupts the poor, and the poor repays him
in kind, till we hardly know with which the initia-
tive lies.
Property, which has served as the basis of gradual
.
288
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civilisation, is also the foundation of individual im-
provement. We attach ourselves to the fruits of
our labours; we respect ourselves in our under-
takings; self-esteem becomes a fortune that we will
not throw away; it brings with it the craving for
the esteem of others; and thus, from a little ease of
circumstance, a little having, moral habits which profit
the whole community spring up in the individual.
It does not belong to all, nor is it expedient in
every case to give free scope to an indignation that
falls directly on, and stops short at, one particular
class of society. If it be neither judicious nor
generous to preach the duties of the poor to the
rich, it is scarcely more so to preach the duties of
the rich to the poor.
3. Manifestation of our Convictions.
(1.) Definition—Necessity of Manifestation.
Conviction is but the submission of the mind after
a certain conflict, its decision after a period of un-
certainty.
No truth is more completely our own possession,
or becomes more entirely part of ourselves, than
one that we have long combated. To be convinced
is to be vanquished.
To manifest our religious conviction is to draw
from our soul, in order to produce it in broad day-
light, what that soul contains of most secret and.
profound; what in every situation, public and pri-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
289
vate, is of least immediate and least actual interest,
and yet is that whose manifestation most compro-
mises the repose of our life.
When an opinion is of importance in men's eyes
generally, or merely in the judgment of those among
whom we are placed, whatever the degree of import-
ance it may have in our own sight, it yet behoves
us spontaneously to declare and frankly to profess
our ideas thereupon.
We owe religious truth to our brethren as soon as
ever we know it-we are debtors here in the strictest
sense of the term,-for truth, properly understood,
is no one's private property. An advantage that
may be communicated without loss to the possessor
must not remain exclusively his. If this proposition
be not true the whole of morality is nought.
Everything stands or falls by this. That which
we do not believe ourselves obliged, and feel ourselves
impelled, to spread abroad, is no conviction.
He who does not respect and honour the truth
that is in him has no moral sense; he who denies
the truth before man inwardly despises it.
The proper time to speak truth is just so soon
as we know it, for it always appears at its own
appointed hour, and we have not the power of
speaking premature truths; indeed, it is not we who
give these truths to our age, it is our age from which
we receive them; so that when one of them breaks
upon our minds, we may boldly utter it, without
fear of being premature.
Ե
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
In many cases, to have spoken is to have done
nothing, because in many cases speaking has no
consequences attached to it, and is little more than
an opening through which the courage for action
evaporates and gets lost; and to have spoken is to
have done nothing in all cases where it is evident
to the public that we might have both acted and
spoken at once. To speak without acting, when
acting is possible, is the refuge of semi-convictions
and semi-courage.
Were we the only ones to be true, we are bound
to be so. This duty is individual, independent
of circumstances, proportioned only to itself, and
expects its sanction and its opportunity from no one
particular condition of humanity. Like virtue, or
moral truth taken in its generality, it neither grows
nor diminishes with prevalent manners and customs;
immortal type that it is, it measures everything,
society and the individual both, with itself, and
its claims are subject to no deduction.
If Solon proclaimed as a bad citizen whoever in
the midst of civil discords refused to take a part,
society, no less severe, sees in every man who main-
tains an obstinate silence on the subject that engages
its attention to be a bad citizen of the republic of
minds.
Even if want of courage had more excuses than
it has, the duty of one who holds the truth is to
speak it with or without hope; is not to allow to
events merely, the honour of demonstrating or en-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
291
forcing it; is not to permit that, introduced by
necessity as by an ignorant midwife, it should come
into the world still-born, instead of alive and
vigorous. Whoever inclines to leave truth alone, to
fare as she may, is no friend of hers; he does more
than hate, he denies her: for if truth be only proved
by facts, if it have no other sanction than utility,
it has neither sanction nor proof, and we may even
say that, being entirely relative, retaining no longer
anything absolute, it is no longer truth.
Every conviction that we fear or disdain to mani-
fest, is unworthy of the name; for if conscience
do not urge us to make it known, what proof
have we that conscience presided at its birth? or,
if it did so, what kind of conscience is that which
believes itself bound to a truth, compelled to accept
it, and yet does not feel its obligation to profess or
even to confess it?
If we were at liberty to keep all the rest of our
thoughts to ourselves, those that we entertained re-
specting religion could not remain our secret; for
our conviction on these subjects so profoundly and
practically qualifies us, that society only knows what
we really are in relation to her, by what she knows
us to be in relation to God.
Sincerity and candour in the profession of religious
doctrines is for society a test of moral health; so
long as this virtue be held in honour, all moral
convictions are safe; but with the dissimulation of
religious thought, will come in rapid succession, dog-
-
I
1
292.
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
matic and moral indifferentism, the preference of
the expedient to the right, and finally the complete
demolition of moral ideas.
Both as to religion, feeling, and doctrines, what
a man does not say is more characteristic and more
important to us in forming a judgment of him than
all that he does say. Silence is in general more
significant than words; we believe little, believe ill,
and hardly love at all what we are content to keep
always unspoken.
To retain truth captive is to retain God himself
in captivity; it is to cheat those to whom He belongs
as much as to us; it is to hinder His being spread
abroad in the hearts of men; it is to steal away the
bread of him who is dying of hunger. All other refusals
may have their reason and find their excuse; there
is neither excuse nor reason for the refusal of the
truth. We do not in all cases owe bread to men,
but in all we owe them truth.
We may conceive a sincere conviction remaining
silent, but not of its making a right, still less a duty,
of silence. To whosoever with deliberate purpose
keeps truth a prisoner, we are authorised to say that
he does not possess it; the religious conviction
which refuses to express, by that alone disavows
itself; it is not convinced, and a religion that should
(I do not say enjoin, but) permit silence would
have thereby pronounced its own condemnation; I
should know it to be false from that one sign.
In the silence of a believer we recognise at once
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
293
either a lack of affection or of conviction, and in
each case alike an absence of religion; for true
religion should at once give happiness and touch
the heart.
In vain should we seek to persuade ourselves that
the interests of truth would be better served by
sacrificing a portion of it in order to remain united
with our brethren, than by separating ourselves from
them in order to retain truth in its entirety. A per-
verse reasoning, an infidel suggestion this! for, in
the first place, what certifies you that, having sacri-
ficed truth on one point, you will not sacrifice it
on all others? What do you expect us to discover
in this first weakness but the guarantee of a second?
You desire by a little dissimulation to be of service
to your fellow-creatures, but of all services that
you can possibly render them, the greatest is the
one you withhold; the greatest is to teach them that
conscience goes for something, that is to say, that
it is everything; and as you can only teach this in
action-as any other mode of instruction will glide
over the surface of their souls like a blunted dart
over a polished cuirass-you ought eagerly and
thankfully to embrace all occasions of rendering
homage to conscience, and consequently of very often
appearing beside yourselves with the foolishness of
Christianity.
Christianity alone has made the publication of
his sentiments a duty, and more than a duty, to the
believer it is his imperious want, his essential cha-
294
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
racteristic; and, urging on to the same end by
two parallel ways, giving to proselytism two motives
at once, gratitude and charity, it has highly dis-
tinguished itself above all other religions, has put
itself out of the pale of comparison with these, by
the zeal of its partisans in publishing, defending,
and propagating their belief.
The Divine Founder of Christianity has conse-
crated the principle that there is a duty towards
truth; that truth itself is holy and precious; that
we are at liberty neither to decline its acquirement
nor to hold back its expression; that it is the
supreme good of the whole world, the good of each
man in particular, his right and his duty.
I shall always doubt a conviction that is unac-
companied by peace. I hold that calm is essential
to an earnest conviction, as it is to all serious actions
and dispositions. Emotion may indeed make the
voice tremble, but it will never be the emotion of
anger; energy may accent the words and give them
a power to thrill, but never passion.
What is earnest is naturally tranquil; and in
proportion as our opinions are most serious, they
the less compromise our peace. Conscience intro-
duced into our debates will soon soften their asperity
and ennoble their character.
The more earnest a belief, the more it measures
and counts its words.
It seems as though the manifestation of eacli
one's religious conviction were just that which is
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
295
most repugnant to himself, and yet most import-
ant to all; alike that with which society has
least to do, and that about which she is most
anxious; what she can best dispense with, and yet
dispense with least; the most extraneous of all
things, and yet the most essential to life; the most
external to, and yet the most intimately involved in
the affairs of the world.
Strong convictions, of which the object is serious,
consequently religious convictions above all, and
pre-eminently, if not exclusively, Christian convic-
tions, will prove those which cause the want of
independence to reach its highest point of intensity.
Indeed, as it seems to us, tenacity, constancy, and
heroism in the maintenance of opinion is a loan
the world has received from Christianity; before its
appearance how poor and pale human dignity was in
this particular!-poor as were the beliefs to which it
was reduced to attach itself. With Christianity the
principle seems to have been born; Christian convic-
tion, so full of self-respect, teaches all conviction to
respect itself; the right and the duty of speaking out
truth simultaneously assert themselves; the principle
of liberty of conscience passes from religion into phi-
losophy; Christian martyrs give martyrs to Platon-
the rights of thought are solemnly inaugurated
in the world; human dignity is completed.
ism;
Every time that an individual has an opinion, and
feels an obligation spring for him out of the opinion,
he has the right to call this opinion conscientious, and
រ
1
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
296
י,
་
no one being able to penetrate into the soul of that
man, no one can dispute the appellation he has been
pleased to confer.
There can be no right against right, no duty
against duty, no necessity against necessity; and if
it be the right of an individual to make manifest
his belief, it is equally the duty of society to respect
that manifestation. Each of these truths implies
the other.
Moral ideas, which are society's true cement,
would dissolve and disappear all at once if ever
the day came when it was admitted that conscience,
which is their seat, had not the right to manifest
itself.
You must not sacrifice one single hair of your
brother's head to the very belief for which you
would do well to lay down your own life.
(2.) Manifestation and Enlightenment—Manifestation
independent of Perfection—Advantage.
It has been said that "prior to the duty of
obeying our conscience comes that of enlightening
it," but it should have been added that true con-
scientiousness never inverts this order; and under
this head we may say, without a paradox, that the
man who does not know, but is seeking the truth,
is far more in the truth than one who holds but
does not love it.
If it be self-evident that we must first have con-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
297
victions before we can express them, it is less evident,
but equally true, that in order truly to have them,
visibly and energetically to feel their possession, in
order that they should live in us, it is essential that
they be expressed.
The life of faith is kept up by action, and the
better where this action is a sacrifice. If no one
thoroughly knows his own thought till he has ex-
pressed it, so, too, no one really possesses a convic-
tion till he has manifested it.
God alone sets souls free, and in order to have
courage to bring their convictions to light, they
must first of all have convictions, have at least a
conviction of the duty of frankly manifesting them-
selves.
Where should we be in the matter of beliefs if
we insisted upon their always being guaranteed by
the ideal and impossible perfection of those who
profess and teach them? What belief could stand
this singular test? Nay, I go further; zeal in
seeking, spreading, contending for truth is naturally
and almost necessarily allied with a passionate
character, and such a one is sure to lead to aberra-
tions and excesses. Let us then submit to hear
the truth from all mouths, to receive it from all
men; it is neither to this nor that human being that
it belongs, but to God; and whatever may be the
instrument He is pleased to choose, He does so freely,
with the view, no doubt, of teaching us to reverence
truth for itself, and to exercise our judgment, as
•
298
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
the law, should administer justice, without respect of
persons.
We only adhere strongly to what we have been
free to deny.
He who is resolved always to obey his conviction
carries within him a principle of order which applies
to all things; and the fruit, the natural effect of this
moral disposition, being to lead to a careful search
as to where duty lies, it follows that there is almost
invariably a faithful correspondence between this
sentiment and correct moral notions; and if consci-
ence does happen to misapprehend one, it surrounds
all the others with sacred inviolability. Only give
me men with consciences, and I will show you a
people where union and subordination prevail.
I do not believe in duties without dangers; and
the more encompassed with sacrifices an obligation
may be, the more imperious does it appear to me.
Sacrifice and duty are correlatives. If the profes-
sion of our convictions cost us nothing, threatened
none of our interests, I should doubt its having been
commanded. Nothing is commanded but what may
injure, and danger is the seal and sanction of
virtue.
In proportion as the storm is greatest, and public
indignation most keen, you will find that the truth
that grows in your conscience grows also in the
public conscience.
A conviction is fortified and sanctified by all that
it costs us.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
299
Every relation founded on a voluntary and inten-
tionally prolonged misunderstanding, every fiction
matching two souls who at bottom tend towards
contrary ends, is derogatory to human dignity.
(3.) Fictions and Opinions-Effect of Manifestations—
State Church.
We must remember that on religious subjects
everything is better than reticence and legal fiction,
and that to attack the truth is also a manner of
announcing it.
Every heart sold into bondage to passion contains
by anticipation a secret sentence of ostracism against
a soul which by its obedience to the internal law is
furnished with the privilege of independence.
There are two ways of obtaining peace,-the silence
of those who know the truth; or others allowing it to
be uttered, and listening to it.
Between persons, enamoured of truth or sincerely
resolved to accept it, the free manifestation of beliefs,
even though these be diametrically opposed, is on
the whole rather favourable than adverse to the
cordiality of mutual relations.
It is better to touch, even if we jar, than always
to shun each other.
Men used to hide ideas, now-a-days ideas hide
men; this difference may be merely one of opinion,
the opinion is a fact, and a powerful one.
Liberty, which I do not make the source of
300
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all social welfare, is, in my opinion, its necessary
condition; but the present state of things affords
motives for doubt and uneasiness. On one side,
political life, by taking us out of ourselves and
incessantly blending us one with another, renders
our life more superficial in proportion as it extends,
communicates, and diffuses it. Now, some degree of
solitude is necessary to the formation of strong con-
victions. Social intercourse, if too frequent and too
animated, agitates, raises, holds in solution, and
floating within us, elements that require to be
stationary in order to combine and crystallise. The
meditation necessary to conviction is hardly pos-
sible on the public parade where we live. I allude
to the press with its myriad publications, and to
the newspapers with their contradictory declama-
tions.
All this noise prevents us from hearing the inner
voice; or else, by blending with it, it produces in our
mind I know not what equivocal results, more properly
named opinion than conviction, and often as little
personal as possible.
We must not either disguise from ourselves, that
in this new social system there is a permanent
conspiracy against our individuality; and nothing,
indeed, more threatens our internal liberty than
the external, in the midst of which we live, and in
which we participate. This organised liberty has
opened out a road to power for individual ambition;
but it is only under the escort of public opinion that
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
301
we are able to enter upon this road; it is this opinion
that we must captivate and in a manner formularise;
accordingly we make everything concur to this end :
we appeal to hopes and fears; we intoxicate ima-
gination and self-love; we stir personal affections;
we act by words and things; it is true we do not
disdain good arguments when wanted, but in a
general way we agitate, and it is in calm alone that
true convictions are formed and embraced. What is
called opinion is little more than personal feeling
or preference. Few people are actual proprietors of
their opinion; very few indeed are able to define it
to themselves; very few have, after receiving it from
others, appropriated it by reflection. As all existing
order rests upon opinion, it behoves us to have one;
we provide ourselves with it as with a house; we
rent our opinion, but we are not responsible for it;
we do not die with its death, for it never formed part
of our life, res perit domino; however, we defend it
warmly as long as it lives, and this factitious warmth,
deceiving him who manifests it to begin with, still
more easily deceives lookers on, so that at the very
time when there are fewest personal convictions,
and when, in this respect, there are no longer indi-
viduals, but only masses, the human conscience
appears more directly engaged and more active than
ever.
Conviction in our time does not sufficiently
differ from opinion. It leans too much upon
reasoning, not enough upon conscience. Conscience
302
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is too little questioned, too little exercised. Men do
not sufficiently appeal to it for the evidence and
confirmation of primary truths. Immediate and sim-
ple faith is rare.
There is nothing now-a-days that people pique
themselves more upon than the having an opinion,
nothing that is more bashfully concealed than a con-
viction.
So long as an opinion remain an opinion, we
are wanting both to those who profess it and to
ourselves if without due examination we attack it
by bold conjectures, by raillery, sarcasm, ridicule ;
by encouraging all reports that are unfavourable
to it; in a word, by running, in mere lighthearted-
ness, the fearful chance of warring against the
truth.
Private persons are exercising a real tyranny as to
opinions when they judge them without being ac-
quainted with them; when they hamper their mani-
festation, or in any way whatsoever offend those who
profess them. All opinions have a natural right to
express themselves freely, and to be examined before
they are condemned. This is the only respect they
exact, or indeed allow.
The novelty of an opinion is never a reason for
rejecting it. Our firmest and best-founded beliefs
have once been new; and time, while rendering
them homage, has not in any way added to their
truth.
Truth of character is in the eyes of all the world
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
303
a fundamental virtue, and the bond of all other vir-
tues. And were we to ask, not this or that indivi-
dual, but humanity at large, how far the obligation
to be true extends, how high it rises-the answer
would be a refusal to assign it any limit.
The courage of conviction lies not only in resisting
the influence of numbers, but in withstanding the
authority of people who far surpass us in talent and
acquirements. If this were not a thing possible, the
universe would be given up to the mercy of genius;
whereas it is essential to the cause of moral truth,
right, and justice, that conscientious convictions
should be able to hold their ground against it.
There must be somewhere or other an evidence
stronger than all the phantoms to which a powerful
imagination, or powerful dialectic, may give a false
air of truth. Conscience must be fortified, so that
the simplest and most ignorant may have a refuge
from the tyranny of intellect, and an impregnable
position amidst the conquests of science. The in-
ternal primordial truths that form part of our nature
must not be at the mercy of a syllogism or a quo-
tation.
It is no such slight matter to be in an attitude of
contradiction to the rest of men; that is to say, for
each one of us to be so in regard to our relations, our
town, or our country. This opposition, more par-
ticularly if it be calm and persistent, is just what
men least readily pardon.
Publicity is in its own sphere what familiarity is
304
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
in that of private relations; it accustoms man to
man; it tramples under foot many littlenesses; it de-
prives the cowardice of self-love of many disgraceful
refuges; it stamps a more virile character upon our
civic life. But has it succeeded in making a
duty of that very openness of which it almost makes
a necessity? Do we press forward, or only allow our-
selves to be dragged into this vivid light? And
when we openly manifest our thought, have we not in
view rather the consolations of glory than the secret
approbation of conscience? In the midst of all these
declamations, these protestations, there is the same
reserve, the same mystery about all that it is our
interest to hide. Underneath the noise, there is the
old silence; the soul, as before, is veiled; it betrays
itself in its passion, as it always has betrayed, but it
does not communicate or shed itself around any more.
If State Churches have not been founded with the
view of repressing the free manifestation and free
formation of beliefs, it is at all events through
hatred of their principle that they are supported at
the present time by a large number of their advo-
cates; it is the dread of this principle which gives
them credit in the eyes of the crowd; in a word, they
exist in antagonism to it. And whatever may be the
sentiments of those that uphold these churches, so much
is certain, that they constantly repress and deaden
this principle; that they constantly cause it, as it
were, to miscarry; they crown with honour, they clothe
with the conventional authority of time, space, and
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
305
number, the twofold servility of imitation and habit;
and their silent sapping shakes even more and more
not only the foundations of true religiousness, but the
very basis of human morality; in a word, they com-
pletely embody the error which we are opposing.
II.-SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS.
1. Relations between the Individual and Society.
(1.) Individuality: Its Definition — Excellence — In-
alienable Character-Individuality—Personality
-Individualism-Objections.
Individuality is felt, can be expressed, but does not
define itself; nor do the most intimate and involun-
tary operations of organic life more obstinately elude
our analysis.
Individuality is that combination of human quali-
ties which distinguishes one being from all his fel-
lows, and does not allow him to be confounded with
any one of them. Despite the simplicity of this de-
finition, individuality is a mysterious something, of
which the most subtle analysis can give no exact
account. Under all the elements that are named
lies something which we cannot name; the former
have produced and yet cannot explain it. By this
it is that the abstract passes into the concrete, and
that common become proper names. We may ask
ourselves if individuality be not an imperfection; if
a perfect agreement of parts with the whole would not
efface individuality; if a being be not individual,
X
306
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
We answer that in-
precisely through those qualities which render him
less fitted to assimilate himself to the great unity,
and to concur with the general harmony? we may
inquire whether the idea of moral perfection does
not exclude that of individuality, and whether the
perfect being be not without any other character
than that of perfection? Thus Paul, Peter, John,
had each their own character; but we do not
speak thus of Jesus. . .
dividuality is not itself an imperfection, but one of
the conditions attached to the imperfection of human
nature. The perfect being is, so to speak, one with
his qualities: is lost in them; is abstract and con-
crete both; is hardly more than the proper name of
perfection. Say Jesus, or say love, you have said
one and the same thing. But for all that, we must
not imagine that in proportion as a human being ad-
vances towards perfection he becomes less individual;
on the contrary, he must be so to advance towards
that end. A being perfect by nature can dispense
with individuality—he has perfection; a being en-
tirely vicious can equally dispense with it—he has
his passions. The first is fused with his good quali-
ties, the latter with his vices. A third being, belong-
ing to neither category, needs to find amongst the
various elements of his being some one prominent
point determining all the rest, and serving as centre
and fulcrum, which may make him self-conscious,
secure a direction to his will, and a form to his life;
for such a one is in the fortunate and unfortunate
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
307
situation of being sufficiently determined neither
by his virtues nor his vices. Between these two ele-
ments individuality comes in.
Individuality is the basis of our peculiar worth;
for in order to be anything we must begin by being,
or in other words, our qualities must be our own.
In this sense individuality is rare; and we do not
exaggerate when we say that most men, instead of
living at home, live in other people's dwellings, have,
as it were, a lease of their opinions and their mora-
lity, for longer or shorter terms indeed, but this
difference goes for nothing. Intelligence and deve-
lopment of mind are not certain guarantees of in-
dividuality.
The individuality of the soul and of the mind have
different effects; the latter separated from the former
divides and rends. They must be united; the one to
feel, the other to comprehend; the one to describe,
the other to explain; the one, in short, to complete
the other, for how should we understand what we
do not feel, or properly explain what we are unable
to describe? Synthesis, too often banished from
science, is nevertheless a scientific instrument; and
till lately its absence has constituted the great defect
of our histories. Without poetry there can be no
exactness.
Individuality only dates from itself, and is only
responsible to God; it is planted in humanity as
the plant is in the soil, and like the plant too, it
bathes its branches in the nourishing air of heaven.
308
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Individuality receives indeed, but by a force which is
within itself, which is its very self, and converts all
it receives into its own substance. It inherits, but
it accepts; it reproduces, gives in its turn, adds to
that common fund which, after all, is formed by the
concurrence of individualities, and has drawn nothing
from without. For suppress in thought all advances
of individual spontaneity, what is left in the general
treasury? Absolutely nothing at all.
Individuality may, it is true, succumb beneath num-
bers, may yield, abdicate; but whatever diminishes it
diminishes the man himself, and if the absorption could
be complete, the word man would designate merely
a material organism furnished with a dialectical ap-
paratus. The two qualities of man and individual
are inseparable; the one cannot be lost without the
other; and one of our fondest cares, as well as one of
the highest problems of education, is to preserve
individuality.
Every man must be an individual of some kind,
but every man has not got an individuality.
Every mind has probably some ideas of its own;
but it is not every mind that can penetrate into its
own ideas through the successive layers formed by
the ideas of others, or of the world at large, by which
our own are always more or less thickly covered.
The question, then, is how to get down to our own
selves. This kind of artesian well is not to be bored
by logic or analysis, which may, indeed, in certain
matters lead to truth, but cannot lead to self-dis-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
309
covery. The bore wanted here, and which I hardly
know how to name, is something more native and
less complicated; it is a certain boldness of mind,
and perhaps of character, which does not always be-
long to the cleverest or most learned, and which,
although it do not immediately lead to truth, is
nevertheless one of the most precious instruments in
this research of it; since before we seek, and in order
to seek, we must first have found that me which is
the agent in the research. We are deeply indebted to
all those who have been able to distinguish and re-
cognise their own voice in the midst of that confused
medley of so many strange voices, where one's own
is so easily lost, till at length it sounds to us the
most strange of all.
Individuality may be defined as an indivisible
unity, in this sense, that whatever we detach from it
is not a unity, but a simple fragment. Individuality
supposes organisation; wherever there is organisation
there is individuality. A tree is an individual.
Life, with the consciousness of life, constitutes
personality. Feeling without thought does not suf-
fice here. We must not only feel that we live; we
must know it, be able to tell ourselves that we live.
This is why an animal-unless we suppose that it
speaks to itself, that is to say, thinks-is not a person.
The fact of personality, less simple than that of
life, but equally primitive, is a profound mystery, as
are all facts of the same order, I mean of the un-
derived order.
310
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Personality implies individuality. The personal
being is still more fully and energetically individual
than the impersonal. Man is more individual than
the plant; but he too has ties, and because his ex-
istence is more rich, these ties are more numerous;
he is dependent, he is united; he is at the same
time a whole and part of a whole, as it were a
complete body, which at the same time is a member.
Individuality is inalienable: once developed by
contact with his fellows, the individual remains a
moral being, having relations of his own with the
law of duty, with the Infinite, with God.
The pagan mysteries prove that individuality and
community (for since the fall the latter implies the
former) required a free scope, that the institutions of
public religion did not secure for, nay, did not even
allow them.
An individuality has not two editions.
There are impossible sacrifices. There is no aim
that can either compensate or justify the sacrifice of
moral existence, of individuality.
It is certain that if we too much abstract indi-
viduality we deprive ourselves of the most energetic
spring of perfectibility, for it is in what he has of indi-
vidual that the true strength of each man, his moral
muscle, resides.
Each attempt at reform or improvement is indi-
vidual before it is collective.
Individuality is not individualism. This refers
everything to self; sees in all things self only;
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
311
individuality consists only in willing to be oneself
in order to be something. And doubtless it is better
for society that each should be something rather than
nothing.
Every separate being does not remain openly and
frankly individual, but each brings into the world
some portion or other of individuality. Some one
has said that “ we are born originals and die copies;"
and this is but too true. Society has a tendency to
assimilate, and consequently to absorb what properly
belongs to each of its members, or rather the less
vigorous individualities are led to throw their small
stock into the common fund. Those who have most
are least ready to give. But example, prejudice, in-
terest, all the forces ranged on the side of the
majority, easily get the better of more feebly con-
stituted souls. Thus we meet in society with pas-
sions, manners, morals, and few characters.
racter is too often confounded with passion.
Cha-
Observe a human being before the levelling ma-
chine has passed over him; study, if you have the
opportunity, some child directed and not annihilated
by that great system of extinction on which men
have pleased to bestow the name of education. You
will see, even in the least remarkable subjects, the in-
tention of Providence to make each being distinct from
all others, a little world in itself; just as, inversely,
it has made of humanity at large a collective man,
whose years are centuries. If any man has ever
borne by unanimous consent the title of great, depend
M
*
312
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
upon it his moral image has engraved itself in the
consciousness of all those who have known him, just
as a human face stamps itself in the memory of those
who have seen it. The men who have most freely
given themselves up to the general interest were
most certainly all eminently individual, so true is it
that individuality is not egotism. Glory has ever
been its portion, and cannot indeed be conceived
apart from it; for glory appertains only to force,
which resides in markedly individual characters alone.
A condition of great things in the real world, it is
no less so in the domain of art; to find and produce
it is the object and the triumph of poetry.
Individualism and individuality are two sworn
enemies, the first being the obstacle and negation of
all society, the second that to which society owes all
it possesses of savour, life, and reality.
Nowhere does individualism prosper more easily
than where there is an absence of individuality; and
there is no more atomistic policy than that of des-
potism.
This individuality to which we refer is not that
sensitive individuality which commonly takes the
name of egotism, or self-love, and to which we should
give that of individualism, if that word had not a
double meaning. An animal is, equally with man,
provided with that kind of individuality which is for
both alike a condition of felt existence, and for man
the starting point of self-devotion-for he possesses
himself in order to be able to give himself away.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
313
The individuality of which we speak, and which
alone deserves the name, is that by which a man,
similar in a general way to all beings of his species,
is, nevertheless, exactly similar to himself only,
appropriates what is common to all, and has, both
morally and intellectually, the right to say I.
Now it is very true that in the actual condition of
humanity that is to say, since the fall-the de-
velopment of this individuality is the occasion of
many divisions in society; but I maintain that it is
not their source, and that it would not produce them
without the egotism by which it is complicated and
envenomed. I also maintain that a society whence
individuality was banished would not be the more
peaceful in consequence, since, in suppressing it,
egotism would not have been suppressed; finally, I
say that egotism would find such suppression to its
advantage, since it would take possession of all the
room that the departure of moral and intellectual
individuality had left vacant in our souls, and that
thus human nature would revenge, by degrading, itself.
A society where individuality is proscribed may
be socialist but cannot be sociable; cannot be human,
cannot be living, cannot, in short, be a society at all;
it contradicts the design of God, and robs Him of
His own-I mean, Man.
Where is the proof that individuality is of the evil
one? that the effort to maintain it independent of
the power of the crowd and the yoke of tradition, the
scrupulous attention to the inner voice, the respect for
314
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
our own reason, the anxious search after truth,-who
shall say that all this is a fruit of sin? We, for our
part, will rather say that if all this be not actually the
truth, it is a step towards it; these are advances that
we make, pledges that we give to truth. Your indivi-
duality is no doubt that of a sinful creature, but it is
all of good that sin has left us, if it be left; the effect
of sin has been to weaken it; it is not a thing evil in
itself; its fault is to be feeble and often non-existent,
and the glory of the Gospel is to stimulate it in some,
to resuscitate it in the majority, and to purify it in all.
(2.) Individuality - Society-Christianity-Liberty
- Responsibility — Individuality and Socialism
-Man and Humanity.
The sentiment of individuality and the principle
of liberty (personal and no longer national merely),
the idea, in short, of the duality of man and society,
spring, for modern nations, under the inspiration of
evangelical dogmas—the dogma of the fall and that
of redemption.
It is religion which has maintained in all peoples
the stability and right of human personality, although
men have almost everywhere tried, by rendering re-
ligion national, to suborn it in favour of impersonality.
They have tried to make the gods they devised gods
of the nation rather than the individual. Neverthe-
less, the immediate relation of the individual man
with the Divine being, and the future life, having been
formally conceded, individuality found in it a resting-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
315
place, and, as it were, a guarantee. The Gospel came,
and this great idea, this idea which makes man to be
such, was crystallized by the Gospel into the purest
diamond. What then remained to be done by the
adversaries of the principle? Why, to make a re-
ligion out of the very abandonment of this principle,
that is to say, a religion against religion, for nothing
is more irreligious than a dogma that diminishes or
denies the principle of individuality. Catholicism
has done all it possibly could to weaken without
denying it; socialism, its heir, has gone a step
farther. In repudiating the idea of individual sal-
vation, or in treating it with a contempt that amounts
to exclusion, it has dealt blows to human personality,
of which it is fully conscious, and for which it ap-
plauds itself.
4
There may, up to a certain point, be individuality
without religion; there is no religion without indi-
viduality, and religion confirms and consecrates in-
dividuality even outside its own domain. Now
individuality is to the moral what the vertebral
column is to the physical man. It is, indeed, rather
the very substance of the man; it is by individuality
that he attains his true stature; and so long as he
remains below it, he may indeed hold the place of a
man on earth, but he is not really one. If man, as
has been said, be a religious being, he is only so
upon the condition of individuality, religion being
nothing but a relation between the Supreme Me and
the me of each one of us. Thus every system of
->
5
316
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
absorption must needs be an irreligious system; and
union, not unity, is the true name of the relation
that binds us to God in the act of adoration and in
that of obedience.
Religion, mighty to consecrate the principle of
individuality when she recognises it, is equally
adapted to encourage the opposite principle when
she bows down thereto.
Religion alone, we are fully convinced of it, can
successfully wrestle with socialism; but this is on
condition of not being itself socialistic.
The individuality that energetic thought had
difficulty in maintaining, and maintained but im-
perfectly in a small minority, becomes on the more
popular ground of duty and love the right of all
Christians. The most obscure of the worshippers of
Jesus can on occasion hold his ground against the
most learned of philosophers, the most passionate of
partisans. It is on the platform of liberty that God
has come to seek him. It was freely that he sub-
mitted himself to God. This deliberate and volun-
tary submission gives him an added stability; and
henceforth, with regard to the world, his dependence
constitutes his freedom,
A
Jesus Christ has taught the principle of indi-
viduality by creating it, or, if you will, by restoring
its freedom; He has placed it in the world by
placing it in religion, from whence it has spread into
all the spheres of life.
Of all purely human religions, as well as all pagan
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
317
systems of policy, not one has ventured to do homage
to individuality. The implicit negation of the
sovereignty of conscience is at the base of all
religious systems anterior or averse to Christianity.
It is a deep-drawn line of demarcation, or rather it
is an abyss between them and it. Judaism was the
bridge thrown across this abyss. It did not actually
consecrate the principle, but it prepared its advent.
The Gospel addresses itself to individuals. It is
not to an abstract negative man, neutralised by the
ideas of all other men, that it addresses its message
it is to you, to us, to him, to each one of us, just as
nature has made and given him. It is to each man
immediately that God has said in His Gospel,
"Come and let us reason together." Each man
is taken apart in what he has of peculiar and exclu-
sive. No collective being interposes between him
and God; no national or secular idea answers in his
name to the Divine interrogatory. It dealt with him-
self alone and exclusively, as though he were the only
one in the world, as though he were humanity.
Without this condition the word sounds in vain for
us, who are we ourselves no more.
To become Christians we must first of all be our-
selves. To make Christians, God wills first of all to
find men. Far, then, from dreading individuality,
this religion accepts, seeks it, strengthens, con-
secrates. How often it has exhumed from beneath a
thousand circumstances that personality which had
ceased to be ours, and which, without its powerful
318
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
appeal, would probably never have been redis-
covered! The Gospel loves individuality because it
is a force, and because the treasure it brings will only
be well preserved and well defended by the strong.
This is why it is eager to cultivate wherever it
finds it; and to awaken, to as it were create it, where
it was not apparent before.
The true Christian-he, I mean, who is so neither
by conventionality, inheritance, system, nor party
spirit (note carefully all these points),—the true
Christian is eminently individual, and all that cha-
racterised him before his conversion becomes more
defined and prominent after it.
This individuality does not isolate a man; how
indeed should he be isolated by a force which in
itself is by no means unsocial, and which has just
received the seal and impulse of charity?
I firmly believe that Christianity is destined to
maintain in the world that individuality which is
threatened by so many different causes. I also be-
lieve that it is from individuality we have to expect
the means of that social restoration invoked alike
by the most opposite in opinion.
Liberty, individuality, these two terms correspond
so exactly that we may call them synonymous; for
we are not free under the empire of irresistible laws
that deal with man as a species. And again, re-
ligion and individuality are inseparable terms.
collective religion is no religion at all.
Jesus Christ has willed to raise Christian obe-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
319
dience to the highest degree of spontaneity; and
the element of individuality, repressed in the old
economy, to the highest power. It is only when the
exercise of liberty is impossible that we are permitted
to wait; and even in that voluntary submission there
is some degree of liberty for the Christian. This
principle, forgotten till the sixteenth century, renders
Protestantism a very serious thing; and if we are
to rejoice in this restoration of the Gospel, and with
it of liberty and personal responsibility, we must
do so with trembling. But if the impossibility of
foreseeing and calculating the consequences of each
action were to prevent us from acting, it is clear
we should never act at all.
God, who knows the value of individuality better
than we, and who discerned beforehand the dangers
that would threaten and the means of preserving
it, God who, on the other side, has willed indivi-
duality and not individualism, has, by one same fact,
secured the one and repressed the other; the Gospel,
the most social of systems, is the most inviolable
asylum of individuality.
Such is the power of individual Christianity that
it revolutionises all our faculties, and gives them
an extraordinary impulse compared to their pre-
vious habits. This effect is not unknown to any
range of intelligence; the Christian sentiment adds
force to force itself; "it gives to him who hath,"
and shows that there is no affluence of genius which
may not receive some addition from a moral excita-
320
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
tion; but its efforts are peculiarly wonderful on
slow and indolent minds.
Christianity has only proclaimed formally the reli-
gious responsibility of the individual, but this was
enough; responsibility in matters of conscience implied
the sovereignty of the conscience; the consequence had
necessarily to be drawn at length from the principle :
it is so drawn! Everywhere, more or less, the
spiritual and the temporal are distinct as law and
morals, as crime and sin. This is not an accident,
but a necessity-not a passing phase, but the
normal and final state of society, a social truth
acquired by humanity, one of the axioms of science
and civilisation. But what then is this distinction
of the temporal from the spiritual if not in principle
and anticipation the distinction of two societies
which represent these two orders of interests-the
society of time and that of eternity?
Individuality is the true socialism, and the real
enemies of society are those who, refusing it nothing,
lend themselves by their silence to the convention
of a false religious unity, and render to Cæsar (that
is to say, to society) what belongs only to God.
True unity is guaranteed by individuality itself,
which finds its real sphere there.
People cry out in favour of society against indi-
viduality without seeing that it is because indivi-
duality is weak that society is so too, and that
the losses of the former can but impoverish the
latter. They forget that the more or less strong
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
321
cohesion of society has for its measure the very
individuality which is composed of conviction and
will. Who has said that individuality is formed
only of what divides and isolates, not of what binds
and reunites? Till when will men persist in con-
founding individuality with individualism? If the
true social unity be the harmony of thoughts and
the concurrence of wills, society will be so much
the more strong and real as there is the more of
will and thought in each of its members.
The more individual we are, the more human;
what there is in us of most primitive and most
general, consequently what associates us with hu-
manity at large, appears in the reverence for and
culture of individuality; these make us more uni-
versal, more cosmopolite, so that by one and the
same stroke the partial unity becomes living, the
total unity more real and more sensible.
And then, after all, individuality is humanity,
is life. He who has no individual life does not
really live, and only offers to our deluded eyes the
simulacrum of a human being. Such a one cheats
his destiny, for he traverses existence but as a shadow,
without reality; society lives in his place by virtue
of a power of attorney, which he has allowed it to
extort from him. The man is lost, in every sense,
by abdicating his individual character; for if indi-
viduality be neither salvation nor its earnest, it is
at least its indispensable condition. There is no
religious life, consequently no salvation, without it;
Y
322
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
and the faith which restores us to God begins by
restoring us to ourselves. We must be men in order
to become Christians.
How obtain men if you do not first of all re-
form individuals? To efface individuality is to
efface humanity, the human reality. To restore
individuals to society is to restore to it men. Man,
in fact, is only man on condition of being him-
self. By what he individually is, he loves, believes,
obeys. The abstract man has nothing more than
the appearance of all this; is a tree without sap,
a body without bones, is the mere type of man, not
really man. It would no doubt be vain to try and
banish authority, example, and habit from human
life; but they are sure enough to assert them-
selves, without our hurrying to throw the human
me, the human reality, into its three oubliettes.
Individuality does not consist in differing from
other men, but in realising under an individual
form, and hence more energetically, the general cha-
racteristics of humanity. To be individual is to be
as much as possible the proprietor of one's opinions,
one's feelings, one's whole being in short, instead of
being merely their tenant, the condition to which so
many of the most learned and enlightened men
have chosen to reduce themselves. Not only is
individuality far from being essentially a schism,
a heresy, but it is a chance of being better under-
stood, better felt; it is the principle of a vast and
living unity.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
323
God, out of love to all men, has willed that they
should form a society. He has ordained for these
beings the arrangement which suited them best; but
He has not created the beings for the arrangement.
He, the all-wise God, has seen and has declared it
not good for man to be alone; He has consequently
co-ordained man for man, has decreed that man
should be man solely by that contact, has linked
the development of all our faculties of soul and
mind with the social state, has rendered society as
essential to man as his heart or his brain, has only
willed him, conceived him, as associated; and just
as He has constituted him essentially complex by
the indissoluble union of soul and body, so He has
made him essentially social, causing his character
of man to depend upon that of member of a com-
munity. Thus we see that the importance of society
is great; but this importance, being entirely relative
to the individual, is only his own importance under
a different name; so that there is a great gulph from
our recognition of the facts above enumerated and
our representing to ourselves society as a being:
society has no existence out of the individual-nay,
it exists in that very individual as a tendency, a
want, an attribute; society is man seeking his fellow.
Touching and adorable mystery, that our passions
have covered with a bloody veil, and over which we
are now spreading the mist of our systems!
I want man complete, spontaneous, individual, in
order that he may submit himself as man to the
324
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
general interest. I would have him master of him-
self that he may be servant of all. I insist upon his
internal liberty in the interests of that Power which
claims to rule over it. Justice and reason, those
universal laws, are the sovereigns whose triumph.
individuality is to secure and enhance.
Is not individuality the gift of being freely and
spontaneously, under the form of our own peculiar
character, what many other souls equally are? It is
the proprie communia dicere of the poet, applied to
the moral man. Far from contrasting individuality
with unity, as with its opposite, we must connect it
therewith as means to an end. Consciences left to
themselves, essentially say the same thing. Struck
on a certain side, all souls give back much the same
tones. In any given number of individuals the more
distinct consciences we can count the less discord
will there be between them. Even the differences
that seem to proceed from the conscience, come in
reality from the mind and its weaknesses; conscience
may indeed ratify a false idea, but is not the original
deviser of it, and the more a man appeals to his con-
science the more probable is it that he will agree
with another man who has equally appealed to his.
I mean to say that, in general, two conscientious men
who sincerely enter into the depths of their own
spirit, there to seek practical direction, will be found
to agree. I might go further, and say that by making
an equally conscientious use of conscience all men
would become Christians; if not, where is the re-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
325
sponsibility of the unbeliever? But practically, con-
sciences are not identical, and cannot be so. The
dictamen of conscience has not the evidence that
leads to identity.
Every man who has caused humanity to take an
onward step-every man whose name is read in letters
of gold or fire in the annals of nations and the history
of art, has been gifted with intense individuality;
without this, no talent, no genius, no extended influ-
ence! But on the other hand there is no extended
influence, no genius, no talent, without those thoughts
which belong to all, in all times, and are, so to speak,
man himself, universal man. The power and charm
of individuality do not so much consist in having
thoughts which are only ours, as in expressing in
a manner peculiarly our own a thought which be-
longs to all the world. I say to all the world, with-
out excepting those that oppose it, proprie communia
dicere. Truth certainly is not individual, but yet it
must become so. This is the twofold mystery, twofold
magic of talent; you feel that there is in it a some-
thing that perfectly resembles itself alone, and yet
you find your own entire self-only luminous and
transfigured-therein. The double secret of the power
exerted by works of great genius consists in belong-
ing to their own epoch, and yet transcending it.
Montesquieu would not have written L'Esprit des
Lois a hundred years earlier; to produce such a
monument of genius it was necessary that he should
belong to, and yet dominate, the eighteenth century.
326
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
It is with the soul engaged in the life of religion,
or that of thought, as with the vessel launched upon
the waters, and seeking beyond the ocean for the
shores of a new world. This ocean is society, religious
or civil. It bears us just as the ocean does-fluid
mass, on which the vessel can indeed trace furrows,
but may nowhere halt. The ocean bears the ship,
but the ocean may swallow it up, and sometimes
does so; society swallows us up still more often, but
yet it is what upbears us; nor can we arrive without
being upborne by it, for it is like the sea, which, less
fluid than the air, and less dense than the earth,
just yields to and resists us enough to sustain with-
out impeding our progress towards the desired goal.
Our haven is not at the bottom, but beyond the
limits of this sea. In ploughing its deep waters
let us beware of disappearing in their depths. It
is enough that we yield the keel of our vessel to
the element that sustains us. We may founder in
the ocean of society as in that of our globe, and
it is useless to say on which of the two, shipwrecks
are most frequent. The vessel which each one of us
is bound to govern and preserve, is individuality.
I admire, then, the vessel and the ocean both;
but another than I collects and measures the waves
of the great deep, and my vessel is my own: nay,
more than this, the ocean is made for the vessel, not
the vessel for the ocean; the essential, the one great
purpose, is that the vessel should get to land-that
is, that the individual man alone in direct relation
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
327
with God, God's true object in His creative work,
should accomplish his destiny; to which society
contributes, indeed, by bearing him up, but man
is distinct from society, he cannot blend himself
with it, and woe to both if society come to swallow
him up!
The essential point is not to have nothing to under-
go, but to re-act in proportion; not to owe nothing, but
to pay. Now the very gifts that we accept afford us
something to give in our turn; and if we received no-
thing, we should have but little to bestow. In all cases
we must admit this concurrence, or this antinomy of
individuality and tradition, of general and personal
thought, as one of those dualities of which our nature
is woven, and which nothing can ever efface. Neither
of these terms can absolutely disappear; but it is
to be remarked that our moral decadence constantly
tends to diminish the energy of the one, and to
augment the powers of the other; and if the temp-
tation to isolate themselves occurs to some, the
temptation to let themselves be absorbed is almost
universal. We are not ourselves from the first, we
only become so by an act of will.
The thought of the individual cannot form itself
outside of society nor without its aid; but it is the
individual, not society, that thinks, believes, and
loves; and if he borrow from society, as doubtless
he does, many of the elements of his thought, he
does not borrow thought itself. In this respect he
is bound at once to make use of, and defend himself
328
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
;
against, society; he even ought, when he finds him-
self insufficiently defended, to do all he can to re-
conquer from it, and it is one of the glories of
Christianity to have consecrated this important duty
in the highest sphere. In doing this it has by no
means weakened society, on the contrary, it has
strengthened it; and if you take the word society
in its fullest meaning, you may say that it is from
religion that it dates and proceeds. All that de-
velops the principle of faith, duty, thought, and
liberty-individual things in the soul of men, adds
to the force of society.
It is better to connect ourselves with society than
to learn to dispense with it, or rather to persuade
ourselves that we are able to dispense with it. It
is only given to the brute to suffice to itself. Man
has been chained to man.
We hardly give more credit to spontaneous gene-
ration in the intellectual sphere than in the physical
world; the most individual work is to a certain
point the work of all the world; everywhere solidarity
reappears, without, however, any prejudice to liberty:
God has willed it so.
So long as man is immortal, he must be of more
value than humanity, which is not so. So long as
the individual expects a judgment beyond this world,
he is greater than society, which expects none. He
cannot admit any equality between himself, who is a
being, and society, which is not a being, but an arrange-
ment between beings. He feels that the substance is
•
329
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
superior to the form, and that which is to last to that
which is not to last. The immortality of the soul
dethrones society, and places it at the feet, not doubt-
less of the individual, but of individuality.
If we could reasonably establish an opposition
between the individual and society, we should not
hesitate to say that the former is the nobler of the two.
This does not most assuredly mean that one single
being is preferable to all: it means rather that so-
ciety has been made for man; that man, or, if you
will, the human creature, human nature, is the end
for which that society exists, without which the indi-
vidual man cannot develop or perfect himself, cannot
consequently draw near to God. Further, society is
for every man a theatre assigned to his activity, an
opportunity provided for his virtues, a barrier opposed
to his egotism, a revelation made to him of several
of the laws of his nature. There is one thing that
especially demands our admiration; it is that the
more a man devotes himself to his brothers, the more
he is master of himself; the more sociable, the more
free; the less he claims, the more he receives; and
finally, the less he is engrossed by, the more he is, him-
self. Human personality and society, very far from
being mutual obstacles, lend each other mutual aid.
Duty is the point of intersection of the two forces.
Individuality and sociability grow together, and reci-
procally exalt each other in the accomplishment and
the worship of duty. Every sacrifice imposed upon
the one is a loss to the other.
330
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Ask everything from man in the name of humanity,
or, if the expression please you better, in the name
of humanitarian interests, everything except his
dignity as a responsible being, and his personal re-
lations with God.
Society, too, is doubtless a truth, but it would but
be an error were it proved that it could only sub-
sist by silencing individual conviction, which, if it
be not the seat, is at least the channel of all truth.
Individuality, apart from generality, is but an
absurd and inconsistent Protestantism; it ought to
dissolve, without annulling itself, in the catholicism
of the human soul.
(3.) Actual state of Society-Socialism-Nationalism
-Pantheism.
Human individuality gets absorbed in totality at
two very different eras of the life of societies; in
their first childhood, and in that far advanced epoch
which would be that of their death were there not a
caldron of Pelias for decrepid nations. In the first
of these eras man acknowledges himself weak against
nature; he needs to feel himself a member of a whole;
he lives, with that whole, upon the as yet inexhausted
fund of primitive traditions which belong to every-
body and to nobody; whatever gets done then is the
work of all; the epoch, the society may be indi-
vidual, the individual alone is not so. The whole
interval between these early ages and the latest is
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
331
filled by the triumphs of individuality. Then come
the times when, society being extremely strong, the
individual does not need to be so. All natural forces
working only inasmuch as they are necessitated to
work, individuality folds up or restrains itself; we
might say it had been placed in retirement. Then
it is that theories formularise themselves and lend
assistance to facts.
The social world of the nineteenth century, less
hideous than that of the Cæsars, is not less effete.
with regard to moral beliefs.
Will, conscience, and love will remain the pecu-
liar property of the individual; but it is certain
that individuality is threatened alike by every-
thing, in the state of the actual world, of bad, of
good, and at all events of inevitable. Unless in
the previous development of individuality we see
nothing beyond temporary advances made by human
nature in the hope of a final state, where it will be
able to depose its functions and re-enter into rest,
we cannot doubt that the level drawn across all the
prominences of the social body must be to the
prejudice of that body itself, as well as to the
beauty of human existence. This sort of spiritual
democracy, which places itself, like the "jealous God,"
opposite our moral nature, forgets that when once the
spring of individuality is broken, its own spring
will be in great danger of being so, and that, carried
by individuality to the degree of force and stability
that it now enjoys, it cannot with impunity deny its
332
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
origin, and condemn the source from whence it has
flowed.
There is one thing, at least, that we must be
explicit upon. The remedy proposed, whatever it
may be, ought to correspond with the two diseases
we have just pointed out; it ought, in one sense, to
recompose unity, and in another to bring out plurality
into prominence; its action should be such as to
make us live at the same time more energetically
in our own selves and in the whole; two effects which,
although they may seem opposed, nevertheless sub-
serve, nay, imply each other, and jointly promote
the end of human life; for we are only adapted to
social life upon condition of having a life of our own,
and we only truly belong to society on condition of
being in the first instance completely men. Now
there is no system, there is only the revelation
of God, which can at the same time and by the
same means snatch us from individualism, and yet
consecrate our individuality. This is one of the
dualities that religion resolves; one of the marvellous
reconciliations it effects. It unites us to society by
self-abnegation, and keeps us individual through con-
science; for religion is the awakening of conscience.
The two effects spring from one principle, their sub-
stance is the same. Looked at closely, they are but
two aspects of one fact.
The condition of our epoch presents us with two
features apparently contradictory: the relaxation of
social unity by the ever more avowed predominance
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
333
of egotism; and the increasingly strong tendency of
conscience to abdicate in order to yield to the torrent
of what is called public opinion, or the spirit of the
age. Thus the progress of individualism on the one
hand, on the other the gradual extinction of indivi-
duality, constitute through the action of one cause the
double abyss, or rather the two abysses, hollowed out,
the one inside the other, into which we are plunged.
The social influence of Christianity, immense
though it be, is not the whole of Christianity—is only
an indirect and remote effect of its doctrine and its
action. To know what it is, we must study it, not
only in history, but in the conscience and the
Gospel.
A soul has to be restored to man, who no longer
has one. There is given him the soul of all the
world; and when the internal guide has disap-
peared, there is imposed upon him universal history,
that is, the common conviction of the very humanity,
each of whose members has no longer any conviction!
And it is forgotten that a general, real, powerful
conviction can be nothing else than the spontaneous
agreement of individual convictions! How make a
savoury dish out of a thousand insipid ingredients?
How bring life out of death, though multiplied a
million fold ?
Our present way of thinking tends to make the
soul depend on, and, as it were, proceed from society,
and to derive from the social state whatever exists
of intimate thought. The middle ages saw or felt
334
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
·
differently. There were, I confess, some alarming
consequences from the principle they adopted, but
that principle was great and elevated; it proceeded
from thought to reality, from spirit to matter, from
doctrines to social arrangements. The soul had not
yet deserted its deep places to live at the surface;
the relations of the human spirit with the invisible
and the infinite were still a reality, and by the com-
mon consent of all, the most important and influential
of all realities. Voluntarily and frequently, external
action gushed from this profound source, and the de-
cision of these essential questions was looked upon as
a very positive interest, worthy of more than one sacri-
fice. I confess that danger was not far off: when
men are persuaded that thought has a sovereign
right over the world, instead of leaving it to make
its own way, they are too likely to want to do so
for it, and to impose certain metaphysical theorems
on society and on individual consciences. Religious
intolerance is indeed sure to find an accomplice in
this tendency; but, nevertheless, the tendency denotes
a spiritualistic character in the epoch that one must
needs admire.
One laments that all liberties should abound
except the liberty of the soul; laments that, while
artists aspire after and exaggerate liberty, nothing
is more rare than an original character; laments to
see opinion so overmastering and personal convic-
tions so feeble. It could not but be that personality
took refuge somewhere, accordingly it has made
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
335
itself a nest in men's interests; self-indulgence, not
self-sacrifice, has inherited after defunct individuality.
If we were to study the character of what now-a-
days goes by the name of civilisation, we should feel
that, drawn from the same source as our institutions,
it is quite as little favourable to the maintenance and
development of individuality. Civilisation, in its
etymological sense, is the formation of the citizen, of
the complete man; but as understood by our epoch,
it is the progress of the intellect in the interests
of material progress; or if this combination be denied
us, the progress of the intellect, together with that of
well-being. Science has not created this strange
definition; but science, which we always see follow
in the train of morals, and model itself upon them,
faithfully represents this idea. It has placed psycho-
logy in the room of morality, and utility in that
of right. Without actually denying the existence of
duties, it has transformed them into rational neces-
sities; without denying the substance of right, it
has denied its essence by deriving it entirely from
the universal interest.
Modern liberty has consecrated the great principle
of individuality, and is constantly insisting upon its
application. An institution which never ceases to
appeal to the wishes of each and all, supposes in every
case a personal conviction respecting the questions
that it propounds. This is not peculiar to pure
democracy; representative democracy, although it do
not propose the same questions to all, nevertheless
336
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
བt
appeals to the consciences of all. Electoral ques-
tions are not purely personal; they involve questions
of principle. The elector needs to have made up
his mind on more points than is supposed. He
cannot have an opinion about men without having
one about things, and his electoral vote contains, if I
may so express myself, a deliberative vote. The
function attributed to him implies, then, some
personal knowledge and conviction; if not, the
whole constitutional edifice would be a lie, and
democracy would resolve itself, as it has too often
done, into a fluctuating and periodically displaced
oligarchy. Once more, then, we say that our social
system rests on individuality. But individuality
only forms by pronouncing itself; only proves itself
by expression. He who disguises his convictions on
subjects of this class has none, never will have;
and he who has no convictions will never be, despite
his votes and all his external activity, a true member
of the political association, such as our age has made
it. And this nullity, generalising itself, brings us
back to our starting point, to the system that we
have repudiated, that of one, or of some, transacting
the affairs of all, or their own affairs in the name
of all.
There are individual errors; there are general
errors. A whole nation may be the dupe of a coarse
sophism, and in such a nation the man of most
enlightened and stable mind is nationally a fool.
What is prejudice if it be not the whole of our
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
337
judgments chained to our first impressions? what
is habit except the subjection of our present to our
past? what is example but the transubstantiation of
all into each? In proportion as these forces triumph
in us, must not our personalities become attenuated ;
must not the universal me absorb the true me? At
least there goes on a singular fusion or assimilation.
The individual appropriates to such a degree the
ideas of all, the tendencies of all-converts them so
thoroughly into his own substance, in succum et
sanguinem, that had he actually conceived them, it
seems as though he could hardly love them better.
He even goes so far as to imagine that they are
inherent in and peculiar to himself; he attaches
to them an interest of personal glory or dignity; he
becomes so possessed by them as to appear strikingly
individual in this borrowed character; a confusion
is made which deceives him first of all, and us
after him. All this aggregate of ideas and feelings
are him, and are not him; they are the general life
identified with his, grafted on the trunk of his
personality. But the more complete the identifica-
tion and the illusion, the more consequently does
individuality get effaced; nothing more of it re-
mains than is wanted to form a support to the
national character and to individualise it in each;
but true individuality, the real native me, sinks even
more and more out of sight beneath the weight of all
that is given it to carry.
Such is the natural tendency and such the re-
Z
338
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
sults of institutions when nothing counterbalances
them.
In all times the political institution, founded upon
individuality, has had a tendency to weigh heavily
upon its base, and to crush its support. It has, so
to speak, paved the field which contained the seed
of individual life, and only allowed it to send up
some poor feeble blades through its own interstices.
In this it has but unreservedly obeyed its own
nature-but yielded without resistance to its specific
gravity. It only belonged to our age to erect an
involuntary exaggeration into a system, and to place
at the base of the social institution what has every-
where prepared its ruin, or rendered it irreparable.
Everything has its reason, and no doubt the idea of
proscribing individuality has not occurred suddenly
and by chance.
By the very effect of sin, egotism, or as it is called
now-a-days, individualism, is at the bottom of every-
thing; it is at the base of all societies. The true
idea of society exists, but ideal society does not.
This ideal society would be completely foreign to the
individual principle. It would be all the world, and
no one in particular. But in reality it is some one,
and it is not all the world. The State is always
a party.
There is no sense in accusing society, which is not.
a person, as though it were one; but there is sense in
complaining of the state of society, more particularly
of what one calls anarchy of ideas of what would
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
339
perhaps be better named absence of convictions, dis-
solution of principles, and death of instincts. But as
a society has neither convictions, nor principles, nor
instincts, it behoves individuals to have these for
society; it belongs to all the world to reform all the
world, or, at all events, it belongs to the small num-
ber that has both knowledge and power to come to
the assistance of those who have neither, and above
all, to teach them self-help. To proceed differently
is to wish, as a wise man once said, to drive in the
wedge by the thick end.
Be yourselves; determine and circumscribe your
position; have a focus,-this is your first duty towards
society. When you gather back the burning coals
from the circumference to the centre, this is for the
advantage of the circumference.
In no time, and still less formerly than at present,
has man been able to shut himself up in individuality.
Neither will facts allow this, nor his own powers
suffice to it in any case; for man enters the world
subject to the law of solidarity, and society is to him
what soil is to the plant. But, moreover, the idea of
individuality in its moral and sublime aspect was
for a long time above his reach. If he could not
conceive of humanity, which makes all human beings
to be one whole, one unity, and as it were one person,
neither was he in a condition to conceive of individu-
ality, in virtue of which each one belongs to himself,
a veritable person, and immediately connected with
God; that is to say, man was equally incapable of
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
two opposite ideas, or, to speak more exactly, inca-
pable of reuniting in thought the two terms of one
and the same idea, that of man, an idea which is
complete, and even correct, only in so far as it em-
braces and combines the two notions of individuality
and humanity. It is in the intervening space, if not
in the middle of these two poles, that the human
mind sought, and we may even say found a halting-place.
In this twofold impossibility of being really oneself,
and uniting oneself in thought and feeling with the
whole of humanity, nationality came to its aid,—
nationality, a true idea so long as it is not exclusive, a
just and beneficial idea when we place it in that very
line which unites and leads, one to the other, the two
ideas of individuality and humanity. But alas! na-
tionality was the negative of both these. The first,
individuality, came to get absorbed, or at least blunted
thereby, lost consequently at once its highest charac-
teristic and most excellent application, by which I
mean personal religion, immediate communication
with God, and eternal freedom of conscience and
thought; because nationality, proceeding by the way
of expropriation in the cause of public utility, de-
clared the religion of individuals national and founded
in the community, so that there only remained of
human individuality the impure residuum and coarse
dregs of selfishness. As for the idea of humanity,
equally ancient as that of individuality, and born,
we may say, on the same day as man himself, it
was already almost entirely effaced, and the task
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
341
of nationality—that collective egotism, that hydra-
headed personality, was to cause its least vestiges,
and even its last memory, utterly to vanish
away.
All individual life requires an end; must it not be
the same with the life of a nation? Indeed, a nation
But
perhaps can less dispense with one than a man.
if it be necessary that a nation should have an end, it
would be desirable that it should find one without
seeking for it.
Society is not properly a product of sociability.
In good logic, a socialist State is either a barracks or
a monastery, according to the morals and tempera-
ment of the nation. The socialist State is necessarily
communist in this sense, that it is the alone proprietor,
and individuals are reduced to a usufruct in propor-
tion to their merit, or their utility. Such a State
imposes on all, its own religious taste and its philo-
sophy, if it has one. A socialist State, in a word,
accepts for its type a family where the children
remain eternally minors.
Socialism implicitly professes the degradation of
human nature, and the impossibility of its restoration.
In this it is less consolatory than Christianity, which
speaks of a fall and a restoration, and less consistent
than rationalism, which only disputes the necessity of
a restoration after having disputed the reality of a fall.
If by a miracle we could render all necessary
offices attractive, what should we have made of man?
We have said it before-a thinking stomach. If this
1
342
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
be the last word of progress, let us progress no longer,
let us retrograde.
The character of socialism is to proceed as though
man and society, instead of being two, were only
one.
The new Rome insensibly inaugurated a new so-
cialism. Catholicism, in fact, is nothing else. It
did not openly deny the principle of individuality in
matters of religion, it did not dare to do this; it con-
tented itself with putting forth pretensions with which
this principle is incompatible, and, to say all in one
word, with totally displacing the seat of authority.
It did, in fact, so displace it; and Christianity thence-
forth, changing its nature as far as this depended
upon man, became sacerdotal and Jewish. After
many tentatives, unfortunate in one sense, but yet
not vain, since they had for effect to maintain the
tradition of religious individualism in despite of
Roman socialism, authority rediscovered its basis
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the
principle of individuality received from our reformers,
not indeed an explicit consecration, but irrevocable
pledges. Nevertheless, socialism did not consider
itself defeated. Even within the pale of Protest-
antism, which is nothing but a barrier raised for the
defence of religious individuality, a new catholicism
was born, as if some inimical power had decreed the
eternal miscarriage of liberty. This limping and
purblind catholicism is the State Church, or national
religion.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
343
Has socialism anything more audacious than the
hypothesis in virtue of which all inhabitants of the
same country are supposed to belong to the same
conviction, and compulsorily bear the expenses of
a ritual to which the majority are indifferent, and
which a large number positively dislike and repu-
diate? To complain of the pretensions of socialism,
and to wonder at its success, after having given it
such a pledge, betrays, in our opinion, the most
singular inconsistency.
Pantheism is alternately the natural complement
and principle of socialism,--more often, however, its
complement than its principle. At the present time,
methinks, they appear together; they meet; at least, it
is difficult to say which of the two has preceded the
other: where one shows itself the other may soon
be expected. For in both cases there is the negation
of personality; you cannot refuse it to man and
ascribe it to God, or deny it to God and maintain it
for man; for these two personalities are materially
and essentially related. At all events, socialism and
pantheism expose each other by their juxtaposition;
the first is no less the condemnation of the second
than the second is of the first; we may judge each
by the other as well as each in itself.
Our exclusive attention to social questions takes us
back to the Jewish dispensation, where the people
were transformed into an individual, and the indi-
vidual lost sight of.
There is heathenism, irreligion, or at least a com-
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
plete absence of spirituality in seeing anything more
in association than an institution of Providence,
intended for individual improvement,-I mean for the
improvement or perfecting of all individuals. If of
the institution, which is only a mean, you make an
end, be sure that what once was an end will no
longer serve even as a mean; that is to say, that
individual improvement will never be pursued as in
the contrary system. The nation may be the object
of my duty, of my devotedness; it will be so all the
more that, in its preservation and success, I see an
earnest of success for greater designs; but for all that,
the nation is not my end, and ought not to be; it is
too narrow to circumscribe the whole man; the whole
man only finds room for himself in God.
What is the principle of socialism? It is fun-
damentally one with that of a theocracy; it is to
place the human species under tutelage; to declare
the individual, as such, a minor, and to perpetuate
his minority eternally; it is to make authority the
social principle, and only to yield to liberty what
it is absolutely impossible to tear away from her;
it is to rule despotically, not only the social or public
career of the individual but his private, not only
his external life but his internal, or, at all events,
to take no account of the latter; it is consequently
to fashion for him his religion, his philosophy, his
conscience.
This idea is a very ancient one-it is classical, it
is pagan; on it rested a whole world, whose funeral
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
345
knell was sounded by Christianity at its advent.
But this antique socialism proved obstinate in its
resistance; it took refuge in Roman Catholicism,
which is to socialism what the species is to the genus;
nay, it even penetrated into the Protestant world,
and there, as elsewhere, overlooking the individual in
order to get at the people, and at the same time looking
upon the people as an individual, it has created or re-
stored the fiction of national religions, has confounded
the quality of believer with that of citizen, has sup-
posed all citizens as such to be believers, and has
boldly required from them contributions in favour
of a faith which perhaps they did not share. If you
wish to support this system, which is indeed social-
ism, altogether socialism, you must not stop here;
you must go further: you must wish in principle
all that is wished by modern socialists, who, unlike
those of old, are systematic and consistent. To
desire that all citizens indiscriminately should con-
tribute to the support of a certain form of religion
is to shake hands with socialism, to give it pledges,
to smooth for it with complacent hand the road of
the future. All nationalists are unwittingly social-
ists, as all socialists are consciously nationalists. If
you dread socialism, you must not approximate, but
separate yourself as much as possible from it; you
must maintain, in all its integrity and all its bearings,
the principle of religious liberty, which is pre-
eminently that of individuality, and consequently
the death of socialism.
346
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Those who, while denying individuality, repudiate
constraint and salutary severity, are only socialists
of an abortive sort. Catholicism (Roman or Cal-
vinist, it matters not which) is but the latest, and
doubtless highest branch of the tree of socialism;
and socialism, in its turn, is only catholicism on the
materialist platform.
Socialism, whatever Rome may say, is the catho-
licism of our age is a reaction against the principle
of individuality, which, consecrated by Protestantism,
has more or less distinguished the last three cen-
turies. We will not say of this principle, as a
panegyrist once said of a great captain, that it "has
remained, as it were, buried in its triumph;" but
we will most certainly say that a certain number of
thinkers, and a portion of the public, have mistrusted
this principle, mistrusted liberty (which is but another
name for it), when they have imagined that, among
all its other powers, it had not that of organisation.
Men of little faith, whatever they may have said, they
saw in the Protestant principle a germ of anarchy
in society as well as in intellect, and an active cause
of dissolution. Some absolutely condemned it, others
denied it implicitly-that is to say, in their practice;
or else, in their plans of social reform, refused it the
applications and the space to which it believed itself
entitled. Thus the new catholicism has gradually
completed itself; it has for its religion pantheism, for
its politics the sovereignty, or rather the divinity, of
the people, for its social theory communism, for its
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
347
political economy the phalanstory: as to its morality,
it is not yet invented-and it is not very easy to
foresee to what part of the system such a thing as
morality will contrive to adjust itself.
2. Church and State.
(1.) System of Union between the Two: its Origin
-Catholicism-Protestantism-Socialism-Effects
of the Union both on Church and State.
The love of domination (and, above all, of spiritual
domination) is natural to the heart of man; it
requires a cultivated religion and a very uncommon
measure of piety to stifle it, and still more to in-
spire a horror of it; and how many men are there,
who, sincere in other respects, are pursued by the
specious idea that the temporal ought to be sub-
ordinated to the spiritual, not only by each in him-
self, but by each in his relation to others! Hence
we have an original mischief, that we shall eternally
meet in our way. Perhaps the true principle, the
primum mobile, of the alliance against which we
protest, was almost invariably clerical ambition, or
what an eminent English writer has opposed under
the name of spiritual despotism.
The long persistence of certain errors, both in
theory and practice, is often explained by the support
lent them by two interests, or two parties, diame-
trically opposed to each other, but nevertheless,
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OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
although in an opposite spirit, uniting to desire the
same results, and thus forming a majority. The
State Church would have long ago ceased to exist
if real Christians, or political unbelievers, had left
off supporting her.
The politico-religious establishment will never be
forsaken, before its fall, by that numerous class of
men who only accept a profession of religion as a
happy medium between impiety and true religion
itself, or who have not discovered any better pre-
servation against religion than a religion.
All the religions of antiquity were essentially na-
tional; they were intimately united with political insti-
tutions; they formed part of them; they were their
own reflection, impress, or emblem; they modelled
themselves upon the State, not the State upon them.
Offspring as they were of individual wants, born
beside the domestic hearth (which has everywhere
been the earliest altar), they nevertheless had in
view, first of all the State, then the individual.
True, the State did not forbid the individual to
make the public religion his own personal one, to
think, to feel, to individualise his religion; but these
religions, resembling in their barren magnificence
and frivolous grace those double flowers that veil
no fruit-these religions had nothing in them that
awoke individuality, nothing that could become in-
dividual; they did not incarnate themselves-did
not identify themselves with the man-were not, so
to speak, the soul of his soul; and observe this, their
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
349
dogmas and ordinances were such as never to give
to the individual any consciousness of the duality
existing between man and society.
Their law corre-
of the land, that
sponded so exactly with the law
one might suppose they had been shaped by that
standard. In a word, religion, which appears made
to raise us above ourselves and above society—reli-
gion, from the point of view of antiquity, was still
self, still society. We return by a circuitous way to
the point whence we set out. Religion is to the
State what a periphrasis is to the simple word.
We must, indeed, acknowledge that what we now-
a-days call the distinction between the temporal and
the spiritual was absolutely unknown to the peoples
of ancient days; the unity of man and society was
universally taken for granted. The earliest formula
was, All that man is, society ought to be; but it
could not fail to be soon replaced by another, All
that society is, man, too, should be.
The State of olden times, with its universal power
and responsibility, has for ever disappeared. If it
have continued to govern purely moral interests, this
has no longer been with a thorough right or with
common consent. The conflicts, formerly impossible,
between religion and politics, have, on the contrary,
been perpetual, and modern history is, in great part,
the history of these conflicts. If they ever cease,
it will not be through the restoration of the ancient
State, but by its still more entire and absolute
abolition. The theories of a few speculators, their
·
350
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
instincts which they erect into a system, are per-
fectly powerless here; the State in our day is no
longer the whole of man, it is only one of the forms
and conditions of human life; it represents and
guarantees rights; it no longer governs all our in-
terests, but it protects them all. The human soul
henceforth provides for what concerns itself alone.
The very men who are most ardent and determined
in claiming for the modern State all the attributes
of the ancient, would be more than disconcerted if
it really grasped at these. On the morrow, or the
evening of the day this happened, we should see
them in the foremost ranks of those who, for some
time past, have been called individualists.
The State of antiquity had provided for the de-
fence of all against each; it was reserved for the
modern State to maintain the right, not only of
each against each, but of each against all. This
is the one distinctly modern and distinctly Christian
feature of our polity. This is the spoil-alas! the
bloody spoil-won by so many centuries of woe.
This is our glorious banner, this the truth that but
just now was floating gaily and brightly over the
vessel of humanity. Are we to see the black flag
of socialism replace for ever this noble standard?
The system of State Churches
Churches can only be
advantageously defended, can only have a philo-
sophy of its own, from the point of view of pan-
theism.
M. de Lamenais alternately wished to give to
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
351
religion the support of the Government and of the
people. Two forms of State religion these we will
have nothing to do with either of them.
From the point of view of Rothes' system, it is
not the State which is man, it is humanity.
Property, exclusively invested with power in the
Church, is the seal of materialism affixed to a quite
spiritual institution.
State religions can have no more zealous cham-
pions than the adversaries of all positive religion.
Spinoza, as well as Hobbes and Hume, gives up
religion to the civil Government. Thinkers of the
materialist or fatalist school are firm upholders of a
State religion.
Nationalism in religion, or national Christianity,
implicitly denies the great principle of the duality
of man and of society by the very fact that it denies
the first fall of man; for the first fall implies this
duality, and nationalism, on the contrary, presup-
poses their identity; and by so doing it shakes
hands with socialism, gives it pledges, affords it a
fulcrum.
We must needs allow that if the Catholic Church
have but too much employed the State for the reali-
sation of her own ends, yet she has never allowed
herself to be absorbed by the State. She has indeed,
very unfortunately, borrowed force and majesty there-
from; still more disastrously has she called the armis
of flesh of the State to assist her own violent mea-
sures; but we must do her this justice, she has never
352
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
known servitude, never given up her independence
as the price of the favours shown her.
The Church State, properly so called, is an inven-
tion of the Reformation: when afraid of its own prin-
ciple, it denied it in action after having proclaimed it
in words. The Reformation, in separating itself from
the Roman Church, which was neither the multitude
nor the civil power, was constrained, in order to find
a head, to address itself either to the people or the
civil power.
Its principle would have led it to
choose the people, but in general it had not courage
for this; and in order to possess a present and visible
authority, it addressed itself to civil power, of which
it made a bishop. Such is the character of State
Churches; they may be briefly designated as the
episcopate of the civil Government.
Thus, then, the real State Churches are not so old;
they only date from the sixteenth century, and may,
without doing them injustice, be called abortions of
Protestantism. For Protestantism, in consecrating the
principle of individuality, pledged itself to a republic,
bound itself to liberty, whereas we see that it
weakened and infringed its principle at the very
moment of proclaiming it.
If under the dispensation of liberty even, the in-
cline towards a religion of numbers and of accidents
is but too much felt, how much more should we
deprecate an institution which renders this incline
more rapid, and erects the evil into a principle!
I do not know whether it has been remarked that
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
353
the zealous defenders of the national system among
Protestants appeal to the very principles on which
Catholics lean in their defence of their Church. All
that Protestants urge against Roman unity may
equally be urged against the national system; if the
Roman unity be massive, inarticulate, material, dead,
what pray is theirs? If theirs be rational how can
they prove that of Rome not to be so? If a political
body can have a religion, why should not an ecclesi-
astical? If the former have religious discernment
may not the other more reasonably claim it? The
difference is, that the Roman clergy allege texts in
their favour, invoke the idea of a perpetual inspiration,
and that the national Church neither alleges nor in
vokes anything of the kind. The difference, too, is
that Catholicism believes itself universal as truth, and
nationalism, local as opinion. It did once occur to
Catholicism to make itself. national, but it soon felt
that this was to be no longer catholic; now it is once.
more ultramontane, and henceforth in its true posi-
tion. The truth for Protestantism lies in being
ultramundane, another way of not being national.
The revival of Catholicism and of Christianity has
its effect, the denationalisation of both.
At the Reformation, man gradually extracted his
own thought, religious or philosophical, from the in-
divisible fund of public belief. The individuality of
conscience and reason, oppressed and panting be-
neath the weight of the institutions and theocratic
prejudices of the middle ages, gushed forth again
A A
354
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
at the close of that long period. This principle of
life, consecrated beforehand by the Gospel, has every-
where penetrated, and at once defies the feeble rem-
nant of theocracy that modern institutions still con-
tain, and the element of pantheistic chivalry that
socialist systems essay to develop. The individual
principle of Protestantism, having at length taken
full consciousness of itself, repudiates the principle
of massive and involuntary agglomeration in Church
matters. This is to pronounce the sentence of death
on national Churches.
The soul of man, the Church, which is the soul of
humanity, has God for husband; has sworn Him her
entire faith; sworn to obey Him alone, and to recog-
nise in Him only the inalienable right of a husband.
But the alliance that she, as a spiritual society, con-
tracts with a society which has nothing spiritual
about it, transmitting to that society the competence
and authority which only belong to God, places her in
a flagrant and permanent state of adultery.
The fiction of a State Church is of all things the
best adapted to put consciences to sleep; and the more
this institution puts on sonorous titles and pompous
insignia, the more fast and profound will the sleep of
those consciences be.
A Church, when it is the State that supports it,
and when it is free into the bargain, is indeed actually
a State within a State; or, at least, this is suffi-
ciently the case to justify many fears, and explain
many precautions.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
355
If there be one thing in the world that is terrible,
it is the tyranny of dogmatism. Nothing is so dan-
gerous as a theologian in power. The faculty of
employing in the defence and the propagation of
truth other arms than those of which St. Paul
affirmed, "The weapons of our warfare are not carnal,"
has plunged into violence and cruelty men who, in
an ordinary position, reduced to the sole resources of
prayer and persuasion, would only have been, in
relation to their brothers, suppliants full of authority.
Out of a thousand Christians you will not find one
whose character has not been perverted by such a
position. Every religion protected from without will
persecute; and persecute, too, for an iota of theology,
an atom of metaphysics.
If I had to choose which of two evils should beset
truth, I should entreat for her a vigorous persecution
rather than such a protection as this. This pre-
carious and fortuitous protection is only a yoke, and
a dishonouring one.
Protected by oppressive measures, truth loses, I
grant, none of her rights to respect; she is always
truth; but surely she does lose her credit in men's
minds. Alone, she would have made a strong im-
pression; but now, an energetic and ineffaceable im-
pression, that of the indignation the light of her
auxiliary inspires, has anticipated her; she has now
got to deal with minds cased in prejudice, which
obstinately misapprehend her.
Nothing intimidates or perverts the religious sen-
356
OUTLIA
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
timent so much as contact with the civil power.
Religion, in the hands of the last, inevitably be-
comes a species of police. Conscience, hurt and
alarmed, retires within itself; creates itself in secret a
religion that is exclusively its own, leaving to shal-
low souls the religion of form, or the forms of religion.
But when, on the contrary, it is free from all impure
contact, the religious sentiment spreads itself abun-
dantly throughout life and society, penetrates the
masses, filters through to the seat of power, forms,
without contract or convention, a Christian nation,
a Christian government. Authority then takes its
tone from public conviction, and is thus the most
precious of all expressions of society; its morality is
Christian; its policy is Christian, because morals
have inscribed this necessity on its mandates.
The national Church, fettered in her officiality
and restrained by her very privileges, mingled with
and allied to the world, heaping up fictions on
fictions to the great damage of evangelical simplicity,
constantly taking for granted what is not and pre-
tending not to see what the whole world sees, sub-
stituting for the apostolic style that of chancery,
inconsistent in her part if she attempts to be excen-
tric, unfaithful to her mission if she be not so, the
national Church is no longer a spiritual army, that is,
she is not a Church. Her principle, which confounds
her with the world, weakens, to the point of nullify-
ing, her action upon theworld, since what is false
is always weak; and her official relations, which are
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
357
constantly deceptive ones, add to the evil of her situa-
tion, for the simple reason, that whatever disguises a
danger aggravates it. Politicians know all this, only
they do not say so; will it then never be known
except they speak? and must Christian prophets (for
all Christians are such) for ever have eyes, and yet
see not?
Christianity, by its very nature, is aggressive, con-
quering, creative; a state of warfare has been or-
dained it here below; it has been sent to disturb a
false peace with a view to the true peace that it
brings to men; conflict and dangers are its portion
in the world; let it not be deprived of this por-
tion; let it, whose natural condition is to stand
with loins girt, beware of seating itself, of crouch-
ing down, in human institutions with which it has
nothing in common; for if it too be human, it is not
so in the sense they are; it is human as was the
God-Man.
The religious sentiment is more sensitive and
jealous than any other. It takes alarm at the least
alloy; it is tarnished by the slightest contact; it
tolerates no alliance with anything extraneous; its
most vital interest is to disentangle itself from all
foreign elements. Now the association of the Church
with the State is evidently inimical to this interest.
Epochs of torpor and indifference tighten the ties
of the Church with the State, because they draw
tight her ties with the material world; but once let
its life break forth, these bonds weigh upon her, she
1
358
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
seeks to loosen them, and if they are drawn yet closer
she bursts them.
When the Church, as though she were the widow
of her invisible spouse, allows this ring of the empire
to be placed on her finger, it seems to me that,
powerful externally in the extent of her conquests
and the dismal silence of her old enemy-paganism,
she seeks, in default of her internal energy, which is
dying away, a foreign force, which may conceal her
debility from all others, and more especially from
herself; and that, like to a river weary of flowing,
which hushes its waters to rest in the wide basin of a
lake, so she too ceases to flow; only she must recom-
mence her course at the other end of that still lake,
which has no other movement than that bestowed on
it by storms.
Having reached the summit of temporal prosperity,
the Church was frightened, and let herself fall into
the arms of the State. Precisely because her credit
with the world was increasing, she should have
avoided all contact, all union with the civil power:
she did the very reverse, and seeing her peril where
her safety lay, she sought her safety just where her
peril lay; nay, was she not even more culpable, and
did she not return a very different answer from Jesus
Christ's to that temptation of the prince of darkness,
"I will give thee all the kingdoms of the world, and
the glory of them?"
That which has almost everywhere deadened reli-
gious wants, weakened religious feeling, and rendered
1
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
359
every species of worship distasteful, has been the
stifling and unwholesome atmosphere of State reli-
gion, the usurpation of religious powers by political
bodies, of the long profanation of which all the world
is more or less conscious; it has been the idea to
which such a system must need give credit, of all reli-
gious institutions being but a political instrument, an
opinion which, propagated in the first instance by dis-
tinguished minds, has prevailed to blight in all hearts
the idea of religion, and of all connected with it.
In accepting the safe conduct of temporal power
religion tears its Divine credentials.
Religion is nothing else than the triumph of the
invisible over the visible, of spirit over matter. To
be religious is to believe in the spirit, that is to say,
to believe that the spirit, or the truth, which is of
God, has an intrinsic virtue sufficient for its end,
and only to esteem real and legitimate the success
attained by the spirit. No religion is worthy of its
name if it do not say, "My kingdom is not of this
world;" no religion is really a religion if it propose
to itself an alliance with the civil power, either as
means or end, for how after this could it still say,
I represent on earth the idea of the independence and
the sovereignty of the spirit, and its triumphs over
matter. Who could say even which had triumphed
with her, spirit or matter, or even which triumph it
was that she aimed at ? She has with her own hands
torn her credentials, and even should she heap vic-
tory on victory, no one is justified in saying that
360
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
it is the spirit that has triumphed. It is open to
every one merely to see policy in a religion that rests
on political power, and most assuredly many will
not fail to do so.
When religion is powerful it is power that has
become religion.
Never has the State espoused the Christian reli-
gion, but only its shade and its phantom. It has
never been able to espouse it, except despoiled of its
essential characters, deprived of its peculiar life, or
at least under the tacit understanding that it should
never give free scope to its vital energies, but confine
them within certain limits. Christianity has never
been able to become a State religion except on the
condition of being sane, not "beside itself;" in other
words, of not being what it is.
Christian policy ceases to be Christian so soon as
it ceases to appear strange and absurd to men of the
world.
Now what
Facts have a language of their own.
says this fact of the Church, a society of consciences
governed by the State, a society of interests? this
fact of the institution, that recognises no other truth
than usefulness and necessity, deciding none the less
what concerns absolute truth? this fact of an insti-
tution, the character of which is to restrain indivi-
duality, intruding itself into a sphere where indivi-
duality triumphs in the very limits it prescribes
itself, these limits being of its own prescription? this
fact of a compulsory society directing the affairs of a
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
361
free society? this fact, in a word, of matter governing
mind? Is it to be supposed that such a fact will
keep silence? No, it will speak; it will declare that
religion is a collective affair, which is false; that
society as society has a religion; that spiritual in-
terests run parallel with political, which is false;
that religion and public worship form a part of civil
obligations, which is false; lastly, as we have so
often heard say, that we must follow the religion of
our fathers, of our country, the official religion; that
it is always honourable to remain faithful to it, al-
ways ignominious to abandon it, which is false,
which is infinitely and shamefully false.
This idea, like a slow and obstinate caries, has
made incredible ravages in the human conscience.
While taking care not to threaten external liberty, it
has dealt terrible blows to internal; it has taken
away not liberty, indeed, but what is much more, the
sentiment and idea of liberty. It has dulled con-
sciences, attacked, rooted them to the soil; has made
religion the growth of earth, not heaven; men have
got accustomed to receive it ready-made from the
same hands that regulate police and taxation; they
do not so much believe in the Word of God, or even
in a Church, as in the State; they have a religious
banner, the State has one; were it to change that
religion, so would they; nothing in the dulled and
cauterised conscience would warn of the change or
the difference; men would accept from the State a
new definition of truth as well (and better) as a new
362
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division of parishes; and as servitude degrades minds
to the degree of making itself loved, they end by
becoming enthusiastic about this Helotism in pro-
portion to its antiquity, and making religion a
mere affair of prescription, they grow sentimental
about the religion of their fathers, without even in-
quiring whether they really hold that religion, or
have indeed any religion at all.
The crime of State Churches is not so much that of
preventing the display as preventing the formation
of convictions; their crime is tacitly to deny both
conscience and religion.
When an institution that was exclusively spiritual
begins to affect temporal attributes, a violence is done
to its inner nature, which throws it at once into the
last extremities of disease.
We cannot too often repeat it: every ecclesiastical
body, even the most pious, will become persecuting
if once it has power on its side.
The Gospel is in every point the reign of the
spirit, or as philosophy would gladly put it, the
reign of the idea. Jesus Christ came to consecrate
and realise the rights and the powers of the pure
idea. Our evil nature has protected, and under the
two forms of Catholicism and nationalism has once
more chained spirit to matter. In this close and
fatal conjunction spirit becomes matter. Alas! in
all forms of the religious institution man is in danger
of sacrificing the reality to the form; but the greater,
the more universal and eternal the danger, the more
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
363
important is it not to create, as does nationalism, the
abuse into a principle.
There is a grave error in looking upon the Church
as one of the establishments of the State like
schools, like the army,-and in believing that the
Church is to expect from the State its organisation
and its laws. The Church in some countries has, up
to a certain point, founded the State, or, at all events,
has cemented the political establishments, but where
is it that the State has founded the Church?
superior in dignity, it is also, if we look to dates, at
least its contemporary. It exists by and for itself,
and if it be not made to give laws, neither is it made
to receive them.
Its
Are you well aware of the great convenience of
a religion of form to those who are averse to real
religion? The fact is, that by filling up one way or
other the empty space, it prevents anything else pene-
trating there. What do you suppose certain men
mean when they say that it is desirable a people
should have a religion? They mean, that a religion
is the best preservation against the religion; that a
State religion is a capsule in which real Christianity
conceals itself; and that there is nothing better than
a death that represents life. Hence it is that sceptics
have so great a value for State religion.
Oh, how the enemies of religion must laugh in-
wardly, and with each other, to see believing men,
dupes of a hypocritical respect, accept for religion a
rank that compromises, and homage that enchains it!
364
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
It must not be imagined that the respect, and,
above all, the love of a people for a religious institu-
tion is any stronger and deeper because it sees that
spiritual institution in regular relations with the tem-
poral power; the people has surer instincts on this
head. It has a constitutional respect, indeed, for all
external power and official authority, and in this sense,
and no other, it respects the official religion and the
authorised pastor. It looks with much the same eye
upon its pastor and its mayor. And yet I am not
sure of this; the pastor has pretensions that the
mayor has not; he wants men's hearts, and wants
them by law. This is not the way to obtain them.
A minister of the Gospel is strong only by that moral
authority for which no other can be a substitute, nay,
which all other only injures by seeking to add itself
thereto.
We must not deny the service that the Church
rendered to European populations by assuming a
public position, but neither must we forget what a
price the children have paid for service rendered to
their fathers.
We can only pretend in political matters to rela-
tive truth and relative good. But absolute truth and
absolute good being the proper object of religion, a
religious system which is false and corrupt is much
more so than a political system of the same quality,
and in this point of view the system of Church States
is much less worthy of indulgence than the feudal
system.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
365
A people that has abdicated its most precious
faculties; that has surrendered into the hands of the
State the individual right of opinion, must needs
become a frivolous people.
Looking at the innumerable evils of which religion
has been either the pretext or the instrument, let
us refer their cause to that fatal error which has
established between the two independent institutions
of Church and State forced and inevitably mischie-
vous relations, which, in substituting physical em-
pire for mere influence, has distorted and perverted
the character of both institutions at once.
To protect without conviction is hypocrisy; to per-
secute without conviction is to join violence to
hypocrisy; to carry on a fanatical course of action
in a spirit of indifference is the part of a shame-
less Machiavellianism. Now, how many times
have Governments presented us with this spec-
tacle! or rather, where is it that they have not pre-
sented it?
Policy, in playing the part of religion, has forced
religion to become a policy; but each has degraded
itself by this conduct, and the latter more than the
former.
What we can never forgive to the union we speak
of, is not all the calamities, of which the very image
alarms us, it is the having corrupted men by demo-
ralising the two institutions which serve as the basis
of social life; I mean religion and politics.
The greatest crime of the alliance is to have low
1
366
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
ered characters, and falsified ideas, by legalising
hypocrisy and basing institutions on falsehood.
(2.) Existing Relations.
The union of Church and State now-a-days signi-
fies pretty nearly the contrary to what it signified under
Constantine; and the same men who would have shud-
dered then at assisting at the signature of the con-
tract, now advise and insist upon carrying it out; the
same enmity which of old wished to have the Church
out of the State, grown more clear-sighted now,
wishes to have it in the State. With the exception of
this untruth, candour and openness everywhere pre-
vail, and the position of Christianity, becoming daily
more defined, is that of an old man grown burden-
some, whose ungrateful family, impatient to inherit
his property, complain of his long life.
The system of State Churches can no longer be
defended in our day as it used to be formerly; certain
arguments have become impossible. And in general,
indeed, it defends itself less than it attacks, content-
ing itself for the most part with contesting the worth,
and, above all, the possibility of the opposite systems
proposed, and trying to establish by way of exclusion
the right that is denied to it.
There was, long ago, a religion of the masses, a
collective faith, compact and indivisible, which, like
a mighty torrent, swept all minds along. Unbelief,
restricted to the depths of the heart, hardly took
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
367
account of itself; was veiled from its own eyes; now
it knows; avows, and measures itself. In general,
men believe better, but there are fewer believers,
at least, fewer unqualified believers. Faith is no
longer to be taken for granted, can no longer be
insisted upon; neither the quality of citizen, nor even
of public official, implies that of believers; religion, in
a word, has ceased to be numbered among the exi-
gencies of civil life.
Truth is always equal to itself; but truth has its
times and seasons. If the universality of religious
belief, if a universal adherence to the theocratic
principle, formerly rendered the union inevitable, what
a time is ours for theocracy; and how evidently the
religious condition of men's minds all over Europe
demands the separation of the two classes! That is
the principle of our resurrection, that henceforth the
form that Christianity must take, that is the earnest
of its future! It would perish in relations, the false-
ness of which becomes even more palpable and re-
volting; but it will not perish, because, like Samson,
it will break the rotten cords that bind it.
Every ruin is touching, and for the majority of
men hope is less beautiful than memory. We who
speak belong to such men, and perhaps we have
drunk more deeply of this cup than any one of them.
But the axe has been laid to the root of the tree.
•
Our temporising would avert nothing, and,
indeed, speaking openly, does anything remain to
destroy?
368
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
The candid partisans of the union must needs end
by confessing it, between Church and State there
is nowhere union, but only arrangement, in which
principles go for nothing; morally, the separation is
already consummated.
By the avowal and consent of the partisans of the
union, the spiritual and temporal are pretty well
detached from each other. This principle, which is
nothing but the specially Christian principle, and
which makes the characteristic difference between the
old and new dispensation, has slowly and laboriously
hollowed out its channel in society, and the stream,
after having long covered an indefinite space, can no
longer flow elsewhere.
About the time of great innovations, the idea from
whence they are to spring is in the atmosphere;
you inhale it with the air; it germinates uncon-
sciously even in the minds most opposed to it: for if
they do not hold that particular opinion, they have a
thousand others that lead to it unawares. So it is
with the separation of the temporal and spiritual; its
triumph is secured; and I am entitled to declare that
nothing remains to us but to make the incline more
easy, and the only way of doing so is to prepare men's
minds for the event.
Just as a Government must not adopt Christianity,
which is too special for deists, so neither must it
adopt deism, which is too general for Christians. A
Government doing either the one or the other, parti-
cularises, excludes.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
369
Some persons have brought forward an idea which
has very little solidity about it, nay, which is not
even specious; they have proposed that the State
should have a religion which might be that of all
possessing any religion, or rather, which should be
contained in all religions. But they have forgotten
that this general religion, by the very fact of being
provided with a form and an establishment, would
change from general to particular, from negative to
positive, since it would be more or less exclusive
of the special forms, which believe themselves the
only true, or the only ones identical with truth.
The idea of submitting religion to rule must strike
us by its opposition to the spirit which more and
more dominates the world. Everything tends to
restrict the sphere of authority, and to reduce the
number of its exclusive attributes. The Government
is only supposed to take charge of what individuals
cannot. It enters into the modern idea of society to
be--I will not say as weakly, but as little governed
as possible. Men are anxious that the spontaneity of
human nature should find space and material; that
general interests should occupy the thought and
heart of individuals who have no public functions
connected with them; that society should freely
advance, and transform itself under the seal of a few
general convictions, placed out of the pale of attack.
This is not an abstract thought, but a part of the
life and instinct of modern societies. Can it then be,
that what there is of most intimate and spontaneous
B B
370
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
in man—the one thing which, in its principle and
development, is the most completely alien to the
course of this world, which, in a material sense,
occupies no room in it, links itself with nothing, and
prevents nothing, that this one thing, of all others,
should be put under tutelage? Whence comes this
difference? If religion be thus treated, is it because
it is so much loved, or so much feared?
Theoretically the State has returned within its own
limits, and confines itself even more exactly within
them.
Liberalism is perfectly in accordance with this
tendency of minds and institutions, of which, perhaps,
it is the most correct name; radicalism, born enemy
of individuality, may, indeed, for a time act inversely
upon men's minds; but modern thought, permeated as
it is with this generous sap, will finally prevail. In-
dividuality will continue at the basis of society, and
the ancient State, with its poetic grandeur, will re-
main a memory of the past.
The ancient or pagan State was, indeed, capable of
absorbing the whole man, because individual religion,
that of the conscience, did not as yet exist. The
masses had a religion, the individual had none.
Religion, therefore, entered without obstacle into the
constitution of the State, or rather, it already found
itself there. The State, more or less, had made it,
and made it day by day; each one received it at its
hands. The great unity, of which some tell us, was
then possible in the State; and the State could present
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
371
itself as the consummation of man, or as man himself,
to the great injury, no doubt, of the most important
developments of which man is susceptible.
At the present time the State is the first of human
institutions, the noblest of human achievements; but
it is nothing more. Man makes the State, not the
State man.
Man is found in his entirety only in
man. The State, man's production, instrument, and
means, proceeds from him, but is, nevertheless, external
to him, as the universe, proceeding from God, is for
all that not God. Such is the characteristic of mo-
dern civilisation and politics. Such is the immense
difference between our age and pagan ages.
(3.) Separation: Importance of the Question-Proofs
in favour of Separation-The Nature of Man and
of the Gospel-Protection and Persecution-The
Individual and Society with regard to Religion
-Objections against Separation-The true rela-
tion of Church and State, and their results.
He who does not share our convictions on this
head neither understands man nor Christianity. He
does not even know, or forgets, the lessons of history,
which invariably shows us religion recovering new
life in proportion as it withdraws out of the State's
sphere of attraction, and the State withering and
paralysing whatever it touches in the spiritual do-
main. When Bonaparte restored altars, he did not
restore religion; she was recovering without him; he
372
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
stifled her in the purple, and under his icy hand the
sacred oil, that had begun to flow in the fire of trial,
was soon seen to congeal again.
The distinction of the two spheres, political and
religious, has made rapid way. Day by day it has
become more severe and exacting. It is imperious,
as truth ought to be; it is fertile as truth. . . . . It
was the want, the vague guess of all ages; it is the
discovery and the glory of our own, which, with eyes
raised to heaven, may legitimately exclaim, with the
geometrician of Syracuse-Eureka!
Let us not then be told that we are amusing our-
selves with a secondary question, or one of mere
organisation; as we conceive of it, it is neither a
matter of organisation nor of secondary importance;
it affects the very foundations of religion, and, accord-
ing to us, affects them to such a degree, that a doubt
respecting the truth of that which we have dared to
undertake the advocacy, would imply to our minds a
doubt as to the truth of Christianity itself; for all the
objections that we have ever heard urged against our
principles have especially distressed us, as containing,
although unconsciously to their promulgators, a secret
distrust of Christianity, an implicit negation of the truth.
We have always felt that the principles of our adver-
saries did it injustice, while ours rendered it homage.
Separation is the morality of the Church, or one
section of it. The Christian Church, as well as the in-
dividual Christian, is called upon to come out of the
world, and its manner of coming out of it is to
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
373
separate itself from the State. Such is its duty, and
such the mode of that duty. It is not therefore with
ecclesiastical policy, but with a moral question, that
we deal. And what form in religion is more appro-
priate to life, comes more near to life, than morality?
And how should any one dare to apply to this form,
morality, the sentence we are now discussing: "the
form does not give the life," since this form makes
part of the life, since this form is the life itself. Can
morality be put out of court by an argument like
this? We ourselves, if our theory concerns morality,
can we help pleading its cause, or can we plead it
with too much ardour and persistency? Let people
say whatever they will about the probable result
of the situation that we wish the Church to
occupy, we have nothing to do with balancing
mere conjectures; the question regards a duty that
the Church has long ignored, that the Church is at
length to fulfil; and never can we be persuaded that
in recalling the Church to its duty, we merely pro-
cure it a new form, and do nothing for its life.
If I could believe it were given to any one to have
a perfect knowledge of the genealogy of his opinions,
I should say that that of separation between Church
and State sprang up in me from the simple considera-
tion of human nature and the study of the Gospel.
The primary interest of a spiritual institution is
to avoid all contact, and still more all commerce
with a temporal institution, founded upon a principle
so different to its own.
374
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
To identify the Church with the State is to forget,
not only the fall, but the probation of man; that is
to say, the design of God, who has chosen to render
man responsible, and could only do so by rendering
him individual, and consequently, by making re-
ligion a matter of moral certainty, not overpowering
evidence.
The Gospel had no need to protest against national-
ism, for the Gospel is that very protestation, or
rather, is a protestation against a religious system,
of which nationalism is, in truth, only a form, or
a manifestation-a confusion, namely, between the
domain of nature and grace, the domain of matter
and mind. In raising itself above this point of view,
which is that of all human religion, and from which
the Jewish even had not entirely freed itself, the
Christian law struck from very far and from very
high, and, as it were, unintentionally, at the system
of nationality in religion, or of national religion.
Absorbed in a more general idea, the latter was
involved in the condemnation of that idea, without
even coming in for the honour of being itself
named.
In consequence of the original fall, or taking
human nature as it is, there is a duality between
man and society; and upon certain points, to use
scholastic language, this duality is irreducible. I am
not surprised; I am not much annoyed at its being
denied. I should reget to see men make up their
mind readily to the fact. I am almost glad that
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
375
they should exclaim against it. I only deny that it
shows much maturity of mind to do this, and I am
a little offended when it is a Christian who thus
exclaims; for a Christian believes in a generic fall
and in individual restoration. He has, therefore, not
indeed exclusively, but eminently, reasons thoroughly
to agree in our doctrine.
In every member of society there are two distinct
beings, one of whom is by his physical nature and his
temporal relations entangled in the bonds of civil
society, and one who, as regards his faith and his
hope, belongs only to God and to himself. The
State has something to demand from the first,
nothing from the second.
For all of us there is a birth according to the flesh,
for a certain number a birth according to the spirit.
Now civil society, which embraces without distinc-
tion all human individuals born on the same soil, is
it born of the spirit or the flesh? We must either
reply that it is born of the flesh, or efface from the
Gospel the distinction between the two births. Con-
sequently, then, the human individual, capable of a
∙second birth, is endowed with a capacity which so-
ciety does not share. So considerable a difference as
this sufficiently attests that man and society are two.
The most brilliant periods of the Church were
those when, denuded of all human help, it had entirely
to depend upon the support of its God.
Christianity is only as pure as it possibly can be
when it is separated from the world.
376
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
There is permanent opposition and hostility be-
tween Christianity on one hand, and the natural
man on the other (I say the natural, and not the
wicked or vicious man); so that, as long as the
natural man shall be in force in the world, spiritual
Christians will be in a state of proscription, and, in
some respects, disinherited; whence it follows that
their alliance, in their capacity of Christians, with a
society on which the natural man impresses his
character and his tendencies, is equivalent to a
dialogue between two interlocutors who do not
understand each other's language, to an association
between two individuals divided in opinion and
interest.
Every citizen is not a believer, but every believer
is a citizen. Religious laws can only bind those who
believe in them, but civil laws bind every man that
lives among men. Accordingly, civil marriage is
a civil and absolute obligation; religious marriage
is only a relative and moral obligation.
Protection and persecution are only the forms of
an idea, and the consequences of a principle,—the
principle which brings religious conviction into any
relation whatsoever with civil society. If this prin-
ciple had not been established in men's minds, no
one would ever have thought either of protecting or
persecuting creeds. So long as it exists, however con-
fusedly, men will at least protect, and in protecting
they will persecute. As soon as society intervenes in
favour of a religion,-in other terms, so soon as society
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
377
has a religion,—it may contest and refuse to indi-
viduals the exercise of their own, in virtue of the
same principle on which expropriation for grounds
of public utility is based. If, on the contrary, it
abdicate this senseless claim; if, keeping out of the
pale where religious parties struggle, it solemnly says
to them, as Jesus Christ to the two disputants,
“Who made me a ruler and a judge over you?" we
do not positively decide that it will thereby render
the recurrence of deplorable excesses perfectly im-
possible, but we think we may affirm that there will
be an immense difference between excesses acci-
dentally committed, and in flagrant violation of rights,
and those same excesses admitted in principle, erected
into dogmas, and passed into laws.
If the State, whose element is constraint, should
bind its penal sanction, or the weight of its material
influence, to the dogmas of the Church, and the
Church on its side should impress a sacred character
on the injunction of the civil power, there would no
longer be any room for spontaneity, any asylum for
liberty; the whole ground would be invaded, until
thought, that no fetters can hold for ever, should force
the State, or rather aid it, to free itself from the grasp
of the Church. Thus came about, at the close of the
middle ages, not the sudden death, but the slow
decay of theocracy.
How right we seem to be when we are persecuted!
how wrong when we persecute!
In religion, the protection of civil authority adds no
378
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
strength to the strong, but it increases the weakness
of the weak. It does not appeal to the spontaneity
of the one, it stifles the little of it that the other had.
To accept protection for any belief whatsoever, is
to accept, as a consequence, the right to persecute.
We will not have protection for the very reason
that we resist persecution; for, from the right to
protect, there inevitably flows an equal right to
persecute. Men may try to limit this right; to cut
it short at the point where protection ends; to forbid
its going beyond; but this limitation is arbitrary, and
it is impossible logically to say how the right of
persecuting can be denied to society when once the
right of protecting has been recognised. Even the
idea of such limitation belongs to modern times. The
days are not very distant when society, not indeed
more reasonable, but certainly more logical, arrogated
to itself and exercised that right, disputed in our
time in virtue of a probably gratuitous distinction.
If the State be the man, it ought to persecute; and
in persecuting it does nothing more than fulfil the
precept, "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and
cast it from thee: if thy hand offend thee, cut it off."
The first service, or rather the first homage, that
religion demands from you, the sign by which she
will recognise you as her own, is your abstaining,
in your character of earthly powers, from affording
her your assistance: thus to aid is to betray her.
If persecution brings with it graces, of which times
of peace know nothing, it has its dangers too, to which
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
379
peace is not exposed. In the tumult and dust of con-
flict, the forms of objects change or get obscured, the
mind grows excited, and the flesh exasperated; and if
one side, one hemisphere of truth then disclose itself
to our eyes, it is greatly to be feared that another
veils itself. Made a spectacle to the world, to angels,
to men, but above all to ourselves, we shall perhaps
find some difficulty in guarding against pride.
If persecution endured have such dangers, what
will not be the dangers of persecution courted, or
what comes to the same thing, the dangers of a perse-
cution to which we have not chosen to oppose the
buckler of truth? No tribulation is good for us if,
instead of coming from God, it comes from our-
selves.
When an individual becomes a Christian it is
through conviction; it is because he feels himself
constrained to it; he yields to something stronger
than, and yet one with, himself,-to conscience: but
when the State becomes Christian it is not from con-
science, since it has none; it is, however the case
may be represented, from the consideration of the
advantages expected from the alliance. Now, con-
formably with the nature of the State, these ad-
vantages cannot be the same that the Church pursues.
This marriage is, therefore, on the part of the State a
mercenary match, a match of interest and expediency.
We know what is the fate of such unions.
The State, in order to suit man who has religion,
ought itself to have none. Here is the difference
380
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
which constitutes harmony; it is the absence in one
of what is present in the other that makes their
correspondence; and the more the State wishes to be
what only the man can be, the less will it repre-
sent him.
The individual alone knows religion as an end.
To know religion as means is not to know it as re-
ligion; it is necessarily to maltreat it. This is why,
whether protecting or persecuting, the society that
meddles with religion inevitably maltreats it.
Civil society, when it assumes a religious character,
denies individuality, and consequently religion: the
Church, on the contrary, sets out from the assump-
tion of individuality, and it is on this condition that
it deserves the name of a religious society.
Society is a being or a fact. There is no medium,
and we must needs allow that if it be a being, man
is not one; if it be man, man is man no longer, has
only the vain semblance of humanity. There
can be no such thing as sharing; the one neces-
sarily becomes all that the other no longer is, the
one ceases to be what the other becomes. If society
be a being it is everything; if not everything it is
only a fact, and the man remains entire in man : we
must absolutely choose here.
Society is not the whole of man, but only all men.
Society is what all men share in common; not all
that one man can have in common with another
man, but a portion more or less great, and in no case
one which is by its nature inalienable. Society
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
381
amounts to this-A man seeking a support and a
complement in another man, and offering himself to
him under the same character.
The real persons of which a people is composed
have placed in common all they could so place.
This mass of interests and affections, of fears and
hopes, of prejudices even, common to all, creates a
kind of individual nationality; but the individual has
never been able to throw into the common fund what
does not belong to him, what was only given to him
upon condition of never being alienated, what does.
not belong to his jurisdiction, but under whose
jurisdiction he, on the contrary, is, namely, truth and
God.
If there be in man as an individual an inalien-
able, inviolable element, which cannot form part of
any community, it is clear that this element, re-
maining the peculiar property of each individual,
withdrawn by him beyond the reach of any usurpa-
tion, will not be represented in the State on any con-
dition, or under any form, and that the State will be
man, if you will, but with this one element less. All
consciences would need to be identical, or in other
words, there would be in all men alike one and
the same conscience, were it possible for it to trans-
plant itself into the social institution and become
its conscience. Now, evidently it is not so, unless
society, in lieu of being a concourse of individuali-
ties, be their absorption, or rather their absolute
negation.
382
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
The State cannot have a religion if individuals
have one, and can only have one on condition of
individuals having none, until a moral miracle shall
reduce the consciences of all to union. But so long
as this miracle do not take place, man remaining
man, man having a religion, the State can have none.
Conscience would not be conscience were it to
sacrifice even its weakest part. But to say truth,
it has no part; it is one and indivisible. Now it
must be with the conscience of society as with that
of the individual, if indeed society have a conscience;
it must be all or nothing. It absorbs, or rather, it
denies that of the individual. Between the latter
and society there intervenes social necessity for the
protection of the society. Between society, furnished
with a conscience, and the individual, there is no
necessity in favour of the latter. The conscience of
the great social unity cannot, without abdicating,
admit the conscience of individual unity. The re-
ligion, I do not say of all, but of the whole, cannot
admit the religion of only one, or of many.
If society have a religion, this is because it has a
conscience; if it have a conscience, how should the
conscience of the individual prevail against that of
society? Conscience is sovereign in man. Now,
should it not be sovereign in society? Alone with
his conscience the man makes head against society.
But how will you represent to yourself this man,
opposed to society, having as such a conscience?
It is impossible to oppose sovereignty to sovereignty,
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
383
omnipotence to omnipotence; impossible to suppose
that from all the individual and various consciences
a social conscience will result. What mystery, or
rather what nonsense, are you proposing to us here!
No; if society have a conscience at all, it is on
condition of the individual having none; and con-
science being the seat of religion, if society be re-
ligious, the individual is not so.
Our conscience does not rank among those posses-
sions of which we may dispose at our pleasure:
conscience is not ours, it is not even we; it is an
authority residing within us; it is the organ of the
Divinity in our souls; it is the supreme law, the
law of laws. To give up our conscience is to give
up God. Society may never exact this.
We may say that all religion deserving the name
professes the sovereignty of conscience; for what is
religion but a reservation made by the social man in
favour of a portion of himself, that he neither will
nor can yield up to political society, namely, his
conscience? This is the vital principle of all reli-
gion, the refuge of individuality, which, without this,
would be too easily absorbed into the social unity;
so that we may well say, that without religion one
of the most solid guarantees of human liberty would
be irrevocably lost.
I, for my part, believe that if there be a dogma that
threatens the existence of the State it is much rather
the dogma of a blind and passive obedience, the
dogma that annuls conscience. The true enemies
384
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
of the State are they who teach that when the
prince speaks, conscience is to be silent, or who,
strangely narrowing the arena of morality, profess
that there is no absolute obligation but that of
obeying the Government; that all other obligations
have merely a relative value, and that the civil
Government is the source and rule of all morality.
These are the doctrines that ruin States.
Numbers signify little so long as it be not proved
that numbers make truth; if this be not proved, all
those individuals that are opposed to me amount
only to one. I have never more than one before me
at a time; I have only got to measure myself with
the first, then the second, then the third, and so on;
the question is only between me and another man,
and the question thus put, it is evident that I am
left free. One man in matters of religion is worth
another, and no more; no one will pretend to tell me
that that other man represents me; I can surely
represent myself, and if I agree to his opinion on
any subject soever, it is not to that man I submit
myself, but to the truth.
Consciences cannot be agglomerated and weighed
against consciences; it is always an individual
opinion that is accidentally found to be the opinion
of a certain number; nay, I go further, the opinion
of a whole people, were it possible that one opinion
could be common to all the individuals of which
a people is composed, could no more be rendered
authoritative on a single individual than can the
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
385
opinion of a single individual upon a whole people,
unless the enormous paradox of numbers making
truth be admitted; for the State can only urge in
favour of its religious competence one of these two
maxims, either the State, as such, is in possession
of truth, is inspired, is an apostle; or, number and
force constitute truth. But if truth does not find its
seal in numbers, I am right in drawing no distinc-
tion between the government of one man and many;
and in all cases alike I see one man (whether he have
many accomplices or not) obliging a people to put on
his conscience; for such, on the part of each member
of the Government, is the real fact, a fact of which
each is aware and has the whole responsibility. Now
the question is, do you admit that a man, in whom a
certain opinion and temporal power are accidentally
united, may make use of his power to impose his
opinion; and that another man, succeeding to this
power, but holding another opinion, may do the
same? But the case would be still worse if, as
has sometimes been the case, the man made use of his
power to enforce an opinion that was not even his ;—a
driver amongst negroes submitted to the same despot;
a slave scourging his companion in slavery! Such
are the monstrous incongruities to which every system
that gives to Government any competence whatever
in matters of religion must necessarily descend.
If the State be the man, the State is religion; the
State is, therefore, capable of comprehending and
practising the precept that bids us turn the left
C C
386
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cheek to him that strikes the right. Let us be
frankly told whether this be the morality that is to
be taught to a political community.
If men persist in believing that the State repre-
sents the whole of man, the State must absolutely be
the Church. This middle term, named union, which
men would place between separation and identity,
is purely chimerical; there can be no true way but
identity or separation.
To realise the system which would place the whole
man in the State, God must be present therein, or be
believed to be present, and the heads of the State
Church must verify by irresistible proof the divinity
of their mission and the plenitude of their rights.
Their laws must be oracles. But to show us the
State, as State, choosing the Church is a pure contra-
diction. How should it choose the Church unless it
be itself the Church? Will it be urged that in our
system the individual chooses it? Yes, doubtless, at
his own risk and for himself alone.
the other system chooses for all.
choose for all unless it be supposed that the con-
science of all is subjugated by those striking evi-
dences to which every man yields for the very reason
that he is man?
But the State in
And how can it
Does the State know the truth? that is the ques-
tion. For if it does not know it, it can neither
teach it nor cause it to be taught. If, as a State, it
does, this must be in virtue of a permanent inspira-
tion, which places it in the position of prophet and
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
387
apostle; and I am ready to consent to this, provided
it be proved: but for all that, we shall be no further
on, for what we shall have proved of one state will
be denied as to all others, each state having its own
doctrine, and it being impossible for truth to reside
at the same time in several different or opposite
doctrines. Consequently the right of the State to
rule over men's consciences must remain founded
solely on force, which has nothing in common with
right.
Does the State as such know the truth? If it
knows it, it must know it better than any one, and
each of us will do well to refer controverted points to
its decision; or rather there will be no controversies,
the teaching of the State preventing them all.
No doubt it would be convenient to regard the
executive power as the depositary of all political
truths; the clergy of all religious, the academies of
all literary truths. This does, indeed, seem so con-
venient to many, that they will not entertain a doubt
of such being really the case; but in spite of their
wishes nothing is less certain.
Until we are shown on the head of kings the
tongue of fire that shone on the brow of the apostles,
until the gift of miracles be conferred upon a govern-
ment, we must reduce it-respectfully and confi-
dently, however to the office of defender of social
morality; and while taking upon ourselves the law
of our eternal interests, we will entrust it with our
temporal interests as citizens.
388
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
There is a truth, and the State is not its depositary.
In order to know it, then, to whom is each one of us
referred? To himself, undoubtedly. This does not
mean that it is to be found in self, and that one is to
have recourse to none other. No; but each listens and
believes; each examines and judges; each compares
and chooses; it is freely that each one submits.
The conscience of the individual discovers the truth,
and his will accepts the law of his conscience.
As for us, we say that truth is in God, and that
from the Father of spirits it is communicated in
silence and mystery, not to society, nor to the State,
but to every spirit that humility and repentance
have rendered fit to receive it. Self-abasement is
the key of this treasure; the secret of the Lord is
with them that fear Him.
The individual conscience, abstracting itself from
every given state, every artificial situation, may seek
for absolute truth, ought to seek for and to hope for it.
To say the reverse would be tantamount to saying
that there is no communication from God, no pre-
sence of God in man, consequently that no religion
is possible: but society as such cannot have this aim
nor this hope; it ought, therefore, while remaining in
its own sphere, to leave the individual undisturbed in
his; in a word, it has only got to inform itself about
religion in so far as religion may manifest itself exter-
nally, by facts that interest society as such: it is
these facts, not religion itself, which properly fall
beneath its notice and within its domain.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
389
It is unjust to render the individual responsible
towards the State for what he is only responsible for
to God; it is unjust to attribute to the association a
competence with regard to the associated that it can-
not exert; and it were exerting it to proclaim the
following maxim:-"The State has a religion:
thenceforth whoever does not belong to the religion
of the State is not a citizen; or if he insists upon
being thus at any price, he must needs affiliate him-
self to a worship that is not that of his own con-
viction."
How far the State is from taking possession of all
the ground that lies between civil rights, properly so
called, and the religious conscience! How far the
civil law is from occupying the whole domain of
natural morality or even of social morality! How
many things in morals it abandons to the man-
ner and custom of the day! How more and more
definite the line of demarcation between sin and
crime is made! Upon how many points formerly
reputed to belong to it does it now keep silence!
To see how increasingly narrow its sphere becomes,
would one not say that the State must end by
being only the responsible manager or official super-
intendent of a great undertaking, which, even from
this point of view, one might continue to call the
republic, that is, public thing?
It is important not to confound the two spheres of
morality and law; for if morality be the support of
the law in human consciences, if it may be summoned
390
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
to the aid of the law, nay, if the law can only have
authority and permanence in so far as it respects mo-
rality, it is none the less true that law is not morality;
for it has not for its direct end and only principle
the absolute perfection of the human race; and
wherever it has applied its own special method,
which is constraint, to the development of that within
the breast of man which should remain sovereign
and free, it has shattered itself against an inevitable
obstacle.
Society is you, is me, is all the world; is
òne, two, ten, a thousand men, many millions
of men, but still of men, still of individuals, all
responsible, all bound to what you are requiring
from society, which, being itself impersonal, is bound
to nothing.
The State, depending upon what there is of identi-
cal in all men, encloses them all alike; the Church,
having sprung from an element which is not that of
identity, only gathers into its breast those in whom
she meets with that element.
We shall always protest against every formula
which directly or indirectly gives to one, or to some,
or to all, any right whatever over the truth: for the
truth belongs to no one; the truth is God Himself;
and we belong to Him, not He to us.
The State can only be the expression of the ma-
jority, and the majority is the world. To diminish
or blunt the Gospel will always be the tendency of
the State.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
391
If you wait till society gives you religion, till
society educates you, you may wait long. Do not
wait. Let the universe rest awhile, and take care of
yourself; the universe will be attended to by-and-bye.
Think of yourself, since the question is of religion,
that is, of the most individual of all things; the
most social too, if you will, since it is the true cement
of all societies; but also the least social as well, since
it is born and dwells in the convictions of the indivi-
dual. Be so good, first of all, to have a religion for
yourselves, or if you do not want one for your-
selves, but only for all the world, oblige us by not
wanting one at all. That is not a religious soul
which views religion as pre-eminently a social in-
terest, and in whom that interest alone originates the
idea and the desire of a religion. Here socialism is
at fault, and contradicts itself; it feels the want of
religion, that is to say, of a spontaneous life of the
conscience; and it insists upon society, which it
views as antecedent to religion, making a present of
a religion to each of its members, as though it were
a manor, a plough, or an acre of ground. Man
wishes to make a religion, and not to receive; and
if so, he does not want a religion.
Christianity has patiently gravitated from indi-
viduals to the mass. It does not pretend to a Chris-
tian society in the first place, in order afterwards to
have Christian individuals. Socialism, which is not
patient (patiens quia æternus), wants, first of all, a
moral society which shall provide for the formation
392
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
of moral individuals. This seems the shorter way, but
what is impossible is always very long! We must
believe that the emptiness, the fallacy, the danger
of these theories will soon strike all eyes. But every-
thing has its reason, even the unreasonable, and the
successive rise and fall of the different socialist
schools is not an insignificant phenomenon.
The Christian philosopher should take heed to it.
Weary and disgusted of all chimeras, he should still
remount to their source, and find there some warning
for himself. The socialistic or social point of view is
contained in Christianity, because Christianity con-
tains everything. If some exaggerate this principle,
others perhaps completely overlook it. It is a point
to which the friends of religious progress should turn
their attention.
No doubt the State—that is, the political institution
-is the condition of all human developments, and of
religious development, which is the first of all; but
this does not imply that the State should take in hand
the management of this interest. Let religion inspire
morals, let morals dictate the laws; that is the natural
progression, that is the true method; that, too, the ade-
quate means. And the power of the Church will not
be more displayed-on the contrary, it will be less so
-by employing the State than in dispensing with it.
The State itself, the State taken in the simple
fact of its existence, is an instinctive and un-
premeditated application of the great principles of
division of labour. The State is only one of the
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
393
forms of humanity, or one of the institutions of God
in humanity; it is the platform, the theatre, the
shelter of all the developments of the moral creature;
the enclosure behind which man labours to accomplish
his destiny; in a word, the condition of all that we
are, but not its principle or its source.
Obliged to choose between two theories of the
State, we declare that we are not for the revival of
the State of the Greeks; we are for liberty, and con-
sequently for the modern State. Now this latter
does not aim at realising within itself a unity, which
only ought and only can be realised in man; con-
sequently this State very naturally leaves the Church
outside of itself. And there is all the more reason
for making over to the individual, among other things
and before-all, his religion, that this religion, absolutely
unlike all that in ancient time bore the name, is not
of a nature to seek to form part of, and lose itself in,
that indivisible fund which is the domain of the
State. This religion, that proclaims a jealous God, is
itself a jealous religion; it takes alarm at all that
attacks its inviolable liberty; it will only owe the
friends and auxiliaries it needs to its own free choice,
and is much more afraid of being helped inopportunely
than unjustly oppressed.
What is most formidable to liberty is not so much
an institution which warns while threatening it, as
an institution which, while affecting to recognise, in
fact denies the very principle of this liberty. The
society that wants to deprive me of my religion
4
394
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
alarms me much less than the society that wants
itself to have one. A constitution that makes the
State religious, makes me irreligious in so far as I
consent to this constitution.
What idea is entertained of religion when even its
liberty is feared,―—that, namely, which is only refused
to verified and recognised evil? Why, this is to try
religion as a recognised and verified evil. And if,
instead of exterminating it as such, it be protected,
adopted, and associated with the State, what else is
this than to proclaim that this acknowledged evil is
at the same time incurable, and that the guardians of
society, unable to extirpate the scourge, take upon
themselves its administration in order to watch
over it, modify, and to repress it, much as in
certain countries the Government takes under its
own care and responsibility gambling-houses and
some other establishments ?
We know very well that all evil comes from sin;
and if that be all, here we have politics, laws, even
medicines, summed up in a word, or suppressed. As
for me, I hold that, sin existing, we must give it as
little hold as possible; we must not favour it by
institutions, must even erect institutions that may
serve as a check to it.
"Let us live," recently exclaimed an author, with
regard to the ecclesiastical system we advocate-"let
us live, and let them argue." It is very right to
determine to live, and when the proof resulting from
the life shall be complete, that is to say, when it shall
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
395
be proved that the ecclesiastical system that is
opposed to ours has as good individual and general
effects as ours aspires to produce, the discussion will
be at an end; or if it has not begun, it will not begin.
But if under certain conditions life be a proof, if in
certain cases it puts an end to all possible doubt, it
must first of all exist,-exist in a measure, a univer-
sality, a superiority, which, as it were, causes the very
arena of the discussion to vanish away. But it is
allowed with laudable humility that this proof, this
annihilation of all doubt, is wanting. We conclude
thence that, even putting out of the question numerous
and important facts, which throw doubts in the minds
of the most thoroughly convinced on this subject of the
union of Church and State, the time is not come for
holding arguments cheap. People may, if they will,
refrain from taking up the question of principles; they
may even refuse to discuss it at all; but to engage
to prove the contrary of a doctrine by an appeal to
an unknown future and an uncertain experience is a
system that has, in our opinion, no other merit to
commend it than that of novelty.
Much is said about the services that national
Churches have rendered. What! because under this
form of government the Church has not absolutely
died—because some rays of the ancient faith, some
sparks of the ancient flame, have continued to shine-
because the substance has proved stronger than the
form constantly engaged in stifling and extinguishing
it, we are to impute to this system all the good that
396
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
(c
it has not been able to prevent, and praise it for all
the evil it has not had the power to do! 'But," it
is said, "in the national Church the pastor has a
ready-made flock, the flock is provided with a pastor
before they have asked for one!" Why, do you not
see that this is the very evil we protest against, and
that you would do much better to leave to that flock
the task of finding a pastor, to the pastor the care of
forming for himself a flock? Can you not see that, in
matters of religion, spontaneity is the very principle of
life, and that all that is taken away from the one is
so much necessarily lost to the other? When we have
to do with material needs, it is their satisfaction that
is the great point: with regard to spiritual needs, it is
the need itself that is of primary importance; and
before we prepare the aliment, we must first occupy
ourselves in creating the appetite. Now this cannot
be the affair of the State, or if this be its affair and
its duty, it cannot better fulfil it than by standing
aloof and doing nothing.
Certainly the State is very innocent of all of great
that has ever been undertaken or performed in matters
of religion during the era of alliance; and everything
proves that it would have taken place equally and
better without it.
Look, we are told, at the spiritual languor, the pro-
found torpor of the masses, and then say if a national
Church be not necessary. What then? Is it no
longer a sure test to judge of the tree by its fruit?
Nay, more, is the rule now to be the finding the tree
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
397
good because its fruits are evil? We are to retain
national Churches on account of the infidelity of
their produce! You say to us, Look what the Church
is, in spite of the institution that binds it to the
State. Why do you not rather say, Look at what the
Church is because of the institution that connects
it with the State?
Uniformity is not the seal of truth, but that of
falsehood, or at least, of fiction. In such a sphere as
this, life cannot go on without diversity; it is the
life that engenders the diversity. And if the institu-
tion of State Churches boasts of realising on a large
scale the phenomenon of uniformity, it condemns
itself by that very circumstance alone.
If it be for the interest of society to have religious
citizens, it is in no way to compromise, but rather to
further this interest, to desire that religion should be
free, and consequently entirely independent of the
State.
Nowhere will the State show itself less atheistic
than in countries where there is no constitutional
religion.
We are very glad that each profession and each
art should be exercised in a Christian spirit; we go
so far as to exact this, but we cannot exact that each
one of the professional undertakings, each one of the
products of art, should be a direct and explicit ex-
pression of the Christianity of the professional man
or the artist; and in the same way we rejoice that
the statesman should be a Christian, we even abso-
t
398
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
lutely require it from an ideal point of view, but
without pretending that he should employ his official
authority to give to Christian doctrines an official
authority that does not belong to them. He may be
entirely Christian, entirely faithful, without that; nay,
he will but be the more faithful, for to overpass
fidelity is only another way of being unfaithful.
The union of the Church with the State is so grave,
so complicated a fact, one that so modifies all por-
tions of social existence, and even the conditions
of the individual, that the evil it has done becomes an
obstacle to the correction of that evil, just as slavery
seems to have rendered slaves incapable of becoming
free. Man would be much to be pitied if evil be-
came a guarantee of evil. The cure of an old abuse
is always painful, and on the condition of not intro-
ducing any disturbance in society, no reform could
ever take place.
If we are asked, What do you wish religion to
become without the support of the State? we simply
reply, Let it become what it can, let it become what
it ought to become; let it live if it be capable of
living, let it die if it is to die; sit ut est, aut non sit.
Has then the edifice of religion so slight a hold
that, detached from political institutions, it must needs
at once crumble away? However low the religious
temperature of a people-if I may be allowed that
expression—the religious want is general. Under all
possible institutions, nothing is more popular than
religion. A religion which asks itself whether it
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
399
does not need the civil power, confesses that it has
no faith in itself.
If it were true that religion was not to survive its
forced and artificial relations with the State, if it
were even true that its conditions were to become
worse by the facts of this separation, we might as well
abandon it at once, and seek in some old error, or
some new system, the consolation of that secret and
profound misery that up to the present time, by the
aid of a wise policy, had been so gently and gra-
ciously soothed.
Suppose the Church never to have been united to
the State, where is the Christian who would not
exclaim at the idea of the union were it now pro-
posed?
It is difficult to believe that earnest Christians
should conceive of the protection of political power as
the only condition of existence of a religion founded
upon the Rock of ages. If they be Christians, they
are doubtless not insensible to the solemn and sub-
lime delight of feeling themselves tempest-tossed in
a bark that can never perish.
Would not the moral force that enlisted the State
in its service have always proved sufficiently strong
without the State?
The national, or rather the official ritual being
suppressed, do you believe that the multitude,
such as you know it, will give itself a new one?
No; this multitude as it is now will not do so, but
most certainly the multitude as it shall have been
400
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
made by a new situation will; it is this that is over-
looked. How precarious the position of pastors will
be! Why so, if this liberty gives to the flock a more
serious sentiment of religion and public worship, and
if they attach themselves to institutions that are
of their own making, and for which henceforth they
will have to answer?
To those who tell me it is not the institutions, it
is sin that does the harm, I reply, Never then speak
against the Catholic institution as an institution.
What Christianity effected before its alliance with
the State was the conquest of the State. There, at
least, is one work that it has accomplished alone and
without the concurrence of the State. Now this
work was more difficult and greater by itself alone
than all those it has been able to do since. It is not,
therefore, possible to suppose that it could not have
accomplished without association all that it has done
under the associated system.
The separation that we are urging does not threat-
en to intercept the current that causes morality to
flow like fresh and pure blood throughout the whole
social body; nothing of the kind; this separation
has no such aim, nor could the State, even if it would,
prevent itself from being thus permeated and pene-
trated. Under this supposition, as well as any other,
the morality of the State will continue that of the
conscience, that of religion; the separation will re-
semble those natural barriers that mark the confines
of two States, but do not prevent their atmospheres
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
401
:
from intermingling; the realms of the air have no
frontiers.
New relations between religion and the State will
spring up from the very suppression of the legal
relations that existed between them: religion only
secedes to unite more perfectly; only recovers posses-
sion of its own special power to apply it with more
energy to the moral wants of society, by acting, not
as before, by the body on the members, but hence-
forth by the members on the body.
Religion, which from without enveloped the State,
is no longer now without; it is in the centre, from
whence it permeates and nourishes the State. It is
no longer the flesh that covers the skeleton, it is the
heart whence the blood flows, giving life to the whole
body. And it is only on condition of being within—
that is, of being purely spiritual—that it can thus
circulate and be truly its own self.
Man has such a need of religion, that if you do not
by a fatal combination make him view religion as
a political machine, or sacerdotal manœuvre, he will
render it some homage, will enter into some relations
with it. He only waits to greet it till he encounters
it in the solitude, the deprivation, and the majesty of
independence.
Man has wants whose satisfaction, sorrows whose
consolation, can only be found in heaven. Man
without religion is the uprooted tree whence the sap
retires. He will be religious if only he be allowed
to be so,-religious, if you will, in an elementary way;
D D
402
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
at all events, it is certain that if religion show itself
to him alone, it has chances of being welcomed,
chances that it loses when it presents itself to him
in bad company.
Wherever man is left free to provide himself with a
religion, he will have one: this want is universal, pro-
found, inextinguishable; and what disguises it from
you is this very institution, which not only does not
give conscience time to speak, time to feel itself, but
which, by making religion and worship proceed from
the State, teaches us to place worship and religion on
a level with the most ordinary worldly practices and
social observances.
We do not deny that the Church separated from
the State may not become powerful, and in one sense
more powerful, we doubt not, than under the system
of the union; but the power will be one of persuasion,
of which no one can fairly complain, and which, sepa-
rated from all alloy and all external means, remains
as pure as a thing can be. Powerful in the State
and by the State, its power would be of a different
nature, and would have quite other consequences.
Against the former corrupt power we must protest
and wrestle; the latter is but the power of opinion:
the arms are equal, and it is truth that gives the
victory. Should we dare to demand more than this?
Religion renders great services to a State, but it
only renders them inasmuch as it is free; as a slave
it is worth nothing, the salt has lost its savour.
The absolute separation of the spiritual and the
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
403
temporal, of the Church and the State, removes
obstacles, takes a fatal snare away, but does not
change the heart of man. Every one who loves his
chains will keep them; every one who wills to be a
slave will remain one. Liberty cannot be imposed.
For servile souls the terrorism of opinion will
succeed to direct or indirect legal constraint.
Everywhere, when the State remains neutral be-
tween several religions, their divergences, although
sensibly felt, do not trouble the peace, nor create many
nations within the one. National unity is never de-
stroyed by religion, but only on account of it, or under
its name; that is to say, when institutions create a po-
litical rivalry between the different modes of worship,
then, no doubt, two religions do make two peoples.
The nation and national unity are at the circum-
ference; conscience and unity of faith are in the
centre. Man does not carry all the depth of his
being into the region of politics. He can-nay,
as member of the body corporate he ought, to with-
hold many things; and although he be indeed most
heartily a citizen, though he may feel himself in this
respect in a sort of communion with those who love
the same country, yet all his heart, all his inner life,
does not expand itself in this relation; the best, the
most intimate portion of his nature remains in re-
serve, for ends with regard to which the State is but
a means and a condition; but still, what he brings
of his moral life into political relations suffices for
the purpose and interests of the association, and
404
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
national unity has no need to strike its roots in a
deeper soil.
If there be any means of advancing religious unity
in any degree, or at least of maintaining through all
difference of creed the union of citizens as such, this
means is liberty. Now in this order of facts equality
is the complement, equality is an integral part of
liberty.
:
Everywhere, when an impetus is given to democracy,
it must be given also to religion; religion may of itself
take the initiative, but it will become popular, national,
powerful, only when it ceases to be an affair of State.
The Church before the State-this is the proper
order. So soon as there be any question of rank
between her and the State, the superiority is incon-
testably hers, and she can only renounce it by deny-
ing her nature. Independent or sovereign, one or
the other she must be.
3. Politics.
(1.) Politics and Christianity-Right and Duty—
Relative Character of Political Truth.
There are Christian schools which have believed
themselves obliged to deduce from the theological
doctrine of the fall the political dogma of absolute
power; the socialists in their conclusion appear to
coincide with these schools, and nevertheless, strange
to say, they profess to hold the integrity of human
nature. And yet could they treat man differently if
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
405
they believed him without a soul, as irreparably cor-
rupt? Christianity has a different logic; bold, but
divinely bold. It proclaims the fall of man, and yet
calls him to liberty; claims to restore him by liberty,
or at least makes liberty the basis of his restoration.
This liberty is not political, but it leads to political
liberty, to liberty of every kind.
Political controversies are a dangerous snare to the
Christian. Too often he loses in them the independent
judgment, the impartiality, the moderation, that ought
to characterise him among men. In love with order,
he tends to arbitrariness; jealous of liberty, he sanc-
tions fearful excesses, and finds himself making com-
mon cause with the enemies of the faith. Let him
rise above these disturbances, let him contemplate
these distresses and convulsions through the pure
light of eternity.
Is there any one political state more in harmony
than another with the accomplishment of the Divine
purpose? Yes; it is that where man has the dis-
posal of a measure of liberty proportioned to his
whole responsibility as man, and where the abuses
of this liberty meet, in the strength of the Government
and the wisdom of the laws, a sufficient counter-
balance and obstacle. Far from absolute equality
being essential to this purpose, there may be in-
equalities that promote it, and which, therefore, all
Christians willingly accept, even if it be to their
individual detriment. Equality before the law is the
only one that is absolutely true.
•
406
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
The public man may be a Christian, may act
in his character of Christian, without a fear, if his
wisdom be first pure, then peaceable, gentle and easily
entreated—without, I say, a fear of seeing his talents
and capacity thrown away. I do not promise him
popularity; I do not guarantee him from all reverses :
but let him once remember that the germ of a victory
is contained in every defeat undergone for God's
cause; let him also remember that, whatever may be
the aversions of the wise of this world for the counsels
of Christianity, the world is so made that Christianity
ever finds its opportunity in the life of society, and
that its counsels end by being followed even without
being accepted.
Duty is individual; right is not, because it is a
mode of living agreed on or recognised by many-a
more or less equitable sharing of social benefices and
burdens. Moreover, right implies, over and above
duty, a public force.
Does right, which metaphysically engenders duty,
always awaken the sentiment of duty? Alas! the
contrary too often appears; and in many cases, merely
to proclaim a right suffices to extinguish or weaken
the desire to exercise it.
If circumstances made it our interest to live and
speak openly at the cost of all our secrets; if the
motive led us to force out the whole mystery of
our soul, the very fact of its not being duty that pro-
voked this manifestation would prevent its being
sincere or authentic, it would not deserve to be
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
407
trusted; and the very man who had just performed
this act of pretended openness could never feel sure
of having said his real thought; the principle that
determined him must needs have deteriorated from the
limpidity of the stream. Can any man be positive
that what has been said from interest has not been
also distorted by interest? It is only the felt pre-
sence and influences of duty which can guarantee
the purity of the revelations it has prompted.
It is when we communicate ourselves from duty
that we may rely on our own sincerity.
It is this principle of life and health that modern
democracy lacks.
A Christian knows his civil rights under the name
of functions; it is the rights of others that it behoves
him to know as rights.
Give to a people good morality, domestic relations,
and ordinary circumstances, and you will see whether
you have not, even without talking politics, given to
that people political morality as well.
In point of fact, we say, despite the examples
quoted, that political morality is deduced from social
morality, is proportioned thereto, may be judged
thereby; and that generally, he who in one of these
two spheres is penetrated with the holiness of duty
equally acknowledges and adores it in the other; so
that to create private virtues is to create public as well,
and to form the family man is to prepare the patriot.
In order to be touched by the right of others as
by my own, it is necessary that I should be pene-
408
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
L
trated with respect for the law that has established
both,--for the law of justice; I must be at least as
sensible of my duty to others as of their duty to me;
I must love equality as much in their interests as in
my own.
To love one's own right is a very different thing
from a love of the right. We only love this inas-
much as we love the rights of others.
When truth obtains a privilege she does not rise,
she descends. Her glory as well as her strength is
to draw everything from herself, to owe nothing save
to herself. She does not degrade herself by insisting
upon rights, for rights are a part of order, and order is
a part of truth. She does not degrade her dignity in
claiming, like every other human thought, her place
in the sunshine. She neither desires to invite nor
encourage men to treat her unjustly. She does not
presume upon their injustice, but begins by suppos-
ing them just. To renounce the exercise of a right
when a general interest is at stake, is a way of
trampling right itself under foot.
Passivity, which is another kind of activity, is
only legitimate and praiseworthy when activity, pro-
perly so called, has become impossible; to enter into
passivity before the resources of our rights are ex-
hausted is, like the young hero of old, to leave the
ranks before the signal is given, and to devote to the
paternal vengeance a laurel-crowned brow.
No tribulation does us good if, instead of coming
to us from God, it originates with ourselves. Instead,
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
409
then, of awaking persecution when it sleeps, or ex-
pediting it when it lingers, believers ought to prevent
its return by all expedients compatible with perfect
loyalty; and to be consistent in this principle, they
ought openly to claim liberty, and the guarantees of
liberty.
My right in every sphere is exactly the same as that
which all others claim for themselves; and their right
has the same extent as that which I myself pretend to.
I have only the rights I acknowledge in them; and as
soon as I refuse them theirs, I relinquish mine -as
soon as I assert my own right, I assert theirs. The
law has intervened to keep up this equilibrium; it
has not created these rights, but has only respect-
fully recognised and done homage to them; it has
taken on itself the task of arbitrating between these
various rights, in order that all should be preserved,
or at least that none should be violated without
reparation. But it is none the less true that my
right is the measure of that of others, and their
right the measure of mine.
With things we do what we will, with men what
we can. The human mind is a stubborn material;
the soul is like fire, it will take no other form except
that which it gives itself. This is the saving truth
in politics.
Nothing in politics is true otherwise than rela-
tively; there is only one absolute truth-pole-star,
around which heaven revolves. There are even some
great errors which seem to have been of use to the
410
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
human race; but yet it was not they, it was the
truth mingled with them. It is only in the central
truth that there is neither approximation, uncer-
tainty, nor mutability.
Political life can no more be guaranteed by charters
than confidence between individuals can be advan-
tageously replaced by contracts written, signed, and
sealed. On the contrary, these charters, like all
contracts, prove that confidence does not exist; and
the aim of all our efforts should be to render them
ever less necessary, and at length quite useless.
Charters are but the provisional props of an ill-
founded building.
These reflections are so far from contesting the
present necessity and advantage of written con-
stitutions, that they seem to us, on the contrary,
their justification.
Falsehood and corruption, even when they occupy
a throne, do not come from God.
(2.) Functions and Mission of the State-Thoughts
on Politics.
I anticipate as an epoch blessed in its principle, or
blessed in its effects, that in which the Governments
will give nothing more than the protection of all
liberties.
A Government which should only meddle with
what belonged to it is still one of those bold
hypotheses which are only put forward with a
kind of fear. And yet the temerity really exists
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
411
in the idea of charging a few men with all the
burden of the moral and intellectual wants of a
nation.
Society has not formed itself so much with the
view of distributing to each a satisfying portion of
social power as of guaranteeing to each the free use
of his individual faculties. Every constitution is
good that offers this guarantee.
Individual rights-that is to say, the free develop-
ment of the liberties of each, without any other limit
than the perfectly equal rights of all the other mem-
bers of the society,-these are the essential objects of
political association.
What is society, if not an institution that we have
established the better to protect our rights? This
constitutes the only special right it has. A simple
depositary of the rights of all, how should it find it-
self in possession of a right that none of its mem-
bers shares ?
There is no public spirit where individuals care-
lessly refer to the Government the foundation of all
establishments for the general good. Government
cannot suffice for so many cares, and the good to be
done is immense; its principal function is to pro-
tect and to smooth the way for the zeal of citizens.
Let Governments govern; that is enough: if public
spirit reign among citizens, their zeal will do the
rest.
The duty of the statesman is not only to listen to
public opinion, but to correct it when necessary,
412
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
We can do nothing without it, but we must not let
it do everything.
The protection to inoffensive minorities is the no-
blest attribute and the very mission of Government.
Without respect to the minorities there would not
be any tyranny in the world more insupportable than
the government of the majorities; but in the sphere
of spiritual interests this tyranny, or, if you will, this
indelicacy, would be doubly odious.
It is forgotten that indirect constraint resembles
indirect arguments, which are lost in eloquence;
it is like indirect taxation, which is lost in ad-
ministration. It is good policy not to render imme-
diately obligatory what may in another way be
admitted as indispensable.
Political ideas cannot fail to introduce in a very
short space of time, and we hardly know how, great
changes in private life.
The formation of political society is at most a
moral and not a spiritual fact.
All parties have their populace; must all parties
have their saints? If ever the lives of such saints
be written, they will not fill fifty-three folio volumes,
like the collection of the Bollandists.
A law is never simply inefficacious; if it do not
destroy an evil, it augments it. When a legislator
comes into collision with the force of facts he not
only meets with resistance, but energetic reaction.
When a law remains unexecuted, the fault lies in
the legislator. A law that cannot be observed is a
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
413
bad law. The legislator must either withdraw it or
himself withdraw.
Injustice once admitted into laws is not easily got
out again. It is a dangerous precedent if men do
not make haste to efface it; and as everything hangs
together in error as in truth, in evil as in good, it is
very rare only to commit one injustice at a time.
To judge without law is to persecute.
I shall not wait to pronounce against a law whose
principle is iniquitous till I see it translated into
action; I shall not have recourse to the translation
when I can read the text.
There are people who adopt a law in the hope that
it will not get itself executed; this is neither reason-
able nor right. If a law is to remain unexecuted,
is it not better not to make it at all? This pre-
tended argument in favour of the law is the strongest
argument against it.
It is of the domination over souls that despotism,
whether that of the prince or the people, is especially
greedy.
Of all empires, none flatters ambition so much
as the empire over minds. There are few heads of a
nation that have not courted it, that have not made
efforts to extend their rule beyond material interests.
There is nothing that so degrades a body corporate
(as well as an individual) as the acceptance of an
odious function.
What proportion can there be between any crime
soever and the sentence by which, virtually precipi-
1
414
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
tating a sinner to the feet of his Supreme Judge, we
pronounce, we creatures of an hour, upon the eternal
destinies of our fellow-creatures?
We are not worthy to govern men when we are
familiar only with the inferior portions of their nature;
we are deficient in the first premises when we do not
believe in the power of ideas; and there are no secular
politics but those which take the soul and the con-
science into account.
We may be sure that every life cast, without re-
servation, into the political stream is a superficial
life; and this is why, in spite of its pretensions,
our age is deficient in profundity. It is not by
political affections, only or principally, that the
political institutions can be restored. We must seek
far deeper into human life in order to find the germ
of renovation for our failing society.
(3.) Governors and Governed-Theocracy—Democracy
-Government of the Middle Classes-Of Small
Political Societies.
In any State soever the governed are bound to
obedience, the governors to justice. This truth may
be looked at from two points of view :-
First, then, from the religious. Each party is
responsible to God, the master alike of subjects and
of masters; and the infraction of the duties of the
one does not authorise a similiar infraction on the
part of the other. Well observed on both sides, this
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
415
principle should render the people secure from
tyranny, the authorities from sedition. Always, in
point of fact, it is by the grace of God that sovereigns
rule; and these words should serve as a guarantee
alike to governed and governors. If it has been
chiefly applied for the advantage of the latter, this
is because between the two evils of anarchy and
despotism we have had to choose the least, because
every form of government has been judged better
than anarchy, and the sacred character of the govern-
ing is the only certain barrier against it.
From a civil point of view governments and
peoples have mutual obligations. This second con-
tract is sometimes written out; but if it be not so, it
is neither less real nor less worthy of respect. Hav-
ing neither sanction nor arbitrator on earth, it finds
its conditions in the wants of society. It is tacitly
agreed on both sides, that if we advance beyond a
certain limit, which for the people is that of patience,
for the authorities that of necessity, there must in-
fallibly be conflict and disruption. In both cases it
is always society that, mindful of its preservation,
provides for it by a violent effort, and thus frees
itself from its perils, from whichever side they come.
So much for the principle; now, then, for the fact.
A people (a form including governors and governed)
may be compared to the alphabet, which contains
a few vowels and many consonants. The vowels are
the governors, the consonants the governed. And
just as human speech, with all its life and power, only
416
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
arises from the intimate union and constant inter-
lacing of consonants with vowels, so too the life of a
people only results from the active and real concur-
rence, the organic union, of the governed with their
rulers. If we were ever so anxious to deny these
truths, we think we should find it totally impossible
to do so.
God, who is the legitimate proprietor of all powers,
re-claims them all. He takes back from human legis-
lators the position of authority He had entrusted
them with, and declares that He himself will execute it.
He himself dictates the laws; not only the moral,
but the civil, economical, ceremonial. He descends
to all the details of State administration; kings are
but, strictly speaking, His lieutenants and agents.
His action does not limit itself to a first impres-
sion; it is continued; it bears upon all objects; it
renews itself constantly; it is the theocracy.
The theocracy, in the full sense of the word, only
exists under the two forms of the State calling itself
the Church, or the Church calling itself the State.
Until the Reformation it was rather under this last
form that the theocracy sought to establish itself.
This rule of theocracy, the true and only true one if
we regard the idea of which it is the symbol, namely
the sovereign right of God himself, is nevertheless,
in respect to its actual application, only a symbolic
and provisional rule, since man only rises to his full
dignity through liberty, and the rule of the theocracy
restrains and suspends liberty.
•
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
417
On the Lex Talionis. In all departments of duty,
in all the relations of life, God identified Himself
with the law, declared Himself the offended by every
offence, the plaintiff in every suit. He concentrated,
as it were, all claims in Himself; He absorbed in
Himself the cause of each, the right of all. It was
thenceforth understood that God himself was robbed
by every larceny, insulted by every outrage, injured
by every homicide. Retaliation became the centre of
penal legislation, because men had not to deal with
men who can pardon, but with the very law itself,
which cannot, or with God, who is the law. Thus is
explained and justified that law of retaliation, against
which such objections have been raised, because it
has not been looked at from its proper point of view.
We see nothing in common between a people as such
and the truth. Truth cannot present itself, cannot dwell
except in the individual, inasmuch as the individual
is alone organised, I do not say to create, but to per-
ceive the truth. Nationality left to itself is not quali-
fied for the part men would make it play. But I do
not say this of nationality placed in an extraordinary
condition by an extraordinary dispensation. Such
a measure may communicate to a people, not, indeed,
the nature and attributes of an individual, but an
aptitude for receiving, preserving, and transmitting the
deposit of truth. God takes this people to Himself;
makes of it His own people in the strictest accepta-
tion of the word; and in the first place He draws it
out of the mire as He drew the first man, and appro-
E E
418
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
priates it to Himself in a quite special sense and
authentic manner; speaks to it as one man speaks
to another; makes it hourly feel His presence; proves
it by miraculous signs; governs and directs it imme-
diately;—in a word, He replaces for this people con-
viction by evidence, and I would even say faith by
sight, if such a substitution could take place abso-
lutely without annihilating human morality with the
faith which in every case and every sense is its
principle. It is this extraordinary rule to which is
given the name of theocracy, or personal government
of God.
Radicalism is only the pioneer of socialism.
The instinct of centralisation is not peculiar to
monarchies; and who knows if, in the absence of a
sensible and living unity, it be not far more keenly
the want of democracies ?
Democracy, regarded in our day as the ultimate
and normal condition of society, is perhaps only an
important crisis, a transitory state, that it has to pass
through. The epithet of Christian does not alter the
case; in such an alliance of words the substantive
chooses its adjective.
We no more understand the Divine right of all
than the Divine right of one, if it be true that society
has an objective end, an object superior to itself, and
that, instead of being a simple association of interests,
a compromise between passions, it is bound to realise
the just and the true. Now in many cases the just
and true would be sacrificed if they could become
>
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
419
questions of mere majority. A certain thing desired
by the greatest number is neither just nor social by
that alone; on the contrary, it may be execrable and
subversive of all society; and were it the will of all
against one, it ought not to be done. If it be said
that certain objects will naturally be reserved and
placed under shelter, this is a vicious circle at which
one can but smile; would not a conviction be needed
to insure this, and in the first instance a deliberation,
in which, as in all others, the majority would decide?
—and on what? On the absolutely true. Strictly speak-
ing, there is no true system except theocracy, which
yet is not a system, but a fact, and not even an
ordinary and constant fact, but a miracle. What is
to be done, however? for we must needs arrive, and in
order to arrive, we must start. Some think that it
is not the starting-point, but the way and the end
which are of consequence; others insist upon the
starting-point being founded in right, and they will
only see right in the absolute equality of all, and the
equal participation of all in the government of society.
This is what is par excellence the democracy that
Thucydides 2,200 years ago defined in these terms:-
((
As our Government is not in the hands of a small
number of citizens, but in the hands of the majority,
it has received the name of democracy." Thucydides
would not have called the actual Government of
France (1841) democratic; and France, on its side,
which knows no slaves on its territory, would not
call the republic of Thucydides a democracy.
420
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
After all, the nature of things is the principle of
principles; and the nature of things which is not an
abstraction, but a living fact, always ends by prevailing
over abstractions.
The religion of democracy divides itself into two
inimical sects, the one having for its watchword the
successive admission of all capacities in measure as
they display themselves; the other, the supposition,
not perhaps of the capacity, but of the right of all,
capable or not capable, in virtue of their quality of
human beings, males and adults.
As a system, and from the purely logical point of
view, the latter of these theories (against which, how-
ever, we shall have to urge a very grave difficulty) has
perhaps some advantage over the former, to which it
may always address the embarrassing objection-The
people on whom you confer the right of verifying and
measuring capacities ought first of all to be chal-
lenged, for they are at once judges and interested
parties; and their whole task, fairly estimated, would
reduce itself to this, the exclusion of the greater
number, and the taking firm possession of authority
for themselves and their party. This conquest indeed
establishes an actual power, but not a right.
It is with the political problem as with a curve
whose extremities vainly seek to unite; Providence
leaves them at a distance from each other: God is
silent, but He incessantly makes the general en-
lightenment and the action of Christianity come to
lead us out of this labyrinth. He takes upon Himself
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
421
to resolve, by facts, questions insoluble in themselves.
Society under this double influence, which does
not shield it, but mitigates its inevitable shocks,
advances, not only towards an equitable distribution
of power, but towards the equality of political rights,
under cover of this great victory of the equality of
social rights. It is not doubtless in the equality of
political rights that society will find its resting-
place (for in certain times and certain given circum-
stances it may only find trouble and war therein),
but rather in the truth of this equality; in other words,
in the equality of the capacities which correspond
to the elementary or primary exercise of political
power.
The monopoly of power by the middle class would
bequeath no grand result to history; a purely com-
mercial republic would only produce commercial
results; it is to the aristocracy, or the absolute demo-
cracy, that the sublime in politics belongs; and if it
be true that the time of the aristocracy is past, middle
class policy will never rise above itself, except by
changing from middle class to popular.
The ideas of the middle classes are too special, I do
not say to contribute, but to suffice to the greatness
of a nation. It is alike higher or lower, though
under different aspects and impulses, that what we
may call, in contradiction, general ideas will be
found.
The existence of small political societies has not
less poetry, and sometimes not less celebrity, attached
422
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
to it than that of great States. The history of the
former often possesses a striking character that the
history of empires lacks. It is more completely the
history of human liberty; the other, rather that of
destiny and Providence; and, whatever may be the
interest of the latter aspect for the contemplative
mind, men in general find a greater fascination in
destinies which seem to have shaped themselves, and
to have only conceded to the necessity of things that
which the human will absolutely cannot refuse it.
It is only liberty, spontaneity, and moral energy
that ennoble the destinies of small States, and can
make us love their history.
III.-EDUCATION.
1. Education and Christianity-Thoughts on Instruc-
tion and Education-Education of Things and
of Books-Public and Private Education.
It is the Christian alone who can fully appreciate
the dignity of instruction. It is the heir of heaven
that he is forming in his schools; it is with reference
to a spiritual and eternal happiness that he teaches
the child to read and write; his masters are in some
sort apostles, his pupils proselytes, his schools tem-
ples, the knowledge that he imparts is the knowledge
of God.
We must not, however, mistake: if Christianity be
useful to education, it is by educating the educators,
it is by giving them a good moral temperament, and
"
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
423
the simple sentiment of the same truths that observa-
tion suggests and reflection counsels; but it does not
replace education, or dispense with it.
•
Even for the Christian there is an art of education,
an art which calculates upon human nature, rests
upon it, accepts its aid as freely as it acknowledges
its obstacles. If Christian education differ consider-
ably from all other, it is not by taking for its starting-
point a supernatural state, for which, as a general
principle, it provides and prepares. It recognises,
accepts, cultivates nature; addresses itself to the will
and the reason; acts by example and habit; estab-
lishes the rights and the elements of law and morality,
so that the child, not all at once and prematurely
pouring out its moral life into the abyss of grace, may
accustom itself to the reality of the law, become
penetrated with what of special value it possesses,
may pass under the hands of John the Baptist before
it reaches Christ.
We should only, alas! be strictly true in imputing
to certain religious methods which pride themselves
upon their rigid fidelity, the visible decline of
Christian discipline in many and many a house which
in other particulars is taxed with over-rigour. There
is a certain piety, high-coloured, loud-toned, severe of
aspect, which despises education, and occasionally
raises to the dignity of a system the mere weakness
of the mind, and the unfaithfulness of indolence. In
a word, though we remain convinced that it is around
some Christian hearths that the most correct repre-
424
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
!
sentation of the family type may be found, we are
obliged to own that many Christian households
might profit by the example of worldly households,
strangers, or even perhaps hostile, to evangelical con-
victions.
A country should draw the essential portion of its
culture from its own breast: we do not expatriate
our minds with impunity; a culture too completely
foreign may become as pernicious to the country into
which it is imported, as it was useful in the land of
its birth. This imprudent transplantation is a means
of renouncing our individuality; that is to say, that
stability of habits, affections, shall I say prejudices ?
-which have sprung from the soil, and constitute the
moral life of a nation.*
Leaving on one side moral influence, instruc-
tion has for its aim both the general improvement
of the intellectual being, and the acquirement of
the knowledge and aptitude relative to a certain
condition.
One of the precepts of education is not to over-
educate, as one of the precepts of politics (another
form of education) is not to over-govern. One must
repress, moderate, but not stifle. Leave Nature time
to declare herself; do not impose silence upon her
before she has spoken.
To instruct is something more than to inform; it
is at the same time internally to arm and to fortify.
* Vinet wrote this at a time when there was a project of founding
a federal university in Switzerland.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
425
The morality of a people is not necessarily pro-
portioned to its instruction; there are causes of evil
which instruction cannot avert, and which prevent its
good effects, or even cause it to bring about bad results.
Study dates from the moment when we begin to
teach ourselves.
Ennui attaches to unsteady and desultory work ;
in the school, as well as everywhere else, it is idleness
that feels weary, it is activity that rejoices; nothing
weighs so heavy as a duty which we have tried to
make light.
It is not without reason that with the ancients the
same words signify school and leisure, games and
study. Not that study is play, or should ever become
so; but compared with the duties and efforts which
should fill every earnest life, study is indeed a game,
like those of the antique Palæstra, and the school
may be called a place of rest.
The simplification of internal existence, such is, both
with respect to moral life and happiness, one of the
most pressing wants of our time. But do not let it
be supposed that this want can be satisfied by the
suppression or reduction of the means of intellectual
culture. The evil does not so much arise from the
excess of culture as from its quality. It is too late
to lead us back into the forests, and could we be led
back thither, we should no longer find beneath their
venerable shade the blessings that, according to poets,
are left behind in them: At all risks we have to ad-
vance, but let us see that we do so really.
426
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
We must, if possible, give to the new generation
an education which, while satisfying the wants of the
intellect and the epoch, respects individual existence
in its natural and intimate character; and, far from
obscuring the sacred traditions of the soul, far from
effacing the last traces that the Creator's hand has left
upon our clay, shall, on the contrary, protect, and
if possible deepen, their impress; an education which
shall preserve us from substituting for our own
native soul, our living and personal being, I know
not what conventional soul, I know not what idea of
the age, impersonal, abstract, irresponsible; an educa-
tion which, far from robbing us of ourselves, shall
secure us the possession of what we are, and keep us
susceptible of those impressions which, addressing
themselves to the soul, will not fall into the mind
as into barren sand, but to which is linked the hope
of our moral regeneration. Let us be wise in order
that we may become Christians.
Unless the most esteemed books on the subject
of education be a tissue of declamation and hyper-
bole, we must confess that nothing is less understood
than the art of educating children, that nothing goes
on more at random, and that in none of the spheres
of our activity are there more numerous and universal
oversights. And as it is with regard to the
most important subject in the world that this hap-
pens, we naturally inquire how, in such a state of
things, society can still subsist, and the world go on.
Good sense does not suffice; what is wanted is
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
427
just to introduce good sense, and to maintain its
rights in a sphere where the most sensible seem to
desert their good sense. It is not, indeed, rare to
see intellectual men and women become perfectly
absurd the moment they have to do with practical
education; and besides, if the resource proposed
sufficed, it would suffice anywhere, which no one
allows. Everything gets observed, studied, learnt,
and why not education like the rest?
We see history professed by women, while dancing
is taught by men. With all the reservation rendered
incumbent by our ignorance of the principles of the
latter art, we venture to ask whether it might not be
better to invert the exercise of these two functions?
Some persons, starting from the true principle
that man, in order to accomplish his destiny, must
become a new creature, believe themselves exonerated
from making any use of the old. They expect, or
rather, they hurry on, the conversion of the child,
which generally means that they inculcate principles;
but both before and afterwards they neglect to give
him habits; or, which perhaps comes to the same thing,
they let him take up habits of which grace, when it
supervenes, will have to efface the marks; they let
nature grow up without watching or directing it—
unless, indeed, by an opposite error they hasten to
smother it. They are afraid of all that is native and
spontaneous; they tolerate, on the part of the soul,
neither impulse nor freedom; they will not permit
it to be born before it be born again; they ignore and
428
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
voluntarily neglect all internal energies, out of respect,
they say, for the energy from without, or from above;
and thus, sometimes compressing without pity an
unfolding nature, sometimes letting it develop and
evolve at its will, they either prepare for the expected
grace the resistance of a rash and wilful soul, or the
insipid compliance of an automaton. Childhood but
too often presents one or other of these aspects. In
religious families we find, with painful surprise, either
spoilt children, and spoilt with less scruple than else-
where, in the expectation of their conversion; or else
mortified creatures, without spirit or generosity, that
will not be capable of a second nature, never having
had a first.
With a sincere desire for instruction, we learn more
by ourselves than with others.
What is not understood cannot profit, and what
does not profit almost invariably harms.
The principal object is to accustom a child to a
view of morality superior, and even opposed, to that
which he will find prevalent in the world.
The sublimity of Christian morality, and its neces-
sary dependence on faith in evangelical truths, should
become as an instinct in the child's soul, a fact of con-
science that time and the world can never more tear
away. We must make dogma fortify his moral faith,
and this last must fortify his faith in dogma.
All morality does not lie in formulas; morality in
the commencement is as good presupposed as taught;
it is as important to give a child a prejudice in
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
429
favour of right as to present him with its rule;
there is a good taste in morals as in other things;
and without any detriment to theory, which will
have its turn, I should like instinct to take the
initiative. Truth is not only an idea that must be
known, it is an air that must be breathed, a rule
that must be followed, a vision which must be occu-
pied with the good and the beautiful. We too much
neglect this method, which is that of God himself.
God saves us by showing Himself; faith is a looking.
The child, and perhaps the man as well, only
knows well what is shown him, and the image of
things is the true medium between their abstract
idea and his personal experience.
The Christian family, which is the true family, is
like a picture of one of the old masters, where time
and neglect have hid the outline and obscured the
colours. That black surface is a Poussin, a Raphael:
a short time since it was only a board or a shred of
canvas; now, thanks to the agency of a pious art, it
will be a monument and a treasure. Let Christians
read their duty in this short allegory. The fate of
the State depends upon the condition of the family;
the condition of the family depends perhaps upon
them.
The best of men have owed to their mothers, after
God, those seeds of piety and spiritualism that the
paternal influence has so often dried up.
All mothers are not able to be, because they wish
it, well-taught and cultivated. Many of them, too,
430
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
want both leisure and ease of mind for long and con-
tinuous conversation with their children. But all
may, by prayer and the reading of the Bible, give to
their thought and judgment the direction they desire
to give to the thoughts of their children. Nor let them
deceive themselves; if they do not begin by their own
education, if their heart have not, on its own account,
adopted all the words they address to their children,
those words will be but a vain sound.
But, on the other hand, let those good and true-
hearted mothers whom other duties prevent from
being much with the objects of their dearest soli-
citude console themselves. Sanctified by prayer, a
single word from their lips, a look, a sigh, addressed
to their children, will often do more than an
eloquent discourse. We must, under God's blessing.
depend on natural means; but in the presence
or absence of these means we must depend upon
God.
The Church contains the school; there cannot,
from the very nature of Christianity, and the form
under which it has been given to us, be a Church
without a school. Wherever true Christianity
establishes itself you will see schools spring up;
and one may affirm that if religion took possession
of the masses, this single fact would insure immense
progress to popular instruction.
If we bring up our children well, our children
repay us. They do perhaps more for our education
than we for theirs. In order to be invariably what
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
431
we ought with regard to them, what respect must
we feel for them! in what a careful and circumspect
attitude of mind should we live! and how necessary
is it for us to have our eyes habitually fixed above!
What Jesus Christ said with regard to His disciples,
"For their sakes I sanctify Myself," should be the
motto of the religious father and mother. What we
want our children to be, that we must be ourselves;
then all flows on naturally; discipline gains unction
and grace; influence is joined to authority, which,
however, is always to be acknowledged, and to make
itself felt. There is in the task of education a certain
good nature that the majority of parents can only
find in the neglect of duty; they play with the cards
shown, or rather, they do not play; there is no part
to be sustained, and the child no longer distinguishes
(which is a pernicious thing) between the father and
the man.
But merely to keep watch over our own
external demeanour is nothing; we do not thus
long impose upon the child, and we corrupt him. It
is within that we must watch and labour; the essen-
tial is to be, not to seem; confidence then comes of
itself, and to obtain it, is almost to obtain all. Let
us then carry on our education, at once ours and
that of our children; let us sanctify ourselves for
them, and for ourselves.
Even if carefully applied, which is rare, education
by facts cannot teach everything; it does not instruct
in a profound and scientific manner; it flatters self-
love, and gives a habit of abrupt decision and super-
432
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
!
ficial views; it distracts the soul and injures the
inner life; lastly, it does not suffice to the actual
state of society, and cannot supply the place of
energetic and methodical study. If it be hurtful
merely to see the world in books, it is equally so
not to have any knowledge of books. It is com-
bined with the latter that the former study is really
profitable. Books, separated from attractive busi-
ness, produce abstraction and pedantry; mere busi-
ness without books leaves no room in the mind
except for practical views and ideas of position.
It is by being exclusive that all systems become
bad.
The history of sciences almost forces upon us the
conclusion that, if they had been cultivated with
interested views, and primarily as instruments of
material well-being, that very well-being would
rather have lost than gained; while by obeying a
curiosity free from selfishness, and following no
other banner than that of speculation, scientific
men have prepared immense results for society,
have caused civilisation to take giant strides, have
renewed the face of the earth.
From the excellent we may, indeed, descend to
the useful, but we do not rise from the useful to the
excellent; the sentiment of duty leads to the ac-
knowledgment of a right, the sentiment of a right does
not create the notion of duty; and lastly, to revert
to our subject, speculation tends towards practice
practice does not rise to speculation.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
433
Let there be imagined—we ask nothing further,—
let there be imagined a system of instruction into
which no element should be admitted except on the
condition of proving its aptitude for some certain
and palpable application. This very basis, this con-
dition, alarms; a degraded future for humanity is at
once described.
Our old studies laid aside, what remains ?-studies
which, to say all in one word, instruct, and do not
cultivate; and which, by always superimposing them-
selves on man, and never incorporating themselves
with him, modify his position, without modifying
himself.
Nothing will be found more useful in the school
than useless studies; by which I mean those at the
end of which we see not a position, a distinction,
no morsel of bread, but truth. Let them remain,
if only to prove that " man does not live by
bread only." Let them accustom the youthful in-
tellect to seek the light for the sake of the light.
This habit once contracted by the mind will be
retained.
In public education more particularly a great
danger lies for the child in a conspicuous inferiority
on any subject, and still more in a general inferiority;
in such a case it is only religion that can raise us
sufficiently high to be above the unhappy feeling of
envy.
The greater number of parents seem anxious to
spare their children the trouble of living; nay, they
FF
434
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
even make a merit and an art of this. Reducing the
activity of their sons in their sedentary studies, and in
all exercises in which superintendence and direction
are sensibly felt; withdrawing them from whatever
involves the least personal responsibility; imposing on
them truth, in the acquirement of which they should
only assist them; obliging them to see, feel, and de-
cide, only by means of the eyes, the sentiment, and
the will of others, they make them automatons capa-
ble of a certain number of acquired movements, and
believe that they have educated them when they have
only drilled them.
A child develops itself by nothing so much as by
the lessons of its nurse, and by the processes that
are unconsciously carried on while he is learning his
mother tongue. Do we sufficiently reflect on the
multitude of unconnected reasonings by which he
attains to the fluent and correct use of this mother
tongue? How many inductions followed up, analo-
gies seized, shades distinguished!-what wondrous
unfolding of the intelligence is implied in the acquire-
ment of a faculty that only the dumb and idiotic lack!
We are more than half what our mothers make
us: amongst the things that a man may be deficient
in, the worst deficiencies are those which his mother
alone could have supplied: in general, we owe far
more of what is good to our mothers than our
fathers; and superior men may have had common-
place fathers, but almost invariably their mothers
will be found to have been distinguished women.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
435
It has been observed long ago that the condition
of the family determines that of the society. The
time is now come for convincing ourselves that the
inverse is not less true. The actual direction of
political ideas has strongly reacted on the family.
The same centrifugal force is exercised over all our
relations. The individual, weak in opposition to the
crowd, is strong as regards the family. The citizen
is lost in the cosmopolite, the member of the family
is absorbed in the politician; we can no longer live
except at the circumference; we exile ourselves to
the remotest frontier of the soul; the central refuge
of loving sentiments is deserted; everywhere family
ties are relaxed under the action of new ideas. All
that, in default of Christianity, may lead to draw
these ties closer than they still exist-all that may
retain, at a distance from abstraction, and in the
circle of individual affections, souls that have a
constant tendency to escape into the desert of theory,
should be welcomed with gratitude and with love.
Happy they for whom the hearth is an altar!-for
there comes an age when the energy of our life and
the exaggeration of our hopes scatter us abroad in a
thousand directions, and dissipate our soul by divid-
ing it.
Our insufficiency is a principle of dependence, and
our dependence a principle of greatness. Is it neces-
sary to say that the family, in the human sense of
the word, is had at the cost of these apparent limita-
tions ?
436
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
There comes an age when everything calls and
claims us at once, and the youthful soul resembles
those inexperienced painters who, not understanding
perspective, place all objects in the foreground.
Paternal affection links itself with morality, and
it is by family ties that a degree of morality has been
preserved in the most corrupt societies.
Public education, which, under the fallacious name
of emulation, has placed ambition at the head, or rather
in the place, of all motives that may act upon youthful
wills,―public education, which undisguisedly substi-
tutes self-love for love, succeeds in making vanity
the basis, the moral life of a whole generation, its
leading character, its second nature; and, by antici-
pation, public happiness and the peace of the country
are sacrificed to that arid passion around which
everything becomes arid, and which scorches up in
the childish soul, as quickly as they appear there, the
young and tender shoots of benevolence, generosity,
and love.
There are two ways of understanding emulation,-
as a spur to vanity, or love of the good excited by
examples.
Private education may form learned men, but it
rarely produces citizens or men of action; and the
incapacity that those formed thereby display in the
things of daily life, sufficiently proves that this method,
which is apparently the most natural, is, in reality,
much less so than that of public education.
Private or special education has inconveniences
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
437
which are not the less serious for being essentially
negative. There will always be something wanting
in a man who has not been plunged early and
long in that current of fresh water which chills
us for a moment, only to warm us thoroughly by
reaction.
2. Books and Writers for Children-Popular Schools
-Classical Studies-Mathematics.
Few people have a vocation for writing for the
young, and a great many attempt to do it; perhaps,
indeed, in this class of writings, "there are no degrees
between the mediocre and the worst."
We must write for youth with philosophy and
enthusiasm both; this is what does good.
Who, then-all other things being equal-who
should write better on education than a Christian
woman? Who could be more true, more delicate,
less hard, and less systematic?
I have some scruple with regard to the fictions,
even the most moral, that are offered to early
childhood. Would not history suffice? It is true
that history does not permit the choice of facts or
the unity of intention that form the privileges of the
romance. But then how difficult it is for a romance
not to be romantic, and not to sow in the child's life
the germs of miscalculations and disappointment!
This is a subject for much reflection. I am so far
from believing that, in this respect, the intention
438 OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Ei
justifies everything, that, above all other romances, I
exclude the Christian romance.
Good books for children are the best among the
books for men.
Perhaps there is no more attractive reading for any
age than a good child's book. Childhood is a paradise
that we all pass through with light and rapid steps,
and into which we may not re-enter; but we love to
look back on it, however far away we may be; we
love to give it a farewell glance; we gladly turn an
oppressed burning brow towards the fresh air that
is breathed there, and associate ourselves with the
impressions of that regretted age, so as once more
to become, for a brief while, children-that is, the first
among the happy, the first of the poets.
But this attraction is not the only one. The books
that have well conceived and well represented the
life of children are among those which give us most
material for thought; they reduce man, the human
being, and morality, to their most simple expression,
and contain a psychology so much the more profound,
perhaps, as it is the more elementary.
Hence, the class of persons, more numerous than
may be supposed, who in their maturity enjoy child-
ren's books, need not blush for this innocent taste,
or pretend that they only read these works in the
interest of their children or the children of others.
A child's book may be a great or beautiful work, and
deserve a place of honour in our libraries.
There is in instruction a critical, a fatal point,
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
439
where we must either stop, or beyond which, if we
cross it, we must travel far. There is one thing, per-
haps, even more pernicious than ignorance, it is the
imprudent delibation of science; it is that presump-
tuous incursion into domains that we may never
traverse; that commencement of knowledge which
is but a commencement of ignorance.
The objects of instruction have been greatly multi-
plied in our preparatory schools; language alone is
worth all the rest. Teach the children to think their
speech, you will have gained much.
Have we a right conception of the popular school?
It ought, above all, to be a gymnasium for thought.
Not only is well-directed thought the way of truth,
but thought is the activity of the noble principle in
man: very far from the thinking man being, as Rous-
seau pretended, "a depraved animal," it is only by
thought that he rises to the dignity of man. The
man who thinks ill may be vicious; the man who
does not think cannot be virtuous. Intellectual
improvement is often the prelude to moral improve-
ment. Nevertheless we do not present the former as
the efficient cause, the adequate condition, the gene-
rative principle of the latter.
Classical studies are disliked by radicals of all
kinds. Some discover in the study of antiquity
a fermentation of democratic enthusiasm; others,
the radicals of the movement, perceive the subtle
* From the Latin word delibatio, and explained by the context.
440
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
germ of an aristocracy of culture; and after the
fall or the anathema of all other aristocracies, it is
the turn of this last to excite hatred and distrust.
In point of fact, nothing speaks more in favour
of these studies than this double hostility; these
reproaches, which it is easy to justify, only prove
that the study of antiquity combines two elements,
progress and stability, and consequently satisfies the
law of equilibrium. I should form an unfavourable
opinion of this study if one of these doctrines flowed
from it and not the other.
It is very certain that the human being, sculptured,
as it were, at once by classical antiquity and by the
Bible, takes from them, and always has taken, the
most perfect form; and that if ever the ideal of hu-
manity, soul and mind, has seen itself realised to
the involuntary applause of those even from whom
the secret of this great work was hid, it has been under
the chisel of this sublime kind of statuary, under the
double influence of classic culture and the sacred
writings. Happy should we be to return, not to the
century, but the modes of discipline, which gave to
France a Chancellor de l'Hôpital, admirable speci-
men of the kind of good and great men formed in
that double school.
The study of languages and literatures develops in
the child a faculty that no other could develop—so
advantageously, I mean, the sentiment of beauty.
The beautiful is, I allow, equally the object of the
art of design; but the incorporeal beauties of poetry
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
441
and eloquence are decidedly superior to those that
belong to painting and sculpture. It is the intel-
lectually beautiful; the beauty of the idea in all its
purity, and disengaged from any material form, which,
in literature, becomes the object of the young man's
contemplation. The faculty of recognising and feeling
it, which is the crown of all liberal education, is not
of secondary importance; elegant forms of speech,
simple, pure, and living, become the ornament and
the recommendation of our own language.
Again, a final advantage of these studies springs
from an apparent character of imperfection which
strikes us in them. They lack the exactness that is
attributed to other knowledge. But in order to con-
vince ourselves that it is for this very reason that
these studies are useful, we must inquire what a mind
would become absolutely given up, if such a thing were
possible, to the influence of the exact sciences. This
influence would paralyse all its life. It would only
take account of what might be made the object of a
rigorous valuation, a precise measurement; but this
would be to acknowledge but a small proportion of
the elements that make up life, as also to misappre-
hend what constitutes its force and beauty. Neither
love nor admiration can be weighed; the impressions
of taste are indefinite; all moral force is imponder-
able; all that is connected with life is no more
appreciable in terms of exact science than life itself,
which eludes all measurement. By causing these
truths to be overlooked, a too exclusive culture of
442
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
science would have for its result to pervert the mind,
and perhaps to deprive the soul of all the power de-
pendent upon its elasticity. It is, therefore, well to
oppose to the influence of this study that of sciences
that do not pretend to the same accuracy. But, further,
the study of the first elements of the exact sciences,
while it occupies the intelligence, gives too little to do
to the reason; the mind mingles too little of its own
substance with the truths it discovers; many of its
forces are not put at all into requisition, and remain
without employment; and we may be certain that an
intellect thus cultivated-unless, indeed, nature raise
a strong opposition-will always prove a deplorably
superficial intellect,—clear, rapid, shrewd, practical, I
allow, but incapable of rising above the middle regions
of thought.
Mathematics, it is true, starting from precise data
in order to arrive at strict results, admitting nothing
vague or approximate, everywhere demanding full
evidence, never, in short, leaving any saving clause
in the chain of their inductions, inflexible to pre-
judice, to ready-made opinions, and to habitual
sentiments, and, consequently, not permitting the
intellect any other than self-support, present at
once two apparently opposite advantages,-that of
stimulating the activity of the mind, augmenting,
if I may so say, its spontaneity; and that of placing
a bridle upon the sallies of the youthful imagi-
nation.
The exclusive application of Pascal to physics and
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
443
·
mathematics during his youth was the safeguard of
his individuality. These sciences, I believe, do not
exercise it much, but neither do they compromise it;
whereas acquirements of another kind-literature,
for example excite, develop, but at the same time
endanger individuality, because, bringing the inner
man out of his retirement, they place him more in
contact with the life of all, and oblige him to receive
from all more perhaps than he ought. Mathematics
are so little liable to do this that they would perhaps
be open to an opposite charge, if it were possible
that man could be exclusively mathematical.
In truth, nothing should be excluded, and it were
well to keep a place open for whatever is useful; but
there are certain fundamental studies which should
take precedence of others. . . . At the basis of all
our studies should naturally be placed that which
teaches us to measure material greatness, and that
other which, having for its object the analysis and
expression of our thoughts, takes some measure of
intellectual greatness.
The more the child advances in the science of
extension, and that of language, the better able will
he be to measure and to name objects, and thence-
forth all studies will be accessible to him.
444 OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
3. Education of Women- Their Mission —
Marriage.
One sex cannot grow unless the other grows too,
and the attention paid to man's education will never
attain its object unless equal and proportionate care
be taken with the education of women. In claiming
the full dignity of citizens, we have pledged ourselves
to bring up at the same time the being given us by
God as our helpmeet. To bring up, i. e., to elevate
(elever),—our language has here admirably defined
the task of education.
The essence of good education has been misap-
prehended, and its aim missed. The studies that
strengthen the mind and ennoble the soul have been
too often sacrificed to the expensive acquisition of
mere accomplishments that have not even been
pursued in the fittest manner. To take one example,
music, that art which should be entirely devoted
to the service of religion, of patriotism, of the
sweet sentiments of nature, has become effeminate
and corrupting. We hear innocent and virgin lips
sing in public, in society, words which, were they
reduced into prose and spoken, would bring a blush
to the least modest cheek. The despicable sighs of
an enervated spirit, the delirium of a selfish passion
which sacrifices the most ennobling feelings and most
holy relations to the object of its pursuit, the puerile
tricks of a scoffing coquetry or an affected delicacy,—
3
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
445
such is the substance of the songs that the wives and
daughters of a free and religious people repeat at the
feet of our Alps. These are fine arts, we are told;
and people do not perceive that this improper appli-
cation of them insensibly introduces into the heart
a poison that infects and corrodes; that in be-
coming familiar with words we become familiar
with things; and that the frivolity which is the very
soul of these love-songs grows gradually to be the
soul of those who sing them. We repudiate for our
wives and daughters songs made for capitals under-
mined by the civilisation of vice.
Excitable, enthusiastic, and too constantly under
the dominion of feeling, woman is easily carried away.
She is at the mercy of her emotions, and examines
often the gravest questions only in their relations to
the heart; she may with the purest intentions fall
into the most serious errors. With such tendencies
nothing is more dangerous than a superficial educa-
tion, which does nothing but add exaggeration and
irritability to feeling. Better in this respect a com-
plete absence of culture; but far better still a solid
and earnest course of instruction, which, by fortifying
the influence of reason, opposes an insurmountable
barrier to the wanderings of imagination. Then it
will no longer be easy to lead women, by the help of
imperfectly understood terms, to adopt opinions that
they hold all the more fervently the less they are
exactly aware of their bearing. Then romances will
no longer appear to them the most interesting of all
446
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
Then
reading, and in exchange for such dreams, reality,
better appreciated, will present them with charms
both more positive and more within reach.
they will only appraise according to its intrinsic
value their position in the world, be it what it may;
and will no longer give to the caprice of fashion and
the tyranny of conventionality the right of disposing
of their happiness.
We shall always be justified in calling defective
any plan of study which for years keeps a young
girl in ignorance of what woman, even were she a
princess, should have some knowledge.
Young girls may be taught by men; and, indeed,
if superior instruction be wanted, this is in all re-
spects the more rational plan; but all this teaching
ought to be surrounded, permeated, and in certain
points dominated, by maternal influence.
Celebrity is, perhaps, of all coveted advantages, the
one which has least relation to happiness. It has none,
more especially, to the true interests of a woman:
we should say that the admiration she excites keeps
off affection; that she becomes something less than a
human being in becoming more than a woman; and
that she must needs have a double share of the
hatred which great renown almost always arouses.
Celebrity isolates an authoress, and exiles her, as it
were, in her own glory.
A woman who has talent must choose between
fame and happiness-between the free employment
of her talent and the home sweetnesses of the life
1
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
447
of wife and mother. This must be; nature will
have it so. Nature, too, has its own way of laying
down laws against accumulation, and rigidly enforces
them.
Decidedly the dictionary of women is more re-
stricted than that of men. There are certain words
very good for us which are not at the disposal of our
fair companions, a language that suits them as little
as a man's hat or boots. Science and politics have
their dialect, or their slang, which have already too
much spoilt men's style, without our letting them
spoil that of our women. It is their part to
correct us in this particular, if indeed we be not
incorrigible.
Woman is more powerful by influence than direct
action, by example than argument, and often by
silence rather than by speech. Confined within these
limits, she is still the depositor and arbitrator of the
greatest interests of human life. Peace is the most
sublime thing in the world, and of all words the most
eloquent. Peace may be compared to that silent
action of electricity which melts and fuses the hardest
metals. Peace, on the brow and in the glance of
a woman, has an inconceivable power.
Arbitrators of our happiness and of a portion of
our virtues, women stamp the seal of their character
and manners on each new generation, since each
generation during its earliest years belongs entirely
to them. Whoever has reflected upon the energy
and obstinate duration of our first impressions, who-
448
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
ever will remember that these first impressions are
just those that a mother communicates or modifies,
will not hesitate to allow that woman holds in her
delicate hands, together with the character of the
rising generation, the destinies of society.
Authorship, and even moral authorship, is not, in
the majority of cases, easily reconcilable with the
nature and duties of a woman; but I will add that, in
mature years, or with a talent at once very special
and eminent, combined with a quite exceptional posi-
tion, the application of our principle is limited; and
the question changes considerably when it relates, not
only to a literary work, but also to work on a greater
scale, where talent becomes the instrument of charity,
and where the good we seek to do under this form
demands a feminine hand.
Laws which impose obedience on the wife, cannot
impose love on the husband. But if in this respect
the man be not bound by law, he is so much the
more stringently bound by religion and the example
of Christ. According to this double rule, his love
should be a true devotedness.
The independence that becomes a man would be
the greatest of misfortunes for a woman; and this
has been proved a thousand times by experience.
A woman is only in her proper place, only happy,
when she has sacrificed this dangerous independ-
ence.
What the world calls love and mutual inclination.
is very far from being able to secure the true happi-
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
449
ness of a married pair; not so with what the Gospel
calls love. Love founded in God, love such as the
Spirit of Christ creates in human hearts, renders de-
votedness easy to the husband, submission easy to
the wife. Whenever we advance in the path of mar-
riage and of life, with eyes lifted up towards a Saviour
we love, with a salvation we hope for, with a spirit of
prayer and supplication through which Jesus Christ
constantly intervenes by His Spirit between the
husband and wife, there indeed a marriage may be
happy, nay, must infallibly be so. The union between
two converted hearts is necessarily sweet and unal-
terable; without this there is no security.
Marriage necessarily makes the happiness or un-
happiness of life; and, what is still more important, it
casts a great weight into the awful scale in which are
weighed the for and against of our eternal destiny.
Marriage, we allow, places a woman nearest pos-
sible to the true destiny of her sex, and, generally
speaking, in the most favourable conditions for fulfil-
ling it; but we cannot allow that an unmarried
woman does not fulfil it.
After all, women are men (homines). Their relation
with God is an immediate one. They stand in
exactly the same position with regard to Him as men ;
and in this supreme point of view the equality of the
sexes is perfect, as is that between the rich and the
poor, the powerful and the weak. It is in this sense
that it has been affirmed that in the new covenant
there is no more male nor female," just as there
G G
450
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
is no more "Greek nor barbarian, bond nor free
The two sexes are only two forms or two function
of our common humanity, the members of which a
all called to serve and glorify God, some as mel
others as women. The service of God is the sut
stance, the rest is only the mode or the acciden
Now we fully believe that God has made the woma
for the man in that He has dualised man, for whom ;
was not good to be alone, and who would have bee
alone in a moral sense, and in that sense mor
especially, with a being exactly similar and perfectl
equal to himself; but we cannot, we must no,
imagine that the whole feminine sex has been calle
out of nothingness into being merely to complete th
existence of individuals of the other sex.
The prc.
position, "the woman was made for the man," ha
therefore, for counterpoise and complement, another
proposition, the woman has been created for herself;
or, better still, man and woman both have been
created for God.
Christianity has nowhere more fully displayed the
Divine good sense and practical justice that charac
terise it than on the subject of marriage. When
men want to reorganise marriage, and by it society;
it is to Christianity that they must revert. Order,
with the happiness which is its touchstone, exists
only there.
In the Gospel point of view, there can no more be
slavery within the married state than outside of it.
The dependence of the wife, though without any
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
451
other close than the life of either of the parties, is not
more degrading than the temporary dependence of a
son. Woman is called upon to serve God in a
subordinate position, as man himself in a position of
command. Submission, authority, are two forms of
the same service, and two social functions. We may,
if we will, designate them by other names: on the
side of man there is power; on that of the woman,
influence. If, taking this view of the case, the woman
be discontented with her share, I venture to say she
does not understand the matter. The most common-
place soul may love power; but a lofty spirit, con-
scious of its own force, will prefer influence, which is
the power of the soul.
Conjugal intimacy would become formidable to the
public, or would, at all events, throw perplexity and
mistrust into social relations, if all the secrets of
which one of the parties has been made the depositary
were to become the booty of the other. I can take
no pleasure in representing to myself two married
people, daily bringing home their spoils, and each
doubling the other's share. There are a thousand
things that ought to be kept back, or that had better
be so. Above all, marriage is never to become a
licence for backbiting; and every husband who views
himself as what he ought, in fact, to be, the educator
of his wife, will beware of troubling by petty topics,
the very number of which is an evil, the " ornament
of a quiet spirit," which should be the motto of the
Christian wife. It is not only to the child, but to

452
OUTLINES OF PHILOSOPHY.
the woman, and in the same sense, that a deep respect
is due, magna reverentia.
Proportion between intellects is not equal in value,
and cannot replace, the relation between characters;
and two married people, who have many thoughts to
exchange, may be less closely allied than the learned
husband with the unlettered wife, or even the culti-
vated woman with the uneducated man, when a
common faith and hope have made one soul out of
their two. Yet who is there who would venture
absolutely to deny the danger of a mésalliance in an
intellectual respect ?
A woman must, no doubt, love her country, and
teach her children to love it; but like that orb of
gentle and comforting radiance which follows our
globe through its celestial pilgrimage, woman, noble
and loving satellite of man, follows through life in the
orbit to which her husband draws her. It is better
that a woman should be of no party, but who could
be offended if she were of her husband's? To be of
her husband's party is to be of none.

I
In order that man may reach his full value
woman must reach hers. Vain were it to attempt to
constitute an independent existence for either sex
this is the hypothesis of barbarism and paganism. It
is not said that God created the man and the won
but that "male and female created He them." Sex
is the separation of two human elements, of two forms
of humanity, moral even more than physical, which
must needs be separate, the better to unite. Generic
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.
453
man is male and female, for the very reason that the
individual human being is of only one sex. And in
my humble opinion, the physical difference has been
determined by the moral, and not the latter by the
former. Each sex has been organised according to
the idea it was to represent, according to the moral
functions it was destined to fulfil. Therefore there
is an organic unity between the two. This may be
more or less overlooked in an enslaved society; it
cannot be so with impunity in a free society, in a
democracy.
The bringing together of unequal cultures has
greater disadvantages for women than for men. The
mutual relations of the latter among themselves-
more particularly in public affairs-remain compara-
tively superficial; it is otherwise with the relations
between women, and consequently between families.
But when refinement of manners has come in with
refinement of mind, when souls have met in the
higher regions of the intellect, certain repugnances
may diminish, and certain barriers may be a little
further removed.
LITERATURE.
FIRST SECTION.
LITERATURE IN GENERAL.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
I.— CHARACTERISTICS.
1. Definition and Mission of Literature.
THERE are pure mathematics, can there be pure
literature? In such a case we should have to ex-
clude from the appreciation of literary works what-
ever did not fall under the jurisdiction of taste and
this would not suffice; we should still have to attri-
bute to taste only the discernment of æsthetic truth,
or rather absolutely to separate æsthetic from moral
truth. Now such a separation is impossible. It is
better to acknowledge that literature embraces all
those writings in which man synthetically reveals
himself to man.
That to which men have agreed to give the special
name of literature is, however, a thing that comes into
contact with everything else. Other disciplines have
a more definite arena. The domain of literature, dis-
tinct from science and pure erudition, embraces an
458
LITERATURE.
aggregate of productions which forms, if we may so
say, the outermost stratum of the treasures of thought
and knowledge; writings which border on all others,
or which derive and deliver up their elaborated and
generalised results to a wider public than the
special one of the man of science or erudition.
Impinging at its extremities on philosophy, science,
and erudition, literature displays in the interval its
somewhat indefinite domain, just as a valley stretches
out between and slopes up the different hills without
one's being able exactly to say where it ends. Be-
sides its necessary relation with knowledge, literature
has equally direct and more important ones with life,
of which it is the echo, and the ideas of which it
represents or denounces. It is pre-eminently "the
expression of society," that is to say, of govern-
ment, religion, morals, and events, all at once; an
expression particularly precious when involuntary.
It always expresses the ideas and impressions of
society. The poetry of a given age teaches us less
what it has, than what it wants and what it
loves. It is a living medal, where the concavities
in the die are transformed into convexities on the
bronze or the gold. Let us say, in conclusion, that
whatever the various elements literature appropriates,
it stamps them with its own peculiar seal; the good
and useful put on beneath its touch the form of the
beautiful; and the productions of which it is com-
posed, under the jurisdiction of reason like the rest,
are also amenable to the judgment of taste.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
459
2. Literature and Society.
Literature-that is, the beautiful realised by lan-
guage—spontaneously seizes on whatever society
adopts, and moreover seizes only this; what is special
and must remain special cannot be converted into
literature. Art retires unless it cannot be beheld by
all; art does not correspond with any particular class
in society, but with society as a whole; it refuses to
aim at anything less wide than humanity itself.
Science is a solitude which removes us from under
the influence of society. The littérateur, on the con-
trary, is only all that he should be on condition of
being thoroughly impregnated with the social move-
ment.
3. Literature and Various Sciences.
Literature is not so much a science apart as it
is the common bond, the mutual interpreter of all
sciences; it reduces all ideas to the unity of its own
form; they are all passed through its filter, which
lets through only what they have of most general
and most simply human. Literally speaking, we
should say that it humanises science, or adapts to the
whole of humanity what before was suited only to
a certain portion of it, to this or that group separated
from the rest, and restricted to itself by the fact of
some particular taste, some dominant faculty, or
peculiar study. Literature extracts out of every spe-
460
LITERATURE.
ciality (the possession only of a few) whatever may
prove within the reach and for the advantage of all.
I need not say that this word all is only to be taken
in a restricted and relative sense. I should rather
need to point out that this sense or this application
is less restricted than many persons suppose.
Literature then, indefatigable messenger, passes from
humanity to those groups I have mentioned, and back
from those groups to humanity; it asks from science
general ideas, with which to increase that common fund
that humanity keeps up and constantly adds to; and
then it returns to science with human ideas, by which
science profits in its turn. It takes back to the de-
pository of the useful and the true that truth and
utility transformed into the beautiful,—the beautiful,
which is its form, its object, the purest emanation of
thought, and perhaps the true in all its truth, in all
its light, and with all its reflections. For human
thought is not satisfied with less; and in its eyes the
beautiful is, if not the climax, at least the necessary
complement of the good and the true.
What is commonly called literature is really related,
like all other kinds of writings, to a special branch of
knowledge that of human life. By this we do not
exactly mean that literature teaches us to live, but
that it displays for us the spectacle of life. Such is
more particularly the object, or, at least, the result of
certain literary productions, of which man is the sub-
ject, whether they deal with man in general, or with
some individual who has figured on this world's stage.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
461
Poetry of every kind reveals to us a world within the
world, by raising us from facts to their ideal, of
which facts, such as they present themselves to the
human eye, are only a very imperfect expression.
Finally, in the very style, in the human word, when
it has received its full force from talent, the man in-
voluntarily reflects himself; and the first subject of
every writer, and sometimes his most interesting, is
himself. The analysis of expression is a study of the
man; rhetoric is psychology. This is the serious
side of literature, in which so many readers only look
for amusement or enjoyment.
As a whole, literature can neither be eccentric in
its course, nor can it anticipate the future; it is sub-
ject to its era, even when reacting upon it. It pays
back what it has borrowed; but it belongs to its
nature to pay back less than it has received.
Literature, then, will never fail so long as thought,
by which it lives, and society, for which it lives, do
not fail. Literature is the ideal result of civilisation,
the internal state of which is revealed by its emana-
tions, as a perfume betrays the presence and nature of
an odoriferous object. It will always be the asylum,
the locality, the meeting-place of all those thoughts that
are very broadly human, free from too special appli-
cations, too technical details, and, if we must speak
out, too immediate utilities. It will always occupy a
niche in the intellect, a place in the interest of civil-
ised societies. It will always complete, and more, it
will begin the culture of man, in whom it will cause
462
LITERATURE.
vilegio
ед
to bud forth, previously to all other, the purely
human element.
A society without letters (paradoxical as this may
seem) would be a society without information,
morals, sociability, and even without religion; not,
indeed, that literature creates any of these, but it ac-
companies them, and is so completely their condition
that without it they are not even conceivable.
I do not know how far it would be possible to be
scientific yet unlettered. At all events, we shall not
find that any man occupying the first rank in science
has been absolutely in this condition; while, on the
other hand, we often find scientific celebrities adorned
by great literary superiority.
By its very nature literature is better adapted
than science to spread and flow in society; it is not,
like science, contained within certain inviolable
limits; algebra does not mingle with "the air we
breathe;" letters are more expansive and more volatile;
they blend with everything, everything is more or
less impregnated with them. There is in society a
sort of permanent literary instruction,-irregular, in-
deed, without form, and even without name, but real
for all that, and gone through more or less by every
one of a certain social elevation. No man who has
not received or accepted it can pass for being cul-
tivated; this word corresponds with that of litera-
ture; and, in fact, science teaches, instructs, but it is
only the reflex and curious application of human
speech, only literature, that cultivates.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
463
It is especially in literature that each has need
of all.
A quite literary age cannot be anti-philosophical.
There is a natural contiguity between philosophy
and literature; we cannot exclusively cultivate one
of these domains and entirely neglect the other. A
great literary epoch will always be a thoughtful one;
the thought may not, indeed, always assume a philo-
sophic form, but it will always possess a philosophic
substance. Poets themselves may be philosophers.
Whatever be the importance and dignity of the
sciences, their results are, no more than the triumphs
of the fine arts, a measure of the power of the
human mind, nor the whole principle of its life.
Sciences that occupy themselves with things are less
profoundly human than literature, which has man
for its subject and man for its end.
The testimony of history is not so ingenuous as
that of literature.
IL-LITERARY EMOTION.
1. Its Nature.
I would not have men fall into this heresy, which is
the ruin of every art, this error of measuring the merit
of any literary production by the virtue of the sen-
sations it excites. The peculiarity of true literary
emotion is to give room and scope for thought; to be
even aided by the conflict of thought. Literary en-
joyment is human, I repeat; it interests, it moves the
464
LITERATURE.
whole man, leaves no part of his nature passive and
unoccupied but it is eminently intellectual; and
above all its impressions causes Thought to brood,
serene and dominant, sustained and surrounded by
all her powers.
There are certain things that do not belong, that
never have belonged, to literature. In the same way,
and for the same reason, that it repudiates all that
too deeply involves life, troubles it, and takes the
sceptre out of the hands of thought, it rejects, and
rejects with disdain, whatever has for aim and effect
to carry disorder into the senses. Where thought
is nothing more than the slave of matter and the
coarse procuress of sin, there is nothing literary;
and we may boldly strike out from the number
of literary works those which do not, at least,
idealise subjects of this kind, and assign in some
way or other a share in them to thought. For
the rest, even were they literary, all those works
that breathe voluptuousness, which lull to sleep
the watchfulness of the mind over the body, which
address themselves to the sensual part of our nature,
the young man should chase from his presence :
form, art, beauty, all these are but vain pretexts;
you know very well whether it be a literary impres-
sion or some other that you are seeking. Propose
this question to yourself, answer it honestly, and
abide by the answer; you will be safe, and your cul-
ture will lose nothing.
Morality recognises another chastity than that
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
465
Out of respect
which exclusively claims the name.
for human dignity it rejects sanguinary images and
atrocious scenes; it is willing, no doubt, that man
should support the sight of the pains of others on
the same title that he supports his own; nay, it even
enjoins that he should go to meet the most heart-
rending spectacles at the calls of mercy; but what-
ever represents, without any necessity and in too
cruel and actual a manner, human degradation,
whatever makes of that degradation a spectacle and
an aliment for the senses, is interdicted by morality
alike to pen and pencil. Even did she not see in it
a danger for the soul, she would at least see a useless
suffering for the heart; for such details add no force
to our convictions, no elements to our moral life.
What would be the state of a soul to which such
sensations were necessary? It would have reached a
point where moral teaching loses all applicability, a
degree of degradation to which moral teaching does
not descend, unless, indeed, it be through the nerves
that conviction makes its way, and conversion effects
itself. And, in fact, all these physics of crime only
produce a physical impression. They do not reach
the serene regions of thought, the summit of our
moral being; they do nothing but spread trouble and
disorder at the foot of the mountain.
The true power of talent does not show itself in
stirring the senses: who does not know how easy this
is? who could not accomplish at least so small a
thing as this? Power is displayed by the voluntary
H H
466
LITERATURE.
relinquishment of such easy methods. Talent is
proved by reaching the soul; and by means of well-
chosen, sensible images, causing the idea of the poetic
object to arrive thither full and strong indeed, but as
pure in form as definite in outline.
2. Function of Thought.
In the first effervescence of the soul and the pas-
sions, thinking is only the weakest half of life; and
even in thought it is life that we seek, that is to
say, animation,-a keen emotion, even though it be
a painful one. This already exceeds the scope of
literature, which has not, and may not accept, such
emotions. And although you owe them to literary
productions, I do not, for all that, hold them to be
literary emotions. There are two things in the litera-
ture of any time-the literature first of all, but the
times as well; the times above all, that is to say,
everything that is dear to us. People feel, suffer,
hope, around you; you yourselves love, feel, suffer,
and hope: a life this too real, too absorbing by itself,
to belong to literature. Literary emotions are of
another kind, human, no doubt, how should they
not be so, since literature is humanity;-human, but
not contemporaneous, present, individual; that within
us which receives the literary impressions being less
the individual than the man, it is in the more uni-
versal portions, of our being that we are affected, and
an emotion that troubles the soul, throws uncertainty
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
467
and disorder into it, reacts too immediately upon life,
is not a purely literary emotion.
Music, that art whose power is so immediately and
instantaneously felt, whose action is so sensible,—
music, upon whose effects conventional ideas seem to
have no influence,-even music comes down from one
age to another, appearing colourless, impotent, dis-
armed of all its fascinations; and there are only a
few who can discover under these superannuated
forms the primitive and immortal tones of nature.
The great works of the art of writing are less liable
to become obliterated; nothing of them dies but what
ought to die, the actual, the transitory; the human
remains, and through it they touch us. But it is
very remarkable—and to this I wanted to come-
that the human, separated from the forms that our
own era assigns to it, reacts less imperiously upon
our personality; exercises so much the more our con-
templative faculties, and so much the less our sensi-
tive being; touches us, so to speak, only by the
highest portions of our nature.
3. Emotion, and Ancient and Contemporaneous
Literature.
What especially renders a passion communicable
and contagious is its form, its costume, its language,
the allusions and images that it assumes. If all these
be taken from the actual, from what surrounds us, it
is no longer an image of a passion, but a real passion,
468
LITERATURE.
a fact that we see too closely to see with impunity;
whereas, if these actual forms be wanting, if the lan-
guage be different, if the allusions are borrowed from
another order of facts-in a word, if the costume of the
passion be antique or foreign, nothing remains to this
passion but its most general, most abstract character,
and in this state it has much less power over us; it
may be a true, and consequently an interesting image,
but it is an image.
•
I think this idea a very true one, and I want no
other proof of it than the passionate preference the
young have always given to the modern in literature,
and their contempt, or at least their insensibility-so
slow to cure for the productions of a former age.
We cannot hide it from ourselves, the most beautiful
things, if they are old, excite less passion than less
beautiful things that are new; they may, indeed, ex-
cite enthusiasm, but enthusiasm is not passion; it
rather preserves from it. In fifty years' time, in two
centuries, Werther will still be read and admired
as now,—more than now, it may be; but it will no
longer occasion suicides.
+4
III.-OF VARIOUS LITERATURES.
1. Ancient Literature.
Classical antiquity will for a long time to come be
the basis of all literary instruction, and as yet we see
nothing likely to replace it. Amongst its titles to
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
469
our assiduous study it has two opposite ones,-
its distance and its proximity. It pleads the
second of these titles against all literature, which,
being still more ancient, might boast moreover of a
great intrinsic value. But strong through its proxi-
mity against all rival claims, further removed or
more ancient, it is nearly in opposition to a Christian
literature. The line of demarcation that Christianity
has drawn between the ancient and the modern
world is deep as an abyss. A different ideal of man
and of life has risen out of the bosom of the truth,-
an ideal which, while higher than any other, is
equally natural; an ideal that every mind adopts
without effort, even when the source that furnishes
him with it is unfortunately suspected or disliked; an
ideal less simple, indeed, than that of antiquity, but
only because it is more complete; an ideal which may
seem less pure, as our cathedrals are less pure than the
Parthenon, but which will be more so when it shall
express the whole truth-better, perhaps, than our
cathedrals express the whole religion of Jesus Christ;
an ideal, in short, outside of which we can no longer
conceive or represent man, although we may still
take pleasure in finding in antiquity, free from all
complication and all conflict, certain sentiments, cer-
tain human tendencies, which, under the light of
Christianity, can no more unfold themselves with-
out control or contradiction.
Christian literature (and I beg that this expression
may not be taken in its religious sense),-Christian
470
LITERATURE.
literature is no more exclusively Gothic than our old
charities are exclusively Christian. I maintain that
a good portion of it is Greek in principle, as in fact;
the Greek element is not outside of Christianity,
which has not merely received it, but, if I mistake
not, reproduced and consecrated it. And why should
we wonder at this? The Greek element is the human,
—in its poverty, if you will, but also in its simplicity.
Now this element, taken in its healthy and normal
aspect, is in the highest degree harmonious with
Christianity. Hence, then, when this element, mingled
with others, has found its place in an admirable
fusion, the definitive unity of which hardly allows
us to distinguish the elements that compose it; when
something of the contemplation of the anchorites,
and the keen recollections of the social man, of
the habits of private life and the one ever-present
thought of society-of the sadness of the Middle Ages
without their gall, and of the antique severity without
its coldness—of the restoration of individuality, and
of the might of common convictions-then, when all
these diverse hues shall form one clear, general tint,
on which shall shine all the brilliancy of the Greek
intellect, then you will have found, not, indeed, a
perfect realisation (it is out of reach), but the ap-
proximate ideas and the distinct signs of Christian
literature. It is then that you will encounter Bos-
suet and Racine; and it is towards that precise point,
or towards that rigidly limited space, that I bid you
turn and fix your glance. That is our antiquity.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
471
It is not but that there are many contrasts, even
literary ones, between Christianity and antiquity;
but, in general, literary truth ought to mould itself
on moral truth. The inverse is, I own, less natural.
Antiquity and Christianity are the two primitive
ages of humanity. Antiquity is man in the plenitude
and simplicity of his human development; Christi-
anity is the simplicity and plenitude of human nature
raised to the Divine. There are relations between
these terms, although no doubt an abyss divides
them; antiquity accomplishes in an æsthetic sense a
development, of which the entirely moral basis is
widened and corrected by Christianity. Human
developments can only be complete by both these
means,―culture of the soul by Christianity, culture
of the mind and taste by the study of antiquity.
•
There is, in paganism, a constant proportion be-
tween the sign and the thing signified, between the
idea and the symbol. The comparison of the pagan
idea with the pagan symbol never awakens in the
mind a sense of the insufficiency and vanity of the
latter. The metaphysics and morality of paganism
are such that the symbols reach their level only too
easily. Even the sublime in this religion is only
breast high; it is in some sort relative; in ours it is
absolute. In the common acceptation of the word
there is nothing of the marvellous in our religion,
although it be marvellous; we cannot at least invent
miracles in imitation of its own, which are historical.
Its miracles are not ornaments, but an integral part of
472
LITERATURE.
itself, its means, or force. The images employed in the
prophecies and the Apocalypse have neither a literary
intention nor character; they are sublime rather than
poetical; may we not say that their voluntary gro-
tesqueness seems intended to exclude them from the
domain of poetry, and thus to preserve them from
all profanation?
There is a great difference in an æsthetic point of
view, at all events, and probably in many others,
between paganism anterior and subsequent to Chris-
tianity; the latter is far from being equal in worth to
the former; the latter is not only false, but contra-
dictory; the former may have cultivated the human
element in default of and to the prejudice of the
Divine; the second cultivates neither and corrupts
both. This is why classical literature retains its
value, even for Christian minds; error for error, we
prefer that which has not come across the truth; and
the beautiful, impossible in that complicated error
which is the negation of the truth, is not incom-
patible with simple error, which is but the absence
of it.
2. Christian Literature.
We must confess that an earnest Christianity
restricts literary genius in certain directions.
All literature is profane. Christianity has no lite-
rature of its own; it must wait till it has a world of its
own. It is perhaps from it that the greatest works
of genius in modern times have sprung, because the
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
473
:
greatest thoughts that can excite and nourish genius are
its own; but no literature depends upon it, because
literature is dependent upon society alone, which, in
the true sense of the word, is not as yet Christian.
All literature, taken as a whole and piously judged—
all literature, that even of the nineteenth century, is
outside of the truth; and if you choose to submit it to
the most formidable of ordeals, it will almost all melt
away in your hands. Be, then, Christian yourselves,
since literature is not, that is all I can say to you;
and be sure that it can be instructive, luminous, and
fertile, for no one so much as for the Christian.
Perhaps one must be a Christian rightly to read Molière
and La Fontaine, and thoroughly to understand them
-that is to say, better than they understood them-
selves. In any case, you cannot have a literature
made on purpose for your convictions, and if it were
so made it would not be literature. Nothing of this
kind is good, nor even true, unless it be spontaneous.
We study man in man, and literature, which also is
man, is to be studied in literature.
It is thus that the "Faust" of Goethe is a Christian
work, and the "Misanthrope" of Molière a sermon on
James iii. 17.
The truth that the Christian deduces from the
"Misanthrope" is that it only belongs to lofty virtue to
be indulgent; or, to speak the language of St. James,
that it only belongs to the "wisdom which is first
peace," to be, in the next place, "peaceable and easily
entreated."
474
LITERATURE.
To render literature Christian, and to make Chris-
tianity literary, are two very different enterprises, the
second of which has never been successfully carried
out, unless the first has been aimed at. A third
attempt is that of making known Christianity or the
Christian life by literary means; and this will never
be succeeded in (I do not say to the satisfaction of
Christians, but to that of the world and of good
sense) except by being or becoming one's self
Christian.
The beauty of Christian dogma is entirely internal,
entirely moral; it is untranslatable; it is a text
which can only be read in the original: mysticism
is the only mythology of which our religion is sus-
ceptible.
If there be a literature at once serious and serene,
animated and calm, it is that in the midst of which
Milton's masterpiece shines out. This poem, founded
on the Christian idea of joy springing up for man only
out of tears, presents us happiness under the above
possible conditions; and if it defies us to obtain any
others, if it connects itself with, and leads us ever
back to, terrible recollections, these recollections en-
hance Christian joy while rendering it graver; and,
moreover, these recollections are facts, realities, which
will not efface themselves before our illusions, facts
of which the trace subsists in life and the conscience,
of which the consequences are constantly met with,
and will oppress men of the world by their weight,
until the hand which has lifted the awful burden of
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
475
so many souls shall be laid on them too, to deliver
them from it.
If we do not purpose to compare popular literature
to a thermometer, which does not occasion the tem-
perature, but only records it, we may confidently
compare it to those electric conductors which do not,
indeed, contain within themselves, but draw out of
reservoirs and faithfully communicate, a mysterious
and potent fluid. "L'Esprit des Lois" was never a
popular book, but many of its doctrines have be-
come so.
3. Classical and Romantic.
Romanticism is a pure illusion regarding human
life; it is the avoidance of the real and the possible;
the dream of a world which does not and cannot
exist; a species of convention in which certain minds
and certain epochs live. Poetry, on the contrary, is
the most lively comprehension of things, their most
intimate as well as their highest truth.
Romantic, according to my idea, is not synonymous
with interesting; and I am quite willing that a ro-
mance should, while instructing, interest me; all the
more willing that I quite understand that it would
be less instructive if less interesting. This seems to
me to open out a fair field for the writers of romance,
nor can they reasonably complain of us. Unfor-
tunately, mundus vult decipi: what the generality of
readers ask of a romance-writer is just what we would
have withheld from them; they want to be rocked
•
476
LITERATURE.
"
into oblivion of life, and foolishly prefer, to the author
that would teach them to love it, the one who renders
it distasteful; to him who places poetry in reality,
him who places, or at all events seeks, it anywhere
else; I say him who seeks it, since a poetry that
cannot be linked with reality is not true poetry.
The love of the romantic has not, it may be, created
the romance, but assuredly it has dictated its laws; it
is the romantic that almost every one looks for there,
even those who pique themselves most upon seeking
something else.
Romanticism, for us moderns, is the right of only
remounting to our own origin, of depending upon
our labours, or rather being ourselves in literature
and in art. Romanticism is the natural and peculiar
literature of Latin nations, of races which, under the
auspices of Christianity, passed from the hands of
the Romans into those of the Germanic races, and
whose individuality has been consolidated by these
very revolutions. Romanticism is therefore, in other
words, the collective individuality of societies that
have sprung from Christianity and the invasion of
the northerns. It is the antithesis, not of antiquity,
but of the servile imitation of antiquity, of classicism.
Let us be of our own time, of our own country; such
is its motto and its formula.
People contented themselves with this word ro-
manticism, and did not see that what was so called
was no more a literature than eclecticism is a philo-
sophy, than Protestantism is a religion. Under this
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
477
far too precise name, nothing was found in reality
but a vague idea of emancipation; in default of a
prepared soil men fell back, at least for a time, under
the yoke of models, and, correctly speaking, they had
done nothing but change their servitude. Some
elements, however, allow themselves to be discerned
in the whirl of new ideas; one after the other these
settle down and take root in men's minds, com-
mencing there the religion of the new literature; but
this was not as yet to constitute it, nor is it con-
stituted even now.
Modern ideas, all more or less related to Chris-
tianity, have created an exquisite happiness and
exquisite sufferings of which the ancients had no
idea. Even at the present time all the world will
not understand such sufferings; to many people they
rather seem pitiable than inspire pity; and really we
must not be too much surprised at this, so many
imaginary misfortunes have cheated us out of our
compassion. We have seen, not only in books, but
in life, so many griefs with an excellent appetite, so
many rosy-cheeked despairs, so many gloomy beaux
and afflicted belles, whom a good and substantial mis-
fortune, even of the most commonplace character,
would have infallibly and radically consoled, we
are so thoroughly convinced that these intimate
distresses are but the myriad caprices, the myriad
contortions, of an egotistical vanity, that we have
become-I feel it myself-somewhat unjust and
severe towards the wants and the sufferings of a
478
LITERATURE.
susceptible nature. This is at once an unfortunate
consequence and a bad symptom; for the intimate
happiness of the soul, moral felicity, foretaste of
heavenly beatitude, is scarcely less mysterious than
moral unhappiness, and is connected with the same
principle. How then conceive the one if we cannot
conceive the other? And if both are alike unintelli-
gible, what feeling, what capacity have we for that
higher life, whose pure ideas are numbered amongst
the elements of happiness?
Our actual literature, as a whole, is nothing but
tumult in the void, taking all its ideas outside of
society, because society has none; hardly describing
the world in any other way, and having neither con-
tact nor intercourse with it except through the pas-
sions which never fail in society, even although there
be a deficiency of thought.
In literature I belong at once to the present
régime and to the old; I applaud the daring of the
former, I admire and regret the purity of the latter.
Exaggeration is the amusement of idle societies,
the romantic is their only poetry. Now action alone
gives the true measure of things; it is on foot, not
by the eye, that we can most certainly estimate dis-
tance. The pure idea does not suffice to the soul,
which need facts, evidence, types; in default of which
the mind, given up to certain strong instincts, trans-
forms the world of moral ideas into a mythology, in
which, without much difficulty, demons usurp the
place of deities.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONSTIONS. .
479
After having sought elsewhere, as all the world
does, for shocks and dazzling sensations, I have re-
turned step by step, and with delight, into that land
of limpid light (the classics), and to the centre of
those clear horizons, those bold and pure forms, that
movement at once spirited and restrained, that per-
fection, as a whole, so rare among us moderns, that
wondrous blending of the most ingenuous sublimity
and the most correct taste, finally, that chaste beauty,
and, if we may apply moral epithets to literature,
those innocent charms, which have even more and
more enraptured my faculties; in a word,-
"In them alone a nameless grace I find,
Which always charms and never tires the mind.”
I am not insensible to other beauties; nay, I am
more easily taken by them-caught with a birdcall,
as Montaigne says than are many others; and even
my unbiassed judgment acknowledges the advan-
tages peculiar to the writings of our own time.
There may not, indeed, perhaps be a literature, not
a light equally diffused; rather have we sudden
flashes and rapid gleams in a veiled and sombre
stage; few complete works; few complete men;
little of that wise simplicity or simple wisdom that
adorns great epochs; ours is a hasty but amazing
fertility; seldom the plan of a campaign, but bold
surprises and assaults; and a profundity dearly
bought by the mournfulness of our fears and the
anxiety of our hopes. So the tragical in literature
has succeeded, in our inventions, a tragical in history
480
LITERATURE.
far more severe and heartrending; it is no longer
melancholy, it is a hard and heavy gloom, which
reappears in all styles, and bitterly tinges our
laughter and our jests; the graces themselves-
the classic school might say, the graces them-
selves have wept. From all this results in the
writings of the day a certain Je ne sais quoi that
attracts and repels; a simplicity hitherto unknown,
an unheard-of refinement; a blending a confusion of
limits between the extraordinary and the trivial;
coarse deceptions, keen and ever-fresh sensations;
but it is just from all these rapid and contradictory
impressions that the impossibility of cultivating
man by means of this literature is evident, and
the necessity to go back to the point where the
stream flows less impetuously and more clearly.
The good in literature is the true; the false has
never been classical; and the true danger is never in
knowledge, but in imperfect knowledge.
The particular glory of the writings of an Augustan
age are proportion in beauty and measure in force.
It is by this admirable moderation that they have
become classical.
The great men of that great age had not so much
cleverness as we have now-a-days; they were more pro-
found and more rich, though we have a false semblance
of excelling them in these respects; but decidedly
our age has more coined intellect, more of that bril-
liancy that springs from the general decomposition of
society. Has it not been said that certain substances
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
481
become luminous by putrefaction? But is this
agency of decomposition, which multiplies reflec-
tion and appearances, equal in worth to those grand
views, those simple thoughts, that were then called
bel esprit ?
I I
482
LITERATURE.
CHAPTER II.
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
I. GRAMMAR.
1. Grammar and Literature.
GRAMMAR verges into literature, of which, indeed,
it is the most ancient name; we have only to pro-
long it a little in a straight line to make it become
literature.
2. Language: Necessity of Studying it
Thinkers
and Authors-Idiom of a People and its Civili-
sation-Respect for Language.
Grammatical instruction, if we reduce it to a more
psychological and equally simple exposition, not of
the rules, as is always said, but of the facts of the
mother tongue, forms, with the teaching of religion
(for nothing is more harmonious, more nearly related,
than these two studies), the true basis of the culture
of our and of every people. A society which does
not feel its religion, or know its language, is not
within the terms of a true civilisation.
In general, language is too little studied; it is
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
483
only known wholesale, as it were; its reasons are not
fathomed; we do not sufficiently practise ourselves
in its management. Those who have the instinct,
the quick and intimate sentiment of language, are
allowed the exclusive employment of this advan-
tage; we do not try to appropriate all that study,
with less of natural talent, may enable us to appro-
priate. Language remains poor in words, and re-
duces itself to a small number of articulations, in un-
practised hands; it only yields to others all it has
to yield.
What greater subject for poetry than the trans-
formation of a world? And what more living witness,
more intimate confidant of that transformation, than
the birth of an idiom? He who did not feel the
poetry of such a subject would be incapable of feeling
any poetry. If Adam, giving name to natural objects,
manifesting to himself his internal existence, repro-
ducing himself in speech, rising by it to human
dignity, is an eminently poetical subject for the soul,
must there not also be poetry in the aspect of a
nation, a group of nations, stamping on its language,
at the moment of some decisive transition, the pro-
found impress of its past, its present, and its future?
If an epoch had the consciousness of what it was and
what it did, would it not be seen, like "our great fore-
father," to thrill at the sight of this new-born language,
its companion, its Eve, that comes to enchant its wak-
ing hour?
Grammar, bringing back to a more precise expression
484
LITERATURE.
all these rapid and instinctive reasonings of which I
have spoken above, is at once a logical and metaphysi-
cal exercise. The mind that devotes itself to it gradually
grows in the necessary arts of abstraction and generali-
sation, two mental operations that constantly recur
in this study. Hence it has a good right to be con-
sidered as the most fitting preparation for philo-
sophical studies, and I doubt that we could find a
single instance of an intellect distinguished in this
latter branch, and not conversant with the science of
language.
The art of writing, such as sound minds have con-
ceived of it, implies so universal, so varied, so delicate
an application of all the faculties of the understand-
ing, that it is hardly possible to imagine a course of
gymnastics more profitable to these faculties. It is
almost the art of thinking, but it is the art of think-
ing applied to the expression of our own thoughts, of
our own feelings, of all we possess of most near and
familiar.
All great thinkers have not been great writers, but
where is the great writer who has been in other
respects a commonplace man?
Speech is the great lever for good and ill; speech,
the product of thought, reacts upon thought, and
through it upon life. It is impossible to calculate
the social results of a study by means of which, if it
be well carried out, we shall no longer speak with-
out knowing what we say.
I am disposed to believe that among the causes
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
485
that impede, favour, or determine the civilisation of a
people, the nature of the language it speaks is by no
means one of the least important. There might be a
language which, well learned, would necessarily give
an admirable form to the mind. A perfect language
would be truth itself.
How much psychology, how much history, how
much information, in the narrative of the adventures
of a word!
If an imperfect language be unfavourable to the
civilisation of the people speaking it, the imperfect
use of a language is still more injurious.
Words are the representative signs of intellectual
values. Writers without purity or correctness of
style are like coiners of false money, who introduce
disturbance into intellectual transactions, and diminish
the credit of words. Respect for language is almost
a morality.
The profanation of words leads to the contempt of
things; and in morality, as well as in religion, in-
credulity is the necessary reaction of hypocrisy.
Thought does much for a language, but passion
more. It is only from passion that it can receive
movement, plasticity, and, strange to say, measure as
well.
Language is a means of expressing our thoughts
only because it is, in the first instance, a way of be-
coming conscious of them. Language methodically
analyses, that is, decomposes, distributes, and classi-
fies, that crowd of perceptions which without its aid
486
LITERATURE.
would remain heaped up and confused in the mind.
Like a powerful chemical agent, it constrains the
different elements of which each of our thoughts is
composed to pronounce and differentiate themselves
in their very union. Like a torch, it throws a bright
light into those retreats of the soul into which only
a dim twilight had been able to penetrate.
To have learnt a language is to have put one's self
in possession of all that mass of fundamental and
ordinary ideas of which the groundwork of that lan-
guage is composed. Hence it results that learning
foreign tongue initiates us into the secret of the
individuality of the people who speak it; so that an
excellent method of understanding a nation is to
study the idioms of which it makes use.
a
Nothing is more intimately connected with a man
or a people than their speech; it is not only the in-
strument, but the substance of their thought, the true
image of their life, the whole of their true philosophy.
It is at the same time the result of social life and
the means of that life; it is an indispensable condition
of order, of union, and consequently of progress; it is
the talisman of our Babel. What wonder, then, if a
universal instinct watches with jealous care over a
vocabulary and a grammar, the alteration of which
would endanger both confusion of tongues and the
dispersion, no longer of tribes, but of the forces of
society? To watch our language is to watch our
society itself.
Language is sacred as society. It is not immu-
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
487
table, it cannot be so; but it will not tolerate any
arbitrary and capricious change, any gratuitous
violence, any purely individual modification. In
the alterations that it accepts it submits to its own
law, and obeys only its own wants.
In general, a language receives its greatest im-
provements from those for whom it is only an
instrument,-men of genius, who, treating of interest-
ing subjects and expressing great things, have, without
other intention, made for themselves a language
adapted to the different requirements of their thought.
We must expect nothing profound or potent from a
reformation of language in which the language itself
has been the sole object and ultimate term. It is
thought that elevates speech.
Language, as well as civil society, rests on respect
for property in grammar, as in politics, there are
vested rights; each word claims its idea, as each
individual his possession. If once these rights are
yielded up to the caprice of all or of one, language,
like society, crumbles; but, on the other hand, in the
forced immobility of property, society and language
stagnate. But the progress of language must go on
slowly and without violence; the more insensible it
is, the more secure; it legalises itself so much the
better the less we can trace its origin; as much as
possible it must be anonymous. In our days it is
very far from remaining within these conditions; as
regards it, the rights of property are constantly
violated; individual arbitration substitutes itself
488
LITERATURE.
for legal; conventionality, the basis of language,
is threatened to be set aside, and consequently con-
fusion to be introduced.
The contempt of language, especially as concerns
the meaning of words, is one of the most certain
symptoms of the decadence of art, and the poetical
impotence of an epoch; nay, it is even a very serious
fact in other respects; anarchy in language corresponds
almost invariably with anarchy in ideas. As a man,
and not merely as an author, we should make it a
serious duty to respect the articles of that social
treaty by which all the men of one country are bound
to recognise the same ideas in the same signs.
Language-admirable impress of the man, admitted
revealer of all his secrets,-language gives back our
impressions more readily than our reflections, and
consequently often the appearance rather than the
reality of things.
3. French and German.
Taken in itself, the French language offers to the
observer many merits that well deserve his attention.
Less philosophical than the German, it is perhaps
more logical; its rigour and consistency in syntax, its
delicacy in form, and rapidity of movement, contrast
strikingly with the star under which it was born, and
the stormy auspices of its earliest formation. This is
perhaps worthy of our attentive examination and
a formal study.
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. 489
II.-STYLE.
1. Style, Logic, and Language-Translation.
Such as the thought is, such will the style be.
The more I reflect, the more I am led to believe
that logic of a delicate or profound character is the
condition and sometimes the first premiss of beauties
of style, both in prose and poetry. Order and pro-
portion, how much is included in those two words!
the whole logic of style, indeed; but it has its degrees,
it has its mysteries, and the initiation that it imposes
is laborious and slow; from well to better, better to
best, in this department, as in all others, the way is
long, and in one sense never-ending.
When the garb of an idea, by dint of transparency
and purity, no longer lets anything but the idea
appear, precise, animated, attractive; when expres-
sions, instead of arresting the gaze like brilliant
asperities, unresistingly allow themselves to be pene-
trated like a luminous medium; when it is only by
reflection that we return to appreciate the details
separately, we may feel sure that we have just been
reading a very well written work.
When subtlety is dominant, either in the mind
or the style, it is less a force than a weakness; it
is, if not the source, at least the companion of many
defects. At first sight a very subtle mind seems
superior; and, in fact, it has a superiority of a certain
kind; but yet, in the judgment of lofty natures, and
490
LITERATURE.
of the public that these finally influence, how much
is subtlety below simplicity! How habitually cold,
weak, frivolous, often false, is the intellect in which it
prevails! And besides, in itself simplicity has more
sense than subtlety. That which is simple and spiri-
tual is much more spiritual than that which is only
spiritual and subtle. "It is only great hearts that
know how much glory there is in being good,”
repeats Fénélon after Sophocles. Thus, too, it is only
great minds that know how much glory there is in
being simple. Posterity, indeed, invariably discerns
this glory, but contemporaries may overlook it.
The style of a writer combines with the language
he makes use of. This style is his own, but must
accommodate itself to the language he is obliged to
employ: style both obeys language and commands
its services. Hence results an indivisible whole.
The style of the author, without his language, is his
style no longer; and on this head the more faithfully
a translator strives to render the forms of his original,
the less will he render its style. Certain phrases,
locutions, terms of speech, being no longer sustained
by the idiom on which they rested in the original,
take a quite different character in translation, or
rather lose all character, all truth whatever. One
cannot, therefore, absolutely prescribe that the style
of an author be identically rendered, except in cases,
always very rare, where the two languages offer quite
equivalent terms. In the majority of cases we must
make use of a delicate tempering, we must modify the
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
491
style to suit it to the language, or, if it be possible,
the language to suit it to the style; but at all events,
the two must sustain and, as it were, accept each other.
Perhaps the true method would consist in saying to
one's self, If the author I translate, thinking as he did,
had had to employ my language, or rather, if my
language had been his, how would he have rendered
this fact, this idea, this sentiment? I think this
is the best way of identifying one's self with the origi-
nal author, and of translating him,—that is, transport-
ing him living and entire into a foreign tongue.
In the matter of translation, talent is not all; nor
even talent joined to learning, since an epoch neces-
sarily adds to the learning of the preceding one, until
all be known, or we despair in good earnest of learn-
ing more.
When style becomes a display, when a simple
expression bears no longer any force, when stimulants
alone provoke signs of animation, are the faculties in
a normal state? has life its due fulness? is the soul in
good health? It may be that the writer who employs
these means is very strong; but is the generation to
whom he applies them strong also? We doubt it.
Just as the style is the man, as the era is a col-
lective individuality, so a style is an era.
In wasting words we wear out ideas.
It is less common than may be supposed to have
the style of one's thought: uncultivated geniuses
have sometimes this merit; half-cultivated ones can-
not pretend to it; and great writers are great because
492
LITERATURE.
they possess it in the highest degree. Dispropor-
tion, or unsuitability between form and substance, is
the stigma of inferior artists, as it is in politics, civi-
lisation, and morality the mark of inferior epochs,
and nations behind the rest. Fulness of life, vigorous
maturity, only realises and announces itself by means
of this correspondence-in all works, at least, which
are not purely instinctive. The great point for the
writer is to arrive through art at the sincerity of
instinct, or rather for the instinct to pass intact
through the sinuous defiles of art and the asperities
of labour. This is the triumph of art consummated,
the joy of superior talent,—sometimes, but much more
rarely, the quite gratuitous happiness of zeal and
love. How often, indeed, may not the style of the
most sincere man be deficient in sincerity!
2. Rhythmical Unity.
Man is one; if he does not pretend to receive all
impressions at once, he insists at least on all he does
receive agreeing with each other. The rhythmical
unity of periods pleases him, as symbol or as metaphor.
That grammatical and logical whole called the phrase
ought at the same time to be a musical whole he
asks from prose, only under a more obscure and inde-
finite form, what he expects from poetry; and, indeed,
where is the actual boundary between poetry and
prose? and how can one help owning that prose is
but poetry gradually but never entirely extinguished or
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
493
calmed down? It would astonish could we but tell
how much a diction denuded of metre loses in per-
suasive efficacy, and how great a part has been
played in the conditions of an eloquent style by the
distribution of intervals in the phrase, distribution of
sounds, and well-chosen cadences. One may, I know,
be substantially eloquent without having the senti-
ment of oratorical rhythm, but without this rhythm
we do not fully realise the eloquence of which we
are capable; or rather, as eloquence is a simple effect
from many causes, each true author is a writer in
numbers, and in one who is not, the people do not
sufficiently feel the orator.
3. Substance and Form.
Neither the idea without the form, nor the form
without the idea, can perpetuate itself.
The most exquisite form-were it possible to give
it to a substance that was coarse, vile, and without
consistency, and if style were not itself thought,—the
most exquisite form could not preserve, not immor-
talise writings: truth alone is born with a capacity
for life; truth alone does not pass away.
It seems to me quite in order, not only that the
lover of the true should be at the same time a lover
of the beautiful, but that a Christian who writes.
verses should make that, as well as everything else,
a point of conscience, and should write them as well
as he possibly can.
The beautiful may result immediately from senti-
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LITERATURE.
ments, from affections; the good is inseparable from
the idea of duty! Moral truth is only realised and
complete in the man who arrives at the beautiful by
means of the good; that is to say, at the sentiment
of love by the sentiment of duty. The love which
will only live under its own jurisdiction, only obey
itself-instinctive love, love which has not passed
through the narrow way of conscience, love which
outruns duty, does not constitute a moral being in
all its integrity, any more than does the duty which
is not resolvable into love. We must have the two
elements, and in the order I have given.
We do not see why the good should exclude the
beautiful; their divorce is only an accident, their
union is in the order of things; and when the good
arrays itself in the beautiful it does but reclaim
what belongs to it.
Form only endures on a solid substance, just as
colour only holds on a good material; and among
the writers reputed classical there is not one who
does not give us food for thought and teach us to
think.
Then, when the idea is very substantial and forcible,
the importance of the form diminishes, or rather, a
forcible and substantial idea finds from the first a
form that essentially suits it. It has no difficulty in
piercing through the accidents of language; its body
is luminous, and shines through the garb bestowed
on it.
I allow that truth knows more languages than
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.
495
7
one, that it is polyglot, so to say, because it is human.
It is therefore to render it service to make it speak
more than one dialect: we know a thing imperfectly
when we can only express it in one way. But still
each idea has its form; and the alliance of evangeli-
cal sentiments with worldly language has something
unnatural about it: the peculiarities of a fashionable
style ill suit the sublime simplicity of an apostolic
thought.
III.-LANGUAGE.
1. Fixing and Innovating.
To fix a language is not to arrest its development
or limit its acquisitions; it is to reject utterly what it
hesitated to reject, and authoritatively to sanction all
the rest.
There are individualities of language which depend
upon individuality of genius, which the latter renders
legitimate, and which are inseparable from it.
Every great writer is an innovator as regards lan-
guage; even those of our classics who appear to us
now-a-days to have been the most discreet and cir-
cumspect in this particular, were bolder than we
imagine; their audacities, now adopted by the public,
have ceased to be audacious.
2. Classical Language and that of Men of the World.
Literary critics, writers by profession, for whom to
write is at once an art and a career, have constituted
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LITERATURE.
classical language, and it is in their works that we
must look for it; but this language is not, in idiomatic
French, the only one worthy of attention and study.
Parallel with its pure and limpid course flows, or
rather boils and rushes on, a language derived from
another source, irregular, turbid, but strong and
copious, and from which the language of books has
borrowed more than it owns or even knows. This is
the language of men of the world, of the army, and
the court, who are placed too much outside of literary
interests, leisure, and consideration, to make to them-
selves a religion of the forms of classical language;
who live at once near and far enough from the vulgar
to borrow all that their speech has of picturesque
and striking without adopting its homely peculiar-
ities; who stand, in short, too high in society, or
rather, who are too much outside of society, not to be
rendered more or less independent generally of re-
ceived phraseology. Many of these men, however,
have only derived from all these advantages a gro-
tesquely incorrect diction, and the too apparent pre-
tension of braving "grammar that knows to govern
even kings."
But when this princely and sometimes cavalier
language of camps and castles falls into the hands of
a man of genius, as a Cardinal de Retz, or a Duke de
St. Simon, it becomes, as it were, a phenomenon in
language, a dialect of a superior nature, fit to figure
in an anthology which is devoted not to purism, but
genius.
•
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
497
г
CHAPTER III.
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
I. THE WRITER.
1. Originality and Individuality.
ORIGINALITY is that literary virtue without which
all others reduce themselves to nothing.
Whatever the cause, whether it be the ascendency
of one man or a collective authority, we may all of
us, more or less, say, as did I know not what cele-
brated character, "I am born a changeling." We are
not allowed time to be ourselves; something new and
foreign imposes itself upon, or rather blends with us,
in proportion as our faculties develop. We employ
in alienating our liberty, or what I could willingly
call our ingenuousness, half of whatever mind we
have; and even if we have but little, we nevertheless
succeed in this. In literature we hardly ever set out
from nature; we come back, we gradually rise to it.
Writings under which we do not see a man are
too abstract for the wants of a simple heart; we
require, in order to have excited in us the interest
we seek, all the variety of a mortal existence.
Each age has its individuality, which is at once
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LITERATURE.
its limit and its force. We must attain the level
of the age, and thence take flight, in hopes to rise
above it.
The most individual creations are suggested or in-
spired.
It is better to be pauper in opere suo than rich
with borrowed funds.
The germs of romanticism for the most part existed
latently in the seventeenth century; many bold tenta-
tives had taken place in the sixteenth. The changes
which seem the deepest are brought about by the
course of time, are suggested by the general spirit. The
peculiarity of genius and the triumph of the indi-
vidual mind is to give them the impress of eloquence.
To be able to do much is to be strong; not to do
all we can implies a twofold strength. This latter
force is the rarest in all spheres of human activity.
In literature it belongs only to first-class men, and
does not even distinguish them all, nor always. It
is difficult not to put out our whole strength on every
occasion; but every special quality is a quality
only in the proper place and measure, and is nothing
but a defect when it superabounds. This too com-
mon indiscretion has lost many admirable intellects,
to whom it has seemed more convenient to concen-
trate than to extend themselves. We may, never-
theless, affirm, without denying the rights of indivi-
duality, or contradicting the old axiom,-
"Nature, so fertile in distinguished minds,
Gives different talents to each author's share,"
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
499
we may affirm that the most special talent needs
to generalise itself; that nothing exclusive is true;
that in each talent a something should be found
of all other talents; that the special gift each may
have received cannot prosper without the concur-
rence of other gifts: and if it be objected that in
order to this the latter must also have been be-
stowed, we boldly reply that they have been
bestowed, seeing that a well-organised mind must
possess them, although in different proportions. In-
deed, this is in our opinion the characteristic of a
well-constituted intellect. Genius of every kind has
no doubt its weak side; but this would be still
weaker if not fortified at all. Whoever goes on
constantly requiring the same crop from his land
exposes himself to see, in the long run, the plant that
he cultivates die out or deteriorate. There is for the
mind, as well as for the earth, a system of rotation.
Individuality is no more in literature than in
society the one and only law. Literature is a social
thing as well. Esthetic truth is not more individual
than every other truth, and the proper part of liberty
here, as elsewhere, is freely to submit. Art would
perish were these principles forgotten.
2. Objectivity and Subjectivity.
I would have writers either broadly objective or
frankly subjective. Sometimes we have as much
pleasure in meeting in a work with the author as
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LITERATURE.
with the subject. It may be a fault in a book, but it
has its charm too.
It is not alone objective truth that edifies in
a work, it is subjective truth as well, that which
dwells in the soul of the author.
An objective talent is impartial, and without pre-
occupation; it sees things as they are, and blends
with them nothing of its own: it is this talent alone
that can reproduce the true colour of times, places,
systems, religions. It is not candour, but it is better
still. No candour could be equally candid. Subjec-
tive talents are in danger of altering everything by
their prepossessions. Objectivity, which has none,
leaves to all things their character and their physi-
ognomy. It would be candour, the perfection of
candour, if it judged; but this is not its office. A
mirror cannot possibly judge.
Amongst the writers who have exercised a powerful
influence, there are few who have not borne with
them to the grave as a crown, but often as a crown of
thorns, some one idea, the importance of the truth of
which had haunted them from their youth up.
Every great writer, every poet, ought to be the
incarnation of an idea. There must be a fusion, an
identification of the author with the subject; the
two must make only one.
The author must com-
municate to his subject the
colour of his own soul,
and himself receive the hue of his subject. .
A book is not a monologue; it would be a long aside
that endured through a whole volume. One must
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
501
write with a view to, and in presence of, others;
borrow, as it were, from the reader the language we
mean to employ towards him; hear him while we are
speaking to him; make each of our phrases an answer
to his mute questionings; allow our words to be dic-
tated to us by him. And yet these words must be
our own. And in order to move the reader they
must strike him as those of another while suiting
him as if his. It is this happy combination that has
always produced clever writers and true orators, and
in proportion as either of these two elements—it
matters not which-has been absent, eloquence has
failed.
3. Progress in the Writer himself.
A literary life is a continual advance, where each
important publication forms a step. It belongs to
criticism to affirm the interval measured by each
step; in other words, the progress achieved. In
literature, as in morality, progress is inseparable
from life; nay, progress is life itself. Life is a per-
petual birth; insensible if taken at too short inter-
vals, but signalising itself in every existence from time
to time by certain acts that give the measure and
form of the agent. These acts in the life of the
writer are books. The least important may come last.
That is not the question; but in the least important
progress, development ought to assert itself. This is
the rule, but how many exceptions there are to it!
Each writer, in his relations to society, is less a
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LITERATURE.
man than a book; and however sincere a book may
be, it is seldom that it is not better than its author,
whose chosen thoughts, best moments, whose quint-
essence, in short, it contains. People are indignant
at the difference, sometimes the contrast between
the two; and, generally speaking, they are wrong,
wrong above all in crying out against hypocrisy.
There is none here, there is only human weakness.
It is not for having surpassed himself in his book,
but for remaining inferior to his book, that the writer
should be blamed. But how much should we not
honour those excellent authors who are of still more
value than their works!—I mean those men whose
external life, admired by all, is even less beautiful
than their domestic.
Every well-ordered life is a logical action, where
each fact is the conclusion of one process of reasoning
and the premiss of another. Action is an ordinary
life; works, in the life of an artist or an author, do
not merely add themselves up, but beget each other.
True progress consists in renewing ourselves. Every
mind that stops short in its victory has only con-
quered for others, not for itself. Nay, it has not
even conquered for others. The public has its con-
science, which warns it that there is no progress,
no life, where there is no renewal.
The elite among
critics are sensitive to immobility, and discover a
principle of death in a series of successes which too
closely resemble each other.
There are epochs in which we could say that
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
503
talent is born old, for after a few efforts it stops, and
begins to revolve upon its own axis. Perhaps this
phenomenon has never been so common as at pre-
sent; perhaps no age has presented us with so many
of these stranded, shipwrecked talents, over which
the wave returns periodically to beat and half-lift,
without ever being able to set them afloat again.
Be very sure that when we are always the same we
are not true for truth is flexible and fertile; truth is
that royal road that renders whomsoever has been able
to find it out, master of the whole country. False-
hood is a blind alley, that there is no getting out
of save by turning back. But remark this,—indif-
ference about truth is a species of—is the principle of
-falsehood; truth in a human soul is faith in truth,
is the lively and spontaneous assent to great moral
truths.
Is there anything sadder than those lives without
a history, whose facts are all absorbed one in the
other, and do not add themselves up? All the world
has heard of that unfortunate, who, in a calculation
upon which his fortune and his honour depended,
always going on saying one and one make one, and
never one and one make two, came to believe himself
ruined and dishonoured, and lost his reason.
his dream is our history. In a great number of the
literary lives of our epoch one and one do make one.
Now turn from this to contemplate the life of a
Racine. What a life! how much history in it! and
what a logic in that succession of masterpieces!
Well,
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LITERATURE.
II.-LITERARY PRECEPTS.
1. Meditation-Inspiration-Taste—Timidity—
Simplicity Power of Creating.
The great, the sublime, is almost always something
involuntary and unforeseen. The higher we rise in
literary creation, the more it seems as though we get
effaced, and no longer dispose of ourselves. The
mediocre in our achievements is thoroughly our own.
We feel this by our fatigue, our exhaustion. The
great is given us. We write under dictation; we do
not know the source, we cannot predict the arrival.
It is ours, and yet not ours.
What we are, then, we
poets have spoken of
us, of a mens divinior.
are by grace; and thus all
their inspiration, of a God in
Remarkable testimony, and too little reflected upon!
Oh, why will man, who in his artistic life so readily
believes in grace and in the Spirit,-why will he in his
moral life believe only in himself? Why not under-
stand this confession of poets, and recognise in
general that man is not the source, but the channel
and the organ, of all that rises above the habitual
level of his life; that he is then only a medium
through which the Divine alternately appears and
disappears?
What is this meditation, this slow and impas-
sioned incubation of an idea? It is the increasing
intimate identification of the writer with his subject,
in order more especially to reunite all its parts, and
to place them under a general point of view.
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
505
True meditation, as the word indicates, places us
in the middle of things (in medias res), identifies us
with them, makes us live with their life. To analyse
is not to meditate; for analysis decomposes, and medi-
tation, like a fertilising incubation, lovingly surrounds
the totality of the fact submitted to it, warming itself
by its heat, and communicating to it its own. Analysis
never arrives at intuition, which in certain subjects
is actual knowledge; this knowledge by intuition is
the peculiar privilege of meditation properly so called.
Let us respect in each man, whether he be poet or
no, the moment-so well named that of inspiration-
when he says more than he knows, does more than
he can, and becomes more than he is; that mysterious
moment when he ceases to comprehend himself, when
he honours himself not in what he himself is, but in
the word that he has just pronounced, the act he has
just accomplished; when, perhaps, he trembles at the
unforeseen height on which that effort has placed
him, because well aware that his own strength cannot
sustain him there. It is the Titan raising himself
beneath the mountain that crushes him, or some im-
prisoned god that sighs within our breast.
When purity of taste is not dependent on timidity
of mind, it may well-at all events, in an epoch where
bad example abounds-be referred to originality of
character.
Taste does not always advocate timidity; boldness
is in good taste whenever without boldness there
would be no truth.
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LITERATURE.
Make a human creature say a single word, or take
a single step, and we shall soon see whether or no
you can create. Some very correct minds are in-
capable of attributing one correct tone to a fictitious
character. But, in general, women know how to
make children talk; and sometimes the most simple
of them, when put to the test, shows herself an artist
in this department.
2. Love in Literature-Love of Nature-The True
and the Beautiful.
The love that our fashionable writers take pleasure
in depicting is not chivalrous love, still less Platonic.
What our age adores in woman is her beauty; the
woman that our age deifies is not Andromache, not
Thekla, but rather Briseis or Armida; love has be-
come pagan once more, and what especially belongs
to us in this repetition is to have mingled a certain
species of mysticism with a voluptuous tone.
age, at once sensual and metaphysical, has composed
out of these two ingredients a something which is
not coarse, but which is not chaste either. Pleasure,
the idol of the nineteenth century, has multiplied
soft and enervating images in the productions of art.
Grace, elegance, are not merely elegant and graceful,
but voluptuous as well. All our aspirations are
towards the East, not as our original birthplace, but
as the country of sunshine, perfume, and roses.
Men still kill themselves, but no longer from
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
507
love. It is to different passions that this deplorable
honour henceforth belongs. Are we better or are we
worse, since love no longer disposes of our life? This
question is not without interest.
Although the love of nature be for certain souls a
passion in the whole force of the term-that is, a suf-
fering, we may say in general that calm is requisite
for the enjoyment of nature. The soul agitated by
passion feeds upon itself alone, and consumes itself
thus. It is when calm returns that we look around
and nourish ourselves through the eye with the har-
monious beauties of nature and art.
Without wishing to deny that primitive peoples
may have felt—and better, perhaps, than we-the
august charm and the majesty of creation, we must
needs acknowledge that a certain way of feeling nature
is peculiar to epochs of excessive maturity. An age
that is civilised into disease gladly turns away from
the spectacle of itself to that of the external world.
Intimate sufferings cause it to feel a particular delight
in this contemplation, that the uncultured man knows
not of. The impression of natural beauty is not so
simple as is imagined. It is only the social man who
is in a condition to feel nature. The impression it
produces is the result of a relation, often of a con-
trast; and the more this relation or this contrast
multiplies in subdividing itself, the more penetrating
and intimate the impressions we receive from nature.
The more we have cultivated our soul by social
intercourse, and especially the more we have suffered
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LITERATURE.
from it-the more, in short, society itself is disturbed
and agonised, the more rich and profound is nature;
mysteriously eloquent for the one who comes to her
from out the ardent and tumultuous centre of civili-
sation.
A marvellous thing truly is the mystic marriage
of nature with itself; the relations which, in our
minds, intimately unite the most different parts of the
great whole, the animate with the inanimate, the
visible with the invisible, matter and spirit; and in
each of these spheres a being with another being.
This unity, this universal harmony, is instinctively
revealed to all minds; but some (and Aristotle de-
clares that these are the sound intellects) are more
sensibly struck by it, and are also more vividly im-
pelled to realise it in discourse. If they have pro-
duced a thought, they eagerly seek out swaddling
clothes for the new-born-that is to say, an image
for their conception; they know no rest till it be
found; it must be found, for it exists; nature cannot
have failed to provide it. Nay, more than this,
there are minds (Jean Paul has been said to be of
this number) who proceed inversely, and go looking
for a thought to fit their image. I know not what
instinct warns them that such a dress must fit
some figure, and find its man; that some nudity, as
yet unknown to them, demands to be thus clothed;
and, indeed, I am much mistaken if some of the hap-
piest comparisons have not owed their existence to
this singular process.
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
509
There is a truth I could wish to see all writers
convinced of; it is that the beauty of a production is
not entirely in the lines, but between the lines; less
in what is written than in what is not; less in this or
that image than in that supple and continuous move-
ment which has no visible expression, which only
manifests itself in the more or less rapid succession
of thought, in its more or less close texture, in the
varied inflexions of its course, but which is none the
less appreciable and touching to a well-constituted
mind.
Truth has a power, a charm; it is perhaps the first
of literary talents, but it is also the rarest. Perfect
truth of thought and expression, when it is accom-
panied by the grandeur of the object and the ideas,
places the author in the highest rank. Pascal re-
fused all manner of ornaments, and replaced them by
a perfect truthfulness; he is both great and true.
The evident relation of the good with the beautiful
has led to great errors; to the idea of the æsthetic
culture of the soul, the idea that the development of
taste is the best preparation for virtue. Far from
this being the case, an ill-directed literary education
will have for its result the perversion of the soul,
will deceive it and give it a fictitious nourishment.
Literary talent is a very great snare; in sinful man
it easily becomes an iniquitous wealth.
At a certain depth the good and the beautiful only
make one.
The truly good and the truly beautiful find a sen-
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LITERATURE.
sitive spot in all minds. Their intimate adaptation
to the primitive wants of our soul makes them ulti-
mately penetrate there.
A rhetorician who steals the form of Christian
thought to make it a mere artifice of diction, is a
citizen strutting about in royal robes, or, rather, a
child who makes a rattle of a sceptre.
3. Literary Precepts and Miscellaneous Observations—
Rage for Reading.
The conceit of being witty, and expressing ourselves
well, is one of the most terrible demons.
In our days vagueness passes for grandeur; it is
natural to believe that, of which we cannot see
the end, to be immense. A false semblance of great-
ness is a fit characteristic of a sceptical epoch.
In times like ours (1834) there are, perhaps, few
merits so significant as that of good sense, when
joined to much power of imagination and sentiment ;
it characterises not only a sound, but a strong mind.
Good sense may be sometimes sublime; it has very
often been genius, and in certain cases moderation
implies power.
It is not especially among letters that we have to
look for well reasoned out, firm, and constant con-
victions: conviction is only an intellectual fact rela-
tively to its object; in its essence it is a moral one.
In a strong intelligence and character, moderation
is also force.
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
511
Let us belong to our own time by our most vivid
emotions; by our intellect let us belong to all times.
The prose of things is not the whole truth, though
this has been often asserted, but it is a part of it, or,
at all events, an aspect which we must take into
account.
I see no difference between a rich man who de-
spises the poor, and a clever man who despises the
commonplace. This aristocracy of the intellect, so
haughty and disdainful, which from the summit of
its own complacency lets fall on every-day minds
the Væ victis of Brennus, is as bad as any other, and
worse than some others.
To begin to think in order to write, or because we
want to write, is to renounce our best thoughts.
There are characters, the features of which are so
delicate, that the pen fails to depict them; there are
things which draw tears of tenderness from the eyes
of a friend, and which on paper would border on the
ridiculous.
Have you not remarked that the most touching
effusions are those of writers who are not habitually
pathetic, when once the holy flame has taken their
heart for altar? They seldom surrender themselves,
but when they do, it is more utterly and more simply
than others. These souls, so severe to themselves,
which are only concealed by dint of self-annihilation,
have moments when they betray what they are.
A puerility does not become important because it
has dropped from the pen of a great man.
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LITERATURE.
In every epoch there are certain ideas floating in
the air, confusedly present to all minds, fortunate gifts
that we must seize hold of on the spot or see escape
for ever.
I do not know if he who has the talent of
discovering has always, also, that of expressing them;
perhaps the one does not imply the other; but rather
I think that this double privilege belongs to ingenuous
minds which have had little premeditated intention,
if we may so say, or which, at least, have not had
the one imputed to them. They have willed one
thing, and they have done another. This is an
accident common to the greatest writings; if their
authors could return to pay a visit to posterity, this
would teach them their own secret.
It is permissible, nay, even laudable, to be ignorant
of our full worth, but we cannot with impunity
wholly ignore it. The consciousness of our powers is
a power the more; we cannot overlook them with-
out disadvantage.
The majority of writers ought to retranslate them-
selves; there are but few thoughts that are born trans-
lated, that is, clothed with the power best fitted alike
to express and transmit them. What we have in the
first instance written for ourselves, should be written
a second time for others.
Why should the false, which will not seduce us to-
morrow, seduce us to-day? It is because to every
epoch corresponds a certain form of the false, which
then looks like the true. Later this falsity will cease
be intelligible, and in consequence it will die out.
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
513
Glory is not a Bethesda, applause is not an expia-
tion. Elsewhere and far away the true Siloam flows.
Before the world indeed they may, but before God
and the conscience never will literary successes re-
deem anything whatever.
At the bottom of the admiration inspired by works
devoted to the praise of martial heroism we feel I
know not what painful void; this is not the case with
regard to those that celebrate civilising heroism.
The affectation of the desire for unity is the disease
of our epoch; the true unity is to collect analogous
facts in one single category.
A book formed of scattered thoughts has its advan-
tages, and still more, its charm, but it has also its
inconveniences. There have been no preliminary
conferences between the reader and the author, no
previous explanations of the meaning of the principal
terms, of the point of view of the whole book; they
have embarked together for a rather long voyage
without any thorough acquaintance, any perfect un-
derstanding of each other's language, and perhaps it
will only be on landing that a word, which would at
the first outset have enlightened and facilitated the
whole, will get accidentally pronounced.
Never in any department whatever can the trouble
or expense serve as a standard for the real worth of
things.
None but God can make it a crime in any one not
to be a Christian; but absolute irreligion, impiety, is
an odious blot. Atheism is not only an evil, but a
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514
LITERATURE.
!
very ugly thing, and consequently nothing is less
literary.
To read, enjoy, and it may be imitate the romances
and poems of the day, is not to practise, still less to
study literature.
There is no culture without literature, no literature
without books. A course of rhetoric is not litera-
ture; it gives an inkling of everything, and shows
one nothing.
Material misfortune fortifies the heart; it some-
times gives a certain asperity to the character, and
rigidity to the ideas; the sufferings of the heart
perhaps augment the personality, but they also add
I know not what sorrowful grace to life and thought.
Less unhappy, many a man of genius had been less
eloquent.
We spend in expressing ourselves. Never without
"an evident miracle," which will not take place, can
that be said of the soul which a poet has said of
a magic cup, “ The more the vase poured out, the less
it emptied itself." Every vase does empty itself in
pouring out its contents; and, up to a certain point,
what is true of the vase is true of the heart as well.
The soul has its excesses, which weaken it as other
excesses weaken the body; and reserved men, when
this reserve is not the mask of sterility, preserve
their soul as temperate men do their physical con-
stitution; nay, this reserve is in general both a
pledge and a principle of force.
What we say of
individuals may also be said of epochs and litera-
LITERARY PRECEPTS
515
tures; there, too, when the sap overflows, we know
that it is exhausting itself.
We are always ill at ease in a borrowed character:
we either fall short of, or caricature it; we can
only avoid inconsistency by exaggeration; either we
remain motionless, or move by a violent effort; it is
in vain that the system be true, we are always in a
false position. This reminds one of the young Ger-
man, whom his friends reproached with an excess of
indolence and apathy. They found him one day pre-
paring to jump out of the window. "I am making
myself lively," said he.
A general and animated correspondence is the rail-
road of thought. Our ideas are no longer our own.
This has its drawbacks as regards our religious life.
Literary journals are, or, at all events, ought to be,
the small craft of science.
Wholesome reading includes a little poetry.
In reading much, we learn to read ill if we do not
learn to read well; and the more we read, the more
we spoil our voice and our accent.
The period of the Restoration will one day bear
in a quite serious sense that name which at pre-
sent seems to us ironical. It has been fertile; less,
however, for itself than for us and for our child-
ren; it has been the epoch of all the revivals in
Europe. It will be to the nineteenth century what
the fifteenth century has been to the whole of
our modern era. Later, it will be better recog-
nised; at present, the conflict going on between the
516
LITERATURE.
conquerors obscures the victory and makes it seem
doubtful; which, however, it is not. The political
struggle is over, the human soul turns towards an-
other prey, and the principal dispute is between
matter and mind. Ere long we shall see the ground
occupied only by industrialism (in all its possible
applications) and immaterial ideas. Unless the soul
abdicates, it is forcibly impelled in the way whence
it has obstinately diverged to seek vagrant paths.
Religion waits till society, disappointed in a thousand
vain pursuits, returns to her out of breath and humbled.
In the thick of the dust of the conflict now going on
this conclusion escapes the prevision of the multi-
tude, but it reveals itself to those to whom, thanks to
the Gospel, the depths of human nature have ceased to
be a secret. When infidelity has no longer any other
option than between the most abject materialism
and Christian faith, we must allow, for the honour of
human nature, that it will be at its last gasp. Never
has humanity in the mass given itself over to matter.
Never has materialism organised a society. We
must perish or go back to the truth.
In France wit has the gift of making everything
attractive. One of the evils of the French mind is to
mistake wit for talent, sometimes even for eloquence.
To read only one book is very often, however
strong we may be, to place ourselves in the power of
a book.
Every study in which the mind remains inactive,
and does not give back in measure as it receives, in
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
517
a word, does not produce, is no more a study than
seeing is looking. Our age is sick of over-reading,
and of reading carelessly. Reading-which has been
called an occupied idleness, and which might be called
an idle activity—is the principal occupation of many
persons whose thoughts, incessantly but weakly soli-
cited by a thousand different subjects, everywhere
die on the surface, and end by having no longer
any vigour, spontaneity, or independence. Without
a voluntary reaction of the reader upon the ideas
of the author, reading is often rather an evil than
a good. Swallowing is nothing unless we digest.
Woe to him who forgets this! woe to him who renders
himself guilty of that voracity, or rather, that im-
prudent appetite, which has caused an age to be com-
pared to a boa distended with printed paper, whose
digestion is a mere agony! Read, but think; and
do not read unless you mean to think while reading,
and to think after having read.
A good comedy might be written against the rage
for plays, but it is clear that it never will. This
subject heads the list of reserved subjects from which
the theatre abstains. If an author were forced to
write it, no player would act it, the inconsistency
would be too great. The world is troubled with
another rage, that of reading. Are we to be pre-
vented protesting against this mania under the pre-
tence that we, who object to all this reading, should
abstain from writing? We do not know; we only see
that the theatre is not the only tribune open to the
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LITERATURE.
opponents of the theatre, while the enemy of the
other excess, if he wishes to be heard, is positively
compelled to write. He might, no doubt try the
theatre, but not only would the mania we speak of
prove a poor subject for a comedy, but is not a
comedy a book? and are not spectators readers?
In order that there may be less reading we will
endeavour to get read; and to increase our chance
of being so, we will insert our thoughts in one of
the publications of that species which represents
and most conveniently satisfies the voracious appe-
tite of that thousand-headed boa constrictor which
feeds or distends itself with printed paper. These
new paper-mills are infinite in their productions. A
journal or a review is a book without an end, a per-
petual book. It may have a special object, but its
true scope, and the one which really procures it
the most readers, is the faculty that it has of afford-
ing at regular intervals a sure repast for this hydra.
Ordinary books appear suddenly, as far as the public
in general are concerned, or else they have to be too
long waited for; and then they are books, tough bits
where there is no lack of bones, and the monster's
teeth have got worn out in measure as this violent
hunger has increased; whereas a journal is a sort of
hash, which suits the debilitated jaws of the multitude,
and the "blasé" taste of some. It is many books in
one, and there is something about it, even down to
the variety of types and the multiplicity of titles,
which pleases and attracts even the most serious eye.
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
519
III.-LITERARY CRITICISM.
1. Theory and Practice.
Literature has everywhere preceded literary theo-
ries, the fact has forerun the idea. Neither, so far
as I can discover, has the greatest display of works
of art ever synchronised with the greatest perfec-
tion of theory; and, generally speaking, the most
illustrious in practice have not been the most con-
summate theorists. This rule admits of exceptions;
yet these exceptions prove the rule if, as we cannot
doubt, it be true that those men who are equally
strong in synthesis and analysis, obtain their inspi-
ration at the price of a momentary but complete
oblivion, not indeed of art, but of analysis.
For the very reason that I do not believe in the
perfect spontaneity of philosophy, I do not believe
in the perfect spontaneity of literary ideas. I see in
them a symptom, an effect, even more than a cause;
and in proportion as new ones make their appear-
ance, I recognise in them a sign of the times, the
expression of a social want, the presentiment or pre-
sage of a renovation. I only refuse them one thing,
and that is the honour of determining the character
of the productions of art, the power of creating
literary epochs. Those great eras do not depend
upon a theory, and I remark that in the periods
where systems upon art have reared their head
highest, either art has been barren, or it has laughed
at those systems.
520
LITERATURE.
:
When
So it is in every department. Men seek after
methods, methods are seeking for their men.
the man is there, the method has not yet arrived;
when it has come, the man is there no longer. The
promulgation, the defence of methods (and this is
true elsewhere than in literature), often devolves
on men of the second order. . . It is when a
doctrine is strong that it attracts strong men, and
finds its champions among literary magnates.
Their
The great renovators, the Protestants of every
kind, have had forerunners that they have thrown
into oblivion. These names, tardily evoked, obtain
indeed esteem, but do not excite applause.
martyrdom, entirely consisting in opinion, has not
been able to inspire any with the enthusiasm of
pity. They lacked genius, and in the order of literary
things it is only genius that posterity remembers.
2. Precepts.
Nothing so bad as a mania for admiration and a
fictitious enthusiasm; it would be dangerous to have
a too easy belief in heroes and saints, and we must
not regret that the way that leads to glory is narrow
as that which leads to life. It is no evil that one
should have to stand and wait single file at the door
of the temple of memory; and, as far as saints go, if
it be good that their light should shine, it is not good
that it should dazzle.
Good sense is especially rare in the domain of
LITERARY PRECEPTS.
521
theoretical criticism; here good models become
posthumous tyrants; they must be imitated in
everything, their qualities and defects alike espoused.
In literature France is the country of routine. If
a man permits himself good sense, he becomes
original and powerful by that alone. Good sense
is always original, for conventionality and tradition
constantly tend to substitute themselves for it.
Impartiality is of two kinds, because it may have
two principles; or, if you will, there are two impar-
tialities. I leave out of the question the impartiality
of calculation and interest, but this is not the only sub-
stitute for the true impartiality. This last is born of
justice, and justice, in a healthy soul, is a positive affec-
tion, a passion. It does not only carry a balance, but
palms and a sword; does not only judge, but hates
and loves as well. Its condition is at once that of
judge and partisan-passionate partisan and upright
judge. It implies faith in duty, and in the eternal
value of moral facts. It belongs to that growth of the
soul which does not depend upon age; which does not
blossom and fade during the illusion of earliest years,
but is green as ever beneath the icicles of winter.
Such is the true impartiality, which its name does
not designate correctly, if to be thus impartial is
to be invariably of the party of truth. The weak-
ness of religious and moral principles has produced a
very different impartiality, fraught with the lassitude
and the indolence of a soul from which doubt has
gradually drained all its sap. Its attribute, its spirit,
522
LITERATURE.
is everywhere to create a level; it brings forward
in turn every idea, every principle, which has any
right of citizenship in the human breast; its chief
anxiety is to keep them all pretty much on the same
height; it lifts what is sinking, presses down what
is rising; it prevents encroachments, or rather, it
just represses one thing by another;-resembling
clockwork in its perpetual oscillations, if, indeed,
like clockwork it could occasion movement; but
this is not given to it; an essentially negative
force, it can create nothing, nor does it even pre-
serve anything.
3. Mediocrity: the part it plays.
It has been very justly observed that the gift of
invention, in which some very great minds have been
deficient, has sometimes distinguished talent of an
inferior order.
It is mediocrity that corrects; it plays the part of
editor.
We must make up our mind in literature to defer
sometimes to inferiors. Common sense is a hundred
miles from genius, but up to a certain point it is
the judge of genius.
While before a court of law an author can only
be held responsible for what he has said, it is very
frequently on what he has not said that criticism pro-
nounces him guilty.
The charge of tendency, justly decried in the sphere
of law, is a very fair weapon in criticism.
SECOND SECTION.
POETRY.
CHAPTER I.
ART.
1.-ART IN GENERAL.
1. Its Definition-Object—Mission-Condition.
ART, which we must not confound with artifice,
is in all departments nothing more than the earnest
search of the means conformable to a given end; so
that, in order to denounce art, we must first of all
show that everything, and the best possible, can be
hit upon at once.
The object of art is no less complex than the being
who conceives it, and the being to which it, addresses
itself. Art is man himself, and the whole man; but
just as in man every action and every emotion re-
quires an idea for its centre, just as contemplation is
the peaceful and luminous throne of the moral being,
so too in every artistic composition the ideal should
brood over the formal and contingent, and inundate
them with its light; and all the emotions which the
soul experiences should rise, to purify and calm them-
524
LITERATURE.
•
selves, into the highest region of internal contempla-
tion. The speculative element is the noblest of those
that art introduces into its compositions; it is the
crown, the royal insignia of the greatest poets: pro-
found view, sentiment, or divination of what belongs
to the soul and to life; instinctive and sublime philo-
sophy, this has been, from the time of Homer down
to Shakspere, from Shakspere down to Goethe and
Byron, the distinguishing mark, the predominant ele-
ment of those geniuses, each of whom must remount
or descend through centuries to find his peer; and
in general, the proportion in which this special ingre-
dient is mingled with those others that constitute
poetic genius, affords us the exact measure of each
poet's greatness.
Art in its practice springs from something more
living, concrete, and powerful than a theory. It de-
pends on life, on that of the artist and of his times. In
order that a real and sincere change should come about
in art, the man, the people, must change; and this
change of a man and a people cannot be the result of
certain æsthetic formulas merely.
Art has certainly its own place in life, but it has
nothing to do with the formation of our convictions ;
these come under the sole jurisdiction of science and
conscience.
Art, taking the word in its true sense, is certainly
little in favour in a time when to fascinate, to dazzle,
or to bewilder, is become the triumph, and indeed the
object of art; in short, art-comparable in this to
ᎪᎡᎢ .
525
religion itself-is not a perpetual constraint for the
mind, but aims at teaching us, by means of some dis-
cipline, easily to do well what before we did ill easily:
and just as the moral law, gradually identified with
our soul by means of religion, ends by assuming within
us all the power and grace of an instinct, so the artist
ends by obeying art as a second nature, and even
becomes more natural in observing its rules than one
could even be in neglecting them.
Art, like Christianity, like civilisation, has for its
mission to bring us back to nature; and how diffi-
cult in every respect do we find our return to it!
Art alone is competent to create works that are
final. In this sphere no achievement effaces or ex-
cludes another. You are well aware that this is not
the case elsewhere. In science, in politics, each dis-
covery is but the resting-place or the fulcrum of some
other discovery. The glory of some labourers in
these fields remains; their work gets absorbed; this
is pointed out from above as a step in the ladder on
which the foot once rested, but one which we shall
no more have to pass. The works of art are the
myriad editions of nature; editions, each of which is
complete in itself, while at the same time serving to
complete others. It is man, life, the incessantly new
and surprising reproduction of a mystery that does
not change. It is, with the exception of the oracles
of inspired wisdom, the most complete and profound
revelation that man can receive.
Madame de Stael wrote too entirely with her whole
526
LITERATURE.
soul, and that a soul filled with too earnest wants, to
be a perfect artist. One is only an artist, in the full
force of the word, at the cost of an impartiality too
complete perhaps for the approval of conscience; it
is either the peace or the indifference of the soul
that makes the perfect artist; and if Fénélon, for
example, fully enjoyed this privilege, it was not
only in virtue of his genius, but because from the
very beginning of his career the Divine Giver had
exonerated him from seeking. Others are artists on
different conditions; on condition of willing to be
so, to be so always, to be nothing else. Such dispose
of their ideas, their ideas do not dispose of them.
Second-class minds have more than once effected
important revolutions in the domain of arts; and the
greatest cleverness is to appear àpropos.
The severe regularity, the scientific composition, of
a work of art seems as a sign of imperturbable balance
of mind to a superficial glance only; the most pas-
sionate are sometimes the most austere; and the
force that regulates may have the same principle as
the passion that carries away, and the enthusiasm
that creates.
2. Art and Nature.
We may affirm that in general, and in every sphere,
it is art that brings back to nature. We are not
naturally so natural as is supposed. Barbarism is
never simple.
There is one sense at least where nature and art
ART.
527
form a contrast, where art is not equal to nature.
Neither man, nor the conviction which is the whole
of man, should be a work of art. A man should not
be a system—this all the world allows; but neither
should a man be a poem.
The imagination constantly furnishes fresh fuel to
passion; but I hold passions nourished on imaginary
elements to be less dangerous than those which, in the
dearth of ideas, are reduced to fall back upon them-
selves, or to seek their aliment in the positive of life.
A book is always a product of art; a man is the
work of nature and circumstance; the light that ema-
nates from him is more akin to us, and more certain,
than that of books.
3. Architecture and Music.
Unlike other arts, which have for object the ex-
pression of the ideas of the soul by the imitation of
external objects, architecture and music, enfranchised
from this imitation, only aspire, the one by sounds,
the other by constructions, to produce a state of the
soul; so that, if they imitate anything at all, it is the
soul itself, and only the soul. They are imitative
merely in the same manner as a man's walk, gesture,
and glance. Other arts render forms by forms,
colours by colours, objects by their names, which
mark them in their entirety. In them there is no
passage from one nature into another, but this is
what takes place in music and architecture, which we
may call great metaphors.
+
528
LITERATURE.
1
CHAPTER II.
POETRY.
•
I.-POETRY IN GENERAL.
1. Its Definition-Source-Unity and Diversity—
Cause-Seat and Mission.
THE history of poetry is not exclusively and identi-
cally the history of works written in verse.
Poetry
dwells in prose writings as well; nay, is necessarily
met with there, for poetry is less a class of writings
than a breath unequally but generally diffused
throughout literature: it is whatever raises us from
the real to the ideal; whatever brings the prosaic in
contact with our imaginations; whatever in any intel-
lectual work echoes within the soul; it is the beauty
of all beautiful things; it penetrates into spheres
apparently most foreign to it; and what Voltaire has
said of happiness may be equally said of poetry,—
She resembles fire, whose gentle heat secretly in-
sinuates itself into all other elements, descends into
rocks, rises in the cloud, reddens the coral in the
sand of the seas, and lives in icicles that winters
have hardened.”
It is with mirth as with poetry when they are
POETRY.
529
both alike genuine, the first can live upon nothing
as well as the second.
Sensibility, which is the imagination of the soul,
just as imagination is, perhaps, only the sensibility
of the mind, is not one with passion any more than
that it is one with virtue. We may, with a good
deal of sensibility, be prone to passion; perhaps,
however, we are the less so in proportion to our sensi-
bility, for what diffuses can hardly concentrate. But
sensibility, which is but a talent or a grace, has, no
doubt, much charm, and much affinity with poetry.
In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand
must spring from the commonplace. Whether we will
or no we needs must return thither. All that remains
for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be
ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world.
Poetry, that enchantment of every human life, has
its source in our souls, and from thence spreads over
all the objects of the world, which it transfigures, and
whose substance it renews. While science in some
sort subjects our mind to them, poetry subjects them
to us, renders them conformable, assimilates them to
us. Things become what we are. Thus we may say,
that of all our possessions our ideas are the most
unalterable and safe from attack; it is there, at least,
that we must be assailed in order to be truly
despoiled: what nature and fortune give us is hardly
ours; but nothing is more our own than what we
give, or, at least, add to them, I mean our ideas.
The true happiness, the true misery of man are in
M M
t
530
LITERATURE.
himself; he is his own destiny; his soul is mistress
of his fate well for him if he be master of his soul.
:
But poetry shares our misery, it is agitated with
all our uneasiness; like us, it goes, comes, flies, never
rests. From all objects, all feelings, it asks some
infinite perspective; it halts nowhere; its flights
fail long before the goal is reached, and it seems to
exist only to recall to man the vague idea of some
unknown end, of some attainment, some possession,
of the nature of which it is ignorant, and whose true
name it cannot reveal.
Is the rest of the world like us? I regret all that the
past hides in its abyss; I would have it all remain
ours. I regret not only the monuments that crumble,
but the thoughts that vanish away, the voices that
die in their first echo. I especially regret poetic
thoughts: others are rediscovered or repeated; the
one is a substitute for the other. Poetic thought
alone is never replaced; we may do other and
better, but a poetic thought can no more be re-
peated than a soul. Each creation of the kind, by
the very fact that it is poetical, is unique and irre-
parable. What has been said by one poet will never
be said again by another.
But can we preserve everything? Must we not
yield to oblivion millions of lines and millions of
thoughts? All these are only present, only living, in the
Divine memory, where the least as well as the greatest
existences impress or reflect themselves immortally.
This great memory will one day come to the aid of
POETRY.
531
our weak ones; facts will rise from the grave, the
past will revive, we shall ourselves live over again
our vanished years; crime, self-forgetting as virtue,
will remember and melt away in anguish.
Poetry, as a whole, springs from the soul of man at
once, fuses all his life, and therefore should represent
it all. Or if there be several kinds of poetry, genius
should embrace them all, and reduce them to unity.
There is one poetry of thought, another of imagi-
nation, a third of sentiment, a fourth of action.
This last displays itself in action; it does not hold
a lyre, but alternately the sword of the soldier, the
balance of the judge, the staff of the pilgrim, the
spade of the labourer, the fathoming-line of the
sailor, the chisel of the artist. Such poetry belongs
to all, and often bursts forth more especially in those
who do not pique themselves on its possession, and
to whom the very name of poetry is unknown.
But the poetry of action is the type and indication
of a written poetry, superior to that of colours, of
images, of the senses, and even of the thoughts and
feelings. If the verb, despite its excellence, is only
valuable through the substantive that carries it,—if
sentiment and thinking are precious only when life
confirms and embodies them,-poetry rises in measure
as it most resembles action, action which alone is
life, and the whole of life, since it supposes all its
elements, concentrates and fertilises them.
It has been thought that poetry is an infancy of
the soul; it must have belonged, in a quite peculiar
532
LITERATURE.
sense, to the infancy of nations and of the human
race. It was then that, free as yet from the know-
ledge of facts, the mind transfigured the world to its
own image; and perhaps poetry is nothing more
than the unlimited liberty, the sovereignty of
thought. Poetry was then everything in the intel-
lectual world; it was the philosophy of the youthful
universe. Once arrived in the region of science,
oppressed beneath the whole burden of acquired
knowledge, but having always the same need of air
and space, the human mind seeks both in another
region, that of metaphysical speculation. If poetry
was the philosophy of early ages, philosophy is
perhaps the poetry of our era; it is a new method
of recovering liberty; it is, perhaps, a second child-
hood; but the first, nevertheless, holds its ground in
some souls. In each generation the human mind in
every man reverts to its starting-point; each new
man is a primitive man. Education and example
regulate this, but human nature resists in some,-
perhaps, to a certain point, in all. Thus, from time
to time, pristine poetry reappears in certain spirits
who have kept, have preserved a greater part of
their childhood.
Poetry, which in every case is the highest and
most intimate expression of human nature, neverthe-
less expresses in certain souls nothing more than a
subjective truth, and that suffices it; and it ought
even to suffice us, if, in the songs of the poet, we
only seek the different modifications of his soul, the
POETRY.
533
individual result of an individual intercourse with
nature. This result is in itself worthy of our
interest and sympathy. What describes one man
describes man, and we may say that in this respect
anecdotes are as valuable as history.
We may conceive, and we even know by expe-
rience, another kind of poetry; and it is, I think,
that of the princes of the art,-a poetry engendered
by a more tranquil, serene, and lofty contemplation
of human things,-a poetry which comprehends
everything, feels everything, and that nothing per-
verts; which guesses all, and wonders at nothing
prophetic, a poetry whose accents, properly speak-
ing, are not those of one man, but of the human
race; which tells not what an individual has felt, but
what has been felt by the human being ever since
the fall that destroyed the simplicity of his nature,
and perhaps, by that very fact, created all that is
poetry,—finally, a poetry which may, in a human
and natural sense, be looked upon as a revelation,
and whose words of an import, perhaps, unknown
to the voice that uttered them-should be gathered
up with earnestness and respect.
Poetry! poetry! the emptiest of all words, or the
most significant, the most frivolous of all things, or
the most important. Methinks it is but now that I
understand all that thou mayest be. Arrived at
that period of life when for so many men poetry has
ceased to exist, I feel thee nearer to me, more potent
over my life, more positive in my thoughts, than ever
534
LITERATURE.
30
thou wert before. I do not confound thee with thy
vain image; and such as I conceive thee, thou ap-
pearest to me as the most complete personification of
humanity, as its living epitome; thou sayest all that
is, or rather art all; thou art its last and most inti-
mate expression; above, below thee, there is nothing;
thou art the truth of things, of which prose is but the
disguise; thou containest their secret, which uncon-
sciously thou dost betray. Thou art the word of
fallen nature; and thy earliest strains were exhaled
at the gates of paradise, beneath the flaming sword
of the cherubim.
There was no poetry in Eden. Poetry is creative;
to be a poet is to remake the universe; and what
had man in paradise to create? And why should he
have remade the universe? When Innocence re-
treated tearfully from our earth, she met Poetry on
the threshold; they passed close by, looked at each
other, and each went her way,—the one to heaven, the
other to the dwellings of men. "But," you will ask
me, "what was it then that, ere sin entered into the
world, filled the space that is now filled by poetry?
Had the soul then empty chambers? Did the soul,
which is only action, conceal within it a passive
portion? Or can it be that it has widened since
man has fallen? What previously went on in that
obscure inner region, which we cannot figure to
ourselves deprived of poetry and thought, if you
say truly poetry was not?" I am not careful to
reply. This only I know, that health is unconscious;
POETRY.
535
that an order which had never been interrupted,
and was not threatened with interruption, would not
perceive itself. Even in our present constitution,
it is not health, it is convalescence that is poetical.
Just as certain plants only yield all their fragrance
to the fingers that crush them, so it is only in a state
of suffering that certain affections utter all their
poetry. True poetry does not, indeed, always
express regret, desire, or hope; we must not seek for
these sentiments at the basis of all poetical works
whatever, but you will find them at the root of
poetry in general, even when it is gay and playful.
Its essential character reveals its origin. And why
should not the incommensurable disaster that gave
birth to virtue give birth to poetry as well? This
genealogy does not render it contemptible. The
pearl, because it is a product of disease, is no less a
pearl; and poetry, that pearl of intelligence and life,
reflects on our brow some pale rays of the glory
that has faded away from it.
But whatever opinion be adopted on this subject,
one thing is at least certain, that poetry, although
creative, is so far from disclaiming allegiance to the
law of truth, that, on the contrary, it is truth itself.
It is this because it is man, and man in his deepest
feelings and most spontaneous thoughts. Poetry is
inherent in man, and he it is who gives it to things.
Events and external objects are, so to speak, but a
neutral substance, which receives its colour and its
significance from our soul. Poetry is not, as has been
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said, an exaggeration, an embellishment of reality;
vague and arbitrary explanation; the poet rather
grasps realities in their ideal character, and this
ideal he bears within himself. It is impossible in
any other way to account for the Apollo of the
Belvedere, and all other creations of art. Nature
has given the reality, man bestows the ideal. It is
thus that humanity manifests all that it contains;
hence poetry may be considered as a revelation,
perfect in its kind, since it is but an involuntary
avowal. Art comes later, voluntary, conscious,
deliberate, taking account of its method; but poetry,
in its origin, taking it at the point where it first
springs forth, bears this character of inspiration and
spontaneity: it is born, not made, and whoever
makes it is no poet.
The great problem is to be at once individual and
universal, to express one's self and human nature both.
There are distracted epochs when, in describing what
we ourselves are, we are not sure either of expressing
humanity or our own selves. Sentiments compli-
cated by ideas, or ideas exalted by facts, create in the
soul, or rather in the mind, I know not what
fictions of individuality and humanity. I know not
what phantom we take for self, and which often
binds us to humanity by the very slightest ties
possible. We are living in one of these epochs now,
and true poets now-a-days are those who know how
to tear themselves away from such influences, who
can pierce through the clouds to the light, and save the
POETRY.
537
purity of their inspiration from the general disorder.
It is refreshing to read them, delightful to steep
ourselves in their truthful poetry. But it is re-
markable that in general it is not the least learned
or least cultivated who appear the most ingenuous;
and candour is very far from being proportioned to
ignorance. Whether with regard to individuals or
to epochs, we have the same observation to make.
Between the two extreme points of barbarism and
culture there extends a region of semi-culture, of
superficial instruction, the region of men and of
epochs alike transitory, and it is in these that we
find the minimum of nature and of truth. The
famous saying of Bacon about religious truth might
be applied to poetry, which is, as we have said, the
truth of human nature,-A little culture removes,
much brings us back to it.
Poetry resides more especially in the conception of
a work-in a parent idea, in the movement which
is also the idea; in fact, in many things before we
come to the language itself, to the form, or image.
There is often as much poetry between the lines of a
poem as in those lines. Such poetry is not to be
described in detail, scarcely to be analysed; the ex-
pressions, if you detach them from each other, will
not perhaps strike you as very remarkable; but com-
bined they form, as it were, a total expression, the
unity, the organic and living continuity, the intimate
connection of which make a profound impression and
leave an abiding memory. Such a work is remem-
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LITERATURE.
bered as a single idea, a single phrase, a single
word.
Great poets, it is true, have not shrunk from pre-
senting us with terrible spectacles; they have had no
pusillanimous regard for our sensibility; but their
action upon thought has always proved itself stronger
than the strongest emotions they permitted them-
selves to excite. Emotions have never been their
ultimate end. Through the medium of the sensitive
man, whose fibres they did not fear to rend, it was
the intellectual and moral man that they aspired
to reach.
The beautiful is the proper object of imagination,
as the true of reason. The ugly is in poetry only a
passing shadow. Evil, no doubt, has its poetry, but
even here it is the poetry, not the prose of evil that
we ask from the poet. If the question be merely
one of seeing things in their actuality, without raising
ourselves to their ideal, there is no need for the poet
to exert himself: it was ideas that we asked from
him; as to sensations, we can easily procure them
without his aid; we have only to go down into the
street,-nay, we have only to remain at home.
There is a treasury of poetry in the souls of all
children.
The poetic instinct mingles in some measure with
all strong and beautiful natures.
Poetry is found wherever there is enthusias m-
that is to say, fervour for an immaterial end. The
dust and odour of ancient libraries, the gloom of those
१
POETRY.
539
crypts of literature, have for their investigator all the
charm of freshest images and freshest poetry. Thus
men who often decline the gift of poetry are poets
in spite of themselves.
Fine arts, poetry in particular, are the voice of
humanity, the expression beneath mutable forms of
what it contains in itself of immutable, and conse-
quently of common to all its constituent beings. It
is for having touched forcibly and truly that invisible
lyre, which echoes in unison in all human souls, that
a poet is adopted by humanity itself, whose thought
he has spoken; for in the poet, in the artist, humanity
only seeks for an organ of what it thinks, an echo
of what it says, an impress of what it is. It is
for this reason, too, that a poet is known to pos-
terity. Humanity, which does not die, attaches it-
self to truth, which is deathless. Talent, in its
highest degree, is perhaps nothing more than this
very truth; at all events, talent has nothing universal
and durable without it. This alone accredits it with
all men, in all places, and in all times. No doubt
there is always something in works of art that, being
accidental and temporary, cannot resist the ordeal of
the ages, some forms to which following generations
will have to extend a kind of indulgence, but this
indulgence costs little when beneath the forms of
another age we recognise ideas that can never grow
old, and beneath a superannuated costume feel the
beatings of a human heart. It is through the heart,
not the mind, that all nations are fellow-citizens, and
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LITERATURE.
all ages contemporaneous. It is by the heart that the
identity of human nature is incessantly established.
The mind is skilful in dividing; the thoughts that
unite individualities spring from the heart. It is
with these thoughts that poetry must on pain of death
eternally link itself. What could we think of a
literature that disowned them, or of one which should
have no moral ideas of any kind; which, blowing out
with its breath one after the other all their lights,
should lead its readers into a sombre desert or a
fantastic region; which should, in a word, while
creating for human beings, absolutely separate itself
from human nature? Man can lend himself to all
the sallies of imagination; he consents to follow its
adventurous bark through the narrowest and most
perilous straits; but when once it has broken the tie
that bound it to reality, he either ceases to follow it at
all, or follows it without sympathy, with impatience,
or anxiety.
That which has remained in the heart of man after
his unhappy fall is for him a religion. He attaches
himself to these fragments, which are at least those
of truth. He lovingly preserves these remnants of
his ancient opulence. He seats himself weeping on
these ruins; he will not have them taken from him.
Perhaps he knows that such ruins are the corner-
stone of the colossal edifice which shall one day
arch high above his consoled race its lofty and
tutelary dome. Whosoever insults these ruins in-
sults man's wretchedness, despoils his indigence.
POETRY.
541
Humanity cannot afford to hold cheap the feeble
beliefs that remain to it; it pronounces an anathema
on the hand that would fain outrage those fragments,
and heap up fresh ruins amongst those that already
exist.
Without poetry the loftiest genius cannot aspire
to sovereignty. Poetry addresses itself to the great
public, and to the most sensitive portions of every
public. The sonorous vibrations of this universal
organ penetrate further and echo longer than all
others.
Poetry has the complex attribute of seeking truth
outside of reality, in order to mould it in human
speech-in speech, that marvellous thing which,
although the organ of a fallen race, yet lends itself to
the expression of all ideas anterior to the fall. Truth
I said outside of reality, but these two ideas are not
separable, and the one without the other is not
poetry. Yet this is what those have appeared to
believe who, led by a true though vague instinct, have
pressed beyond the real without winging their
flight towards the true; those who have put in the
place of the truth an ideal either arbitrary, relative,
or partial, which caused imagination to spread its
wings only in order to bring it back to its start-
ing-point by another way. In general, poetry has
ceased to be a constitution of the human race, a pro-
longed echo of the truths that exiled humanity had
saved from its great disasters; always true in a
measure, else it would have ceased to be poetry, it
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LITERATURE.
has coined its gold, subdivided it, reduced it into
thinner and less weighty truths, blended it with a
deteriorating alloy, brought it insensibly into con
tact with the reality it should have surmounted.
Through what remains to it of truth, it is still the
charm and consolation of elevated imaginations; but
its high functions, its prophetic missions, have ceased:
it governs society less than society governs it; it can
no longer constitute or determine anything: intui-
tion, which is the true name of its effect upon souls,-
intuition, that other conscience, is, like conscience pro-
perly so called, benumbed; and if we still ascend to
the truth of things in theory and application, it is
by means of redoubled efforts, that stretch almost to
breaking every chord of thought that is to say, of
mediate or reflective reason.
Is this the fault of poets? It is that of all the
world. Is it open to poets to confer once more
upon themselves their ancient powers, and to re-enter
into the plenitude of their attributes? Can they do
anything but gradually ascend towards the source,
towards the primitive ideas that bind together man-
the family and society-with a different cement to
that of science and of law? Long will it be ere
poetry can solder together the fragments of its falling
sceptre; but these fragments are beautiful, and in
the present day he who succeeds in picking up one
of them will be a king among us. Wondrous to
say, the circle described by civilisation has brought
us from analysis to analysis, from refinement to
POETRY.
543
refinement, in face of nothingness, and we have only
to choose between it and the A B C of the human
race. We have nothing more to learn in academies,
but seated on the benches of an infant school every-
thing would be new and fresh to us: we have com-
pletely forgotten what is taught there; indeed, it is
not certain that even on those very benches we
should find the first truths still taught. Every gene-
ration does not recommence the human race; for we
now make it begin life at the point where the men
of early ages looked on life as consummated. The
truths of the young world are found too simple, too
elementary, that is to say, too strong, even for child-
ren; their form at least robs them of their early
majesty; they no longer appear compact, in an im-
mediately synthetical condition; the trunk, divided
a countless number of times, has become a tightly
bound bundle of rods: it remains to be seen whether
poetry can rediscover those great and solemn forms,
that simplicity adapted to intuitive truths; whether
it can reproduce something of the accent of early
humanity, and whether the present humanity will
recognise that accent and be thrilled thereby.
2. On the Disinterested Nature of Poetry.
Yes, poetry is essentially disinterested, is but too
much so; it folds its wings at the rough contact of
reality; it has no intercourse save with the idea; but
safe from the incursions of reality, it yields itself up
544
LITERATURE.
more completely to that idea; it inhales and absorbs
it all; it intoxicates itself with a cup whence all the
coarser juices have been extracted; it goes to the
bottom of every emotion; it feels in one sense much
more, and in another much less, than the soul engaged
with reality; more superficial in one respect, it is
more profound in another. Poetry very often is
fuller than life, just because it is not life; never-
theless, life does not give up all its advantages;
it has certain simplicities and cries of nature, the
secret of which is almost entirely confined to itself.
Poetry is in itself indifferent and impartial; prose
is less impassive. Poetry aspires to the ideal; it
lives on contemplation, compromises itself little in
the choice of its subjects. The poet sees and selects
from on high and afar, and hardly inquires about
what is near at hand. An age which becomes in-
creasingly prosaic loses and gains at the same time,
-loses in coming down from the ideal, gains in draw-
ing nearer to reality. Poetry draws back a step;
prose takes a step in advance.
Is there not a race of minds which live less amid
things than ideas of things; which, just as the dialec-
tician feeds on notions of being, nourish themselves
with images of things; which, in a word, rather dream
that they live than really live? This mode of existence
places a man indeed above all littlenesses; but we
may well ask whether it constitutes a profound life,
one truly earnest, truly human. Does not poetry
itself lose somewhat in detaching itself so entirely
POETRY.
545
from the reality whence it proceeds, and fixing itself
thus solitary in aërial heights? Has the Divine
hand, which in the beginning co-ordinated poetry
and life, permitted any to be thus purely poetical
without injury to poetry itself? No doubt, poetry
is the highest impartiality of thought; but can it be
true that one is a poet in proportion to the lack of
intensity and reality in our lives? and is the trans-
formation of the man into a thought in very truth
the idea of poetic genius? These questions, we
think, deserve examination.
The literary history of our age will, perhaps, say
that at no other time has there been a more complete
separation between poetry and conviction, between
the poet and the man. Even that entirely personal
poetry, which disproportionately dilates in the moral
void of the epoch, contains little individual truth,
little humanity. But, strange to say, for the very
reason that convictions are rare, poetical material
abounds; for a conviction has always some character
of exclusiveness, while scepticism is free to gather
and explore everything. The sad thing is to see
poetry from the heights of its indifference pounce
down upon what there is of most serious and most
holy, to see religion serve as prey to frivolous minds,
for whom it is a subject of heroic verse and nothing
beyond.
The part that French manners have assigned to
woman has done an incalculable injury to poetry.
Object at once of a mocking contempt, and of an
N N
546
LITERATURE.
idolatry which is also a contempt; mixed up with
all affairs, but excluded from her true domain, woman
in France is unable to bestow on domestic relations
the charm of that influence which she exerts in other
countries. Now the half of human affairs hinge upon
this single point; from family life flows all that is
most potent, most dear and sacred, the love of country,
and even public spirit; on the character of marriage
the principal characteristics of national existence de-
pend; so that, to date from Christianity, the rehabi-
litation of woman has changed the whole of history.
It is easy to understand how much French litera-
ture has lost by that lightness of opinion on the
subject of morals, and that perpetual ridicule of mar-
riage, which are in great part an effect of that very
literature. Hence domesticity, cordiality, tenderness,
have been too often absent from our poetry, which in
these important respects has been more than Athe-
nian.
3. Poetry and Scepticism.
We have in philosophy fragments of opinion; in
morals, fragments of principle; and even this is per-
haps saying too much. Everything is true; nothing
is true: the mind grasps at all things, without attach-
ing itself to any. We had before become acquainted
with a scepticism terrifying, because terrified; which
was nothing else than reason in despair; which
resembled faith,-implied, contained, a species of
faith,—a faith, shall I say, in the necessity of faith;
POETRY.
547
which struggled against the darkness, and if con-
quered, cursed it. The scepticism of our days has
no longer this character; men have fallen from de-
spair to ennui: and when I speak of ennui, it is
not that of an Attila embarrassed by his superfluous
forces, and seeking employment for them; it is an
impotent and rickety ennui, which has not even
the remnants of energy necessary to prompt the get-
ting out of self; no desire is keen enough, no impulse
passionate enough, to vary its monotony; no grief
sufficiently violent to awaken alarm or pity. The
former scepticism walked on thorns; this sinks
ankle-deep in mud.
Is a scepticism like this poetical? Yes, if nothing-
ness can be so; no, if there be not any poetry with-
out ideas, or, in default of ideas, a definite state of
the soul: that which has no name, which cannot
have any, which the soul itself knows not how to
designate, can offer no material for poetry; the tor-
por of the soul is never poetical.
It sometimes seems to me (it is an error, I confess,
but one into which I am for ever falling) that poetry
is no longer anything more than an imitation of
poetry; and that people only write odes, epics, bal-
lads, verses, now-a-days, because they used to be
written formerly. So much is certain, that for a
long time, and it may be still, styles have been cul-
tivated which have no root in our present manners,
and which now lack a certain actual truth, of which
they once bore a very vivid impress. Romanticism,
548
LITERATURE.
which was at first but a reaction of the Gothic against
the classical, and, so to speak, of one imitation against
another, had at all events the merit of breaking sacra-
mental forms and destroying the fetishism of style.
In our literature it has led to a profound modifica-
tion, to an increasingly thorough alteration of ancient
types: from conventional they have grown natural;
from abortive, actual; from false, in short, true and
sincere. These forms of art no longer rest entirely
upon hypothesis; the poet no longer necessarily trans-
ports himself out of his time and character; poetry
aspires to becoming actual; but the real revolution
is still far from having been accomplished; and
under one form or other I still see the factitious
on all sides. For the rest, an age which in archi-
tecture, religion, philosophy, has so little of its own,
can hardly have a poetry of its own either.
We live in a time when art has compromised its
character by taking itself for its own object, thus
trying to make itself absolute instead of relative, as
it is, and should remain; forgetting that its beauty,
force, and dignity are properly derived from a felt
reality. It contemplates from afar, I do not say from
on high, the affections and creeds of humanity, and
out of these cursorily observed and half-guessed
forms it composes the world of its creations. The
modern poet seizes the objects of general interest on
the wing, and, without appropriating them to him-
self, appropriates them to his designs. What tortures
society is only for him a more or less happy, more or
POETRY.
549
less fertile theme. This indifference must not be
confounded with that supreme calm in which genius
is constantly wrapped,—a calm essential to the art of
poetry, but which, very far from resting upon
apathy, springs from the contrast of a stirred soul
and a peaceful mind. The property of true poetical
genius is to feel more intensely than any one, and to
contemplate as though it did not feel. Our clever
moderns do not live in this region, let them say what
they will. Frivolous in life and character, they take
up by preference grave and even infinite subjects.
Humanity, the poet par excellence, lets its grand
poetry, which is a deep and vague rumour, escape
them; they gather up a few sighs, a few broken
groans; but even this is not immediately. Some
individual voice amongst men must have already
imitated that mighty voice; imitators of an imita-
tion, reflections of a reflection, they begin to sing, and
gaily improve--without caring for them in any other
way-our doubts, our anguish, our ineffable unrest.
Are they assailed in their own destiny by one of the
arrows of Providence? Such is the force of habit,
that even there, artists above all, or in spite of all,
we see them dig to the bottom of their own grief
to seek for poetry. Let a burst of desire or hope
heave the bosom of humanity, let a universal sigh
rise towards heaven or towards the religion of our
forefathers, for them this is still poetry, or rather
still verses; they profane, by a homage without tact
or intelligence, the object of their transitory worship;
550
LITERATURE.
their adoration insults it; they pretend to bear it
aloft on a triumphal car;-draw near, that car proves
a mere hurdle.
At certain epochs poetry is more generally human,
and by that so much the greater. At other periods
it becomes more especially social; that is, it attaches
itself pre-eminently to man, such as he has been made
by society. Thus it is that it diminishes man by
turning away his eyes from the depths of his being
and the greatness of his future. In becoming more
social it becomes less human.
We have lived long enough to bury humanitarian
poetry out of sight; human poetry will survive us,
though it be much more ancient than the other.
The events or the individualities that have, if we
may so speak, exhaled most poetry, seen and ob-
served near at hand, appear to contain none; their
poetry resembles a perfume or an echo which only
becomes perceptible at a certain distance, either of
space or thought. Thus the industrial movement of
our era will have its poetry in the future; it has it
already in the mind of the cotemporary who can
contemplate it from the heights of that future; but
when quite close to the movement, in the midst of
its bewildering details and tumult, there is for the
immense majority of spectators no poetry to be found.
It is not the persons who have had the sentiment of
being poetical, or those who aspired to be so, that
have given out the most poetry: it was rather posi-
tive and elevated minds; strong and tender souls,
POETRY.
551
devoted to action, living an earnest, an unselfish life;
and if you come quite close, everything in them will
seem to you mere prose. Nevertheless we must
know how to read and understand this prose when
we want to rise to the poetry of a fact or a person;
otherwise we shall be vague and characterless, that
is to say, we shall not be poets.
Lovers of the poetical, do not foster your doubts.
as though they were poetry. Do not either imagine
that doubt is a simple misfortune; it is something
else: taken in its principle it is sin; speculative
doubt is born of the debility of moral life, and in its
reaction thereon it only depends on yourselves to
discover negatively the confirmation of that profound
sentence of the Master,-" If any man will do His
will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of
God, or whether I speak of Myself." Will, and you
shall believe. Believe, and you shall will. This is
the double hinge on which turns the door of the
narrow way.
Doubt may have its poetry-nay, it is even the
whole poetry of certain minds, on which we see it
grow and blossom as upon a building in ruins; and
to say the truth, what else indeed is the whole of
poetry but a mantle of verdure overspreading broken
walls, which, upright and entire, had not afforded
space for one blade of grass? Nevertheless it is
only under certain conditions that doubt can be
poetical; these conditions are found in Byron, and
both the heart and imagination are touched alike
552
LITERATURE.
in watching him describe the ever-narrowing circles
of the fearful whirlpool.
Poetry lives on faith, on some faith or other; and
when faith is wanting, it at least aspires thereto.
But it cannot rock itself in uncertainty without fall-
ing soon asleep.
Some poets, more particularly among our lyrists,
have, it would seem, made it their task to introduce
scepticism into language as into opinions. In their
writings a given word signifies more or less, or this
or that, according to the fancy of the writer and the
exigencies of the metre. No more definite significa-
tion, no exclusive application; all outlines effaced,
all limits lost; and in this vagueness a false show
of precision, and the affectation of a design clear even
to hardness; tones at once shrill and confused; frac-
tures multiplied in the verses under the name of ar-
ticulations;-in short, as much as you will of system,
but very little true art; a puerile severity regarding
indifferent forms, negligence as to the substance of
things and the composition as a whole.
Too much has been concluded from the success of
certain sceptical or indifferent writers. Doubt is a
state of the soul, a human and veritable fact, of which
the expression is interesting under certain conditions,
and it has been given to some clever indifferentists
to intellectually identify themselves with the true.
As a general rule, you must start from truth to have
any permanent life. Literature, which has man itself
for object, can no more dispense with human truth
POETRY.
553
than can morality or politics; literature can no more
exist without a moral conviction, a faith, than can
the life of which it is the impress; outside of these
conditions it has neither development nor progress to
look for.
II. THE POET.
1. The Poet,
There are admirable poetical talents, each of which
has its own special potency, but there are very few
complete poets; the disorganisation of ideas and of
society does not allow of such. There cannot be
poetry without society, nor any true and living so-
ciety without a common faith.
A society without a moral symbolism is but a
fiction of society. War is as favourable to poetry as
peace; civil dissensions do not kill it, but it dies in a
vacuum, and for it the vacuum is incredulity. The
despairing or haughty scepticism of the times that
preceded our period, might indeed inspire lays that
the human soul did not disavow; but when scepticism
becomes resigned, when out of all its anguish it only
makes a pillow for its drowsy head, when society is
impaired in its noblest parts, faith and love, poetry
may in vain struggle in a few sons of genius, it
must needs surrender itself to the slumber of Epime-
nides. And when will Epimenides rise from his
dream? When the rays from on high shall strike
on his closed eyelids. The awaking of society will
be the waking of poetry.
554
LITERATURE.
True poets are those who have received from God,.
together with the gift of expression, the power of
penetrating further than others into the things of
the heart and the life.
It suffices the poetic soul to be superficially touched,
slightly warned, to lead it to penetrate the secrets of
a life that it does not live; it allows itself to be
traversed by sentiments that it does not dream of re-
taining; a living lyre, it only lives enough to echo,
and all that it has of life it pours out, and spends
in song: the inspiring tripod which the poet
ascends, at once unites him to, and separates him
from, society. He better understands, and seems to
feel better, than one who lives more; he can tell
you what passes within you more fully than you
yourself; he is more and less than a man; and
almost appears to us as a victim without devotion,
illuminating us by the flames in which his being
passes away.
Poets are candid. They tell us not under an ab-
stract, but an individual form, in which reality
breathes, what humanity thinks in the most secret
recesses of its mind.
The poet needs to admire; he is in a merely
human sense the high priest of the true, the beauti-
ful, the grand. On whatever side he spreads his
wings it is his mission to bear the universal homage
to these worthy objects, or to some ideas of them.
The poet who, after a laborious and mighty creation,
beholds the fictitious being his genius has produced,
.
POETRY.
555
resembles the woman in the Gospel who "remembers
no more her anguish, for joy that a man is born into
the world." The analyst devoted to dissection can-
not claim to produce a living and palpitating being
at the close of his cruel operation.
Lyres are placid in the hands of poets; but the
true lyre is the poet himself. It has even been
doubted whether he was anything else but a lyre;
yet in truth, harmonious though it be, this were
saying too little; but we are all lyres in different
degrees; and the one that the poet holds, if indeed
he does hold one, is we ourselves.
Every real existence is the bearer of an idea, the
form given to that idea. No idea is completely
realised in life. What does the poet? He seizes
upon the unfinished lines, prolongs them in every
direction until their last term, adds nothing besides,
invents nothing arbitrarily, but only succeeds in
disengaging the statue from the rude block in which
some portion of it was still involved.
If we neither are poets nor wish to be, can we
possibly comprehend the whole of life? nay, to say
the whole truth, can we be quite human? Is it not
essential that the good man (we are using here the
language of Pascal) should be a poet up to a certain
point, and in some manner or other?
Great poets are sublime children, by which we do
not mean that they are deficient in earnestness, since
after all the child is more earnest than the grown
man.
556
LITERATURE.
་
A system, even though it have been conceived and
constructed by one single man, belongs in a sense to
the whole world; for it is a work of logic, and logic
has no individuality; but the kind of system that is
called a poem belongs and can belong to one person
only. It is there that individuality must triumph ;
on it alone depends the unity of the work; the more
. strongly individual, the more decided the internal
unity which forms, in a literary point of view, its
truth. Everything which is collected from without,
which has not been attracted from within by a sort
of moral magnetism, and re-united, summed up, by
that living force; everything which, instead of grow-
ing like a plant, has been constructed like a building,
cannot, poetically speaking, have any truth; and, on the
other side (marvellous and convincing proof of human
personality), elements that the reason did not com-
bine, and whose union lacks objective truth, obtain
a kind of unity and verity in the soul of the poet,
which binds one to the other by unknown bonds.
Poetry will never live on pure ideas and generali-
ties special or lyrical, it matters not; the reader
will always seek for an individual in order to find
himself there. When once this truth is overlooked
there may perhaps be verses still; there will be no
more poetry.
POETRY.
557
2. The Poet and the Man.
Through want of perception or of reflection people
like to believe that there is a solidarity between the
poet and the man. It is an illusion which finds
favour, but it is an illusion. In the majority of men
poetry is at once better and less than a talent; it is
an internal life. An existence without poetry is a
light without a halo; none are destitute of this crown
without being naturally defective. It is better than
a talent, for it is a life; it is less than a talent, for it
does not realise itself, and lacks the faculty of crea-
tion. But among the chosen band called poets,
poetry is a talent. In some of them, indeed, it is
nothing else; they have no more poetic life of their
own than many a one who has never made a verse.
The poet sometimes encloses the man as the pulp
does the kernel, the pellicle the seed. In others
poetry does not affect the rest of existence; they pro-
duce it just as one takes an excursion to the country
on Sundays or in the evening. This way of being a
poet is not inferior to the other; perhaps, indeed, the
greatest belong to this category.
Impartiality is the attribute of high poetry; and
certainly nothing is grander than the independence
and serenity of judgment of a soul where, at the same
time, all human affections are keenly felt; this is the
double condition of poetry, which has for its vocation
to feel all and to judge of all. It has not been suffi-
558
LITERATURE.
ciently remarked how difficult and how beautiful this
combination is, but all the world may have ascer-
tained (for there is no lack of examples) that the poet
is in the man, and is not the whole of the man; that
the man does not always value on his own account
the problem that the poet has conquered; that the
man often remains at the mountain's foot, whence he
can only see a grey and stormy sky, and lets the
poet climb alone to heights, whence the eye looking
upwards everywhere meets an unsullied azure ;-in a
word, that in the same individual the poet is impar-
tial when the man is not. Decidedly the poet is
always the man's best; the poet is at moments, and
in a quite contemplative sphere, a sort of regenerated
man he is at least his image; and the true new
man, created a second time by the breath of the Spirit
of God, may in its turn be the image of the poet. For
he too, like the poet, is the real man raised to the level
of the pure idea; but of an idea which becomes in its
turn a reality, a fact; of an idea which engenders a
life and renews the whole man. Sublime, adorable
poetry, which at once surpasses and accomplishes all
poetry-true creation, according to the real meaning
of the word poetry, but creation of a whole man,
who is at the same time thought, love, action, and of
a man who thinks, loves, and acts after the manner
of God.
:
POETRY.
559
3. Method of the Poet.
The method of the poet is a rapid, instantaneous
synthesis, a true vision; and but for this his concep-
tion would not be compact, nor his characters life-
like.
It is not by means of complete enumerations, by
dissections more and more minute,-in a word, by way
of analysis, that poets attain to the individuality of
their object, the ultimate aim of all description. Their
method is broader and more synthetical; they do not
define, they point out, they put us on the way; they
are careful not to indulge too much in detail, knowing
that in proportion as we descend to elementary parts
we reach that which is less brightly coloured and
less living: and it is certainly noticeable that the most
intimate characteristics, the most delicate shades, do
not cost the great masters a profusion of details and
an extreme subdivision of the subject; but that a
rapid pencil-stroke, a passing word, awakes all the
impressions they intended to produce, but which they
would not have ventured to enlist one by one in
their cause, nor to excite by the efforts of analysis.
Poetry in general does not define objects; it shows
them, gives them a form. What we ask from a
poet is not the idea of an object, it is that object
itself, concrete, complex, living.
The secret lies not in saying much, but in exciting
much thought. The pleasure that poetry gives is
560
LITERATURE.
that of imagining more than is written; the task is
divided between the poet and his reader.
A certain disorder, or the sacrifice of some of the
indispensable conditions of human life, is not, as some
suppose, one of the necessary elements of poetry.
Every description is a limitation, and all limita-
tions are repugnant to enthusiasm; the ineffable alone
is great, because we feel that what is really great
ought to be ineffable; and wherever the finite does
not distinctly show us its bounds we think we see
the infinite. True poets know this, and in every de-
partment they express, they indicate, rather than de-
scribe; they open the angle, and do not prolong its
sides; they begin a curve that our imagination com-
pletes; they light up a corner of the picture, and lead
us to dream the scene they have not chosen to unroll
before us.
We must not suppose that the poet always goes
from the idea to the fact, or, in other words, seeks in
nature or in life for a fact, an illustration, for his idea;
very often (and this is perhaps best) the fact unex-
pectedly met with, and seized by the genius of the
fabulist, suggests the idea. Thus nature becomes for
him what it is in fact, and perhaps intentionally, an
immense apologue, a parable which breaks up into
a thousand parables. No one knows, unless hẹ
has experienced it, the delight which is felt by
those minds born for fiction, for whom everything
in nature becomes personal and human, for whom
the most commonplace incidents transform them-
POETRY.
561
selves into little epics. The fabulising genius is as
natural and as imperious as any other.
Whatever may be thought of a poet's right and
obligation to be always himself, he is not less obliged
to accommodate himself to others, than others to him.
Their encounter takes place only in a debatable land,
which is neither his nor theirs exclusively. It is even
an essential part of poetic talent to place itself more
or less in the standpoint of the world at large; with
a superiority peculiarly its own, to understand and
speak the universal language, not to wait for other
minds in a proud solitude where only its peers will
ever come to seek it out; in a word, to be at the
same time by the exquisiteness of the form the man
of the minority, and by the truth the man of the
whole world.
No doubt, in a sense, poetry can say all, and in-
deed it alone does this, it alone achieves the expres-
sion of the human soul; but it does not tell us in the
same way as prose; it tells less than it expresses its
aim is not so much to transmit us a fac-simile of ob-
jects as to extract their idea, to render their impres-
sion, to translate them to the soul. It is at this
height that it remains poetry; lower down it turns to
prose; and if then you insist upon its preserving the
external forms that are peculiar to poetry, there is a
painful contrast between the essence of the object
and its form; it is but disguised and ill-disguised
prose; the vibration of the rhyme and the pomp of
the images only enhance the incurably prosaic
0 0
562
LITERATURE.
nature of the substance. It is here that we see
revealed one of those intimate connections, those
secret affinities of art, which reflect life, together
with the morality that ought to rule it. Both have
received the same lesson, or rather morality has
counselled art, and art has served morality. And
why, indeed, should not these two objects, too widely
separated in their developments, have originally
had a common starting-point? Why should we not
admit that before breaking off they flowed in the
same channel, followed the same course, and that
they have been, under different aspects, and with
different means at their disposal, the pursuit of the
best in everything? In our opinion, it is morality
which, in the first instance, has interdicted to art
the reproduction in detail, and in the most abso-
lutely concrete form, of whatever is hideous in the
manifestations of moral evil; it is morality which
would have condemned at all times, and condemns
to-day, this enormous accumulation of nameless
horrors.
Would you, in a
Then beware, not of
Would you keep the treasure of natural affection
pure and entire, the energy of your conscience in-
tact? Would you avoid changing the gold of truth
for some arbitrary equivalent?
word, live a real, a manly life?
poetry, but of the trade of poet.
but too often, this either empties out a man, or
requires one emptied out already. Too strong, too
Not always, indeed,
intimate a moral life may often prove an obstacle to
.
POETRY.
563
poetic creation. Vividly to comprehend all human
sentiments without feeling them deeply, this is the
condition under which several of the greatest poets
have been formed, greatest men we might have
called them, had they been men. They were careful
not to be so: a sublime indifference seemed to make
part of their genius; and, cursed as was the pro-
phetess of Troy, though in another manner, they
prophesied for the whole world, with the exception of
themselves. One might say that they had been sent
on earth to say and not to be, to see and not to live.
When, truly inspired, they flung to the multitude
some striking idea like this,-"I am a man; nothing
human can be indifferent to me,"-no more of this
grand thought remained within their own nature
than if, by expressing it for others, they had deprived
themselves of its possession.
Prophetic inspiration alone can dispense with study.
Rhetoric is not needed when there are miracles for
arguments; but when one has nothing wherewith
to influence human nature but that nature itself,
we needs must reckon with, we must observe, study,
follow it: this is the principle of all art, the secret
of all eloquence, and the religious orator can as
little as any other dispense with the knowledge of
this principle and the possession of this secret.
The richest language has not got expression for all
our shades of feeling; there are things that poetry
cannot say, at least directly; and the art of the poet
very often lies in saying one thing that implies
564
LITERATURE.
another that he cannot say. Great poets do not
pique themselves upon describing all impressions, but
they aim at exciting them, and it is their triumph to
develop in the soul of their reader a whole world
of feelings which are not even named in their works.
In poetry those who find are not they who seek.
Poetry is an activity of the intellect. When it does
nothing but move the feelings, it mistakes the means
for the end. Sensation ought to be considered the
medium of the idea. Poetry does not, it is true,
neglect the sensible impression, but it traverses it to
reach higher. It must needs enlarge the horizon of
thought, it must needs procure for us the noble
pleasure of contemplation.
III.—-POETRY, ART, AND SCIENCE.
Philosophy, Eloquence, Music, History.
Without philosophy there can be no true poetry:
without it pretty verses may, indeed, be made; but in
order to be really a poet it is essential to be also, up
to a certain point, a philosopher.
Every great poet is a philosopher by instinct and
inspiration, every great philosopher is a poet. There
can be no high philosophy without imagination.
Observation and induction, which have been called
the two crutches of science, can make no advance
if they be not impelled by the vital power of imagi-
nation.
More ideas will spring from one single fable than
POETRY.
565
fables from twenty ideas, and the lesson most vividly
taught by a narrative was rarely distinctly present
to the mind of the narrator. Great works, im-
mortal inventions, are not conceivable à priori;
in the idea which gave them birth there was
something at once more immediate and more com-
plex. The theme of every poetical composition is
an intimate combination of elements, of which the
junction, although accidental in appearance, was a
kind of vision for the mind that produced it. Were
it otherwise, one does not see in what the poetical
genius would essentially differ from the philoso-
phical. And here we may remark, in passing, that
this is why what is called the idea of a work of
imagination is difficult to disengage from that work,
The fact is it never appears purely abstract and
alone. The immediate object of poetry is always a
compound; and a unity of thought, at once more
rigorous and more visible, could only be had at the
cost of poetry itself. To say this is in no way to
depreciate the poet or to deny his art; it is rather
to concede to poetry the power of creating living
beings; for life is a complex fact, the simultaneous
concurrence of several elements that analysis will
be able to distinguish by-and-bye.
In these latter times have been born two enemies
to Poetry, against which she should guard all the
more that they give themselves out as allies,-we
mean idealism, which perverts and distorts, and
pantheism, which corrupts her.
566
LITERATURE.
Poetry is to thought what the body is to the soul.
The method of the poet is not that of the philo-
sopher, but no one is either poet or philosopher
except by thought.
There is no high poetry but that which feeds.
thought; poetry is philosophy in a concrete con-
dition.
All arts, and philosophy as well, demand a noble
impartiality of thought; all aspire towards the pure
ideal: and eloquence itself is only an apparent ex-
ception; the orator only becomes great in rising to-
wards vaster principles, more universal interests, than
his momentary pursuit; it is from the heights of
the ideal that he must dominate the real. But this
doctrine does not go so far as to declare that, in order
to be pure, art must absorb itself in the thought
of art. How should it possibly gain anything by
denying its origin? Does it not exist as means
before it is put forth as an end? Has an idea been
first looked out for the sake of expression, or expres-
sion for that of idea? What, then, in the eyes of
human consciousness, is art separated from its object,
or making that object merely its opportunity? So
much is certain that, placed upon this basis, art
withers as art, and that the exclusive pursuit of form
ruins that very form. Literary teaching, obliged to
treat of the form apart, to concentrate attention for
years upon words and phrases; the more noisy
triumph of literary success; the more palpable
charm of works in which devotion to form neces-
POETRY
567
sarily occupies much space; all these, applied, as it
would seem, to the advantage of art, have often, for
their only effect, to reduce and impoverish it. Strong
thought, substantial knowledge, are the first condi-
tions of art, and, as has been very well said, it is
only solid materials that are susceptible of a fine
polish. Consequently we need not wonder that
science, aided by literary culture, though retaining
its own supremacy over it, should have occasionally
given us excellent writers. Scientific precision can
hardly fail to communicate itself to language, since
the true "savant" is the one who bestows the most
appropriate names, and science itself is a better
nomenclature of natural facts.
Order is seldom
wanting in the style of a man who derives his
strength and owes all his discoveries to order.
Moreover, there reigns in that physical world,—in a
special sense, a world of order and of God, with
which, fortunately, the observer need not mix him-
self up in any way,-there reigns a majestic peace
easily tinging the style, which, in other departments,
is the man himself-in this, the world itself. The
dignity of life, much more common among men of
science than of literature, because their passions are
not the material of their productions, quite naturally
becomes dignity of language; and the sublimity in-
herent in the great natural features of nature, and
great scientific views, when reflected in a feeling soul,
gives birth to an earnest eloquence.
A man that inspiration visits unexpectedly, re-
568
LITERATURE.
ceives thence a kind of surprise which is sometimes
more favourable to art than a premeditated intention,
and, above all, an exclusive intention of producing
beautiful forms. Thus several men of scientific
genius have left models of eloquence without in-
tending it; form came to them without their seek-
ing it; and beauty, attracted by truth, followed after
it into the writings of those who only aimed at in-
structing. We may find ingenious developments of
this idea in an article of M. Topffer on the travels of
De Saussure (Bib. Univ. de Genève, Sept., 1834).
May we not hence infer that the poet would have
much to gain in the matter of his art from earnest
relations with science? and might not the words of
Fontenelle be aptly quoted here and generalised ?—
((
Although eloquence and poetry be the principal
talents that the French Academy requires, it also
admits erudition (add, science), which is not bar-
barous; perhaps nothing is wanting but to display
somewhat more the use made, and even the want felt,
of it."
There are but few instances of real abilities of
which erudition has robbed poetry. When poetry
is a vocation, it is apparently very difficult not to
remain faithful to it.
Poetry no more dispenses with force than eloquence
excludes beauty. We must seek elsewhere the dif-
ference between these branches. It lies in this, that
eloquence has facts for object, and poetry ideas; I
mean eloquence as such and poetry as such, for these
POETRY.
569
two arts sometimes border on, and more or less blend
with, each other.
Eloquence aims at bringing about changes in the
actual world; poetry is satisfied with producing
them in the representations of the mind alone.
Eloquence does not ignore ideas; poetry makes no
abstraction of facts: but the former proceeds from
ideas to facts, the latter from facts to ideas; that is
to say, eloquence transforms ideas into facts, and
poetry facts into ideas. Eloquence must needs find
its fulcrum in ideas (ideas of justice, honesty, pro-
priety), but like a lever, it avails itself of this fulcrum
to move facts; and in the same manner poetry must
needs take facts for its fulcrum (take reality, experi-
ence); but this is in order to raise itself with them
towards ideas, or towards an ideal. Let us, however,
observe that the word idea does not mean the same
thing in both cases: in the former it represents laws,
laws of nature, of reason, and of conscience; in the
second, ideas are but purer or more complete types
of all existences whatever than can be presented,
either by any one real and concrete existence taken
separately, or by all such together. Eloquence, then,
leads us to action, poetry to contemplation.
quence is a conflict, poetry a spectacle or a vision.
Eloquence speaks of what is, poetry creates what
ought to be. Eloquence flows in the same channel
as life; poetry makes for itself a channel that runs
parallel with life. Eloquence mingles, as it were,
with life's stream, swelling and hurrying it onward ;
Elo-
570
LITERATURE.
poetry suspends its course: I am not speaking here,
be it understood, of inner or contemplative life, but
of external and practical. The two streams are not
always separated; they may, from time to time, re-
unite and flow in one: poetry may become eloquent,
eloquence may become poetical; but for all that,
eloquence and poetry are none the less distinct in
their principle, their order, and consequently in the
means they employ: and this is so true, that
eloquence, which is an action, if it ceases acting in
order to contemplate, is no longer eloquent; and
poetry, if it forgets contemplation for action, ceases
to be poetry.
The rule for each is to avoid falsifying itself, to
remain faithful to its principle, constantly to main-
tain it, and to make reciprocal use of each other
without allowing mutual absorption.
What used to be most lauded as poetry in our
authors was usually eloquence. The cleverest critics
have been liable to make this mistake; and-singular,
but easily proved fact-it is perhaps among our prose
writers that we must seek out some of our greatest
poets.
Poetry, which raises itself above music by the
admission of the logical element, sometimes reverts
towards music to borrow thence not merely melody
of sound, cadence, rhythm, but even something of
the nature of musical language, which, if it does not
say all that speech can, says in return much that
speech can never express. There is a musical cha-
... POETRY.
571
racter in certain verses, perhaps in certain lines of
prose, where the ties of logic, being somewhat relaxed,
allow thought to float more freely, to occupy in the
soul a larger amount of space, and to flow into
crevices into which a more precise form would have
forbidden its entrance. It is music in words; and
the least harmonious words may contain it, for it is
the spirit and not the form of music that has thus
entered into poetry.
Art that creates, history that judges, do not come
under the same conditions. Poetry is accountable for
its inventions only to human nature. She has not
got to detach herself from affection, whence she is
born, on which she lives; she does not ask the poet,
in order to follow her, to leave behind him a portion
of his being; she carries the whole man along with
her. What she gives to her fictions is the imprint of
the whole real, concrete man; hers are fictions which,
rightly speaking, are none,-which are truer than his-
tory, for history is always the judgment of an indivi-
dual mind applied to facts that overflow its limits;
and in poetry the poet has, as it were, only to mea-
sure himself with himself. There is no re-writing the
"Iliad," but there is no historical masterpiece which
does not require to be re-written; each of these is only
perfect, only irrevocable, as a poem, so that the same
character makes it at once a transitory work and an
immortal.
572
LITERATURE.
CHAPTER III.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
I.-DRAMATIC POETRY.
1. Drama and Poetry-French Tragedy-Corneille
and Racine.
THE drama is only a technical and special name for
life. Every life is a drama, for every life is an ex-
change of thoughts and feelings between two persons,
or between two beings in the same person. Where
this interchange is wanting there is no life and no
poetry. Amant alterna camœnæ.
The drama, whatever the subject, is a conflict
of rival forces, each furnished with more or less
important auxiliaries: two armies which muster
simultaneously take the field; there is an encounter,
an engagement; varying successes; an attack, as
definite as vehement; prolonged suspense; and for
dénouement, the defeat of one party, the victory
of the other. The drama is an action which, born
under our eyes from very distinct elements, goes
on complicating itself, widening its plot, deepening
its difficulties, embracing more interests, associating
us by at least a speculative sympathy with all its
vicissitudes, and hurrying us on breathlessly towards
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
573
a fatal term, where we repose at length, but generally
in tears or in a painful train of thought. The drama
is composed of many dramas, each of which has for
its stage the heart of one of the characters divided
within himself, and asking back its lost unity either
from virtue or from crime.
All that is grand, all that is beautiful, is poetical,
but is not necessarily dramatic; we must not con-
found the genus and the species. It is true that the
dramatic element completes the narrative, as narra-
tions complete lyrical poetry, which latter is poetry
in its, not perhaps primitive, but elementary state;
it is poetry in its purest, most abstract notion; it is,
one might say, the essence of poetry. But just as the
soul which inhales and exhales it involuntarily seeks
to unite itself with all forms of life, so lyrical poetry
aspires to narrative, and narration to the drama.
The drama in poetry, or, if you will, the dramatic
portion of every poetical work, triumphantly asserts
the unison of two worlds, of the external world with
the world of the soul, and displays the most complete
harmony of poetry with reality. It is life entering
no more at the side door, but by the front entrance
into the sanctuary, where all things come to utter
their last word, and to reveal their most intimate
secret. After the drama there is nothing left.
The ancients did not know love. What we call by
that name has, no doubt, its origin in nature, but
develops by civilisation. Accordingly, this sentiment.
does not exist in ancient tragedy, which turns entirely
574
LITERATURE.
upon the affections of parent, husband, or child;
and in this respect Voltaire rediscovered the forsaken
vein.
The practical and little contemplative genius of
the French has prevented them from making the
speculative element prominent in their tragedies.
For I shall not certainly give the name of contem-
plation, or of satisfaction of the speculative element,
to that mania for preaching which got possession of
Voltaire and his disciples during the last century.
The Frenchman, a practical man, a man of appli-
ances and results, even in the sphere of the fine
arts, has declared that tragedy is an instrument, a
machine, intended to produce movements of terror
or pity in the soul, a definition which, if it goes no
further, seems to me unworthy of tragedy. But the
French temperament, far more oratorical than poetical,
tends to action, and hardly takes cognisance of con-
templation. To tickle and to irritate the feelings is,
generally speaking, the aim of French tragedians, and
this gives to their works a character of immobility
which other nations have been better able to avoid.
There is in tragedy a speculative element which they
have known how to seize and appreciate, and which
connects itself with the highest faculties of the soul.
Tragedy should not proclaim a thesis, but realise
an idea; and this is one of its principal interests, not
only for philosophers by profession, but for every
earnest-minded man.
French tragedians are the most eloquent, have the
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 575
most taste, but are the least poetical. Pure poetry
abounds more on the stage of other nations. The
characters of the English drama do not speak as they
ought; they spoil their part by an insupportable
medley of cynicism, of grotesqueness, and absurdity;
but the gift of the ideal and fertility of creation are
the portion of the English.
The strength of passion was the ideal of Racine;
the strength of will that of Corneille. The former
was more true and less sublime, more tender and
less pathetic. Love mingled with heriosm was the
favourite subject, the very soul of his tragedies.
A man of exquisite sensibility, St. Paul, has made
use of an expression as profound as simple,-" Al-
though the more I love, the less I am loved!" Can
it be true, then, that by loving more, we expose, we
condemn ourselves to be less beloved; and that the
trusting surrender of affection is, as it were, a signal
for ingratitude? Can it be that this is one of the
mysteries of the human heart and life? If so, what
could be more tragical? Well, then, this forms one
part of the tragedy of " Corinne." Striking revelation!
Love is a sacrifice, and not a bargain; as such love
must be entertained; to love is to mount the altar, is
to renounce beforehand all reciprocity; we only love
when we do thus renounce it, and taste the ineffable
happiness of love in all its purity only when we make
love love's sole reward; and in order that these sub-
lime and mournful truths should take life within us,
it is ordained that, according to the expression and
576
LITERATURE.
the experience of the apostle of the Gentiles, "the
more we love, the less are we loved."
2. Theatrical Taste — Its Cause and Effects-
A Theatrical People.
The poetical element, in our opinion, completes the
man. Poetry is not the decoration of things; it is
their intimate idea, or at all events it is the pur-
suit of that idea which perhaps was present and
palpable to man's eyes before the fall had obscured
the spiritual sight. The poetical element, taken in
itself and apart from its application, corresponds
with the best portions of our being, and cannot there-
fore deteriorate in proportion as the social conditions
improve; for one truth cannot contradict another.
It
But the theatrical taste is of another nature.
implies a want of seeing life as it is not; a want of
deceiving ourselves about the inevitable proportions
of objects. It is the empire of the sensuous part of
our nature over the spiritual. This sensuous part
has indeed its rights, but they are those of a vassal,
not of a master. It ought to be at the service of the
spiritual part, to work in the direction and interests
of the former, and not in its own.
A theatrical people is one which carries about with
it everywhere the inclinations it carries to and brings
back from the theatre; a thirst for sensuous impres-
sions, dramatic effects, scenes, representations. The
reality of things may, indeed, inspire such a people with
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 577
1
aversion or esteem, according to its character; but
these sentiments will only be intense in proportion as
the popular imagination lends them intensity, and
imagination is directed by the senses. Before long
this people even accustoms itself to pay little heed to
what does not come to it recommended by this essen-
tial accompaniment. Whatever is obscure, silent,
secret, does not touch, does not even reach it. It
only hears through a speaking-trumpet, only sees
through a microscope, only judges an object by the
pomp of its decoration. It is not capable of feeling
any enthusiasm for pure reason, nor of resisting
sonorous declamations, nor defending itself against
the prestige of words. Virtue which knows not how
to attitudinise, which gets up no scene, is not
dramatic, does not act, leaves it tolerably cold; in
morals the fine strikes it more than the good; it is
no use to be just in its presence unless one is sub-
lime, to be true if one be not striking, to be firm if
not imposing; we have to do with a dulled sense of
hearing, which is no longer open to moderate sounds,
and only takes in screams.
Now, to succeed in the midst of a people like this,
it is clear that we must blow the trumpet, must draw
up the curtain and present them with a spectacle.
Men who want to get on turn actors. In the pulpit,
in books, newspapers, society, they are more anxious
about a part to play than a line of conduct to main-
tain. The theatre is no longer confined to certain
buildings; it is everywhere; it encroaches upon
P P
578
LITERATURE.
public life. When a country is a theatre its citizens
are actors.
The history of such a people is a long drama, in
which stage effects are numbered complacently under
the name of days. The patient continuity of a pros-
perous social development attracts the glances of a
few; those of the majority let themselves be fasci-
nated by striking and sudden changes. A few wish
for what is right, more for what is useful, all for what
is glorious. The most desirable successes are little
valued unless they happen to be showy into the
bargain; and pampered and fastidious Imagination
covers with erasures all that she has been unable to
embellish and dramatise.
It is difficult to say to what point this love of the
theatrical may influence the course of public events.
To do this we ought to be able to measure the force
added, by skill in stage effect, not only to truth, but
to error; to determine all that, in critical moments, the
emotion caused by a striking and unexpected spectacle
may bring about.
The history of certain peoples,
which does not permit us to entertain any doubt as
to the reality of these electrical shocks, does not fur-
nish us with sure data for appraising their bearing.
Now this is not my idea of a poetical national
existence; this last is a more contemplative thing;
it finds poetry everywhere, for, in fact, it exists.
everywhere. Especially is it found in the joys,
the cares, and even the sadnesses of the domestic
hearth; in that long, quiet, monotonous drama of
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
579
1
family life; in the regular return of what a modest
hope ventures to look for; in the graceful, gloomy,
or touching episodes that Providence introduces into
the history of each of our lives; in the reverential
memory of the real and practical virtues of our an-
cestors; in esteem rather than glory; in an intimate
affection for the land of our birth, for all its children,
all its interests; in the inner life of the heart, that
vast and deep theatre where move in solemn twilight
so many thoughts and feelings, images and reali-
ties, hopes and memories; lastly, in religion, without
which all poetry is mendacious and mutilated, and
which alone, by giving an imperishable value to
things unseen, proportionately takes it away from
all that appears and dazzles. A poetical people little
needs theatrical representations, or at least for such
a people the most simple are the best; it is contented
with those which by a few touches consecrate and
symbolise its own earnest, active, and tranquil
existence.
3. Influence of Dramatic Representations.
I do not venture absolutely to condemn the
theatre and those who frequent it; I merely per-
mit myself the remark that a true Christian will
hardly have much taste for or want of the theatre;
that there is no harmony whatever between Chris-
tianity and the theatre in its actual condition; and
hence I infer (always from a religious point of view)
that those who have a decided love for the theatre
580
LITERATURE.
are under an illusion which is not without its
danger. If the theatre, by the tasks it imposes on
them, devotes those who serve it to immorality, and
sometimes to infamy, how can it be lawful for us to
encourage such an amusement?
Looked at closely, every case of distress is prosaic ;
true charity alone can idealise it. It is therefore
much to be feared, as J. J. Rousseau has observed,
that some disappointment should be felt in meeting
in real life with unhappiness and unhappy people of
a perfectly different stamp from those on the stage
who inspired us with such lively interest, and this
disappointment may give our sympathies a consider-
able chill.
What we have to declare in the first place is, that
a heart frequently touched and stirred by theatrical
distresses is not made the more tender by them; and
secondly, that there is a false pity, a false bene-
volence, too often excited by dramatic authors, which
does the soul far more harm than good.
It is a bad sign to be obliged to seek our pleasures
out of a natural sphere; a well-employed life ought
itself to be the source of all true pleasures. As
much as possible our pleasures should be connected
with our condition and linked with our duties, as is
the case with domestic delights, the best of all earthly
enjoyments.
Every dramatic author who understands his busi-
ness ought to be more effective when acted than
when read.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
581
Reading, and not representation, is, however, the
true touchstone of the merit of a dramatic work. I
admit the prestige of the stage as a fact; but what is
good only when acted is not good; what does not
appear true when read is not true.
Publicity is a dazzling but false light, which
is unfavourable to judgment and to candour of
character.
Theatrical emotions need to be corrected by con-
templation. The thrilled and excited spirit recovers
and strengthens itself by this noble exercise. From
this height it can see more calmly and better the
accidents whose first aspect perturbed it. Terror
and pity remain, but they change their character,
and sometimes their object. The soul feels attracted
towards higher interests. Britannicus and Junia
interest the feelings, but the nobler powers of the
mind irresistibly tend elsewhere. It is not even
enough that the destiny of Rome hangs on the
decision Nero is about to take; the whole of
humanity is in that man. And if, on one hand,
the mere aspect of this monstrous individuality
appal us, what there is in Nero of man in general
is far more appalling. As we watch the growing of
the tiger's claws, we shudder at so easily under-
standing how they grow; we shudder at eventually
finding that there is nothing in the monster but
what is human, and the soul becomes filled with
an earnest sadness, of which at last it is itself the
object.
582
LITERATURE.
We must say it, for the credit of our nature, all
fallen though it be, the interest that we take in any
character has always for its motive the qualities we
think we perceive in it; and for measure, the measure
of those qualities; and hence it is that the interest
of the character connects itself with the interest of
some principle.
At the performance of a dramatic work, or in
reading history or fiction, nothing more vividly ex-
cites our sympathy than the character of a man
singly resisting by his individual conviction the error
of all, or by his individual conscience the perversity
of all. This sympathy is no doubt a triumph of the
moral sentiment, and it is permissible to conclude
that, up to a certain point, we are able to recognise
and honour true morality seen from a distance.
But at the same time, as these facts that touch us so
keenly and so legitimately have been very often
repeated, as each epoch reproduces them, we must
also conclude that the love and hatred of the public
have been very often misled. Let us take a step
further. Is this position of outlaw that the noble
character we are admiring was placed in by his co-
temporaries, one that he would lose amongst our-
selves? As things now stand, his perfection does
not threaten us, nor compromise any of our interests.
What, indeed, should prevent us from admiring? our
admiration costs us nothing. But transplant the
same man into our midst, would he meet with less
opposition on our part than on that of the men of
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY 583
his own time? The question is not whether we are
in a condition up to a certain point to admire and
appreciate defunct virtue, but rather whether we are
good judges of living virtue, and consequently if
our love and our hate afford a correct estimate of the
quality of persons and things.
The dignity of women is inseparable from the
reserve which it becomes them to keep up. And
which of us would have for our sister or our
daughter the heroine of a comedy? Comedy, then,
is pernicious, in that it presents us with a series of
pictures adapted to enervate the heart, and dispose
it to the most seductive of passions. It deceives
youth, feminine youth more especially, in bringing
forward as the main interest of life what only
occupies a brief part of it. This falsehood influences
the character too often attributed on the stage to
the old age of both sexes; it tends to render age
contemptible and paternity odious. Let us only
add that these vices are not peculiar to the theatre,
they equally belong to literature, more particularly
to the novel. The novel is the stage transplanted to
the home.
II.-EPIC POETRY-LYRICS.
Lyrical and Dramatic Poetry compared-Introspective
Poetry-Comic Poetry-Satire.
An epic poem, in point of fact, is nothing more
than the explanation of earth by heaven; it is of
all styles the most essentially religious. History is
581
LITERATURE.
+
a chain that drags along the ground so long as it be
not connected with its first link, the ring riveted in
the Rock of Ages. It is only complete and tho-
roughly philosophical on these conditions. People
may object to the manner in which Bossuet refers all
historical events to the Divine will, but all the
criticisms of Bossuet's book cannot affect the real
question. Outside of this, no doubt, history, looked
at in itself, may still retain a certain meaning and
certain philosophy; but the epopee, which is only
history idealised, loses all its value without the
intervention of the Deity. This is not a mere con-
ventionality, it is the result of profound reason. A
man is not competent to write an epic merely be-
cause he wishes it. In default of a religious heart,
there must at least be a religious imagination. And
besides this, it is requisite that an epic be animated
by some great humanitarian fact. But in such a
work as this—and it is here that we trace the limits
of individuality-a man requires to be sustained by
a whole people, by a whole world.
Their com-
Epics are veritable human Bibles.
memoration of a great event serves to consecrate a
great truth. The human race seeks the conclusion
of each of its historical vicissitudes in an idea.
Self-knowledge is the necessary fulcrum of all
regeneration, yet perhaps this great work is ham-
pered by a too minute self-observation. This latter
turns into study, into curiosity, those great impres-
sions that incline the soul on the side of the light.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 585
It furtively transforms the anguish of repentance into
the joy of self-love, and the reproaches of the con-
science into the discoveries of the mind. This is not
a re-entering into self, but rather coming out of it.
As amused spectators of a serious evil, we cease to
be identified with it, we estrange, distract ourselves
from it, while apparently occupying ourselves with
it. This study may, indeed, by a counter-stroke be
profitable to other men; it generally does harm to
the one who gives himself up to it. It is better in
the first instance to see only the great features of our
nature, to know only the great words of the moral
language, to follow with respect to ourselves the
Gospel method, which, taking hold at one grasp of all
small sins, turns them at once into one great sin, and
thus places us not in presence of ourselves, but of
God. Later, no doubt—I mean after the restoration
of the soul-the sheaf gets unbound, and lets us see
one by one all the stalks of tares; the Christian
eye, which discerns great things from very far off,
observes very exactly the least things at hand. The
primary idea of Christianity is a sure and delicate
instrument, which penetrates, like the Gospel word, to
the ultimate division of soul and spirit, of the joints
and marrow; and it is to Christianity even that we
owe that subtle psychology which unfortunately
does not always return to its source.
Certain pro-
ductions that Christianity disavows-René, Werther,
Obermann-perhaps could never have seen the day but
for Christianity. Where the light of the Gospel does
586
LITERATURE.
not penetrate, it at least throws strange reflections; if
it does not illuminate, it at least disabuses. Where
it does not carry joy, it carries disenchantment: a
subtle melancholy, a hollow and craving mysticism,
is the reaction of Christianity in all deep and deli-
cate souls that have not become Christian. In enter-
ing the world Christianity has caused a great void in
all spirits that it has not filled; it has rendered the
fantastic creations with which they had been wont to
people themselves thenceforth impossible; there is
no longer any place in the world except for Chris-
tianity or nothingness. Unwillingly every one feels
or experiences this, and hence those torments for-
merly unknown; hence those enervating reveries of
dispossessed souls; hence that poetry which feeds upon
itself, and which, in default of a full immensity, takes
possession of a desert immensity, an immensity of
grief; other infinite for a being of whom the infinite
is the true portion, the eternal want, the incor-
ruptible symbol !
;
Lyricism is less a style than a poetical element
at least, it is an element before it is a style. It is
poetry itself in the greatest possible purity of its
being. It is that mysterious emotion which attaches
itself to everything, and also springs from everything,
because its source is rather in us than in things.
Separate from every kind of poetry that which
characterises and gives it its name, from the drama
the dramatic, from the epic personages and facts,
from the didactic poem its teaching, what will remain?
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 587
Nothing, do you suppose? Nothing but the soul of
the poet, a soul full of poetry, which will take itself
for subject if you deprive it of all else. But, how-
ever excellent it be for itself, it serves only as a make-
shift, and always, like a swallow above an abyss, you
see it flying from side to side seeking some place to
settle. Hence all the different styles that poetry
numbers; hence the lyrical style itself, which we must
not confound with lyricism, of which it is one appli-
cation. For, after all, lyrical poetry too has subjects,
sometimes epical, sometimes dramatic, sometimes
philosophical; but what nevertheless prevents it from
being either a drama, an epic, or a philosophical
poem, is that it only borrows from all these different
themes just what it requires to justify the emotions
it expresses. The proper subject of lyrical poetry
is the impression that the poet receives from those
various objects. It is, so to speak, their echo in
the poet's soul, the sound that they render in his
ears, the colour they assume in the depths of his
being.
If we reflect upon it a little, we shall find that the
two styles, the two elements, lyrical and dramatic,
although separate and distinct, are not so far removed,
not so opposed to each other, as a first glance
might lead us to suppose. Lyrical poetry is sub-
jective, I admit; it is the me, and the me only, striking
upon the lyre; the poet, concentrated in himself,
appears as if he never issued thence. But, be it
observed, it is not his deepest, his most personal
588
LITERATURE.
self which is the subject of his songs; it is, if we
may so say, an ideal self, which is at once within and
without the poet, a purified personality, at a distance
from passion, and safe from its immediate shocks.
Never was passion properly so called lyrical. Poetry
lives on emotions apart from perturbation. It feeds
on the purest substance of the sentiments of the
soul. It quenches its thirst with a nectar that has
no dregs. The lyrical poet is a me listening to the
personal me, and, like a pure echo, ennobling the
sounds it repeats. What lyrical songs express is less
the immediate and concrete reality of our impressions
than their ideal. There is consequently in lyrical
poetry a germ, an outline of the drama. There is a
transformation, a translation; the poet bends his voice
to the man; the me interprets the me in the same
way that the dramatic poet, after having experienced
them, transmits to us the emotions and thoughts of
some personage who is positively a stranger to him.
That which is pre-eminently internal is that last
depth of the soul into which scarcely any one de-
scends; where we live without feeling that we live
there; where, unknown to us, our leading thoughts
are engendered, and which constitute whatever worth
we may have. Obscure stage, even for ourselves, of
the greatest events of our life! Primary source of
those facts that we believe to be primary, and which
are but secondary! Profound life, which is hardly
reached by that pseudo-intimate poetry which is
within the compass of the most superficial, and suits the
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 589
taste of the most frivolous, but into which the Divine
ray strikes directly when the fiat of the second crea-
tion is pronounced over us, and whence, at all stages
of our life, the true and pure light breaks forth!
This abyss, lined with pearls of great price, repulses
like a too dense flood the too light diver; and in our
days only a few spirits have touched at times those
gloomy depths, and have brought back a few pearls
thence. Others have returned empty-handed, the
hair of their flesh standing up, having beheld down
there some vague shape of God, the sight of which
overset all their notions, and menaced their security.
The fact is, that there lies the real point of contact
between the finite and the infinite, between the soul
and God; there is found all that is earnest in life,
the ultimate essence of human personality, the veri-
table self; there consequently, and not in I know not
what slender and subtle psychology, exist those inti-
mate thoughts, intimate poetry, the name of which
is so lavishly scattered in our day. The primitive
and the secret have points of meeting without being
essentially the same thing; in an era like ours, the
really intimate hardly opens out except to the gaze
of a troubled conscience; perhaps it is only our
moral anguish that paves the way to those depths;
perhaps there is nothing really intimate except the
thoughts of repentance; and God only renders Him-
self in the first instance perceptible to the medita-
tions of remorse.
To substitute for the hatred that each deserves, the
590
LITERATURE.
ridicule that folly excites, is to tend to make sin
appear a mere eccentricity of the mind; it is to per-
vert or turn aside the impression that the conscience
ought to receive from it; it is to oblige the vicious
man, rather to change his mask than his character.
Ridicule is not an unlawful weapon in all cases, but
it is a dangerous one; it may sometimes be well to
make vice blush, but ridicule soon becomes a vice
itself in its turn; the sinner may sometimes be led
by shame to remorse, but how many souls there are
which stop short at the shame, and whose self-love
alone suffers and weeps! The ridicule of comedy, the
best in every sense, because it is but the simple
representation of a true character in probable cir-
cumstances, and is less scornful than any other, is
for all that not without its dangers. This game is
a hazardous one, not only to play, but to watch. It
seems to us at least that it is more applicable to the
absurdities of the mind than the vices of the heart,
-a real distinction, though there is hardly any ab-
surdity without sin, nor any sin that does not lead to
an absurdity.
Comedy, which is nothing more than an ingenuous
revelation of a character by itself, when it is good,
never wearies.
Plenty of people are quite able to judge evil to be
evil, and yet they only laugh at it. This is how all
atheists begin, and the peculiarity, alas! of the most
excellent comic writers.
The pleasure that even first-rate satire gives is
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
591
in general of an inferior nature to that afforded by
comedy. In this last there is something more than
amusement, something higher even than that legiti-
mate but dangerous satisfaction that the sight of a
necessary and merited punishment bestows. The plea-
sure of comedy, or, to restrict myself to the exact
truth, the pleasure that the comic properly so called
gives, is a poetical and intellectual pleasure, nay, I
will even say a philosophical one.
Raillery is nothing but the wrong side of earnest-
ness.
III.-RELIGIOUS POETRY.
1. Poetry-Religion-Christianity.
I do not know whether there exists a Christian
art, but what is called by this name is, generally
speaking, very little Christian. There is very little
Christianity in the majority of paintings of pious
subjects; the most excellent in this respect are, at
all events, not the most celebrated. Christian art
triumphs rather in the expression than in the form,
because it is appreciated rather by the soul than the
eyes; and a painting is only Christian when its
aspect impresses us like a fresh reading of the
Gospel.
Religion has distinctly separated her cause from
that of arts, in order not to give a worldly charm to her
lessons. She has not, indeed, affected the direct con-
trary; Truth affects nothing; but she has not deigned
.
ין
592
LITERATURE.
to flatter a too common weakness; to ensnare minds
by false pretences, and to distract from the true by
the beautiful. She has chosen means, forms, a lan-
guage, where the true appears (not, indeed, exactly
alone, since in a certain sense the true implies the
beautiful), but where the beautiful appears only as a
consequence of the true. She could not avoid being
sublime, but she permitted herself nothing further,
and had so little regard to literary requirements, that
we are often led to think she intentionally defied
them. Taken up with the substance, she did not
choose to occupy herself with the form beyond what
the substance imperatively demanded; and she seems
to have said, like St. Paul, "I take no thought for
the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof; I keep under
my body, and have it in subjection."
There is most certainly a relation between poetry
and faith: poetry as well as love lives on faith and
truth; not that she escapes doubt or denies mystery,
but she has faith in something in man and outside of
man; she lives and expresses life; she may know
despair, she does not know ennui, does not separate
herself from all existences, abjure all sympathies, to
bury herself in the void of a vain egotism. For the
honour of human nature be it said, egotism is so
little poetical that all poetry loses itself therein.
Poetry is not conceivable without sympathy, and
without a lively and continual communication from
the inner to the outer. Ideas alone will not suffice
it; like love, like the soul, it requires beings, realities,
6
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
593
history, a complete world. Every other medium is
for it a vacuum in which it must needs expire.
It is impossible but that supreme truth, coming
forth out of itself to put on human speech, should
become a poetry, and the purest and most perfect as
the most living poetry; it is, in fact, at this altitude
that the idea and the life, the reality and the image,
embrace and blend.
Although art may identify the artist with all that
he does not experience, and that it be even the
ambition, the peculiar object and the nature of art
to do so, yet few artists, especially in our own
epoch, have sufficiently studied, sufficiently contem-
plated Christian truth to be able to associate them-
selves in imagination with the principal situations to
which it gives rise; they generally better express
what tends towards than what springs from that
truth, and nothing in them is so Christian as the
nameless want they feel of being so. Almost always,
if they treat religion as an instrument, they play
upon it ill; if as a language, they speak it ill; their
accent betrays them. I prefer their Christianity
when they are Christians without intending it.
Their doubts very often contain more religion than
their faith. In this department, objective truth or
dogmatic exactness, were it even complete, is of much
less value than subjective truth, even with greatest
imperfection in idea or knowledge. Nothing at first
sight in M. Hugo's poetry is more positively Christian
than his prayer for all; but how inferior it really is
♠♦
594
LITERATURE.
in this particular to other pieces in which he never
thought of being Christian!
Poetry has this in common with religion, that it
blends and unites with all things, as sound with
motion, as the echo with the voice.
Religion is no more than man himself, dependent,
as Pascal says, " on space and duration." The ideas
of infinitude, immensity, eternity, power, essential, no
doubt, to religion, are nevertheless not religion; all
these may superabound in the language of a poet, and
yet earnestness be entirely wanting there. These ele-
ments may constitute metaphysics, and even poetry;
but neither these metaphysics nor this poetry will be
religious. Even greatness will be absent from them,
for the greatness of God is to be holy, and the great-
ness of man is to aspire to being so; and until he be
holy, his greatness lies in feeling that he is not. A
religious thought, then, is first of all a thought of
compunction and repentance; a religious poem is
a poem founded and resting throughout on these
ideas; but nowhere else can it derive any interest or
any unction; without these ideas it is barren, and the
very love it expresses, inasmuch as its roots do not
strike down into sorrow for sin, dries up at once,
never blossoms, and gives out no perfume.
Just as every Christian is a philosopher, so every
Christian is a poet. It is a thing that has often even
surprised us to see how austere, arid, rigorous minds,
yielding to the bold poetry of the Christian faith, be-
come poets in spite of themselves-poets because
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 595
they are believers. This poetry only admits simple
beauties, but for all that, true and more various
beauties than may be supposed. For a rather length-
ened period, poetry, almost extinct in Germany,
breathed only in pious songs. English hymns hold
a place in the literature of Great Britain.
Poetry, which is a species of spirituality, would be,
for whoever chose to reflect upon it, a valuable indi-
cation of our nature and our destination. A religion
has been made of it; and poetry itself has made reli-
gion; but religion is a virtue, and though poetry
have the same date as virtue, it does not proceed
from the same principle. Poetry ought simply to
have warned us, to have recalled our dignity, to have
thrown into the infinite one of the anchors of our
vessel. If it has so frequently been a distraction of
the soul, is this not rather our fault than that of
poetry?
If there be a true religion, to say that poetry can-
not apply itself thereto without changing it, and that
the mutual contact of religion and of art is fatal to
one or the other, is to make poetry an attribute and
characteristic not of restored, but of fallen humanity ;
it is only to concede to it a provisional legitimacy;
it is to declare it capable of life in the soul only
until conversion; it is to assert that the poet becomes
absorbed and annulled in the believer, and poetry in
truth.
The pursuit after the ideal, having met with its
object in the object of the Christian faith, would, we
596
LITERATURE.
might suppose, thenceforth cease. But the restora-
tion effected in us by the Gospel word and the Spirit
of God does not take us back to the point from which
sin removed us. Our new state may be as good, may
be even better than our original one, but it differs
from it. Virtue replaces innocence; innocence is not
recovered. The memory of the fall remains; the
knowledge of good and evil remains; life and the
soul are no longer simple.
And, besides, has not religion, positive religion,
its own peculiar poetry, a poetry belonging to itself
alone? People are ready to discover this in the
troubled time of the Church; they admit that poetry
is profusely scattered amidst the annals of persecu-
tion and martyrdom; but the persecution that the
soul endures within, that long, perpetual, and secret
martyrdom of fidelity, that burning conflict of prayer,
those agonies of love, that zeal which makes each
Christian another Moses on another Nebo, sustaining
by his tears that army of martyrs that only his as-
pirations may accompany into another Canaan; the
holy terror which seizes the soul and the imagina-
tion on the borders of the deep things of God; the
new solemnity given to life and death, the touch-
ing language of the whole creation, to which faith
has found the key that sin had lost-how many
elements, how many sources of poetry here! and
when could they be exhausted? They renew them-
selves in every soul; each rehearsing in his own
manner the universal drama of faith. Not only has
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 597
Christianity its poetry, but every heart-Christian is
a poet by the very fact that he is a Christian. Here
is a source of poetry as well as truth open to those
whose soul but for it would scarcely have risen above
prose. Many have indulged in a holy censure of
poetry, have repudiated it; and sometimes their
very anathemas were poetry!
Never will we accept your beautiful verses in ex-
change for the truth that you owe us, shall be our
language to poets and to Christians. Never will we
excuse bad verses or bad rhymes in compliment to
your poetry; nothing obliges you to put your Chris-
tianity into verse, or even to believe that this form
suits it; but, whether Christians or no, verses are
verses, and the best sentiments will not make them
good if they are in themselves bad. If you do not
choose to adorn Truth, leave her unclothed; that suits
her beauty well; but do not degrade her by covering
her with rags. If you find it too difficult to compose
good verses, write good prose, which is not, however,
all things considered, infinitely more easy, but which
is just as necessary; for whatever one has to say
must be well said: to state the truth ill is to act
ungently towards her, and to refuse what properly
belongs to her.
That in the occurrences of daily life the substance
be accepted for love of the form, or that the form
pass in virtue of the substance, we readily allow ; and
hold ourselves fortunate not to find everything bad
where everything is not good. But the accident is
598
LITERATURE.
.
not the rule; the rule decrees that "the good should
always accompany the beautiful." There is no more
half-poetry than half-Christianity; and it is simpler,
and, indeed, more reasonable, to be neither poet nor
Christian in any degree whatever than to pretend to
be so by halves.
It is because all poetry born in a Christian land
is not Christian that Christian poetry has become a
style apart; but it is also because the least pure ele-
ments that have made their way into the Christian
world have passed into Christianity, that is to say,
into the idea of it generally entertained, it is because
there are at the present time many different Chris-
tianities, very little familiar and sociable among
themselves, that the title Christian has come to
mean pretty nearly anything and everything.
That an expression of profound pity, of ecstasy, or
love may give rise to a pious emotion within the
soul I noways deny; and woe, woe to art had it not
such power! but I doubt whether the beauty of
forms be able to raise the soul, and to spiritualise it
to the point of prayer.
2. Poetry and Morality.
Every moral truth is a part of Christianity, which
is the whole truth. Christianity adopts, or rather,
claims whatsoever is true. It is by this that poets
who have in other respects-both in their writings, and
worse, in their lives-failed to pay sufficient respect
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 599
to the laws of morality, have yet been Christians
unknown to themselves in their pictures of hu-
manity.
Remarkable fact there are often two men in the
same poet, the one who moralises directly, and tends
as much as lies in his power to establish a worldly
morality; the other, who decries it, and tends towards
Christian morality. This latter morality has, then,
friends amongst its foes, and it defies them to prove
their own doctrine as well as they demonstrate and
consolidate hers.
There can be no poetry without internal liberty;
and there is no liberty in passion. But there is a
moment when passion itself becomes thought; still
more, affection, duty, all the moral elements, all the
moral acts of human life. All this constitutes
not an obstacle, but the treasury, the condition of
poetry. All this had, at all events, to be divined be-
fore poetry could be written; and are we not more
sure to understand it all after having experienced it,
to express this life when we ourselves have lived?
Can poetical divination go further or know more than
personal experience? And although talent, as it
appears, has an entrance everywhere, may there not
be some sacred retreats into which it can only pene-
trate under the auspices and treading in the footsteps
of memory?
A poet must already be moral up to a certain
point if he be true, if passion and human nature
show themselves in his works such as they really are;
600
LITERATURE.
if he express without disguise the strength and the
weakness of everything; if he do not carry the fictitious
into poetry; if, in a word, in default of just conclu-
sion, he furnish us with correct premises whereon to
base our own conclusions. All great poets have had
this gift; and hence their works have become so
precious to all ages; talent can insure popularity for
a time, truth alone bestows immortality.
I only demand from the poet that he be true, and
do not interest himself in vice; this is the whole of
his positive morality.
If at the close of some lively moral excitement,
some movement of enthusiasm produced by reading,
by a composition, by the theatre, or whatever other
cause, we do not feel ourselves equally-nay, feel
ourselves less disposed to practise some minor virtue,
to make some sacrifice without praise or ostentation,
let us say to ourselves that we have experienced a
poetical emotion and nothing more. A truly moral
emotion would have embellished in our eyes every one
of our duties; would have added charm and grace
to the most repulsive. In this order, poetry is the
tributary of life, not life of poetry.
Egotism is absolute solitude. The man who loves
neither God nor his neighbour is an exile, a voluntary
prisoner, but if he cannot escape from contempt, he
escapes from Poetry; she will not go and shut herself
up with him in his dungeon for the sake of painting
him; she only points her finger at him, and passes
on,
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY.
601
It is a great misfortune for a people, and it is one
for poetry too, when all natural sentiments find them-
selves isolated from the religious sentiment. You may
do what you will, there is something false and incom-
plete; weak and violent at once are all affections with
which that Divine affection is not blent; without it
there is nothing but what sounds hollow, nothing
but what in the long run proves vulnerable to fresh
influences and convictions. Political poetry less than
any other dispenses with this combination, which we
may compare to the mingling silver largely with brass,
in order to make it more sonorous. Béranger himself
appears to have felt this.
3. Sacred Poetry - Hymn Writing - Its Condition,
Individuality.
Everywhere poetry has formed a part of the
cortége" of religion. Whenever dogma, received
into the conscience or sanctioned by the mind, has
passed into the heart or taken hold of the imagina-
tion, ordinary speech no longer sufficing to the soul's
transports, it invokes the aid of that mysterious
language which is itself a kind of religion, an aspi-
ration after the invisible and the infinite. Neverthe-
less, the true religion is the only one which can
boast of having, in all the force of the term, a sacred
poetry, because the true religion alone stirs the soul
in its utmost depths, and makes all its faculties tend
at once to one same object.
602
LITERATURE.
Popular sacred poetry belongs to the religion of
individualism, to Protestant Christianity. Protest-
antism makes poetry as well as faith the common
possession of all.
To be a Christian without any peculiar tinge, a
Christian in the simple acceptation of the word, is a
primary condition of success in sacred poetry.
A spontaneous strain springs from the super-
abundance of any sentiment whatever which seeks
an egress, which asks itself for an echo.
The logical simplicity of the hymn should be
carried to humility. The sublime is permissible to
it, but never the ingenious.
There is a deep line of demarcation between the
mental state of the natural man and that of one
who has been touched by Divine grace. Imagina-
tion, that echo from the soul of all in the soul of
each, suffices to explain the first of these condi-
tions; it contains within itself all the necessary
facts; but the impressions of Gospel doctrines upon
a soul are not equally within its reach. Not
being able to conceive, it cannot describe them;
it cannot paint them, or it paints them with-
out truth or life; for its power does not in any de-
partment extend to painting that of which it has
no anticipated knowledge, no internal perception.
General passions have sometimes been rendered
with such startling truth, that it seems as though
the poet could not have described them better had
he himself experienced them; but I do not think
DIFFERENT KINDS OF POETRY. 603
this can be the case with positively Christian
emotions.
The hymn is bound to connect itself with the
substance of things. Its beauty lies in idea and
cadences, rather than in images.
But the very
cadence of which it is susceptible is an earnest,
grave, continuous one, quite different from the
sudden turns of the Pindaric style, and even from
the impetuous sallies of eloquence. Christian song
pours forth in large transparent waves from a soul
touched yet calm. A too ingenious imagery ill befits
it; effort is fatal to it; in the matter of ideas it is
only the simple and sublime that it dare employ.
Individuality, indeed, is not prohibited, but a too
strongly marked individuality produces rather the
Christian elegy than the hymn. Grace is permis-
sible to the hymn, but it must be an austere grace;
Biblical words must be able to fit into it without
discrepancy or discord; and just as the Gospel is the
common language of great and small, so the hymn
is in poetry the common medium of all intellects; it
should therefore be like the Bible-nobly popular.
THIRD SECTION.
ELOQUENCE.
I.—ELOQUENCE IN GENERAL.
1. Its Definition — Eloquence and Truth — Spoken
and Written Eloquence-Eloquence and Indivi-
duality.
ELOQUENCE is a gift, and a gift of the soul. It is
the gift of thinking and feeling what others think
and feel, and of adopting the words and movements
of one's discourse thereto; in short, speaking the
thoughts of others. Eloquence rests on sympathy.
We are never eloquent except on condition of speak-
ing or writing, as it were, under the dictation of
those whom we address. It is our hearers who
inspire us, and if this condition be not fulfilled, we
may be profound or agreeable, but we shall not be
eloquent. In order to be eloquent, we must feel the
need of communicating our life to others, and in-
timately comprehend the chords that must be made
to vibrate in them.
Eloquence, in the sense of La Bruyère and Pascal,
is an action of real life, an effort put forth against
a resistance, a compulsion-one might say a drama,
ELOQUENCE.
605
where only one person appears, but where there are
two; a drama which has its plot, its reverses, and
its dénouement. This dénouement may, according
to the nature of the case, be a determination, a
voluntary act of the one we address, or else a sen-
timent which is also an act, and from the point of
view of philosophy and religion the act par excel-
lence.
A discourse is eloquent when it establishes be-
tween us and its object just and distinct relations;
when it places our conviction in harmony with our
sentiments, and our sentiments in harmony with our
conviction; when it so closely unites our impressions
with those of the orator that the two streams have
only one course.
At bottom, to be eloquent is to be true; to be
eloquent is not to add something to the truth, it is
rather to remove one after the other the veils that
cover it. And this is no negative function, for facts
are truth. In this sense Pascal is pre-eminently an
orator, because he is also as severely true as it is
possible to be. But truth does not reside merely in
facts, it is equally found in the sentiment of truth. To
unite ourselves with it, to be pathetic in its cause,
Is truth spoken with
Surely not; but truth
is a second way of being true.
love less truth than before?
seen, but outside of us, is not truth as yet.
Truth is eloquent in itself: we do not add eloquence
to it; we rather elicit it therefrom; truth, in what-
ever sense the word be taken, is the condition and
:
606
LITERATURE.
material of eloquence. Rhetoric is only the art of
extracting and afterwards purifying this precious
mineral. One expression is more beautiful than
another only because it is more true, more adequate
to the idea. Cicero defined eloquence as aptè dicere.
Eloquence may strive in vain, it can never be more
eloquent than truth; eloquence is at bottom nothing
but truth, and the most accomplished orator is the
one who places truth in its fullest light; and often
nothing more is required for this than to cite facts,
to name things.
Eloquence being nothing more than truth placed
in fullest light, truth is at bottom the very ground-
work and soul of eloquence.
An oratorical discourse is an action before it is a
discourse. Eloquence is a virtue. Woe to him who,
erecting the means into an end, sees only in rhetoric
the art of making a discourse, and not the art of pro-
portioning language to truth and truth to man!
. . He for whom a speech is only a speech
will never be eloquent; my speech, to be eloquent,
must be a business (negotium) in the most real sense
of the word, a substantial and veritable action, an
event in my moral and civil life; my speech must
be myself, and not-whether good or bad, deformed or
beautiful-a something external to myself.
Eloquence is the concurrence and concentration of
all the internal energies of a man in the exposition,
or, if I may so express myself, in the vindication of
truth. Eloquence is the whole man, mind, imagina-
ELOQUENCE.
607
tion, will, and all these reduced to an indivisible.
unity. There can be no eloquence without poetry,
none without philosophy, none without passion.
Born from the true influence of these sources, the
stream of eloquence does not always hollow out
abysses, nor always form cataracts; but it is always a
stream and never a lake: continuity of movement is
the most essential condition of eloquence, and in this
general movement there are also special movements,
unforeseen and sudden inflections, not less character-
istic signs, or less essential forms, of a truly eloquent
discourse. These accidents, arising from the lively
intuition of certain relations that only the soul takes
cognisance of, are true eloquence, and some of the
finest oratorical passages that are quoted with delight
are neither more nor less than such transitions as
these.
That which is eloquent in eloquent productions is
truth; eloquence is nothing but impassioned truth;
that is to say, truth in its plenitude, for passion com-
pletes truth. I am speaking, be it observed, of truths
of the moral order.
That which is sensibly and effectively eloquent is
not truth external to us, but truth within us; conse-
quently, as I expressed myself just now, impassioned
truth.
Our written eloquence is not more lively nor more
oratorical than our spoken eloquence, but I believe it
to be more perfect.
A German or an English book, as a book, is a
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LITERATURE.
monologue, a long aside; with certain nations an
harangue even is a book; with us a book is an
harangue, and every writer a species of orator; to
which we may add that in that tribune entitled a
book, we generally find ourselves more at ease than
in any other.
Neither preaching nor pleading, nor any other
public and solemn exercise of language, has anything
in common with eloquence, if it set eloquence itself
before it as an object; it is with true eloquence as
with true probity, which is "careful for nothing," the
orator is a man of action, in whom thought does
nothing but continue or precede action; a speech is
a very real scene between two very animated inter-
locutors, only one of whom allows himself to be
heard; in short, truth, movement, grandeur, all this
and nothing else, is the whole of eloquence.
There is but one eloquence, and nevertheless every
one has his own. He who has not his own has none;
the art which remains impersonal has no range and
does not hit home; for the idea is only somewhat for
the multitude on condition of making itself flesh, of
becoming man, and the abstract man is not a living
man.
However much the word individuality be abused,
I feel myself obliged to recommend the orator to be
individual;—which does not mean to withdraw him-
self from the general laws, the oblivion of which
places us out of the conditions of human com-
munion, but acquitting himself of his mission as an
ELOQUENCE.
609
intelligent and responsible being, and taking count
of the particular manner in which he is affected
by the truth. Must not the liquid assume the
form of the vase into which it is poured, and yet
does this form in any way change the liquid itself?
Without individuality, no truth. In art as in reli-
gion, objectivity, objective truth, has ingenuousness
for its condition, and there can be no ingenuous-
ness without individuality. When we renounce
our own selves in favour of a third-that is to
say, of a model or conventional life, what does
truth gain thereby? It is essential, then, that we
place ourselves in presence of our subject, that we
submit to its influence, receive its law, owe to it our
form, and, while profiting by models, accept no other
form than that which the law of good sense and the
knowledge of human nature imprint on our works.
It is clear, in fact, that individuality equally finds its
scope in the structure of a discourse as everywhere
else.
Eloquence is made up at once of individuality and
of sympathy; to live much in ourselves, to live much
in others,—such is the double condition of powerful
speaking.
We are well pleased that rank should, up to a certain
point, feel intimidated by intellect; but intellect too
has its tyranny, and we feel that it is as just to pro-
test and to forearm ourselves against the despotism
of talent as against any other. Man is not as yet
free, so long as capable, indeed, of resisting material
RR
610
LITERATURE.
power, he is not capable of defending his conscience
against the attacks of eloquence.
2. Its Method, Rules, Medium, and Means.
The method of the orator cannot without incon-
venience or injury be confounded with that of the
naturalist; now we are involuntarily and through
force of habit reducing the former to the latter, trans-
planting the processes of science into art, which is a
mistake. I do not know whether Aristotle would be
contented with this, but certainly Plato would not.
The nosce teipsum is the motto of the orator as
well as the rule of the man.
The sight of a man that nothing distracts or diverts
even for a moment from the path that he has marked
out for himself is one of the things that most power-
fully acts upon the imagination. A mind so com-
pletely subjugated by its thought is very likely to
subjugate us to it as well. If such a one take one
step out of his course, he may depend upon our taking
ten. If certain digressions please the genius of
eloquence, this is as an exception, and the case is
rare; a severe continuity is essential to the perfection
of every oratorical achievement.
We must by preference deduce emotion from the
loftiest affections. A blow with a clenched fist may
bring about weeping. There are generous tears, and
there are others that are only too easily made to flow.
Respect for liberty is essential to eloquence, as it is
ELOQUENCE.
611
to Divine grace, that other and sovereign eloquence.
One may be convincing without being eloquent.
There is an oratorical order as there is a lyrical
order; and I have some spite against Quintilian,
and even against Cicero himself, for having, by an
abuse of etymology, placed all the force and the very
essence of eloquence in elocution. Altering, or per-
haps without altering, the application of an expres-
sion of Buffon, I would say, eloquence is the order
and the movement that we put into our thoughts; or
at least it results, before all, from that order and that
movement.
When we invite the orator to explore the idea, to
seek facts in the idea, we are not proposing to him a
barren logical dissection, which could only give super-
ficial results without body or life; we must be care-
ful to remember that the idea itself is a fact, a vast
but living fact, taken in its very substance, and not
in its formula; which, like all facts of the moral
order, is seen with the soul, and must be felt in order
to be known. But this condition once laid down,
let us acknowledge that an idea, true at its starting-
point, if followed in its course with perseverance and
inflexible rigour, would necessarily lead to all the
details furnished by immediate observation, and with
the additional advantage of co-ordinating these details
one with the other, and all of them together, with one
primary fact, acquaintance with which gives them
a kind of rational life, that the most fortunate em-
piricism cannot communicate.
612
LITERATURE.
3
This method is not merely legitimate; it is the
only one in many cases. Thus every new enterprise,
not being able to walk in footsteps already marked out,
draws all its information, and, if I may so say, all its
itinerary, from some general idea, on the necessary
deductions from which it presses hard yet cautiously.
How many times has an idea pointed out the way to
observation! How often has the astronomer marked
out in the vague immensity of the sky the very spot
where some star ought to be found, that a little later
the telescope showed shining there, having the very
size and gravity assigned to it by scientific calcula-
tion! How slow would be the progress of science
if it contented itself with waiting for facts to come to
it, instead of evoking them by the powerful aid of
hypothesis! It was an idea that discovered the New
World before the ships of Columbus reached its
shores; and if the human mind had not its limits.
(limits that we cannot determine, but must needs
allow), it would not merely have been the existence
of America, but its configuration, soil, climate, and
vegetation, that the idea, grown prophetical, would
have accurately described.
The true region, the natural medium of eloquence,
is the thought of all, and consequently as much as
possible the language of all. Eloquence is the con-
tact of man with man, not on his accidental or in-
dividual, but his human side. The language, there-
fore, that befits eloquence is a general, common, usual
one. Here nothing rare or exceptional would be
ELOQUENCE.
613
appropriate. I do not say that one may not be
eloquent upon or about very special subjects; but
one could not be oratorical upon such subjects except
before a very select audience, to whom they offer no
difficulty, and who can rapidly refer special to general
ideas, the only ones that are oratorical.
Everything else being equal, the subject of politics
is usually more favourable than any other to elo-
quence.
Effusion is only one of the forms of eloquence;
we must neither interdict nor prescribe it to ourselves;
we are always sufficiently eloquent when we are
entirely true to ourselves, and it would not be just
to confound self-possession with coldness. I cannot,
however, deny that a certain degree of reserve in ex-
pression is but little adapted faithfully to represent
the true position of the moral being with regard to
the moral law and its Divine Author. However abused
a particular language may have been, that which an
inevitable reaction has brought into vogue is rather
too prominently philosophical and intellectual in
tone;
but it is too true that mere declamation has
forced us to it.
Many an author, whose personal eloquence lacks
nature and simplicity, sometimes recovers these pre-
cious qualities when he makes others speak. We
might say that it is easier to speak well in the name
of some third person than our own, and perfectly to
imitate eloquence than to be simply eloquent on our
own account.
614
LITERATURE.
Do not confine yourself to authors of your own
class or your own species. Let the orator study his
art among historians, the preacher among lawyers;
all among those who are neither orators nor writers.
This is a principle of rhetoric to be found in no
rhetoric, and yet it is the most important of all.
Whether we want to be preacher or advocate, it is in
common life that we must study language.
It is in expatriating ourselves, as it were, in getting
out of our own special class, that we rise to general
ideas on the nature of eloquence.
It would be an error to suppose that the only
models are great preachers for the preacher, great
advocates for the advocate, the masters of the tribune
for the aspirant to the post of deputy, or even, in a
general way, orators for the orator. This is a danger-
ous view, for the idea of eloquence ought to remain
free and unlimited in our mind. To substitute a
type, even the most perfect, is to limit it; nay, more,
it is to disguise. If such were to be the result of
reading special models, it would be better to leave
.them unread. Almost all of them, I allow, rise
beyond our conceptions, and raise us with them; let
us therefore read them, we shall do well; but let us
beware of only seeking eloquence where we find it
ready made; let us seek it where it is still in an
elementary, virtual condition, where the substance is
found without the form. Otherwise we shall run
great danger of being for ever in captivity to the
form, and of seeing the idea escape us by incorpo-
ELOQUENCE.
615
rating itself in the phenomenon or the accident. . . .
There is no fruitful and living imitation save that of
the internal model.
Clearness in eloquence is often in itself alone a
great means of persuasion, but may we not add that it
is at the same time often a snare? It is not always a
proof of correct reasoning, still less correct views; it
may equally with elegance accompany and decorate
error. One may no doubt be both superficial and
obscure, but superficiality sometimes gives clearness
to those whom a higher flight would have lost and
left in the clouds. We must always distrust ob-
scurity, but we must not place absolute confidence in
clearness. Self-love and indolence conspire to pre-
possess us in favour of what is clear; but to judge of
an author, it is not enough to understand him easily
from the point of view he has taken up; we must,
above all, examine that point of view itself. From
the top of a hill the horizon is distinct because it is
limited; from the summit of a mountain the view we
embrace may be somewhat confused at its furthest
limits, but then it is immense.
Eloquence, like all other acts, is a product, a
development of nature. It should present the same
phenomena as nature. If it be cultivated in a natural
order, it is impossible but that it should produce the
beautiful in producing the useful; but just as in
morals the useful is produced by the good, so in art
the truly beautiful can only spring from the useful.
Here, then, the useful takes the first place; but the
616
LITERATURE.
useful in this domain is the conviction, is the precise
determination of the will; and the useful, according
to moral laws, is one with the true, the just, and the
good. It is, then, from the very substance of the
subject that our ornamentation should be evolved;
the only true, and therefore the only beautiful, is to
be found there: nothing is absolutely beautiful in
itself but by the place that it occupies; it would
therefore be a great miscalculation to seek for orna-
ments outside of our subject, in other words, outside
of our aim. Our subject places these ornaments
within our grasp; there is no need to wander from it.
Eloquence, being not a species of composition, but
an energy of the soul, permeates and animates on
occasion the most widely different matters. The
oratorical style in public speaking is only its most
immediate occasion and most complete form. But
eloquence in the art of writing is none the less a
special virtue-a beauty distinguishable from all
others.
It associates itself, if need be, with philosophy,
with poetry; it rests on the one, it decks itself with
the other, but it is neither the one nor the other.
Poetry and philosophy, taken in their purity, dis-
engage themselves from reality to rise to the ideal;
eloquence has reality for its object, and pursues a
practical aim; the first two are disinterested, elo-
quence cannot be so; they contemplate, eloquence is
action. The philosopher and the poet address them-
selves to what there is of speculation in our nature;
ELOQUENCE.
617
the orator seeks to take possession of our will. His
function is to be obstinately aggressive; our soul is
a fortress to which he lays siege, but could never take
if he had not those within on his side. Eloquence
is only an appeal to sympathy; its secret consists
in discerning and seizing, in the soul of others
whatever corresponds with the soul of the orator and
with all souls; its aim is to lay hold of the hand that
unwittingly we are ever stretching out towards it.
It is from us that eloquence obtains the weapons it
uses against us; with our concessions it fortifies
itself; with our gifts it recommends itself; with
our admission it overwhelms us; in other words,
the orator invokes intellectual and moral principles
that we hold in common with him, and only press-
ingly demands and insists upon conclusions from
those premises. He proves to us that we are in har-
mony with him, makes us love and feel that harmony;
in a word, as it has been energetically said, one can
only demonstrate to people what they already believe.
This talent of the mind, or rather of the soul, is a
talent apart and distinct from all others. It depends
upon a sensibility, a gift of living in our fellow-
creatures, that no one can either imitate or teach.
Nothing can supply its place, and yet what more
simple? But just because it is so simple it is
very rare. What are the most famous passages of
a Demosthenes, a Bossuet, or a Fox, if not appeals
to the good sense of the mind, or to the conscience,
which is the good sense of the soul? What is the
·
618
LITERATURE.
.
true sphere of eloquence, if it be not the common-
place? This eloquence combines with lofty philoso-
phical considerations, of which modern times furnish
instances. We are at first tempted to attribute the
impression we receive to philosophy, but eloquence is
something more popular; it is the power of making
vibrate within us the soul's primitive chords, what it
possesses of most simply human; it is this, and
nothing else, by which we recognise the orator.
3. Eloquence-Poetry-Philosophy—Rhetoric.
We are not orators by the same title that we are
poets. A man becomes a poet at the command of
his genius, and to sing was never a business; now to
speak is one; oral and public eloquence is only one
of the dependencies, and one of the instruments of
some political design, religious or social. The orator
is not first of all an orator. Indeed, he only is one on
condition of being something more; this something
wanting, we have no longer an orator, but only a
rhetorician.
"True eloquence," said Pascal, "despises eloquence."
If it be supposed that he meant to say that nature
despises art, I think this is a mistake; the eloquence
at which true eloquence, and Pascal with it, scoffs, is
the eloquence of the schools,-formal eloquence, which
reduces everything to conventions and receipts,—is
pompous would-be eloquence, which thinks to raise
itself by avoiding simplicity; or, in a word, a phantom,
ELOQUENCE.
619
a simulacrum of eloquence, form without substance,
organism without life.
No one can set his conscience at rest and his life
at liberty without the aid of sophistry, and sophistry
will not go far unsupported by rhetoric.
Rhetoric, that treasury of forms, has itself more
than one form, and every man is rhetorical because
every man is false.
Rhetoric is not always where we look for it, it is
more often still where we did not expect it to be.
II.-PULPIT ELOQUENCE.
1. Necessity of Art and of Study—Authority.
Study has very immediate practical applications.
There is no development of the human mind which
is not either an aid or an obstacle to religion. No-
thing is indifferent, everything serves or injures.
Even the most scientific doctrines, the most abstract
systems, at the end of a given time, descend among
the people.
We must study to excite and enrich our own
thought by means of the thought of others. Those
who do not study will find their talent wither, will
be old in mind before their time. Experience abun-
dantly exemplifies this in the matter of preaching.
Whence comes it that preachers exceedingly admired
at their outset so rapidly decline, or remain so far
below the hopes to which they gave rise? Generally
this comes of their having left off study.
620
LITERATURE.
:
Doubtless it is God who converts-there is the
principle; but He converts man by man-here is the
fact; I mean by the personal, living, moral man. As
soon as you admit this fact you admit art in preach-
ing; for what would man be minus thought? and
how can you leave him thought, and prevent him
from reasoning out what he does? And if he reasons
will he reason by halves? If the Holy Spirit does
not hold the pen, it must needs be man himself that
holds it; if he be not inspired, he must needs reflect.
Inspiration being laid aside, I cannot see why he
should prefer trusting to his first impulse rather than
to reflection, to chance rather than to art. To take
for our starting-point that human wisdom for which
the cross is foolishness, is to repudiate that foolishness
which is the very doctrine of salvation. But reflec-
tion, method, in a word, art, has nothing in common
with the human wisdom alluded to. The most skil-
ful preacher, the wisest, as far as art goes, may abound
in the "foolishness of God," just as the most utter
stranger to this Divine foolishness may be absolutely
deficient in art.
The art of abstracting, generalising, harmonising
principles will never be disdained by enlightened
preachers; and there is also a Christian philosophy,
which, confined within precise limit, has its use in
preaching, and even in life. And in our days we
have already seen it applied
equal propriety and success.
to Christianity with
If God makes use of means, we may well make
:
ELOQUENCE.
621
use of them; our faculties are not more unworthy of
us than we are of God; and if it is indubitable that
God consents to make man His means, let us place
all these means, that is, the whole man, at God's dis-
posal. Now man comprehends art, man is essentially
an artist; take away art, man is man no longer.
A literary invalid, to whom a friend was endea-
vouring to represent the joys of paradise, interrupted
him thus :-" Do not speak of them, father; your bad
style would disgust me with them." This profane
witticism is the last word of intellectual Epicureanism.
But, frankly, it is not permissible to speak of Divine
things in bad style. In vain may it be said that
the things themselves should speak; but what is a
vicious style but something that hinders them from
speaking, an unfaithful style, a style that is not true
(and in this respect it may be at once elegant and
bad); and what, on the other hand, is a good style,
but one that is true in every respect?
If there be so many ministers that one cannot en-
dure to hear; if vapid discourses be so frequent in the
pulpit; if the feeblest advocates can scarcely sink so
low as do the feeblest preachers, it is because art,
still more necessary in the pulpit than at the bar, is
denied by indolence or repulsed by prejudice. An
opposite doctrine would infallibly raise the level of
ecclesiastical eloquence. Let the youngest amongst
the most zealous make the attempt; they will soon
get rid of the mistaken idea that art is something
essentially voluminous, which requires, in order to its
622
LITERATURE.
development, a great space,—that is to say, a great
time; they will soon comprehend, and later will
know experimentally, that a great deal of art can
be comprised within the limits of a single hour; in-
tensity of labour is equivalent to long duration;
when this discovery has been made, a great step in
advance has been taken. What in many minds has
tended to discredit art is not art itself, is not even
the abuse of it; is far rather its absence. A dis-
course whose progress is stilted, whose plan is pain-
fully symmetrical, whose style is pompous or over-
ornate, whose periods are uniformly rounded and
sonorous, depresses or provokes us by its icy elegance.
Let us emphatically condemn so false a style as this.
Let us even venture to blame, in works of far greater
earnestness and simplicity, a certain stiffness of form
and elaboration of language, latest and too enduring
vestiges of a time when eloquence was theatrical.
Let us banish, if you will, the rhetoric of rhetoricians
to make way for that of philosophy. Let us redemand
the rights of individuality, which is to art what liberty
is to faith. But do not let us accuse or banish art,
which has nothing to do with the peculiarities that
have shocked us. Art is necessary, art is immortal ;
the very reforms that we recommend lie under its
jurisdiction, and will be its work; and when we have
obtained them we shall say, with equal right and
truth, At last nature has recovered its rights; at last
art has triumphed! Art, in fact, consists essentially
in observing and perhaps in rediscovering nature.
1
ELOQUENCE.
623
There is only one real opposition; it is not that be-
tween nature and art, but that between true and
false art. If we hold to this formula, it is because
this formula is a principle.
The spirit of analysis of our age has pulverised so
many opinions, has left so few beliefs erect! Pure
reasoning is so powerless an agent in reinstating the
moral world and natural religion! Happy then he
who has received from God the solution that earth
is unable to bestow! An arbitrary solution this, but
one which ought to be arbitrary, since it is proved by
the fact that reason cannot discover a natural one.
Happy then the man who has found it! he has some-
thing to impart to souls, and in his humble depend-
ence on revealed truth he is in reality far more in-
dependent, he has much more influence, than the
preacher who will only believe in himself, and who is
constantly surprised at not believing in himself.
What subjugates men is authority, and there is
little authority in passion.
The man who is easily impressed by others is not cal-
culated to make an impression upon them; he who
trembles before them will never cause them to tremble;
and if Peter, in preaching his first sermon, his pro-
bationary sermon if you will, had been pre-occupied
with his own position, and the opinions of his audience,
he would never have heard the multitude, moved and
repentant, asking, at the close of his discourse, “Men
and brethren, what shall we do?" (Acts ii. 37).
I think that we in general are contented in this
624
LITERATURE.
:
matter of authority to keep below what is legitimate;
possible, and even necessary. The boldness and free-
dom that should belong to prophets do not make
themselves sufficiently felt in our discourses. In a
word, we do not enough reprove. We fight with
foils as at a fencing match; we forget that a serious
conflict requires the naked blade, and that a mere
semblance of combat leads only to a semblance of
victory. A more kindly compassion for our flocks,
a deeper sense of our responsibilities, in short, a
higher and more solemn ideal of our state, ought to
place us above vain considerations and conventionali-
ties, with which in truth we have nothing to do. This
may not, I admit, be the idea entertained of the
ministry now-a-days, but does it behove us to conform
to that ideal, or to reform it? If the world's maxims
on this head are to fix the measure of our liberty,
there is no reason why we should not sink lower and
lower in complaisance; if, on the contrary, we adjudge
to ourselves all the liberty that Christianly we may,-
if, far from allowing our ministry to be infringed
upon, we claim for it all the authority that rightly
belongs to it, there is every reason to believe that
the world, with some surprise at first, will consent
and grow accustomed to our fidelity. After all, it loves
courage and independence; it is only strong against
the weak; and it is our timidity which makes its
boldness. Everywhere and in all times, provided
that we follow truth with charity, our ministry will
be what we choose that it should be; and besides,
ELOQUENCE.
625
whether accepted or not accepted, the essential is
that it be what it ought to be.
If we ask what the difference is in the matter of
authority between our times and those of old, we
shall not find the explanation to be any weakening
of conviction on the part of ministers, but a circum-
stance of another kind; and perhaps, looking closely,
we shall discover that authority only appears to have
decreased because it had once been exaggerated, or
that the cords, so to speak, only appear loose at the
present time because they had been too tightly drawn
of yore. With the authority of conviction and in-
ternal vocation, which is all in all, there had mingled
imperceptibly the authority of position or external
vocation; and perhaps the latter had but too large
a share in the confident and lofty tone of preaching
that prevailed. There was not more true faith or
less real incredulity then than now, but this incre-
dulity was less given to pronounce itself, and even
knew itself less; it had not yet been driven by cir-
cumstances to proclaim or investigate itself; even
amongst those who on this point perfectly under-
stood themselves, and had no remaining delusion, the
majority, whether through prudence or deference,
kept silence, and the small number who gave them-
selves out as what they really were, were blamed
even by such as shared their opinions. The legal
fiction, or rather the common prejudice, was that all
the world believed. The flocks still appeared entire
and compact; the Church thoroughly incorporated
S S
626
LITERATURE.
with political institutions; faith was invariably, and
with good right, taken for granted; the clergy seemed
tranquil occupants of a strong position, and of privi-
leges, for the defence of which they would, I imagine,
have made few sacrifices, but against which their
opponents made but feeble efforts. I do earnestly
believe that the change that has supervened, and
that many deplore, is a Divine benediction; and
that if the unbelief that formerly ignored itself is
self-conscious now, if the opposition that kept its
own secret now discovers and declares itself, there
is in this nothing but progress.
It is the duty of some to examine before believing;
it is the duty of others energetically to affirm the
object of their faith. This energy, persistency, earn-
estness, in a word, this authority, do not in the
slightest degree attack liberty; they do but warn and
rouse the conscience; and preaching only infringes
upon liberty when it troubles the soul and convulses
it by its assumptions, and, under cover of the noise
and tumult it has excited, snatches from us an assent
that our soul, touched and attentive but calm and
self-collected, would never have granted.
The most modest of men must know how to sacri-
fice his modesty to the dignity of Truth, and a lofty
tone becomes him when it is for her he is speaking.
But authority is still more essential to Christian
preaching, which speaks on the part of God himself,
and announces the oracles of God. Were we not
to set this seal on our discourses we should wound
ELOQUENCE.
627
simple souls; nay, we should even astonish those who
do not believe our Gospel. They do not share our
point of view, but they perfectly know what it ought
to be; if they permit us to be convinced, they equally
permit us to speak with authority; and by taking
any other tone in their presence we shall only suc-
ceed in scandalising and estranging them still
further.
Those who, in this world of inconstancy and per-
plexity, express themselves upon a serious subject
with conviction and authority, secure to themselves
beforehand a favourable hearing. The first thing
that strikes us in an orator, and wins for him our
attention, is that he draws all his authority from
his message, and not from himself, and that he is as
modest as he is thoroughly convinced.
If authority were all or nearly all in preaching,
preaching would soon reduce itself to nothing.
Experience and argument blend in the pulpit with
authority, not in order to prove the authenticity
of the documents, which is out of the question, nor
to act as an ally to evidence, since the certainty
that springs from this testimony is not a semi-cer-
tainty; but because subjectively, and with regard to
the final end kept in view, no proof suffices in this
sphere unless the testimony of the heart combines
with it, and because the declarations of the Bible are
often only starting-points for the reason.
628
LITERATURE.
2. General Precepts—Familiarity and Prattle.
We fancy that there is no mystery in the action of
soul upon soul by means of speech, because it is a
very ordinary thing; as if what was ordinary were
not often exceedingly mysterious and inscrutable.
The same words act in one way upon this man, in
another way upon that. No doubt the character of
the individual has a great deal to do with it, but
whence comes it that a vehement preacher often
fails to produce any effect, and a feeble one to leave
deep furrows in the souls of those who hear him?
How many who have not been touched by one man's
sermon are so by another's! How often it only de-
pends upon a word whether the listening soul be
converted or not! Is not the dispensation, in virtue
of which one soul, one single soul, may be touched,
while a whole crowd around it remains cold,-is not
this the greatest of mysteries? Yes, preaching is a
mystery, the most profound of all, the one that in-
cludes a multitude of other mysteries. In point of
fact, it is God who preaches, and man is but His
instrument.
Conflict is always found at the bottom of a pas-
tor's work. The high priest is himself the victim,
and it is his own blood that flows on the altar.
It is written in facts as well as in the nature of
things, that the preaching which is not Christian
ELOQUENCE.
629
cannot be eloquent, and that positive faith is alone
competent to give masterpieces to the pulpit.
One would always, if one could, be very eloquent ;
but we must sometimes resign ourselves to the sedate,
humble, and weak. A cold and feeble but sincere
discourse will be more blessed than an eloquent
one which transcends the condition of the hearer.
The Christian idea is beautiful, especially from its
purity: it only tolerates pure ornaments; the style,
which is the man, ought to be converted with the
man, or at all events shortly afterwards.
I am not much more partial to the lustre of
imagery in pulpit discourses than to gold in the
priestly vestments, or luxury in the sanctuary.
Why is it that the plots of modern writers excel
those of the ancients? Because Christianity has
changed our moral point of view, and inspired us
with respect for individuality in ourselves and others.
But could the literary beauty resulting hence be
appreciated or felt by those who had not experienced
the same influence? Would a Greek of the time of
Euripides be aware of it? The beautiful, therefore,
is here only the highest power of the good, and this
superior good is of Christian invention.
One thing has greatly misled pulpit orators,-the
desire, at all risks and in all cases, and continually,
to be orators. In this respect great models have
done them harm. They have not perceived that
these models themselves were only orators on oc-
casion, and sometimes in their own despite. The
630
LITERATURE.
preacher in his own parish is first of all the catechist
or teacher.
Indignation, that anger of the conscience, is as
worthy of the Christian as any other anger is un-
worthy. The love of good, as we have said, implies
the hatred of evil; and if love has its effusions and
transports, why should not hatred as well? How,
indeed, could we excite it if we dared not express it?
Did not the prophets and apostles, did not Jesus
Christ himself, give free scope to the sorrow and
pious wrath with which their soul was filled? It is
with holy anger as with a thunder-clap in a clear
sky, it neither interrupts nor troubles the soul's
serenity; it is not opposed to love; on the contrary,
it would be a want of love not to feel and not to
show it.
The church is a heaven; we enter for a moment
into eternity, to return into time; and of all the
events that go on outside nothing should penetrate
there but one single thing, the truths these events
bring with them.
Grace has not depreciated nature; and because
the heavens do not tell all the glory of God, it does
not follow that they have become dumb on that
great subject.
Nature is an immense parable.
One is no Christian if one does not think one's
religion, if one is not persuaded of it; now both
these conditions are incompatible with a violent and
perturbing eloquence.
ELOQUENCE.
631
The political eloquence of the ancients sought to
disturb, and avowed its aim; preaching, whenever it
curtails our internal liberty, tears its credentials.
It seems to me that religion would appear a far
more real, proximate, and necessary thing if we saw it,
like a pure and Divine blood, throbbing and pulsing
throughout life; and if preaching, after having proved
it to us as rational, made us feel it as living, that is
to say, human.
The traditional form of pulpit discourses, a form
that their aim has never entirely justified, is a com-
plete anachronism now-a-days; and in the midst of
a movement tending to transform the ideal into an
action, there is great impropriety in giving to an
action, the most positive as well as the highest of all,
the false appearance of an idea.
Prattle in the pulpit is always unbecoming, for
there can be no religious prattle; these are terms
that exclude each other.
But the preacher who is not familiar, and who takes
into the pulpit all the proprieties and periphrases
of worldly civility, who maintains his reserve, who
never surrenders himself, is a friend who stretches
out his hand indeed, but it is a gloved hand, in
which we feel no warmth and no life. How then if
care be taken to cover up this hand before stretch-
ing it out to a friend—that is, if the preacher permit
himself less freedom, less spontaneity in the pulpit
than in ordinary meetings even, and in the superfi-
cial intercourse of social life? If we correctly under-
632
LITERATURE.
stand the position of the preacher, invested as he is,
for a short space of time at least, with the freedom of
a father and a brother, his language will be familiar
inasmuch as it will be full, and indeed, made up
of turns, movements, and forms of speech borrowed
from family and friendly relations. This language
will indicate the relation that he feels to exist be-
tween his audience and himself; it will give the
feeling that it is not a new idea, but a common,
actual, and dominant interest that he is discussing
with his hearers; it will draw them nearer to him.
There is no need to distinguish the familiarity we
have in view from an indecent and profane familiar-
ity of another kind; the essential, in and above all
things, is to be animated with Christian feeling; this
feeling at once creates and limits familiarity, which,
if it be truly Christian, will ever be accompanied by
that holy reserve which is never absent from the
freest outpourings of two Christians to one another.
3. Facts and Ideas; two Opposite Excesses-Sermons,
Conferences-Homilies-Eloquence of the Reforma-
tion-The Bible and Pulpit Eloquence.
Preaching has always tended to two opposite
extremes,—to transform itself into the image of the
preacher, or into that of a certain conventional idea.
Both extremes are dangerous, but the second is more
common than the first. The preacher who yields.
himself without any counterpoise to his individual
ELOQUENCE.
633
impressions, the lyrical or contemplative preacher,
if one may venture to call him so, deceives himself
woefully as to his mission. No doubt a man should
be individual; and it is remarkable that he must be
so in order to be universal, that is to say, to speak a
language which reaches the heart of all: but this
rule has its limitations; and he may perhaps be a
poet, but no orator, who knows not how, by coming
out of himself, to place himself in that standpoint
where all human souls re-unite, and form, so to
speak, only one single soul.
The objective element, moreover, has its place, and
a very large place too, in Christian preaching: the
minister of the Gospel announces the Gospel; he has
to relate not his own private history, but the wonders
of God; only he relates these with his own soul; it is
on that soul, as on a living focus, that the rays of
truth fall, to strike thence on other souls; and these
truths, which ought to have become a part of himself,
reach his hearers as an emanation of his being, real
and personal at the same time, objective and subjec-
tive, Divine and human.
This is sufficiently to assert that preaching may
subject itself to no other form than that of the truth
itself, whether external or internal; that it rejects
every other type, that it is bound to nothing conven-
tional or traditional. Preaching does not, like the
preacher, wear a gown and bands; its language is that
of the subjects it treats, and no other. Earnestness,
unction, simplicity, are its forms; it has none more
634
LITERATURE.
special, it has no rites, and nothing obliges the
preacher to make it an additional chant, almost as
invariably noted as the musical one.
Grave subjects, and still more, holy subjects, equally
reject what is too subtle, too pungent, too varied,
too brilliant, and do not permit worldliness to pene-
trate by a thousand allusions (what, in fact, are those
charms of the style in vogue except such allusions?)
into an eloquence devoted to the triumph of the in-
visible over the visible, of eternity over time. It is
from want of study, and perhaps want of imagination,
that an orator goes seeking for beauties outside of his
subject; if this be not the orator's fault, we must
then admit that a subject that reduces him to seek
his resources thus promiscuously was not worthy to
be treated; and one of the most indisputable stigmas
of a degenerate literature is this drawing ornament-
ation not from the substance of the subjects them-
selves, but from without, instead of seeking in one
and the same place, and educing in one gush, both
the force of a discourse and its beauty.
The preacher—or let us say in general the moralist
-may revert directly to things, to facts; may show
them as immediately as he himself has seen them ;
may let them, as it were, speak: but he may also
address himself to the idea that includes or sums
them up; and, by exploring that idea, cause by the
method of deduction all the facts therein contained
to come forth one after the other with their own
form and colour. If it be so that he has not himself
ELOQUENCE.
635
seen them, he trusts to the analysis of the idea giving
him. the mental vision of details with which he has
not come into contact or known by experience.
Now is this method legitimate? is it safe? may we
recommend it to the preacher? Yes, but not ex-
clusively; nothing may compensate for experimenta-
tion; nothing can absolutely supply the place of sight
and life; no speculation can teach by itself the secret
of those true and lively tones, those cries of the soul,
that poignant reality, which strictly belong to ocular
testimony and personal recollections.
I should like to say to the youthful preacher, Above
all, observe, feel, live; seek facts in facts themselves;
be in no hurry to abstract; abstraction itself can
only take a living character, and prove fruitful, where
there are memories, where life has given rise to
thought. But I should, at the same time, be careful
not to exclude the other method, which is powerful,
fertile, and distinguishes all the great works of moral
eloquence. If we must in general have lived with
facts in order to reproduce them with a vivacity
which shall render them present, we must have
meditated upon their idea in order to give them all
their meaning and importance. The philosophy of
morality and of religion is only discoverable in this
way; and this philosophy, be it known, ought to be
offered and taught to all.
I am thoroughly convinced that a great number
of the most energetic passages, the truest, most inti-
mate, and most highly coloured details that we meet
•
.
636
LITERATURE.
with in the works of the greatest preachers, and of
which at first sight we give the credit to immediate
and assiduous observation of real facts, are essentially
the deductions from an idea, vividly seized and ener-
getically examined; I am convinced that without the
aid of this method, those great men would have seen
far fewer things, and that every mind needs the guid-
ance of a general idea to find its way among facts, to
appreciate, and often even to perceive them.
Our pious writings are truer in form, and even in
inspiration, than the majority of our sermons. The
time is come for speaking; we must not obstinately
persist in preaching.
Let Christianity lose nothing of its majesty; in an
age when reverence is dying out, let it remain the
object of the latest reverence, and bring back all the
rest,-reverence for conscience, law, age, weakness, and
misfortune; but in a positive age let it show itself
more positive still, and more real than all besides ;
let its incomparable dignity be relied on to counter-
balance familiarity of expression; and, very far from
fearing that any ridicule will attach to the ingenu-
ous language of nature and the lively colours of
reality, let it be understood that it is permitted to
the pulpit alone to be familiar with impunity, and
that it will never incur ridicule more certainly than
by a ceremonious politeness so unlike the frankness
of the prophets, and an apparatus of forms so different
to the pathetic spontaneity and impetuous logic of
the apostles. Precautions intended to disguise the
ELOQUENCE.
637
true nature of things may suit other eloquences, which
have to conceal I know not what intimate nothing-
ness in their object; but Christianity, all life and all
substance as it is,-only object absolutely solid and
serious of all those that occupy our minds,-Chris-
tianity gains everything by coming forward unveiled.
The infinite prolongs, as it were, each of the
thoughts and affections of the religious man; for him
everything is stamped with the seal of infinity, and
the sentiment of adoration, awakened within him by
a worthy object, pervades all his life and all his elo-
quence by that mysterious savour-for which it would
seem as though religion alone could find a name,
since it is only that of unction that men have ven-
tured to bestow on it.
A good sermon is easier to write than a good
homily.
The sermon is motionless, stationary; it speaks
to men of all times. The lecture is progressive; it
follows the course of ideas, of events, and of centuries.
The lecture is a mode of preaching which extends
to all that stands in any relation whatever to Chris-
tian truth, to all those considerations which may tend
to the establishment or the glory of that truth. It
embraces the whole of apologetics, embraces all the
ideas and all the facts that recommend the Gospel
to humanity. It takes note of different ages; if
it reply to the difficulties that suggest themselves
to every human soul, it has also respect to those diffi-
culties which are peculiar to certain minds, to those
638
LITERATURE.
that result from the actual state of science, or from
political anxieties, or from the general condition of
society.
The lecture is other than the sermon; it differs
from it in that its special aim is instruction, and
that it prescribes to this no other limits than those
of its object, which is, generally speaking, the demon-
stration or the development of the truths of Chris-
tianity.
We must not forget that the Reformation, which
restored and consecrated the principle of religious
individuality, addressed itself nevertheless to the
masses; it aspired from the first to constitute a
people, to organise a State; evangelical in its doc-
trines, it was Jewish or Catholic in its method; and
such as was its method, so too was its preaching.
The Reformer of the sixteenth century did not de-
compose his audience, did not take each individual
apart; he embraced the entire mass, and sought to
push it on all at once towards one same end.
It seems to me that the Bible is the true diapason
of the preacher, to whom it gives out with certainty
the general tone of his discourse; it is in the Bible
that his imagination must steep itself; it is from this
medium that he must issue forth, in order to be strong
with moderation, simple with grandeur, familiar with
nobleness and solemnity. I may remark, in particular,
that it is the Bible which impresses on and preserves
to pulpit discourses that just measure of popularity
which we are constantly exposed, in the present
ELOQUENCE.
639
state of our civilisation, either to fall short of or
exceed.
Nothing is so human as Christianity; no one is
so thoroughly man as the Christian. By inspiring
itself with the Scripture the eloquence of the pulpit
will attain without difficulty to that grandeur blent
with familiarity, that familiarity replete with grandeur,
which ought to be, but has not always been, the in-
imitable seal of preaching.
AUG 2 4 1921
PRINTED BY J. AND W. RIDER, LONDON.
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