Chapter XI: Appendix: 371 (9)

Do you know a language, a people, which does not possess the word disinterested virtue? Who is especially called an honest man? Is it the skilful calculator, devoting himself to making his own affairs the best possible, or he who, under all circumstances, is disposed to observe justice against his apparent or real interest? Take away the idea that an honest man is capable, to a certain degree, of resisting the attractions of personal interest, and of making some sacrifices for opinion, for propriety, for that which is or appears honest, and you take away the foundation of that title of honest man, even in the most ordinary sense. That disposition to prefer what is good to our pleasure, to our personal utility, in a word, to interest--that disposition more or less strong, more or less constant, more or less tested, measures the different degrees of virtue. A man who carries disinterestedness as far as devotion, is called a hero, let him be concealed in the humblest condition, or placed on a public stage. There is devotedness in obscure as well as in exalted stations. There are heroes of probity, of honor, of loyalty, in the relations of ordinary life, as well as heroes of courage and patriotism in the counsels of peoples and at the head of armies. All these names, with their meaning well recognized, are in all languages, and constitute a certain and universal fact. We may explain this fact, but on one imperative condition, that in explaining we do not destroy it. Now, is the idea and the word disinterestedness explained to us by reducing disinterestedness to interest? This is what common sense invincibly repels.

Poets have no system,--they address themselves to men as they really are, in order to produce in them certain effects. Is it skilful selfishness or disinterested virtue that poets celebrate? Do they demand our applause for the success of fortunate address, or for the voluntary sacrifices of virtue? The poet knows that there is at the foundation of the human soul I know not what marvellous power of disinterestedness and devotedness. In addressing himself to this instinct of the heart, he is sure of awakening a sublime echo, of opening every source of the pathetic.

Consult the annals of the human race, and you will find in them man everywhere, and more and more, claiming his liberty. This word liberty is as old as man himself. What then! Men wish to be free, and man himself should not be free! The word nevertheless exists with the most determined signification. It signifies that man believes himself a free being, not only animated and sensible, but endowed with will, a will that belongs to him, that consequently cannot admit over itself the tyranny of another will which would make, in regard to him, the office of fatality, even were it that of the most beneficent fatality. Do you suppose that the word liberty could ever have been formed, if the thing itself did not exist? None but a free being could possess the idea of liberty. Will it be said that the liberty of man is only an illusion? The wishes of the human race are then the most inexplicable extravagance. In denying the essential distinction between liberty and fatality, we contradict all languages and all received notions; we have, it is true, the advantage of absolving tyrants, but we degrade heroes. They have, then, fought and died for a chimera!

All languages contain the words esteem and contempt. To esteem, to despise,--these are universal expressions, certain phenomena, from which an impartial analysis can draw the highest notions. Can we despise a being who, in his acts, should not be free, a being who should not know the good, and should not feel himself obligated to fulfil it? Suppose that the good is not essentially different from the evil, suppose that there is in the world only interest more or less well understood, that there is no real duty, and that man is not essentially a free being,--it is impossible to explain rationally the word contempt. It is the same with the word esteem.

Esteem is a fact which, faithfully expressed, contains a complete philosophy as solid as generous. Esteem has two certain characters: 1st, It is a disinterested sentiment in the soul of him who feels it; 2d, It is applied only to disinterested acts. We do not esteem at will, and because it is our interest to esteem. Neither do we esteem an action or a person because they have been successful. Success, fortunate calculation, may make us envied; it does not bring esteem, which has another price.

Esteem in a certain degree, and under certain circumstances, is respect,--respect, a holy and sacred word which the most subtile or the loosest analysis will never degrade to expressing a sentiment that is related to ourselves, and is applied to actions crowned by fortune.

Take again these two words, these two facts analogous to the first two, admiration and indignation. Esteem and contempt are rather judgments; indignation and admiration are sentiments, but sentiments that pertain to intelligence and envelop a judgment.[189]

Admiration is an essentially disinterested sentiment. See whether there is any interest in the world that has the power to give you admiration for any thing or any person. If you were interested, you might feign admiration, but you would not feel it. A tyrant with death in his hand, may constrain you to appear to admire, but not to admire in reality. Even affection does not determine admiration; whilst a heroic trait, even in an enemy, compels you to admire.

The phenomenon opposed to admiration is indignation. Indignation is no more anger than admiration is desire. Anger is wholly personal. Indignation is never directly related to us; it may have birth in the midst of circumstances wherein we are engaged, but the foundation and the dominant character of the phenomenon in itself is to be disinterested. Indignation is in its nature generous. If I am a victim of an injustice, I may feel at once anger and indignation, anger against him that injures me, indignation towards him who is unjust to one of his fellow-men. We may be indignant towards ourselves; we are indignant towards every thing that wounds the sentiment of justice. Indignation covers a judgment, the judgment that he who commits such or such an action, whether against us, or even for us, does an action unworthy, contrary to our dignity, to his own dignity, to human dignity. The injury sustained is not the measure of indignation, as the advantage received is not that of admiration. We felicitate ourselves on possessing or having acquired a useful thing; but we never admire, on that account, either ourselves or the thing that we have just acquired. So we repel the stone that wounds us, we do not feel indignant towards it.

Admiration elevates and ennobles the soul. The generous parts of human nature are disengaged and exalted in presence of, and as it were in contact with, the image of the good. This is the reason why admiration is already by itself so beneficent, even should it be deceived in its object. Indignation is the result of these same generous parts of the soul, which, wounded by injustice, are highly roused and protest in the name of offended human dignity.

Look at men in action, and you will see them imposing upon themselves great sacrifices in order to conquer the suffrages of their fellows. The empire of opinion is immense,--vanity alone does not explain it; it doubtless also pertains to vanity, but it has deeper and better roots. We judge that other men are, like us, sensible to good and evil, that they distinguish between virtue and vice, that they are capable of being indignant and admiring, of esteeming and respecting, as well as despising. This power is in us, we have consciousness of it, we know that other men possess it as well as we, and it is this power that frightens us. Opinion is our own consciousness transferred to the public, and there disengaged from all complaisance and armed with an inflexible severity. To the remorse in our own hearts, responds the shame in that second soul which we have made ourselves, and is called public opinion. We must not be astonished at the sweets of popularity. We are more sure of having done well, when to the testimony of our consciousness we are able to join that of the consciousness of our fellow-men. There is only one thing that can sustain us against opinion, and even place us above it: it is the firm and sure testimony of our consciousness, because, in fine, the public and the whole human race are compelled to judge us according to appearance, whilst we judge ourselves infallibly and by the most certain of all knowledge.

Ridicule is the fear of opinion in small things. The force of ridicule is wholly in the supposition that there is a common taste, a common type of what is proper, that directs men in their judgments, and even in their pleasantries, which in their way are also judgments. Without this supposition, ridicule falls of itself, and pleasantry loses its sting. But it is immortal, as well as the distinction between good and evil, between the beautiful and the ugly, between what is proper and what is improper.

When we have not succeeded in any measure undertaken for our interest and prosperity, we experience a sentiment of pain that is called regret. But we do not confound regret with that other sentiment that rises in the soul when we are conscious of having done something morally bad. This sentiment is also a pain, but of quite a different nature,--it is remorse, repentance. That we have lost in play, for example, is disagreeable to us; but if, in gaining, we have the consciousness of having deceived our adversary, we experience a very different sentiment.

We might prolong and vary these examples. We have said enough to be entitled to conclude that human language and the sentiments that it expresses are inexplicable, if we do not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, between virtue and crime, crime founded on interest, virtue founded on disinterestedness.

Disturb this distinction, and you disturb human life and entire society. Permit me to take an extreme, tragic, and terrible example. Here is a man that has just been judged. He has been condemned to death, and is about to be executed--to be deprived of life. And why? Place yourself in the system that does not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, and ponder on what is stupidly atrocious in this act of human justice. What has the condemned done? Evidently a thing indifferent in itself. For if there is no other outward distinction than that of pleasure and pain, I defy any one to qualify any human action, whatever it may be, as criminal, without the most absurd inconsequence. But this thing, indifferent in itself, a certain number of men, called legislators, have declared to be a crime. This purely arbitrary declaration has found no echo in the heart of this man. He has not been able to feel the justice of it, since there is nothing in itself just. He has therefore done, without remorse, what this declaration arbitrarily interdicted. The court proceeds to prove to him that he has not succeeded, but not that he has done contrary to justice, for there is no justice. I maintain that every condemnation, be it to death, or to any punishment whatever, imperatively supposes, in order to be any thing else than a repression of violence by violence, the four following points:--1st, That there is an essential distinction between good and evil, justice and injustice, and that to this distinction is attached, for every intelligent and free being, the obligation of conforming to good and justice; 2d, That man is an intelligent and free being, capable of comprehending this distinction, and the obligation that accompanies it, and of adhering to it naturally, independently of all convention, and every positive law; capable also of resisting the temptations that bear him towards evil and injustice, and of fulfilling the sacred law of natural justice; 3d, That every act contrary to justice deserves to be repressed by force, and even punished in reparation of the fault committed, and independently too of all law and all convention; 4th, That man naturally recognizes the distinction between the merit and demerit of actions, as he recognizes the distinction between the just and the unjust, and knows that every penalty applied to an unjust act is itself most strictly just.

Such are the foundations of that power of judging and punishing which is entire society. Society has not made those principles for its own use; they are much anterior to it, they are contemporaneous with thought and the soul, and upon these rests society, with its laws and its institutions. Laws are legitimate by their relation to these eternal laws. The surest power of institutions resides in the respect that these principles bear with them and extend to every thing that participates in them. Education develops them, it does not create them. They direct the legislator who makes the law, and the judge who applies it. They are present to the accused brought before the tribunal, they inspire every just sentence, they give it authority in the soul of the condemned, and in that of the spectator, and they consecrate the employment of force necessary for his execution. Take away a single one of these principles, and all human justice is overthrown, no longer is there any thing but a mass of arbitrary conventions which no one in conscience is bound to respect, which may be violated without remorse, which are sustained only by the display of extreme punishments. The decisions of such a justice are not true judgments, but acts of force, and civil society is only an arena where men contend with each other without duties and rights, without any other object than that of procuring for themselves the greatest possible amount of enjoyment, of procuring it by conquest and preserving it by force or cunning, save throwing over all that the cloak of hypocritical laws.

It is true, such is the aspect under which skepticism makes us consider society and human justice, driving us through despair to revolt and disorder, and bringing us back through despair again to quite another yoke than that of reason and virtue, to that regulated disorder which is called despotism. The spectacle of human things, viewed coolly, and without the spirit of system, is, thank God, less sombre. Without doubt, society and human justice have still many imperfections which time discovers and corrects; but it may be said, that in general they rest on truth and natural equity. The proof of it is, that society everywhere subsists, and is even developed. Moreover, facts, were they such as the melancholy pen of a Pascal or a Rousseau represent them to be, facts are not all,--before facts is right; and this idea of right alone, if it is real, suffices to overturn an abasing system, and save human dignity. Now, is the idea of right a chimera? I again appeal to languages, to individual consciousness, to the human race,--is it not true that fact is everywhere distinguished from right, fact which too often, perhaps, but not always, as it is said, is opposed to right; and right that subdues and rules fact, or protests against it? What word is it that restrains most in human societies? Is it not that of right? Look for a language that does not contain it. On all sides, society is bristling with rights. There is even a distinction made between natural right and positive right, between what is legal and what is equitable. It is proclaimed that force should be in the service of right, and not right at the mercy of force. The triumphs of force, wherever we perceive them, either under our eyes, or by the aid of history in bygone centuries, or by favor of universal publicity beyond the ocean, and in foreign continents, rouse indignation in the disinterested spectator or reader. On the contrary, he who inscribes on his banner the name of right, by that alone interests us; the cause of right, or what we suppose to be the cause of right, is for us the cause of humanity. It is also a fact, and an incontestable fact, that in the eyes of man fact is not every thing, and that the idea of right is a universal idea, graven in shining and ineffaceable characters, if not in the visible world, at least in that of thought and the soul; concerning that is the question; it is also that which in the long run reforms and governs the other.

Individual consciousness, conceived and transferred to the entire species, is called common sense. It is common sense that has made, that sustains, that develops languages, natural and permanent beliefs, society and its fundamental institutions. Grammarians have not invented languages, nor legislators societies, nor philosophers general beliefs. All these things have not been personally done, but by the whole world,--by the genius of humanity.

Common sense is deposited in its works. All languages, and all human institutions contain the ideas and the sentiments that we have just called to mind and described, and especially the distinction between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between free will and desire, between duty and interest, between virtue and happiness, with the profoundly rooted belief that happiness is a recompense due to virtue, and that crime in itself deserves to be punished, and calls for the reparation of a just suffering.

These things are attested by the words and actions of men. Such are the sincere and impartial, but somewhat confused, somewhat gross notions of common sense.

Here begins the part of philosophy. It has before it two different routes; it can do one of two things: either accept the notions of common sense, elucidate them, thereby develop and increase them, and, by faithfully expressing them, fortify the natural beliefs of humanity; or, preoccupied with such or such a principle, impose it upon the natural data of common sense, admit those that agree with this principle, artificially bend the others to these, or openly deny them; this is what is called making a system.

Philosophic systems are not philosophy; they try to realize the idea of it, as civil institutions try to realize that of justice, as the arts express in their way infinite beauty, as the sciences pursue universal science. Philosophic systems are necessarily very imperfect, otherwise there never would have been two systems in the world. Fortunate are those that go on doing good, that expand in the minds and souls of men, with some innocent errors, the sacred love of the true, the beautiful, and the good! But philosophic systems follow their times much more than they direct them; they receive their spirit from the hands of their age. Transferred to France towards the close of the regency and under the reign of Louis XV., the philosophy of Locke gave birth there to a celebrated school, which for a long time governed and still subsists among us, protected by ancient habits, but in radical opposition to our new institutions and our new wants. Sprung from the bosom of tempests, nourished in the cradle of a revolution, brought up under the bad discipline of the genius of war, the nineteenth century cannot recognize its image and find its instincts in a philosophy born under the influence of the voluptuous refinements of Versailles, admirably fitted for the decrepitude of an arbitrary monarchy, but not for the laborious life of a young liberty surrounded with perils. As for us, after having combated the philosophy of sensation in the metaphysics which it substituted for Cartesianism, and in the deplorable aesthetics, now too accredited, under which succumbed our great national art of the seventeenth century, we do not hesitate to combat it again in the ethics that were its necessary product, the ethics of interest.

The exposition and refutation of these pretended ethics will be the subject of the next lecture.

FOOTNOTES:

[187] See 2d Series, vol. ii., lect. 11 and 12; 4th Series, vol. ii., last pages of _Jacqueline Pascal_, and the _Fragments of the Cartesian Philosophy_, p. 469.

[188] 1st Series, vol. iii., lectures 2 and 3, _Condillac_.

[189] See the Theory of Sentiment, part i., lecture 5.

LECTURE XII.

THE ETHICS OF INTEREST.[190]

Exposition of the doctrine of interest.--What there is of truth
in this doctrine.--Its defects. 1st. It confounds liberty and
desire, and thereby abolishes liberty. 2d. It cannot explain the
fundamental distinction between good and evil. 3d. It cannot
explain obligation and duty. 4th. Nor right. 5th. Nor the
principle of merit and demerit.--Consequences of the ethics of
interest: that they cannot admit a providence, and lead to
despotism.

The philosophy of sensation, setting out from a single fact, agreeable or painful sensation, necessarily arrives in ethics at a single principle,--interest. The whole of the system may be explained as follows:

Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he shuns the one and seeks the other. That is his first instinct, and this instinct will never abandon him. Pleasure may change so far as its object is concerned, and be diversified in a thousand ways: but whatever form it takes,--physical pleasure, intellectual pleasure, moral pleasure, it is always pleasure that man pursues.

The agreeable generalized is the useful; and the greatest possible sum of pleasure, whatever it may be, no longer concentrated within such or such an instant, but distributed over a certain extent of duration, is happiness.[191]

Happiness, like pleasure, is relative to him who experiences it; it is essentially personal. Ourselves, and ourselves alone we love, in loving pleasure and happiness.

Interest is that which prompts us to seek in every thing our pleasure and our happiness.

If happiness is the sole end of life, interest is the sole motive of all our actions.

Man is only sensible to his interest, but he understands it well or ill. Much art is necessary in order to be happy. We are not ready to give ourselves up to all the pleasures that are offered on the highway of life, without examining whether these pleasures do not conceal many a pain. Present pleasure is not every thing,--it is necessary to take thought for the future; it is necessary to know how to renounce joys that may bring regret, and sacrifice pleasure to happiness, that is to say, to pleasure still, but pleasure more enduring and less intoxicating. The pleasures of the body are not the only ones,--there are other pleasures, those of mind, even those of opinion: the sage tempers them by each other.

The ethics of interest are nothing else than the ethics of perfected pleasure, substituting happiness for pleasure, the useful for the agreeable, prudence for passion. It admits, like the human race, the words good and evil, virtue and vice, merit and demerit, punishment and reward, but it explains them in its own way. The good is that which in the eyes of reason is conformed to our true interest; evil is that which is contrary to our true interest. Virtue is that wisdom which knows how to resist the enticement of passions, discerns what is truly useful, and surely proceeds to happiness. Vice is that aberration of mind and character that sacrifices happiness to pleasures without duration or full of dangers. Merit and demerit, punishment and reward, are the consequences of virtue and vice:--for not knowing how to seek happiness by the road of wisdom, we are punished by not attaining it. The ethics of interest do not pretend to destroy any of the duties consecrated by public opinion; it establishes that all are conformed to our personal interest, and it is thereby that they are duties. To do good to men is the surest means of making them do good to us; and it is also the means of acquiring their esteem, their good will, and their sympathy,--always agreeable, and often useful. Disinterestedness itself has its explanation. Doubtless there is no disinterestedness in the vulgar sense of the word, that is to say, a real sacrifice of self, which is absurd, but there is the sacrifice of present interest to future interest, of gross and sensual passion to a nobler and more delicate pleasure. Sometimes one renders to himself a bad account of the pleasure that he pursues, and in fault of seeing clearly into his own heart, invents that chimera of disinterestedness of which human nature is incapable, which it cannot even comprehend.

It will be conceded that this explanation of the ethics of interest is not overcharged, that it is faithful.

We go further,--we acknowledge that these ethics are an extreme, but, up to a certain point, a legitimate reaction against the excessive rigor of stoical ethics, especially ascetic ethics that smother sensibility instead of regulating it, and, in order to save the soul from passions, demands of it a sacrifice of all the passions of nature that resembles a suicide.

Man was not made to be a sublime slave, like Epictetus, employed in supporting bad fortune well without trying to surmount it, nor, like the author of the _Imitation_, the angelic inhabitant of a cloister, calling for death as a fortunate deliverance, and anticipating it, as far as in him lies, by continual penitence and in mute adoration. The love of pleasure, even the passions, have a place among the needs of humanity. Suppress the passions, and it is true there is no more excess; neither is there any mainspring of action,--without winds the vessel no longer proceeds, and soon sinks in the deep. Suppose a being that lacks love of self, the instinct of preservation, the horror of suffering, especially the horror of death, who has neither the love of pleasure nor the love of happiness, in a word, destitute of all personal interest,--such a being will not long resist the innumerable causes of destruction that surround and besiege him; he will not remain a day. Never can a single family, nor the least society be formed or maintained. He who has made man has not confided the care of his work to virtue alone, to devotedness and sublime charity,--he has willed that the duration and development of the race and human society should be placed upon simpler and surer foundations; and this is the reason why he has given to man the love of self, the instinct of preservation, the taste of pleasure and happiness, the passions that animate life, hope and fear, love, ambition, personal interest, in fine, a powerful, permanent, universal motive that urges us on to continually ameliorate our condition upon the earth.

So we do not contest with the ethics of interest the reality of their principle,--we are convinced that this principle exists, that it has a right to be. The only question that we raise is the following:--The principle of interest is true in itself, but are there not other principles quite as true, quite as real? Man seeks pleasure and happiness, but are there not in him other needs, other sentiments as powerful, as vital? The first and universal principle of human life is the need of the individual to preserve himself; but would this principle suffice to support human life and society entire and as we behold it?

Just as the existence of the body does not hinder that of the soul, and reciprocally, so in the ample bosom of humanity and the profound designs of divine Providence, the principles that differ most do not exclude each other.

The philosophy of sensation continually appeals to experience. We also invoke experience; and it is experience that has given us certain facts mentioned in the preceding lecture, which constitute the primary notions of common sense. We admit the facts that serve as a foundation for the system of interest, and reject the system. The facts are true in their proper bearing,--the system is false in attributing to them an excessive, limitless bearing; and it is false again in denying other facts quite as incontestable. A sound philosophy holds for its primary law to collect all real facts and respect the real differences that also distinguish them. What it pursues before all, is not unity, but truth.[192] Now the ethics of interest mutilate truth,--they choose among facts those that agree with them, and reject all the others, which are precisely the very facts of morality. Exclusive and intolerant, they deny what they do not explain,--they form a whole well united, which, as an artificial work, may have its merit, but is broken to pieces as soon as it comes to encounter human nature with its grand parts.

We are about to show that the ethics of interest, an offspring of the philosophy of sensation, are in contradiction with a certain number of phenomena, which human nature presents to whomsoever interrogates it without the spirit of system.

1st. We have established, not in the name of a system, but in the name of the most common experience, that entire humanity believes in the existence, in each of its members, of a certain force, a certain power that is called liberty. Because it believes in liberty in the individual, it desires that this liberty should be respected and protected in society. Liberty is a fact that the consciousness of each of us attests to him, which, moreover, is enveloped in all the moral phenomena that we have signalized, in moral approbation and disapprobation, in esteem and contempt, in admiration and indignation, in merit and demerit, in punishment and reward. We ask the philosophy of sensation and the ethics of interest what they do with this universal phenomena which all the beliefs of humanity suppose, on which entire life, private and public, turns.

Every system of ethics, whatever it may be, which contains, I do not say a rule, but a simple advice, implicitly admits liberty. When the ethics of interest advise a man to sacrifice the agreeable to the useful, it apparently admits that man is free to follow or not to follow this advice. But in philosophy it does not suffice to admit a fact, there must be the right to admit it. Now, most moralists of interest deny the liberty of man, and no one has the right to admit it in a system that derives the entire human soul, all its faculties as well as all its ideas, from sensation alone and its developments.

When an agreeable sensation, after having charmed our soul, quits it and vanishes, the soul experiences a sort of suffering, a want, a need,--it is agitated, disquieted. This disquietude, at first vague and indecisive, is soon determined; it is borne towards the object that has pleased us, whose absence makes us suffer. This movement of the soul, more or less vivid, is desire.

Is there in desire any of the characters of liberty? What is it called to be free? Each one knows that he is free, when he knows that he is master of his action, that he can begin it, arrest it, or continue it as he pleases. We are free, when before acting we have taken the resolution to act, knowing well that we are able to take the opposite resolution. A free act is that of which, by the infallible testimony of my consciousness, I know that I am the cause, for which, therefore, I regard myself as responsible. God, the world, the body, can produce in me a thousand movements; these movements may seem to the eyes of an external observer to be voluntary acts; but any error is impossible to consciousness,--it distinguishes every movement not voluntary, whatever it may be, from a voluntary act.

True activity is voluntary and free activity. Desire is just the opposite. Desire, carried to its culmination, is passion; but language, as well as consciousness, says that man is passive in passion; and the more vivid passion is, the more imperative are its movements, the farther is it from the type of true activity in which the soul possesses and governs itself.

I am no more free in desire than in the sensation that precedes and determines it. If an agreeable object is presented to me, am I able not to be agreeably moved? If it is a painful object, am I able not to be painfully moved? And so, when this agreeable sensation has disappeared, if memory and imagination remind me of it, is it in my power not to suffer from no longer experiencing it, is it in my power not to feel the need of experiencing it again, and to desire more or less ardently the object that alone can appease the disquietude and suffering of my soul?

Observe well what takes place within you in desire; you recognize in it a blind emotion, that, without any deliberation on your part, and without the intervention of your will, rises or falls, increases or diminishes. One does not desire, and cease to desire, according to his will.

Will often combats desire, as it often also yields to it; it is not, therefore, desire. We do not reproach the sensations that objects produce, nor even the desires that these sensations engender; we do reproach ourselves for the consent of the will to these desires, and the acts that follow, for these acts are in our power.

Desire is so little will, that it often abolishes it, and leads man into acts that he does not impute to himself, for they are not voluntary. It is even the refuge of many of the accused; they lay their faults to the violence of desire and passion, which have not left them masters of themselves.

If desire were the basis of will, the stronger the desire the freer we should be. Evidently the contrary is true. As the violence of desire increases, the dominion of man over himself decreases; and as desire is weakened and passion extinguished, man repossesses himself.

I do not say that we have no influence over our desires. That two facts differ, it does not follow that they must be without relation to each other. By removing certain objects, or even by merely diverting our thoughts away from the pleasure that they can give us, we are able, to a certain extent, to turn aside and elude the sensible effects of these objects, and escape the desire which they might excite in us. One may also, by surrounding himself with certain objects, in some sort manage himself, and produce in himself sensations and desires which for that are not more voluntary than would be the impression made upon us by a stone with which we should strike ourselves. By yielding to these desires, we lend them a new force, and we moderate them by a skilful resistance. One even has some power over the organs of the body, and, by applying to them an appropriate regimen, he goes so far as to modify their functions. All this proves that there is in us a power different from the senses and desire, which, without disposing of them, sometimes exercises over them an indirect authority.

Will also directs intelligence, although it is not intelligence. To will and to know are two things essentially different. We do not judge as we will, but according to the necessary laws of the judgment and the understanding. The knowledge of truth is not a resolution of the will. It is not the will that declares, for example, that body is extended, that it is in space, that every phenomenon has a cause, etc. Yet the will has much power over intelligence. It is freely and voluntarily that we work, that we give attention, for a longer or a shorter time, more or less intense, to certain things; consequently, it is the will that develops and increases intelligence, as it might let it languish and become extinguished. It must, then, be avowed that there is in us a supreme power that presides over all our faculties, over intelligence as well as sensibility, which is distinguished from them, and is mingled with them, governs them, or leaves them to their natural development, making appear, even in its absence, the character that belongs to it, since the man that is deprived of it avows that he is no longer master of himself, that he is not himself, so true is it that human personality resides particularly in that prominent power that is called the will.[193]

Singular destiny of that power, so often misconceived, and yet so manifest! Strange confounding of will and desire, wherein the most opposite schools meet each other, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Condillac, the philosophy of the seventeenth century, and that of the eighteenth! One, a despiser of humanity, by an extreme and ill-understood piety, strips man of his own activity, in order to concentrate it in God; the other transfers it to nature. In both man is a mere instrument, nothing else than a mode of God or a product of nature. When desire is once taken as the type of human activity, there is an end of all liberty and personality. A philosophy, less systematic, by conforming itself to facts, carries through common sense to better results. By distinguishing between the passive phenomenon of desire and the power of freely determining self, it restores the true activity that characterizes human personality. The will is the infallible sign and the peculiar power of a real and effective being; for how could he who should be only a mode of another being find in his own borrowed being a power capable of willing and producing acts of which he should feel himself the cause, and the responsible cause?

If the philosophy of sensation, by setting out from passive phenomena, cannot explain true activity, voluntary and free activity, we might regard it as demonstrated that this same philosophy cannot give a true doctrine of morality, for all ethics suppose liberty. In order to impose rules of action on a being, it is necessary that this being should be capable of fulfilling or violating them. What makes the good and evil of an action is not the action itself, but the intention that has determined it. Before every equitable tribunal, the crime is in the intention, and to the intention the punishment is attached. Where, then, liberty is wanting, where there is nothing but desire and passion, not even a shade of morality subsists. But we do not wish to reject, by the previous question, the ethics of sensation. We proceed to examine in itself the principle that they lay down, and to show that from this principle can be deduced neither the idea of good and evil, nor any of the moral ideas that are attached to it.

2d. According to the philosophy of sensation, the good is nothing else than the useful. By substituting the useful for the agreeable, without changing the principle, there has been contrived a convenient refuge against many difficulties; for it will always be possible to distinguish interest well understood from apparent and vulgar interest. But even under this somewhat refined form, the doctrine that we are examining none the less destroys the distinction between good and evil.

If utility is the sole measure of the goodness of actions, I must consider only one thing when an action is proposed to me to do,--what advantages can result from it to me?

So I make the supposition that a friend, whose innocence is known to me, falls into disfavor with a king, or opinion--a mistress more jealous and imperious than all kings,--and that there is danger in remaining faithful to him and advantage in separating myself from him; if, on one side, the danger is certain, and on the other the advantage is infallible, it is clear that I must either abandon my unfortunate friend, or renounce the principle of interest--of interest well understood.

But it will be said to me:--think on the uncertainty of human things; remember that misfortune may also overtake you, and do not abandon your friend, through fear that you may one day be abandoned.

I respond that, at first, it is the future that is uncertain, but the present is certain; if I can reap great and unmistakable advantages from an action, it would be absurd to sacrifice them to the chance of a possible misfortune. Besides, according to my supposition, all the chances of the future are in my favor,--this is the hypothesis that we have made.

Do not speak to me of public opinion. If personal interest is the only rational principle, the public reason must be with me. If it were against me, it would be an objection against the truth of the principle. For how could a true principle, rationally applied, be revolting to the public conscience?

Neither oppose to me remorse. What remorse can I feel for having followed the truth, if the principle of interest is in fact moral truth? On the contrary, I should feel satisfaction on account of it.

The rewards and punishments of another life remain. But how are we to believe in another life, in a system that confines human consciousness within the limits of transformed sensation?

I have, then, no motive to preserve fidelity to a friend. And mankind nevertheless imposes on me this fidelity; and, if I am wanting in it, I am dishonored.

If happiness is the highest aim, good and evil are not in the act itself, but in its happy or unhappy results.

Fontenelle seeing a man led to punishment, said, "There is a man who has calculated badly." Whence it follows that, if this man, in doing what he did, could have escaped punishment, he would have calculated well, and his conduct would have been laudable. The action then becomes good or ill according to the issue. Every act is of itself indifferent, and it is lot that qualifies it.

If the honest is only the useful, the genius of calculation is the highest wisdom; it is even virtue!

But this genius is not within the reach of everybody. It supposes, with long experience of life, a sure insight, capable of discerning all the consequences of actions, a head strong and large enough to embrace and weigh their different chances. The young man, the ignorant, the poor in mind, are not able to distinguish between the good and the evil, the honest and the dishonest. And even in supposing the most consummate prudence, what place remains, in the profound obscurity of human things, for chance and the unforeseen! In truth, in the system of interest well understood, there must be great knowledge in order to be an honest man. Much less is requisite for ordinary virtue, whose motto has always been: Do what you ought, let come what may.[194] But this principle is precisely the opposite of the principle of interest. It is necessary to choose between them. If interest is the only principle avowed by reason, disinterestedness is a lie and madness, and literally an incomprehensible monster in well-ordered human nature.

Nevertheless humanity speaks of disinterestedness, and thereby it does not simply mean that wise selfishness that deprives itself of a pleasure for a surer, more delicate, or more durable pleasure. No one has ever believed that it was the nature or the degree of the pleasure sought that constituted disinterestedness. This name is awarded only to the sacrifice of an interest, whatever it may be, to a motive free from all interest. And the human race, not only thus understands disinterestedness, but it believes that such a disinterestedness exists; it believes the human soul capable of it. It admires the devotedness of Regulus, because it does not see what interest could have impelled that great man to go far from his country to seek, among cruel enemies, a frightful death, when he might have lived tranquil and even honored in the midst of his family and his fellow-citizens.

But glory, it will be said, the passion of glory inspired Regulus; it is, then, interest still that explains the apparent heroism of the old Roman. Admit, then, that this manner of understanding his interest is even ridiculously absurd, and that heroes are very unskilful and inconsistent egoists. Instead of erecting statues, with the deceived human race, to Regulus, d'Assas, and St. Vincent de Paul, true philosophy must send them to the Petites-Maisons, that a good regime may cure them of generosity, charity, and greatness of soul, and restore them to the sane state, the normal state, the state in which man only thinks of himself, and knows no other law, no other principle of action than his interest.

3d. If there is no liberty, if there is no essential distinction between good and evil, if there is only interest well or ill understood, there can be no obligation.

It is at first very evident that obligation supposes a being capable of fulfilling it, that duty is applied only to a free being. Then the nature of obligation is such, that if we are delinquent in fulfilling it, we feel ourselves culpable, whilst if, instead of understanding our interest well, we have understood it ill, there follows only a single thing, that we are unfortunate. Are, then, being culpable and being unfortunate the same thing? These are two ideas radically different. You may advise me to understand my interest well, under penalty of falling into misfortune; you cannot command me to see clearly in regard to my interest under penalty of crime.

Imprudence has never been considered a crime. When it is morally accused, it is much less as being wrong than as attesting vices of the soul, lightness, presumption, feebleness.

As we have said, our true interest is often most difficult of discernment. Obligation is always immediate and manifest. In vain passion and desire combat it; in vain the reasoning that passion trains for its attendance, like a docile slave, tries to smother it under a mass of sophisms: the instinct of conscience, a cry of the soul, an intuition of reason, different from reasoning, is sufficient to repel all sophisms, and make obligation appear.

However pressing may be the solicitations of interest, we may always enter into contest and arrangement with it. There are a thousand ways of being happy. You assure me that, by conducting myself in such a manner, I shall arrive at fortune. Yes, but I love repose more than fortune, and with happiness alone in view, activity is not better than sloth. Nothing is more difficult than to advise any one in regard to his interest, nothing is easier than to advise him in regard to honor.

After all, in practice, the useful is resolved into the agreeable, that is to say, into pleasure. Now, in regard to pleasure, every thing depends on humor and temperament. When there is neither good nor evil in itself, there are no pleasures more or less noble, more or less elevated; there are only pleasures that are more or less agreeable to us. Every thing depends on the nature of each one. This is the reason why interest is so capricious. Each one understands it as it pleases him, because each one is the judge of what pleases him. One is more moved by pleasures of the senses; another by pleasures of mind and heart. To the latter, the passion of glory takes the place of pleasures of the senses; to the former, the pleasure of dominion appears much superior to that of glory. Each man has his own passions, each man, then, has his own way of understanding his interest; and even my interest of to-day is not my interest of to-morrow. The revolutions of health, age, and events greatly modify our tastes, our humors. We are ourselves perpetually changing, and with us change our desires and our interests.

It is not so with obligation. It exists not, or it is absolute. The idea of obligation implies that of something inflexible. That alone is a duty from which one cannot be loosed under any pretext, and is, by the same title, a duty for all. There is one thing before which all the caprices of my mind, of my imagination, of my sensibility must disappear,--the idea of the good with the obligation which it involves. To this supreme command I can oppose neither my humor, nor circumstances, nor even difficulties. This law admits of no delay, no accommodation, no excuse. When it speaks, be it to you or me, in whatever place, under whatever circumstance, in whatever disposition we may be, it only remains for us to obey. We are able not to obey, for we are free; but every disobedience to the law appears to ourselves a fault more or less grave, a bad use of our liberty. And the violated law has its immediate penal sanction in the remorse that it inflicts upon us.

The only penalty that is brought upon us by the counsels of prudence, comprehended more or less well, followed more or less well, is, in the final account, more or less happiness or unhappiness. Now I pray you, am I obligated to be happy? Can obligation depend upon happiness, that is to say, on a thing that it is equally impossible for me to always seek and obtain at will? If I am obligated, it must be in my power to fulfil the obligation imposed. But my liberty has but little power over my happiness, which depends upon a thousand circumstances independent of me, whilst it is all in all in regard to virtue, for virtue is only an employment of liberty. Moreover, happiness is in itself, morally, neither better nor worse than unhappiness. If I understand my interest badly, I am punished for it by regret, not by remorse. Unhappiness can overwhelm me; it does not disgrace me, if it is not the consequence of some vice of the soul.

Not that I would renew stoicism and say to suffering, Thou art no evil. No, I earnestly advise man to escape suffering as much as he can, to understand well his interest, to shun unhappiness and seek happiness. I only wish to establish that happiness is one thing and virtue another, that man necessarily aspires after happiness, but that he is only obligated to virtue, and that consequently, by the side of and above interest well understood is a moral law, that is to say, as consciousness attests, and the whole human race avows, an imperative prescription of which one cannot voluntarily divest himself without crime and shame.

4th. If interest does not account for the idea of duty, by a necessary consequence, it does not more account for that of right; for duty and right reciprocally suppose each other.

Might and right must not be confounded. A being might have immense power, that of the whirlwind, of the thunderbolt, that of one of the forces of nature; if liberty is not joined to it, it is only a fearful and terrible thing, it is not a person,--it may inspire, in the highest degree, fear and hope,--it has no right to respect; one has no duties towards it.

Duty and right are brothers. Their common mother is liberty.

They are born at the same time, are developed and perish together. It might even be said that duty and right make one, and are the same being, having a face on two different sides. What, in fact, is my right to your respect, except the duty you have to respect me, because I am a free being? But you are yourself a free being, and the foundation of my right and your duty becomes for you the foundation of an equal right, and in me of an equal duty.[195]