Chapter III: Appendix: 371 (1)

LECTURES

ON

THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE GOOD.

DISCOURSE

PRONOUNCED AT THE OPENING OF THE COURSE,

DECEMBER 4, 1817.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Spirit and general principles of the Course.--Object of the
Lectures of this year:--application of the principles of which
an exposition is given, to the three Problems of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good.

It seems natural that a century, in its beginning, should borrow its philosophy from the century that preceded it. But, as free and intelligent beings, we are not born merely to continue our predecessors, but to increase their work, and also to do our own. We cannot accept from them an inheritance except under the condition of improving it. Our first duty is, then, to render to ourselves an account of the philosophy of the eighteenth century; to recognize its character and its principles, the problems which it agitated, and the solutions which it gave of them; to discern, in fine, what it transmits to us of the true and the productive, and what it also leaves of the sterile and the false, in order that, with reflective choice, we may embrace the former and reject the latter.[3] Placed at the entrance of the new times, let us know, first of all, with what views we would occupy ourselves. Moreover,--why should I not say it?--after two years of instruction, in which the professor, in some sort, has been investigating himself, one has a right to demand of him what he is; what are his most general principles on all the essential parts of philosophic science; what flag, in fine, in the midst of parties which contend with each other so violently, he proposes for you, young men, who frequent this auditory, and who are called upon to participate in a destiny still so uncertain and so obscure in the nineteenth century, to follow.

* * * * *

It is not patriotism, it is a profound sentiment of truth and justice, which makes us place the whole philosophy now expanded in the world under the invocation of the name of Descartes. Yes, the whole of modern philosophy is the work of this great man, for it owes to him the spirit that animates it, and the method that constitutes its power.

After the downfall of scholasticism and the mournful disruptures of the sixteenth century, the first object which the bold good sense of Descartes proposed to itself was to make philosophy a human science, like astronomy, physiology, medicine, subject to the same uncertainties and to the same aberrations, but capable also of the same progress.

Descartes encountered the skepticism spread on every side in the train of so many revolutions, ambitious hypotheses, born out of the first use of an ill-regulated liberty, and the old formulas surviving the ruins of scholasticism. In his courageous passion for truth, he resolved to reject, provisorily at least, all the ideas that hitherto he had received without controlling them, firmly decided not to admit any but those which, after a serious examination, might appear to him evident. But he perceived that there was one thing which he could not reject, even provisorily, in his universal doubt,--that thing was the existence itself of his doubt, that is to say, of his thought; for although all the rest might be only an illusion, this fact, that he thought, could not be an illusion. Descartes, therefore, stopped at this fact, of an irresistible evidence, as at the first truth which he could accept without fear. Recognizing at the same time that thought is the necessary instrument of all the investigations which he might propose to himself, as well as the instrument of the human race in the acquisition of its natural knowledges,[4] he devoted himself to a regular study of it, to the analysis of thought as the condition of all legitimate philosophy, and upon this solid foundation he reared a doctrine of a character at once certain and living, capable of resisting skepticism, exempt from hypotheses, and affranchised from the formulas of the schools.

Thus the analysis of thought, and of the mind which is the subject of it, that is to say, psychology, has become the point of departure, the most general principle, the important method of modern philosophy.[5]

Nevertheless, it must indeed be owned, philosophy has not entirely lost, and sometimes still retains, since Descartes and in Descartes himself, its old habits. It rarely belongs to the same man to open and run a career, and usually the inventor succumbs under the weight of his own invention. So Descartes, after having so well placed the point of departure for all philosophical investigation, more than once forgets analysis, and returns, at least in form, to the ancient philosophy.[6] The true method, again, is more than once effaced in the hands of his first successors, under the always increasing influence of the mathematical method.

Two periods may be distinguished in the Cartesian era,--one in which the method, in its newness, is often misconceived; the other, in which one is forced, at least, to re-enter the salutary way opened by Descartes. To the first belong Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz himself; to the second, the philosophers of the eighteenth century.

Without doubt Malebranche, upon some points, descended very far into interior investigation; but most of the time he gave himself up to wander in an imaginary world, and lost sight of the real world. It is not a method that is wanting to Spinoza, but a good method; his error consists in having applied to philosophy the geometrical method, which proceeds by axioms, definitions, theorems, corollaries; no one has made less use of the psychological method; that is the principle and the condemnation of his system. The _Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement Humain_ exhibit Leibnitz opposing observation to observation, analysis to analysis; but his genius usually hovers over science, instead of advancing in it step by step; hence the results at which he arrives are often only brilliant hypotheses, for example, the pre-established harmony, now relegated among the analogous hypotheses of occasional causes and a plastic mediator. In general, the philosophy of the seventeenth century, by not employing with sufficient rigor and firmness the method with which Descartes had armed it, produced little else than systems, ingenious without doubt, bold and profound, but often also rash,--systems that have failed to keep their place in science.[7] In fact, nothing is durable except that which is founded upon a sound method; time destroys all the rest; time, which re-collects, fecundates, aggrandizes the least germs of truth deposited in the humblest analyses, strikes without pity, engulfs hypotheses, even those of genius. Time takes a step, and arbitrary systems are overturned; the statues of their authors alone remain standing over their ruins. The task of the friend of truth is to search for the useful remains of them, that survive and can serve for new and more solid constructions.

The philosophy of the eighteenth century opens the second period of the Cartesian era; it proposed to itself to apply the method already discovered and too much neglected,--it applied itself to the analysis of thought. Disabused of ambitious and sterile attempts, and, like Descartes, disdainful of the past, the eighteenth century dared to think that every thing in philosophy was to be done over again, and that, in order not to wander anew, it was necessary to set out with the modest study of man. Instead, therefore, of building up all at once systems risked upon the universality of things, it undertook to examine what man knows, what he can know; it brought back entire philosophy to the study of our faculties, as physics had just been brought back to the study of the properties of bodies,--which was giving to philosophy, if not its end, at least its true beginning.

The great schools which divide the eighteenth century are the English and French school, the Scotch school, and the German school, that is to say, the school of Locke and Condillac, that of Reid, that of Kant. It is impossible to misconceive the common principle which animates them, the unity of their method. When one examines with impartiality the method of Locke, he sees that it consists in the analysis of thought; and it is thereby that Locke is a disciple, not of Bacon and Hobbes, but of our great countryman, Descartes.[8] To study the human understanding as it is in each one of us, to recognize its powers, and also its limits, is the problem which the English philosopher proposed to himself, and which he attempted to solve. I do not wish to judge here of the solution which he gave of this problem; I limit myself to indicating clearly what was for him the fundamental problem. Condillac, the French disciple of Locke, made himself everywhere the apostle of analysis; and analysis was also in him, or at least should have been, the study of thought. No philosopher, not even Spinoza, has wandered farther than Condillac[9] from the true experimental method, and has strayed farther on the route of abstractions, even verbal abstractions; but, strange enough, no one is severer than he against hypotheses, save that of the statue-man. The author of the _Traite des Sensations_ has very unfaithfully practised analysis; but he speaks of it without cessation. The Scotch school combats Locke and Condillac; it combats them, but with their own arms, with the same method which it pretends to apply better.[10] In Germany, Kant wishes to replace in light and honor the superior element of human consciousness, left in the shade, and decried by the philosophy of his times; and for that end, what does he do? He undertakes a profound examination of the faculty of knowing; the title of his principal work is, _Critique of Pure Reason_;[11] it is a critique, that is to say again, an analysis; the method of Kant is then no other than that of Locke and Reid. Follow it until it reaches the hands of Fichte,[12] the successor of Kant, who died but a few years since; there, again, the analysis of thought is given as the foundation of philosophy. Kant was so firmly established in the subject of knowledge, that he could scarcely go out of it--that, in fact, he never did legitimately go out of it. Fichte plunged into the subject of knowledge so deeply that he buried himself in it, and absorbed in the human _me_ all existences, as well as all sciences--sad shipwreck of analysis, which signalizes at once its greatest effort and its rock!

The same spirit, therefore, governs all the schools of the eighteenth century; this century disdains arbitrary formulas; it has a horror for hypotheses, and attaches itself, or pretends to attach itself, to the observation of facts, and particularly to the analysis of thought.

Let us acknowledge with freedom and with grief, that the eighteenth century applied analysis to all things without pity and without measure. It cited before its tribunal all doctrines, all sciences; neither the metaphysics of the preceding age, with their imposing systems, nor the arts with their prestige, nor the governments with their ancient authority, nor the religions with their majesty,--nothing found favor before it. Although it spied abysses at the bottom of what it called philosophy, it threw itself into them with a courage which is not without grandeur; for the grandeur of man is to prefer what he believes to be truth to himself. The eighteenth century let loose tempests. Humanity no more progressed, except over ruins. The world was again agitated in that state of disorder in which it had already been once seen, at the decline of the ancient beliefs, and before the triumphs of Christianity, when men wandered through all contraries, without power to rest anywhere, given up to every disquietude of spirit, to every misery of heart, fanatical and atheistical, mystical and incredulous, voluptuous and sanguinary.[13] But if the philosophy of the eighteenth century has left us a vacuity for an inheritance, it has also left us an energetic and fecund love of truth. The eighteenth century was the age of criticism and destructions; the nineteenth should be that of intelligent rehabilitations. It belongs to it to find in a profounder analysis of thought the principles of the future, and with so many remains to raise, in fine, an edifice that reason may be able to acknowledge.

A feeble but zealous workman, I come to bring my stone; I come to do my work; I come to extract from the midst of the ruins what has not perished, what cannot perish. This course is at once a return to the past, an effort towards the future. I propose neither to attack nor to defend any of the three great schools that divide the eighteenth century. I will not attempt to perpetuate and envenom the warfare which divides them, complacently designating the differences which separate them, without taking an account of the community of method which unites them. I come, on the contrary, a devoted soldier of philosophy, a common friend of all the schools which it has produced, to offer to all the words of peace.

The unity of modern philosophy, as we have said, resides in its method, that is to say, in the analysis of thought--a method superior to its own results, for it contains in itself the means of repairing the errors that escape it, of indefinitely adding new riches to riches already acquired. The physical sciences themselves have no other unity. The great physicians who have appeared within two centuries, although united amongst themselves by the same point of departure and by the same end, generally accepted, have nevertheless proceeded with independence and in ways often opposite. Time has re-collected in their different theories the part of truth that produced them and sustained them; it has neglected their errors from which they were unable to extricate themselves, and uniting all the discoveries worthy of the name, it has little by little formed of them a vast and harmonious whole. Modern philosophy has also been enriched during the two centuries with a multitude of exact observations, of solid and profound theories, for which it is indebted to the common method. What has hindered her from progressing at an equal pace with the physical sciences whose sister she is? She has been hindered by not understanding better her own interests, by not tolerating diversities that are inevitable, that are even useful, and by not profiting by the truths which all the particular doctrines contain, in order to deduce from them a general doctrine, which is successively and perpetually purified and aggrandized.

Not, indeed, that I would recommend that blind syncretism which destroyed the school of Alexandria, which attempted to bring contrary systems together by force; what I recommend is an enlightened eclecticism, which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence, all schools, borrows from them what they possess of the true, and neglects what in them is false. Since the spirit of party has hitherto succeeded so ill with us, let us try the spirit of conciliation. Human thought is immense. Each school has looked at it only from its own point of view. This point of view is not false, but it is incomplete, and moreover, it is exclusive. It expresses but one side of truth, and rejects all the others. The question is not to decry and recommence the work of our predecessors, but to perfect it in reuniting, and in fortifying by that reunion, all the truths scattered in the different systems which the eighteenth century has transmitted to us.

Such is the principle to which we have been conducted by two years of study upon modern philosophy, from Descartes to our times. This principle, badly disengaged at first, we applied for the first time within the narrowest limits, and only to theories relative to the question of personal existence.[14] We then extended it to a greater number of questions and theories; we touched the principal points of the intellectual and moral order,[15] and at the same time that we were continuing the investigations of our illustrious predecessor, M. Royer-Collard, upon the schools of France, England, and Scotland, we commenced the study new among us, the difficult but interesting and fecund study, of the philosophy of Koenigsberg. We can at the present time, therefore, embrace all the schools of the eighteenth century, and all the problems which they agitated.

Philosophy, in all times, turns upon the fundamental ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good. The idea of the true, philosophically developed, is psychology, logic, metaphysic; the idea of the good is private and public morals; the idea of the beautiful is that science which, in Germany, is called aesthetics, the details of which pertain to the criticism of literature, the criticism of arts, but whose general principles have always occupied a more or less considerable place in the researches, and even in the teaching of philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Hutcheson and Kant.

Upon these essential points which constitute the entire domain of philosophy, we will successively interrogate the principal schools of the eighteenth century.

When we examine them all with attention, we can easily reduce them to two,--one of which, in the analysis of thought, the common subject of all their works, gives to sensation an excessive part; the other of which, in this same analysis, going to the opposite extreme, deduces consciousness almost wholly from a faculty different from that of sensation--reason. The first of these schools is the empirical school, of which the father, or rather the wisest representative, is Locke, and Condillac the extreme representative; the second is the spiritualistic or rationalistic school, as it is called, which reckons among its illustrious interpreters Reid, who is the most irreproachable, and Kant, who is the most systematic. Surely there is truth in these two schools, and truth is a good which must be taken wherever one finds it. We willingly admit, with the empirical school, that the senses have not been given us in vain; that this admirable organization which elevates us above all other animate beings, is a rich and varied instrument, which it would be folly to neglect. We are convinced that the spectacle of the world is a permanent source of sound and sublime instruction. Upon this point neither Aristotle, nor Bacon, nor Locke, has in us an adversary, but a disciple. We acknowledge, or rather we proclaim, that in the analysis of human knowledge, it is necessary to assign to the senses an important part. But when the empirical school pretends that all that passes beyond the reach of the senses is a chimera, then we abandon it, and go over to the opposite school. We profess to believe, for example, that, without an agreeable impression, never should we have conceived the beautiful, and that, notwithstanding, the beautiful is not merely the agreeable; that, thank heaven, happiness is usually added to virtue, but that the idea itself of virtue is essentially different from that of happiness. On this point we are openly of the opinion of Reid and Kant. We have also established, and will again establish, that the reason of man is in possession of principles which sensation precedes but does not explain, and which are directly suggested to us by the power of reason alone. We will follow Kant thus far, but not farther. Far from following him, we will combat him, when, after having victoriously defended the great principles of every kind against empiricism, he strikes them with sterility, in pretending that they have no value beyond the inclosure of the reason which possesses them, condemning also to impotence that same reason which he has just elevated so high, and opening the way to a refined and learned skepticism which, after all, ends at the same abyss with ordinary skepticism.

You perceive that we shall be by turns with Locke, with Reid, and with Kant, in that just and strong measure which is called eclecticism.

Eclecticism is in our eyes the true historical method, and it has for us all the importance of the history of philosophy; but there is something which we place above the history of philosophy, and, consequently, above eclecticism,--philosophy itself.

The history of philosophy does not carry its own light with it, it is not its own end. How could eclecticism, which has no other field than history, be our only, our primary, object?

It is, doubtless, just, it is of the highest utility, to discriminate in each system what there is true in it from what there is false in it; first, in order to appreciate this system rightly; then, in order to render the false of no account, to disengage and re-collect the true, and thus to enrich and aggrandize philosophy by history. But you conceive that we must already know what truth is, in order to recognize it, and to distinguish it from the error with which it is mixed; so that the criticism of systems almost demands a system, so that the history of philosophy is constrained to first borrow from philosophy the light which it must one day return to it with usury.

In fine, the history of philosophy is only a branch, or rather an instrument, of philosophical science. Surely it is the interest which we feel for philosophy that alone attaches us to its history; it is the love of truth which makes us everywhere pursue its vestiges, and interrogate with a passionate curiosity those who before us have also loved and sought truth.

Thus philosophy is at once the supreme object and the torch of the history of philosophy. By this double title it has a right to preside over our instruction.

In regard to this, one word of explanation, I beg you.

He who is speaking before you to-day is, it is true, officially charged only with the course of the history of philosophy; in that is our task, and in that, once more, our guide shall be eclecticism.[16] But, we confess, if philosophy has not the right to present itself here in some sort on the first plan; if it should appear only behind its history, it in reality holds dominion; and to it all our wishes, as well as all our efforts, are related. We hold, doubtless, in great esteem, both Brucker and Tennemann,[17] so wise, so judicious; nevertheless our models, our veritable masters, always present to our thought, are, in antiquity, Plato and Socrates, among the moderns, Descartes, and, why should I hesitate to say it, among us, and in our times, the illustrious man who has been pleased to call us to this chair. M. Royer-Collard was also only a professor of the history of philosophy; but he rightly pretended to have an opinion in philosophy; he served a cause which he has transmitted to us, and we will serve it in our turn.

This great cause is known to you; it is that of a sound and generous philosophy, worthy of our century by the severity of its methods, and answering to the immortal wants of humanity, setting out modestly from psychology, from the humble study of the human mind, in order to elevate itself to the highest regions, and to traverse metaphysics, aesthetics, theodicea, morals, and politics.

Our enterprise is not then simply to renew the history of philosophy by eclecticism; we also wish, we especially wish, and history well understood, thanks to eclecticism, will therein powerfully assist us, to deduce from the study of systems, their strifes, and even their ruins, a system which may be proof against criticism, and which can be accepted by your reason, and also by your heart, noble youth of the nineteenth century!

In order to fulfil this great object, which is our veritable mission to you, we shall dare this year, for the first and for the last time, to go beyond the narrow limits which are imposed upon us. In the history of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, we have resolved to leave a little in the shade the history of philosophy, in order to make philosophy itself appear, and while exhibiting to you the distinctive traits of the principal doctrines of the last century, to expose to you the doctrine which seems to us adapted to the wants and to the spirit of our times, and still, to explain it to you briefly, but in its full extent, instead of dwelling upon some one of its parts, as hitherto we have done. With years we will correct, we will task ourselves to aggrandize and elevate our work. To-day we present it you very imperfect still, but established upon foundations which we believe solid, and already stamped with a character that will not change.

You will here see, then, brought together in a short space, our principles, our processes, our results. We ardently desire to recommend them to you, young men, who are the hope of science as well as of your country. May we at least be able, in the vast career which we have to run, to meet in you the same kindness which hitherto has sustained us.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] We have so much felt the necessity of understanding well the philosophy of the century that ours succeeds, that three times we have undertaken the history of philosophy in the eighteenth century, here first, in 1818, then in 1819 and 1820, and that is the subject of the last three volumes of the 1st Series of our works; finally, we resumed it in 1829, vol. ii. and iii. of the 2d Series.

[4] This word was used by the old English writers, and there is no reason why it should not be retained.

[5] On the method of Descartes, see 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 20; 2d Series, vol. i., lecture 2; vol. ii., lecture 11; 3d Series, vol. iii., _Philosophie Moderne_, as well as _Fragments de Philosophie Cartesienne_; 5th Series, _Instruction Publique_, vol. ii., _Defense de l'Universite et de la Philosophie_, p. 112, etc.

[6] On this return to the scholastic form in Descartes, see 1st Series, vol iv., lecture 12, especially three articles of the _Journal des Savants_, August, September, and October, 1850, in which we have examined anew the principles of Cartesianism, _a propos_ the _Leibnitii Animadversiones ad Cartesii Principia Philosophiae_.

[7] See on Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, 2d Series, vol. ii., lectures 11 and 12; 3d Series, vol. iv., _Introduction aux Oeuvres Philosophiques de M. de Biran_, p. 288; and the _Fragments de Philosophie Cartesienne_, passim.

[8] On Locke, see 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture 1, especially 2d Series, vol. iii., _Examen du Systeme de Locke_.

[9] 1st Series, vol. iii., lectures 2 and 3.

[10] 1st Series, vol. iv., lectures on the Scotch School.

[11] See on Kant and the _Critique of Pure Reason_, vol. v. of the 1st Series, where that great work is examined with as much extent as that of Reid in vol. iv., and the _Essay_ of Locke in vol. iii. of the 2d Series.

[12] On Fichte, 2d Series, vol. i., lecture 12; 3d Series, vol. iv., _Introduction aux Oeuvres de M. de Biran_, p. 324.

[13] We expressed ourselves thus in December, 1817, when, following the great wars of the Revolution, and after the downfall of the empire, the constitutional monarchy, still poorly established, left the future of France and of the world obscure. It is sad to be obliged to hold the same language in 1835, over the ruins accumulated around us.

[14] 1st Series, vol. i., Course of 1816.

[15] _Ibid._, Course of 1817.

[16] On the legitimate employment and the imperative conditions of eclecticism, see 3d Series, _Fragments Philosophiques_, vol. iv., preface of the first edition, p. 41, &c., especially the article entitled _De la Philosophie en Belgique_, pp. 228 and 229.

[17] We have translated his excellent _Manual of the History of Philosophy_. See the second edition, vol. ii., 8vo., 1839.

PART FIRST.

THE TRUE.

LECTURE I.

THE EXISTENCE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.

Two great wants, that of absolute truths, and that of absolute
truths that may not be chimeras. To satisfy these two wants is
the problem of the philosophy of our time.--Universal and
necessary principles.--Examples of different kinds of such
principles.--Distinction between universal and necessary
principles and general principles.--Experience alone is
incapable of explaining universal and necessary principles, and
also incapable of dispensing with them in order to arrive at the
knowledge of the sensible world.--Reason as being that faculty
of ours which discovers to us these principles.--The study of
universal and necessary principles introduces us to the highest
parts of philosophy.

To-day, as in all time, two great wants are felt by man. The first, the most imperious, is that of fixed, immutable principles, which depend upon neither times nor places nor circumstances, and on which the mind reposes with an unbounded confidence. In all investigations, as long as we have seized only isolated, disconnected facts, as long as we have not referred them to a general law, we possess the materials of science, but there is yet no science. Even physics commence only when universal truths appear, to which all the facts of the same order that observation discovers to us in nature may be referred. Plato has said, that there is no science of the transitory.

This is our first need. But there is another, not less legitimate, the need of not being the dupe of chimerical principles, of barren abstractions, of combinations more or less ingenious, but artificial, the need of resting upon reality and life, the need of experience. The physical and natural sciences, whose regular and rapid conquests strike and dazzle the most ignorant, owe their progress to the experimental method. Hence the immense popularity of this method, which is carried to such an extent that one would not now condescend to lend the least attention to a science over which this method should not seem to preside.

To unite observation and reason, not to lose sight of the ideal of science to which man aspires, and to search for it and find it by the route of experience,--such is the problem of philosophy.

Now we address ourselves to your recollections of the last two years:--have we not established, by the severest experimental method, by reflection applied to the study of the human mind, with the deliberation and the rigor which such demonstrations exact,--have we not established that there are in all men, without distinction, in the wise and the ignorant, ideas, notions, beliefs, principles which the most determined skeptic cannot in the slightest degree deny, by which he is unconsciously, and in spite of himself, governed both in his words and actions, and which, by a striking contrast with our other knowledges, are marked with the at once marvellous and incontestable character, that they are encountered in the most common experience, and that, at the same time, instead of being circumscribed within the limits of this experience, they surpass and govern it, universal in the midst of particular phenomena to which they are applied; necessary, although mingled with things contingent; to our eyes infinite and absolute, even while appearing within us in that relative and finite being which we are? It is not an unpremeditated paradox that we present to you; we are only expressing here the result of numerous lectures.[18]

It was not difficult for us to show that there are universal and necessary principles at the head of all sciences.

It is very evident that there are no mathematics without axioms and definitions, that is to say, without absolute principles.

What would logic become, those mathematics of thought, if you should take away from it a certain number of principles, which are a little barbarous, perhaps, in their scholastic form, but must be universal and necessary in order to preside over all reasoning and every demonstration?

Are physics possible, if every phenomenon which begins to appear does not suppose a cause and a law?

Without the principle of final causes, could physiology proceed a single step, render to itself an account of a single organ, or determine a single function?

Is not the principle on which the whole of morals rests, the principle which obligates man to good and lays the foundation of virtue, of the same nature? Does it not extend to all moral beings, without distinction of time and place? Can you conceive of a moral being who does not recognize in the depth of his conscience that reason ought to govern passion, that it is necessary to preserve sworn faith, and, against the most pressing interest, to restore the treasure that has been confided to us?

And these are not mere metaphysical prejudices and formulas of the schools: I appeal to the most vulgar common sense.

If I should say to you that a murder has just been committed, could you not ask me when, where, by whom, wherefore? That is to say, your mind is directed by the universal and necessary principles of time, of space, of cause, and even of final cause.

If I should say to you that love or ambition caused the murder, would you not at the same instant conceive a lover, an ambitious person? This means, again, that there is for you no act without an agent, no quality and phenomenon without a substance, without a real subject.

If I should say to you that the accused pretends that he is not the same person who conceived, willed, and executed this murder, and that, at intervals, his personality has more than once been changed, would you not say he is a fool if he is sincere, and that, although the acts and the incidents have varied, the person and the being have remained the same?

Suppose that the accused should defend himself on this ground, that the murder must serve his interest; that, moreover, the person killed was so unhappy that life was a burden to him; that the state loses nothing, since in place of two worthless citizens it acquires one who becomes useful to it; that, in fine, mankind will not perish by the loss of an individual, &c.; to all these reasonings would you not oppose the very simple response, that this murder, useful perhaps to its author, is not the less unjust, and that, therefore, under no pretext was it permitted?

The same good sense which admits universal and necessary truths, easily distinguishes them from those that are not universal and necessary, and are only general, that is to say, are applied only to a greater or less number of cases.

For example, the following is a very general truth: the day succeeds the night; but is it a universal and necessary truth? Does it extend to all lands? Yes, to all known lands. But does it extend to all possible lands? No; for it is possible to conceive of lands plunged in eternal night, another system of the world being given. The laws of the material world are what they are; they are not necessary. Their Author might have chosen others. With another system of the world one conceives other physics, but we cannot conceive other mathematics and other morals. Thus it is possible to conceive that day and night may not be in the same relation to each as that in which we see them; therefore the truth that day succeeds night is a very general truth, perhaps even a universal truth, but by no means a necessary truth.

Montesquieu has said that liberty is not a fruit of warm climates. I acknowledge, if it is desired, that heat enervates the spirit, and that warm countries maintain free governments with difficulty; but it does not follow that there may be no possible exception to this principle: moreover, there have been exceptions; hence it is not an absolutely universal principle, much less is it a necessary principle. Could you say as much of the principle of cause? Could you in any way conceive, in any time and in any place, a phenomenon which begins to appear without a cause, physical or moral?

And were it possible to reduce universal and necessary principles to general principles, in order to employ and apply these principles thus abased, and to found upon them any reasoning whatever, it would be necessary to admit what is called in logic the principle of contradiction, viz., that a thing cannot at the same time be and not be, in order to maintain the integrity of each part of the reasoning; as well as the principle of sufficient reason, which alone establishes their connection and the legitimacy of the conclusion. Now, these two principles, without which there is no reasoning, are themselves universal and necessary principles; so that the circle is manifest.

Even were we to destroy in thought all existences, save that of a single mind, we should be compelled to place in that mind, in order that it might exercise itself at all--and the mind is such only on the condition that it thinks--several necessary principles; it would be beyond the power of thought to conceive it deprived of the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.

How many times have we demonstrated the vanity of the efforts of the empirical school to disturb the existence or weaken the bearing of universal and necessary principles! Listen to this school: it will say to you that the principle of cause, given by us as universal and necessary, is, after all, only a habit of the mind, which, seeing in nature a fact succeeding another fact, puts between these that connection which we have called the relation of effect to cause. This explanation is nothing but the destruction, not only of the principle of causality, but even of the notion of cause. The senses show me two balls, one of which begins to move, the other of which moves after it. Suppose that this succession is renewed and continues; it will be constancy added to succession; it will by no means be the connection of a causative power with its effect; for example, that which consciousness attests to us is the least effort of volition. Thus a consequent empiricist, like Hume,[19] easily proves that no sensible experience legitimately gives the idea of cause.

What we say of the notion of cause we might say of all notions of the same kind. Let us at least instance those of substance and unity.

The senses perceive only qualities, phenomena. I touch the extension, I see the color, I am sensible of the odor; but do our senses attain the substance that is extended, colored, or odorous? On this point Hume[20] indulges in pleasantries. He asks which one of our senses takes cognizance of substance. What, then, according to him and in the system of empiricism, is the notion of substance? An illusion like the notion of cause.

Neither do the senses give us unity; for unity is identity, is simplicity, and the senses show us every thing in succession and composition. The works of art possess unity only because Art, that is to say, the mind of man puts it there. If we perceive unity in the works of nature, it is not the senses that discover it to us. The arrangement of the different parts of an object may contain unity, but it is a unity of organization, an ideal and moral unity which the mind alone conceives, and which escapes the senses.

If the senses are not able to explain simple notions, much less still are they able to explain the principles in which these notions are met, which are universal and necessary. In fact, the senses clearly perceive such and such facts, but it is impossible for them to embrace what is universal; experience attests what is, it does not reach what cannot but be.

We go farther. Not only is empiricism unable to explain universal and necessary principles; but we maintain that, without these principles, empiricism cannot even account for the knowledge of the sensible world.

Take away the principle of causality, and the human mind is condemned never to go out of itself and its own modifications. All the sensations of hearing, of smell, of taste, of touch, of feeling even, cannot inform you what their cause is, nor whether they have a cause. But give to the human mind the principle of causality, admit that every sensation, as well as every phenomenon, every change, every event, has a cause, as evidently we are not the cause of certain sensations, and that especially these sensations must have a cause, and we are naturally led to recognize for those sensations causes different from ourselves, and that is the first notion of an exterior world. The universal and necessary principle of causality alone gives it and justifies it. Other principles of the same order increase and develop it.

As soon as you know that there are external objects, I ask you whether you do not conceive them in a place that contains them. In order to deny it, it would be necessary to deny that every body is in a place, that is to say, to reject a truth of physics, which is at the same time a principle of metaphysics, as well as an axiom of common sense. But the place that contains a body is often itself a body, which is only more capacious than the first. This new body is in its turn in a place. Is this new place also a body? Then it is contained in another place more extended, and so on; so that it is impossible for you to conceive a body which is not in a place; and you arrive at the conception of a boundless and infinite place, that contains all limited places and all possible bodies: that boundless and infinite place is space.

And I tell you in this nothing that is not very simple. Look. Do you deny that this water is in a vase? Do you deny that this vase is in this hall? Do you deny that this hall is in a larger place, which is in its turn in another larger still? I can thus carry you on to infinite space. If you deny a single one of these propositions, you deny all, the first as well as the last; and if you admit the first, you are forced to admit the last.

It cannot be supposed that sensibility, which is not able to give us even the idea of body, alone elevates us to the idea of space. The intervention of a superior principle is, therefore, here necessary.

As we believe that every body is contained in a place, so we believe that every event happens in time. Can you conceive an event happening, except in some point of duration? This duration is extended and successively increased to your mind's eye, and you end by conceiving it unlimited like space. Deny duration, and you deny all the sciences that measure it, you destroy all the natural beliefs upon which human life reposes. It is hardly necessary to add that sensibility alone no more explains the notion of time than that of space, both of which are nevertheless inherent in the knowledge of the external world.

Empiricism is, therefore, convicted of being unable to dispense with universal and necessary principles, and of being unable to explain them.

Let us pause: either all our preceding works have terminated in nothing but chimeras, or they permit us to consider as a point definitely acquired for science, that there are in the human mind, for whomsoever interrogates it sincerely, principles really stamped with the character of universality and necessity.

After having established and defended the existence of universal and necessary principles, we might investigate and pursue this kind of principles in all the departments of human knowledge, and attempt an exact and rigorous classification; but illustrious examples have taught us to fear to compromise truths of the greatest price by mixing with them conjectures which, in giving brilliancy, perhaps, to the spirit of philosophy, diminish its authority in the eyes of the wise. We, also, following the example of Kant, attempted before you, last year,[21] a classification, even a reduction of universal and necessary principles, and of all the notions that are connected with them. This work has not lost for us its importance, but we will not reproduce it. In the interest of the great cause which we serve, and taking thought here only to establish upon solid foundations the doctrine which is adapted to the French genius in the nineteenth century, we will carefully shun every thing that might seem personal and hazardous; and, instead of examining, criticising,[22] and reconstituting the classification which the philosophy of Koenigsberg has given of universal and necessary principles, we prefer, we find it much more useful, to enable you to penetrate deeper into the nature of these principles, by showing you what faculty of ours it is that discovers them to us, and to which they are related and correspond.

The peculiarity of these principles is, that each one of us in reflection recognizes that he possesses them, but that he is not their author. We conceive them and apply them, we do not constitute them. Let us interrogate our consciousness. Do we refer to ourselves, for example, the definitions of geometry, as we do certain movements of which we feel ourselves to be the cause? If it is I who make these definitions, they are therefore mine, I can unmake them, modify them, change them, even annihilate them. It is certain that I cannot do it. I am not, then, the author of them. It has also been demonstrated that the principles of which we have spoken cannot be derived from sensation, which is variable, limited, incapable of producing and authorizing any thing universal and necessary. I arrive, then, at the following consequence, also necessary:--truth is in me and not by me. As sensibility puts me in relation with the physical world, so another faculty puts me in communication with the truths that depend upon neither the world nor me, and that faculty is reason.

There are in men three general faculties which are always mingled together, and are rarely exercised except simultaneously, but which analysis divides in order to study them better, without misconceiving their reciprocal play, their intimate connection, their indivisible unity. The first of these faculties is activity, voluntary and free activity, in which human personality especially appears, and without which the other faculties would be as if they were not, since we should not exist for ourselves. Let us examine ourselves at the moment when a sensation is produced in us; we shall recognize that there is perception only so far as there is some degree of attention, and that perception ends at the moment when our activity ends. One does not recollect what he did in perfect sleep or in a swoon; because then he had lost voluntary activity, consequently consciousness; consequently, again, memory. Passion often, in depriving us of liberty, deprives us, at the same time, of the consciousness of our actions and of ourselves; then, to use a just and common expression, one knows not what he does. It is by liberty that man is truly man, that he possesses himself and governs himself; without it, he falls again under the yoke of nature; he is, without it, only a more admirable and more beautiful part of nature. But while I am endowed with activity and liberty, I am also passive in other respects; I am subject to the laws of the external world; I suffer and I enjoy without being myself the author of my joys and my sufferings; I feel rising within me needs, desires, passions, which I have not made, which by turns fill my life with happiness and misery. Finally, besides volition and sensibility, man has the faculty of knowing, has understanding, intelligence, reason, the name matters little, by means of which he is elevated to truths of different orders, and among others, to universal and necessary truths, which suppose in reason, attached to its exercise, principles entirely distinct from the impressions of the senses and the resolutions of the will.[23]

Voluntary activity, sensibility, reason, are all equally certain. Consciousness verifies the existence of necessary principles, which direct the reason quite as well as that of sensations and volitions. I call every thing real that falls under observation. I suffer; my suffering is real, inasmuch as I am conscious of it: it is the same with liberty: it is the same with reason and the principles that govern it. We can affirm, then, that the existence of universal and necessary principles rests upon the testimony of observation, and even of the most immediate and surest observation, that of consciousness.

But consciousness is only a witness,--it makes what is appear; it creates nothing. It is not because consciousness announces it to you, that you have produced such or such a movement, that you have experienced such or such an impression. Neither is it because consciousness says to us that reason is constrained to admit such or such a truth, that this truth exists; it is because it exists that it is impossible for reason not to admit it. The truths that reason attains by the aid of universal and necessary principles with which it is provided, are absolute truths; reason does not create them, it discovers them. Reason is not the judge of its own principles, and cannot account for them, for it only judges by them, and they are to it its own laws. Much less does consciousness make these principles, or the truths which they reveal to us; for consciousness has no other office, no other power than in some sort to serve as a mirror for reason. Absolute truths are, therefore, independent of experience and consciousness, and at the same time, they are attested by experience and consciousness. On the one hand, these truths declare themselves in experience; on the other, no experience explains them. Behold how experience and reason differ and agree, and how, by means of experience, we come to find something which surpasses it.

So the philosophy which we teach rests neither upon hypothetical principles, nor upon empirical principles. It is observation itself, but observation applied to the higher portion of our knowledge, which furnishes us with the principles that we seek, with a point of departure at once solid and elevated.[24]

This point of departure we have found, and we do not abandon it. We remain immovably attached to it. The study of universal and necessary principles, considered under their different aspects, and in the great problems which they solve, is almost the whole of philosophy; it fills it, measures it, divides it. If psychology is the regular study of the human mind and its laws, it is evident that that of universal and necessary principles which preside over the exercise of reason, is the especial domain of psychology, which in Germany is called rational psychology, and is very different from empirical psychology. Since logic is the examination of the value and the legitimacy of our different means of knowing, its most important employment must be to estimate the value and the legitimacy of the principles which are the foundations of our most important cognitions. In fine, the meditation of these same principles conducts us to theodicea, and opens to us the sanctuary of philosophy, if we would ascend to their true source, to that sovereign reason which is the first and last explanation of our own.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] 1st Series of our Course, vol. i.

[19] 1st Series, vol. i.

[20] Ibid.

[21] 1st Series, vol. i., Fragments of the Course of 1817.

[22] See that criticism, 1st Series, vol. v., _Kant_, lecture 8.

[23] This classification of the human faculties, save some differences more nominal than real, is now generally adopted, and makes the foundation of the psychology of our times. See our writings, among others, 1st Series, Course of 1816, lectures 23 and 24: _Histoire du moi_; ibid., _Des faits de Conscience_; vol. iii., lecture 3, _Examen de la Theorie des Facultes dans Condillac_; vol. iv., lecture 21, _des Facultes selon Reid_; vol. v., lecture 8, _Examen de la Theorie de Kant_; 3d Series, vol iv., _Preface de la Premiere Edition, Examen des Lecons de M. Laromiguiere, Introduction aux Oeuvres de M. de Biran, etc._

[24] This lecture on the existence of universal and necessary principles, which was easily comprehended, in 1818, by an auditory to which long discussions had already been presented during the two previous years, appearing here without the support of these preliminaries, will not perhaps be entirely satisfactory to the reader. We beseech him to consult carefully the first volume of the 1st Series of our Course, which contains an abridgment, at least, of the numerous lectures of 1816 and 1817, of which this is a _resume_; especially to read in the third, fourth, and fifth volumes of the 1st Series, the developed analyses, in which, under different forms, universal and necessary principles are demonstrated as far as may be, and in the third volume of the 2d Series the lectures devoted to establish against Locke the same principles.

LECTURE II.

ORIGIN OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.