Chapter VIII: Part II: Society (5)

Man presents characteristics which distinguish him profoundly from the animal races: no one disputes it. He possesses speech; he is capable of religion; he exhibits the varied phenomena of civilization, while the animals succeed one another generations after generations in the unrecorded obscurity of a life for ever the same. Suppose we admit that human phenomena presented themselves at first in a very elementary form; in rudiments of language and rudiments of religion,--although the historical sciences do not quite give this result:--still suppose the case that at a given moment a branch of the monkey species presented the germ, as little developed as you please, but real, of new phenomena. One variety of the monkey species has been endowed with speech, has become religious, capable of civilization, and the other varieties of the species have not offered the same characteristics, although they have had the same number of ages in which to develop themselves. Observe well now my process of reasoning. Remark attentively whether I oppose theories to facts, whether I substitute oratorical declamations for arguments. I grant the hypotheses best calculated, as commonly thought, to contradict my theses. I assume that natural history demonstrates by solid proofs that the first man was carried in the bosom of a monkey; and I ask: What is the circumstance which set apart in the animal species a branch which presented new phenomena? What is the cause? That monkey-author of our race which one day began to speak in the midst of his brother-monkeys, amongst whom thenceforward he had no fellow; that monkey, that stood erect in the sense of his dignity; that, looking up to heaven, said, My God! and that, retiring into himself, said: I!--that monkey which, while the female monkeys continued to give birth to their young, had sons by the partner of his life and pressed them to his heart; that monkey--what shall we say of it? What climate, what soil, what regimen, what food, what heat, what moisture, what drought, what light, what combination of phosphorus, what disengagement of electricity, separated from the animal races, not only man, but human society? humanity with its combats, its falls, its risings again, its sorrows and its joys, its tears and its smiles; humanity with its arts, its sciences, its religion, its history in short, its history and its hopes of immortality? That monkey, what shall we say of it? Do you not see that the breath of the Spirit passed over it, and that God said unto it: Behold, thou art made in mine image: remember now thy Father who is in heaven? Do you not see that though we grant everything to the extreme pretensions of naturalists, the question comes up again whole and entire? When by dint of confusions and sophisms such theorists imagine that they have extinguished the intelligence which radiates from nature, that intelligence again confronts them in man, and there, as in an impregnable fortress, sets all attacks at defiance. Mark then where lies the real problem. Whether the eternal God formed the body of the first man directly from the dust of the earth; or whether, in the slow series of ages, He formed the body of the first man of the dust of the earth, by making it pass through the long series of animality--the question is a grave one, but it is of secondary importance. The first question is to know whether we are merely the ephemeral product of the encounter of atoms, or whether there is in us an essence, a nature, a soul, a reality in short, with which may connect itself another future than the dissolution of the sepulchre; whether there remains another hope than annihilation as the term of our latest sorrows, or, for the aspirants after fame, only that evanescent memory which time bears away with everything beside.

This is the question. Do not allow it to be put out of sight beneath details of physiology and researches of natural history, which can neither settle, nor so much as touch the problem. If therefore you fall in with any one of these philosophers of matter, bid him take this for all your answer: "There is one fact which stands out against your theory and suffices to overthrow it: that fact is--myself!" And since, to have the better of materialism, it is sufficient to understand well what is one thought of the mind, one throb of the spiritual heart, one utterance of the conscience,--add boldly with Corneille's Medea:

I,--I say,--and it is enough.

In fact, nature does not explain man, and to this conclusion has tended all that I have said to you to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[97] _Harmonices mundi, libri quinque._

[98] _Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica._

[99]

The whole universe is full of His magnificence.
May this God be adored and invoked for ever!

[100] _Le Rationalisme_, page 19.

[101] _Force et Matière_, page 262.

[102] _Les Mondes Causeries astronomiques_ by Guillemin; see p. 122 (3rd edition), where Kepler is described as an intelligence "penetrated by a profound faith in nature and exalted by a noble pride." See also pages 327 and 336.

[103] The question discussed in these pages must not be confounded with that of the relations between the science of nature and the documents of revelation. Whether nature can be explained without God is one question. Whether geology is in accordance with the language of the book of Genesis is another question, as regards both its nature and its importance. This latter subject does not come within the scope of these lectures. I will merely call attention to the fact, that if nature and the sacred text are fixed elements, this is not the case with the interpretations of theologians, and the results of geology. It is difficult to pronounce upon the exact relation of two quantities more or less indeterminate.

[104] In the writings of M. de Rougemont, if I am not mistaken.

[105] _Systema naturæ._

[106] Ps. civ. 24.

[107] _Biographie universelle._

[108] _A. P. de Candolle_, by A. de la Rive, pp. 12 and 13.

[109] M. Vaucher's principal title to scientific distinction is his _Histoire des conferves d'eau douce_, Genève, an XI (1803), 4°.

[110] _Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences_ of 20 April, 1863, page 738.

[111] Exeter Hall Lectures--_The Power of God in His Animal Creation_, pamphlet in 12mo. This remarkable lecture contains a twofold protest--against the blindness of those savants who fail to recognize the presence of God in nature; and against the pretensions of those theologians who attack the certain results of the study of nature, relying upon texts more or less accurately interpreted.

[112] _Chemistry applied to Agriculture and to Physiology_ (in German). Seventh edition. Introd. page 69.

[113] Since these words were spoken, M. de la Rive has been named an associated member of the Institute of France (Academy of Sciences), and thus elevated to the first of scientific dignities. It might be shown, I believe, that the greater number of the eight associates of the Academy of Sciences to be found in the world, make profession of their faith in God the Creator, the Almighty and Holy One. The silence which others may have preserved on the subject would, moreover, be no authority for concluding that they do not share in beliefs and sentiments which they have not had the occasion perhaps of publicly expressing.

[114] _On the Origin of Species_, page 81. Fifth edition.

[115] _On the Origin of Species_. The text is--"the _necessary_ series of facts;" but it would be to do the writer wrong to impute to him the idea that observation reveals to us what is _necessary_, in the philosophical import of the word.

[116] _On the Origin of Species._

[117] Caro, _L'Idée de Dieu_, page 47.

[118] _Force et Matière_, page 181.

[119] The Büchner proceeding is found again pretty exactly in _Les Mondes_ of M. Amédée Guillemin. This writer affirms (page 60 of the third edition) that science does not approach metaphysical questions; and asserts in the same page, ten lines further on, that astronomical experience leads our reason to the idea of _the eternity of the universe_. After that, he may laugh, if he will, at _lovers of the absolute_.

[120] See in particular the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, passim.

[121] S'enivrait en marchant du plaisir de la voir.

[122] See the lecture above mentioned.

[123] _Lettres sur les Etats-Unis d'Amérique_, by Lieutenant-Colonel Ferri Pisani, page 400.--Letter of 25 Sept. 1861.

[124] On the origin of species, in the _Archives des sciences de la Bibliothèque universelle_, March, 1860.

[125] Vous coulez des moucherons.

[126] In his _Principes de philosophie zoologique_, a collection of answers made by Geoffroy, in the discussions of the _Académie des Sciences_, in 1830.

[127] Voyons, Messieurs, le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire.

[128]

Sur cent premiers peuples célèbres,
J'ai plongé cent peuples fameux,
Dans un abîme de ténèbres
Où vous disparaîtrez comme eux.
J'ai couvert d'une ombre éternelle
Des astres éteints dans leur cours.
--Ah! par pitié, lui dit ma belle,
Vieillard, épargnez nos amours!

[129] _Esprit des Lois_, Bk. I. chap. 1.

[130] _Leçons sur l'homme_, by Carl Vogt (lectures delivered during the winter of 1862-1863, at Neuchâtel and at Chaux-de-Fonds), 1 vol. 8vo. Paris, 1865.--_L'Homme et le Singe_, by Frédéric de Rougemont, pamphlet, 12mo. Neuchâtel, 1863.

LECTURE V.

_HUMANITY._

(At Geneva, 1st. Dec., 1863.)

GENTLEMEN,

Man has need of God. If he be not fallen into the most abject degradation, he does not succeed in extinguishing the instinct which leads him to inquire after his Creator. A false wisdom labors to still the cravings which the truth alone can satisfy; but false wisdom remains powerless, and betrays itself continually by some outrageous contradiction. Here is a curious example of this:

In a book which was famous in the last century, and which was called the gospel of atheism,[131] the Baron d'Holbach explains as follows the existence of the universe: "The universe, that vast assemblage of all that exists, everywhere presents to our view only matter and motion.--Nature is the grand whole which results from the assemblage of different material substances, from their different combinations, and from the different motions which we see in the universe."[132] Here is a clear doctrine: all that exists, the soul included, is nothing but matter in motion. I pass from the beginning to the end of the work, and I arrive at this conclusion: "O nature! sovereign of all beings! and ye, her adorable daughters, virtue, reason, truth! be ye for ever our sole divinities; to you it is that the incense and the homage of the earth are due."[133] If we try to translate this sort of hymn in accordance with the express definitions of the author, we shall obtain the following result: "O matter in motion! sovereign of all material substances in motion! and ye, virtue, reason, truth, who are various names of matter which moves, be ye the only divinities of that moving matter which is ourselves." Yet this author was no blockhead. What then passed in his mind? He laid down the thesis of materialism: bodies in motion are the only reality. But he is all the while a man. The need for adoration is not destroyed in his soul, and he deceives himself. He defines nature as consisting wholly of matter, and when he sets himself to worship it, he entirely forgets his definition. This is not on his part a piece of philosophical jugglery, but the manifestation of the real condition of our nature, which is always giving the lie, in one direction or another, to erroneous systems. The power of wholly maintaining himself in error has not been granted to man. He who denies God is always deifying something; and all worship which is not that of the Eternal and Infinite Mind is stultified by glaring contradictions. Here is a recent example of this: We were not a little surprised a short time since to see M. Ernest Renan deny clearly enough the immortality of our persons, and, in the opening of the very book in which this negation appears, to find him invoking the soul of his sister at rest with God.[134] Elsewhere, the same writer says that the Infinite Being does not exist, that absolute reason and absolute justice exist only in humanity, and he concludes his exposition of these views by an invocation of the Heavenly Father.[135] The Baron d'Holbach had put eight hundred and thirty-nine pages between his materialistic definition of the universe and his invocation of nature. Now-a-days everything goes faster; and M. Renan places but a few pages of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ between his denial of God and his prayer to the Heavenly Father. With this difference, which is to the advantage of the writer of the eighteenth century, the process is absolutely the same. The philosopher declares God to be an imaginary being, and the future life an illusion; but the man protests, and, by a touching illusion of the heart, the man who in his system of doctrine has neither God nor hope, finds that he has a sister in the realms eternal, and a Father in the heavens. It is impossible not to see, especially in literary works destined to a success of fashion, the seductive influence of art, the precautions of prudence, the concessions made to public opinion; but we cannot wholly explain the incredible contradictions of the Holbachs and Renans, without allowing full weight to that need for God which shows itself even in the farthest wanderings of human thought by sudden and abrupt returns.

The illusion which deifies matter in motion is gross enough. It belongs only to minds which Cicero called, in the aristocratic pride of a Roman gentleman, the plebeians of philosophy.[136] It requires, in fact, no great reflection to understand that truth, beauty, and goodness are neither atoms nor a certain movement of atoms. The attempt, which is to form the subject of our study to-day, that of deifying man, is a far more subtle one. Let us first of all inquire into the origin of the strange worship which humanity accords to itself.

Nature, considered separately from the beings which receive sensible impressions from it, has neither heat nor light. In a world peopled by the blind, light would have no name. If all men were entirely paralyzed as to their sensations, the idea of heat would not exist. Light and heat, regarded as existing in matter itself, without reference to sensitive organizations, are, in the opinion of our natural philosophers, only determinate movements. In the same way, if nature were without any spectator whatever, beauty would not exist; if there were nowhere any intelligence, truth would no longer be. In the same way again, if there were no wills, goodness, which is nothing else than the law of the will, would be a word deprived of all meaning. Beauty expresses the object of the perceptions of the soul. Truth denotes the quality of the judgments of intelligences. Goodness (I speak of moral goodness) expresses a certain direction of the free will. There exists no means of causing to proceed from nature, or from matter, the attributes of the spiritual being. This is only done by imaginary transformations, by a course of arrant juggling. The flame does not feel its own heat, light does not see itself, the planets know nothing of the laws of Kepler. Materialism is the result of a modesty wholly misplaced which leads man to forget himself, in order to attribute gratuitously to nature realities which exist only in spiritual beings connected with nature by a marvellous harmony. In order therefore to account for the universe, we must raise ourselves above the atom in motion, and penetrate into a higher world where truth, beauty, goodness become the objects of thought. Truth, beauty, goodness conduct the mind to God, their eternal source. But there is a philosophy which endeavors to stop midway in the ascent of the Divine ladder, and thinks to satisfy itself in the contemplation of the true, the beautiful, the good, without connecting them with their cause. This philosophy considers the true, the beautiful, the good, as ideas which exist by themselves, without a supreme Spirit of which they are the manifestation. It has received, in consequence, the name of idealism.

To conceive of ideas without a mind, ideas having an existence by themselves, is a thing impossible; such a conception is expressed by words which give back a hollow sound, because they contain nothing. We have already stated this thesis; let us now confirm it by an example. A literary Frenchman, M. Taine, would make us understand in what manner the universe may be explained without reference to God, and by means of a pure idea. Listen well, not to understand, but to make sure that you do not understand: "The universe forms a unique being, indivisible, of which all the beings are members. At the supreme summit of things, at the highest point of the luminous and inaccessible ether, pronounces itself the eternal axiom; and the prolonged resounding of this creative formula composes, by its inexhaustible undulations, the immensity of the universe. Every form, every change, every movement, every idea is one of its acts."[137]

M. Taine is a man of humor, and the burlesque has a place in his philosophical writings; but in the words which I have just read to you he seems to have intended seriously to expound the system which replaces God by an idea. Try now to form a definite conception of this universe composed of the undulations of an axiom. Do you understand how an axiom undulates, and how the heavens and the earth are only the undulations of an axiom? Making all allowance for rhetoric and figures, do you understand what can be the acts of an axiom, and how an axiom _pronounces itself_ without being pronounced? You do not understand it, as neither do I. Such doctrines, then, as we have said, can only be the portion of a small number of thinkers who have lost, by dint of abstraction, the sentiment of reality. The ideas--truth, beauty, good--will only exist for the common order of men, under such a system, in the human mind, where we have cognizance of them; and thenceforward, the ideal, or God, is nothing else than the image of humanity which contemplates itself in a sort of mirage. Thus it is that the adoration of man by man is disengaged from the high theories of idealism. Let us proceed to the examination of this worship, which is cried up now-a-days in divers parts of the intellectual globe.

I open the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, of the 15th February, 1861. As the author of the article I refer to[138] appears to admit "that one assertion is not more true than another opposed to it,"[139] we will not be so simple as to ask whether he adopts the opinions which he propounds. He presents to us, in a rapid sketch, the principal tendencies of the modern mind. The modern mind is here characterized by one of its declared partisans; you will not take therefore for a wicked caricature the picture which he puts before us. Here then are the thoughts of the modern mind: "There is only one infinite, that of our desires and our aspirations, that of our needs and our efforts.[140] The true, the beautiful, the just are perpetually occurring; they are for ever in course of self-formation, because they are nothing else than the human mind, which, in unfolding itself, finds and knows itself again."[141] This is only the French translation of a saying celebrated in Germany: "God is not: He becomes." What we call God is the human mind. What was there at the beginning of things? The human mind, which did not know itself. What will there be in the end? The human mind, which, in unfolding itself, will have come to know itself, and will adore itself as the supreme God. If this be indeed the final object of the universe, it appears that, in the opinion of these philosophers, the consummation of all things must be near. Once that humanity, faithful to their doctrine, shall have pronounced the lofty utterance, "I am God, and there is none else," the world will no longer have any reason for existing.

Such is the system of which we have to follow out the consequences. Let us take as our point of comparison the old ideas which we are urged to abandon.

We usually explain human destinies by the concurrence of two causes, infinitely distinct, since the one is creative and the other created, but both of which we hold for real: man, and God. Humanity has received from its Author the free power which we call will, and the law of that will which we name conscience. The law proceeds from God, the liberty proceeds from God; but the acts of the created will, when it violates its law and revolts against its Author, are the creation of the creature. God is the eternal source of good, and liberty is a good; but God is not the source of evil, which is distinctly a revolt against Him, the abuse of the first of His gifts. Together with will, man has received understanding, and gives himself to the search after truth. Truth is the object of the understanding, its Divine law. Error is a deviation from the law of the understanding, as evil is a deviation from the law of the will. Lastly, with will and understanding, man has received the faculty of feeling. This faculty applies itself to the world of bodies, from which we receive pain or pleasure. But our faculty of feeling does not stop there. Above the animal life, the mind has enjoyments which are proper to it, and the object of which is beauty. Beauty is not only in nature and in works of art, it is everywhere, in whatever attracts our love. The sciences are beautiful, and the harmony of the truths which are discovered in their order and mutual dependence causes us to experience a feeling similar to that produced by the most delightful music. Virtue is beautiful; it shines in the view of the conscience with the purest brightness, and, as was said by one of the ancients, if it could reveal itself to our eyes in a sensible form, it would excite in our souls feelings of inexpressible love. Vice is ugly when once stripped of the delusive fascination of the passions; the vicious excesses of the lower nature are ugly and repulsive as soon as the intoxication is over. Error is ugly too; there are no beautiful errors but those which contain a larger portion of truth than the prosaic verities, which are nothing else than falsehoods put in a specious way. Beauty therefore is the law of our feelings, as truth is the law of our thought, and good the law of our will. We will not inquire now what secret relations shall one day bring together in an indissoluble unity of light, the good, the true, and the beautiful, and in a unity of darkness, evil, deformity, and falsehood. Let it suffice to have pointed out how a threefold aspiration leads man to God, under the guidance of the conscience, the understanding, and the feelings; and that a threefold rebellion estranges him from God, by sinking him into the dark regions of deformity, error, and evil. Humanity has therefore a law; it has been endowed with liberty, but that a liberty of which the legitimate end is determined. It advances towards this end, or it swerves from it. There is a rule above its acts. The thing as it is may not be the thing as it ought to be; rebellion is not obedience, and good is not evil.

All these consequences are included in the idea of creation. The struggle between two opposite principles, a struggle which sums up human destiny, is a fact of which each one of us can easily assure himself in his own person. What will happen when man, sensible of the law of his nature, and conscious of this struggle, proceeds to encounter humanity? Each one of us carries humanity in his own bosom. But humanity, the character of man which is common to us, and which makes the spiritual unity of our species, is found to be altered by the influence of places, times, and circumstances. Our reason is encumbered by prejudices of birth and education, and by such as we have ourselves created in our minds in the exercise of our will. Our sense of beauty is vitiated and narrowed by local influences and habits. Our conscience is likewise subjected to influences which impair its free manifestation. Every one needs to enlarge his horizon. By seeking occasions of intercourse with our fellows, we shall learn to discriminate true and eternal beauty in the diversity of its manifestations; we shall distinguish the truth from the individual prepossessions of our own minds; good and evil, disengaged from the narrownesses of habit, will appear to us in their real and enduring nature. Our taste will be formed, our conscience purified, our mind enlarged; we shall more and more become men, in the high and full acceptation of the term. In order that the meeting together of the individual and of humanity may produce such fruits, God must dwell continually in the sanctuary of the conscience. The inner light is kindled in the intercourse of the soul with its Creator; it is afterwards brightened and nurtured by the soul's intercourse with the traces of God which humanity reveals. But this light makes manifest within us, and without us, great darkness. We have no right to abandon ourselves to every spectacle which strikes our view. If, in presence of what is passing in the world, we are tempted to regard the prosperity of the wicked with cowardly envy; if we would fill up, for the satisfaction of our evil desires, the abyss which separates the holy from the impure, the inner voice lifts itself up and cries to us: "Woe! woe to them who call evil good, and good evil."[142] God is our Master, even as He is our good and our hope. The fact of the revolts of humanity can have no effect against His sovereign will. Soldiers in the service of the Almighty, life is for us a conflict, and duty imposes on us a combat.

Such, Sirs, is the explanation of our destinies, an old, and, if you like, a vulgar one. Let us now give our attention to the doctrine which deifies humanity, and follow out its consequences. Humanity carries within its bosom the idea of truth, the love of beauty, the sense of good. What does it need more? These noble aspirations mark for it the end of its efforts. What will be wanting to a life regulated by duty, enlightened by truth, ennobled by art? What will be wanting to such a life? Nothing, or everything. Nothing, if the search after good, truth, and beauty leads to God. Everything, if it be sought to carry it on without any reference to God, because from the moment that man desires to be the source of light to himself, the light will be changed into darkness, as we said at the beginning of this lecture. Put God out of view, and good, beauty, and truth will disappear; while you will see produced the decline of art, the dissolution of thought in scepticism, the absolute negation of morality. Let us consider with the attention it deserves, and in contemporary examples, this sad and curious spectacle.

I open a treatise by M. Taine. The English historian Macaulay speaks of literary men who "have taken pains to strip vice of its odiousness, to render virtue ridiculous, to rank adultery among the elegant fashions and obligatory achievements of a man of taste." The honest Englishman takes the liberty to judge and to condemn men who have made so pernicious a use of their talents. This pretension to make the conscience speak is in the eyes of the French man of letters a gothic prejudice. Listen how he expresses himself on the subject: "Criticism in France has freer methods.--When we try to give an account of the life, or to describe the character, of a man, we are quite willing to consider him simply as an object of painting or of science.... We do not judge him, we only wish to represent him to the eyes and to set him intelligibly before the reason. We are curious inquirers and nothing more. That Peter or Paul was a knave matters little to us, that was the business of his contemporaries, who suffered from his vices--At this day we are out of his reach, and hatred has disappeared with the danger--I experience neither aversion nor disgust; I have left these feelings at the gate of history, and I taste the very deep and very pure pleasure of seeing a soul act according to a definite law--."[143] You understand, Gentlemen: the distinction between good and evil, as that between error and truth; these are old sandals which must be put off before entering into the temple of history; and the man of the nineteenth century, if he has taste and information, is merely an historian, and nothing more. The sacred emotion which generous actions produce in us, the indignation stirred in us by baseness and cruelty, are childish emotions which are to disappear in order that we may be free to contemplate vice and virtue with a pleasure always equal, very deep, and very pure. We have not here the aberration of a young and ill-regulated mind, but the doctrine of a school. I open again the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and there I encounter the theory of which M. Taine has made the application: "We no longer know anything of morals, but of manners; of principles, but of facts. We explain everything, and, as has been said, the mind ends _by approving of all that it explains_. Modern virtue is summed up in toleration.[144]--Immense novelty! That which is, has for us the right to be.[145]--In the eyes of the modern savant, all is true, all is right in its own place. The place of each thing constitutes its truth."[146]

I cut short the enumeration of these enormities. All rule has disappeared, all morality is destroyed; there is no longer any difference between right and fact, between what is and what ought to be. And what is the real account to give of all this? It is as follows: Humanity is the highest point of the universe; above it there is nothing; humanity is God, if we consent to take that sacred name in a new sense. How then is it to be judged? In the name of what rule? since there is no rule: in the name of what law? since there is no law. All judgment is a personal prejudice, the act of a narrow mind. We do not judge God, we simply recount His dealings; we accept all His acts, and record them with equal veneration. All science is only a history, and the first requisite in a historian is to reduce to silence his conscience and his reason, as sorry and deceitful exhibitions of his petty personality, in order to accept all the acts of the humanity-deity, and establish their mutual connection. The deification of the human mind is the justification of all its acts, and, by a direct consequence, the annihilation of all morality. Let us look more in detail at the origin and development of these notions.

The individual placing himself before humanity is to accept everything: this is the disposition recommended to us, in the name of the modern mind. Good and evil are narrow measures which minds behind the age persist, ridiculously enough, in wishing to apply to things. "We no longer transform the world to our image by bringing it to our standard; _on the contrary, we allow ourselves to be modified and fashioned by it_."[147] The individual goes therefore to meet humanity without any inner rule: he gives himself up, he abandons himself to the spectacle of facts. But the world is large, and history is long. Even those who spend their whole life in nothing else than in satisfying their curiosity, cannot see and know everything. To what then shall be directed that vague look, equally attracted to all points for want of any fixed rule? At what shall it stop? It will rest on that which shines most brilliantly, like a moth attracted by light. Now, nothing shines more brightly than success; nothing more solicits the attention. The glorification of success is the first and most infallible consequence of moral indifference. In leaving ourselves to be fashioned by the world instead of bringing it to our standard, we shall begin by according our esteem to victory. This philosophy is come to us from Germany. It was set forth on one occasion, in France, with great _éclat_, by the brilliant eloquence of a man who has rendered signal services to philosophy, and whose entire works must not be judged of by the single particular which I am about to mention. In the year 1829, M. Cousin was developing at the Sorbonne the meaning of these verses of La Fontaine, which introduce the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb:

La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure:
Je vais le montrer tout à l'heure.

He had written as the programme of one of his lectures: _Morality of Victory_. Now see how he justified this surprising title: "I have absolved victory as necessary and useful; I now undertake to absolve it as just in the strictest sense of the word. Men do not usually see in success anything else than the triumph of strength, and an honorable sympathy draws us to the side of the vanquished; I hope I have shown that since there must always be a vanquished side, and since the vanquished side is always that which ought to be so, to accuse the conqueror is to take part against humanity, and to complain of the progress of civilization. We must go farther; we must prove that the vanquished deserved to be so, that the conqueror not only serves the interests of civilization, but that he is better, more moral than the vanquished, and that it is on that account he is the conqueror.... It is time that the philosophy of history should place at its feet the declamations of philanthropy."[148]

These words are worth considering. When Brennus the Gaul was having the gold weighed which he exacted from the vanquished Romans, he threw his heavy sword into the balance, exclaiming, _Væ Victis!_ Woe to the conquered! He simply meant to say that he was the stronger, and did not foresee that a Gaul of the nineteenth century, availing himself of the labors of learned Germany, would demonstrate that being the stronger he was on that very account the more just. But we must not wander too far from our subject.

When the spectacle of the world is freely indulged in without any application to it of the measure of the conscience, what first strikes the view is success. It is necessary therefore to begin with rendering glory to success by declaring victory good. Now, mark well here the conflict of the old notions with the so-called modern mind. From the old point of view, victory in the issue belongs to good, because while man is tossed in strife and tumult, God is leading him on; but the success of good is realized by conflict, and the victory is often reached only after a long series of defeats. There are bad triumphs and impious successes. What is proposed to us is, to put aside the rule of our own judgments, and to declare that victory is good in itself. The old point of view, that of the conscience, does not surrender without an energetic resistance; and that resistance shows itself in the very words of M. Cousin. His thesis is, that all victory is just. His intention is therefore to _approve_ victory. Why does he say _absolve_? it is the term which he employs. Since the matter in question is to absolve victory, it is placed on trial. It is accused of being, like fortune and fame, at one time on the side of good and justice, at another on the side of injustice and evil. Which then is the party accused? Victory. Who is the advocate? An eloquent professor. Who finally is the accuser? Do you not see? It is the human conscience; the conscience which protests in the soul of the orator against the theory of which he is enamoured, and which forces him to say _absolve_ when he should say _glorify_. And in fact the choice must be made: either to glorify victory, by treading under foot that narrow conscience which sometimes ranks itself with Cato on the side of the vanquished; or to glorify conscience by impeaching the victories which outrage it.

It is not sufficient, however, to sacrifice the conscience in order to rescue from embarrassment the philosophy of success. It strikes on other rocks also. The same causes are by turns victorious and vanquished, and it is hard to make men understand that, in conflicts in which their dearest affections are engaged, they must beforehand, and in all cases, take part with the strongest. It will be in vain for the philosopher to say that the Swiss of Morgarten were right, for that they beat the Austrians; but that the heroes of Rotenthurm were greatly in the wrong, because, crushed without being vanquished, they were obliged to yield to numbers, and leave at last their country's soil to be trodden by the stranger;--the children of old Switzerland will find it hard to admit this doctrine. Even in France, in that nation so accustomed to encircle its soldiers' brows with laurel, this difficulty has risen up in the way of M. Cousin. Béranger, when asked for a souvenir of Waterloo,

Replied, with drooping eyelid, tear-bedewed:
Never that name shall sadden verse of mine.[149]

But philosophy would be worth little if it had not at its disposal more extensive resources than those of a song-writer. M. Cousin therefore looked the difficulty in the face. Victory is always good. But how shall young Frenchmen be made to hear this with regard to that signal defeat of the armies of France? Listen: "It is not populations which appear on battle-fields, but ideas and causes. So at Leipzig and at Waterloo two causes came to the encounter, the cause of paternal monarchy and that of military democracy. Which of them carried the day, Gentlemen? Neither the one nor the other. Who was the conqueror and who the conquered at Waterloo? Gentlemen, there were none conquered. (_Applause._) No, I protest that there were none: the only conquerors were European civilization and the map. (_Unanimous and prolonged applause._)"[150]

To make the youth of Paris applaud at the remembrance of Waterloo is perhaps one of the most brilliant triumphs of eloquence which the annals of history record. But this rhetorical success is not a triumph of truth. There were those who were conquered at Waterloo; and, to judge by what has been going on for some time past in Europe, it would seem that those who were conquered are bent on taking their revenge. We may infer from these facts that all triumphs are not good, since truth may be for a moment overcome by a false philosophy tricked out in the deceitful adornments of eloquence.

But let us admit, whatever our opinion on the subject, that the Waterloo rock has been passed successfully; we have not yet pointed out the main difficulty which rises up in the way of this system. If victory is good, it seems at first sight that defeat is bad. But defeat is the necessary condition of victory; and being the condition of good, it seems therefore that it also is good; and the mind comes logically to this conclusion: "Victory is good;--defeat is good, since it is the condition of victory;--all is good." We set out with the glorification of victory, and, lo! we are arrived at the glorification of fact. All that is, has the right to be; in the eyes of the modern savant whatever is, is right. M. Cousin laid down the principle; he laid it down in a general manner in his philosophical eclecticism, of which it was easy to make use, as has in fact been done, in a sense contrary to his real intentions. Our young critics, wasting an inheritance of which they do not appear always to recognize the origin, are doing nothing else, very often, than catching as they die away the last vibrations of that surpassing eloquence.

In the eyes of the modern savant, everything is right and good: such is the axiom for which the labors of more than one modern historian had prepared us. We are to seek for the relation of facts one to another, that is to explain; and all that we explain, we must approve. Let us follow out this thought in a few examples.

It was necessary that Louis XVI should be beheaded and the guillotine permanently set up, in order to manifest the result of the disorders of Louis XIV, of the shameful excesses of Louis XV, and of the licentious immorality of French society. It was necessary for Louis XIV to be an adulterer, Louis XV a debauchee, the clergy corrupt, and the nobility depraved, to bring about the shocks of the revolution. The facts mutually correspond; I explain, and I approve. In the eyes of the modern savant everything is right.

It was necessary that Buonaparte should throw the _Corps législatif_ out of the window, that he should let loose his armies upon Europe, and leave thousands of dead bodies in the snows of Russia, in order to end the revolution, and extinguish the restless ardor of the French. It needed the massacres of September, the gloomy days of the Terror, the anarchy of the period of the Directory, to throw dismayed France into the arms of the crowned soldier who was to carry to so high a pitch her glory and her influence. The facts correspond; I explain, and I approve. In the eyes of the modern savant, everything is right.

I consider the character of Nero. I take him at the commencement of his reign, when, being forced to sign the death-warrant of a criminal, he exclaimed--"Would I were unable to write!" And then again I regard him after he has perpetrated acts such that to apply his name in future ages to the cruellest of tyrants shall appear to them a cruel injury. What has taken place in the interval? The development of his natural character, Agrippina, Narcissus ... I understand the play of all the springs which have made a monster. As I am out of his clutches, my detestation vanishes with the danger. "I taste the very deep and very pure pleasure of seeing a mind act according to a definite law." I understand, I explain, I approve. In the eyes of the modern savant, everything is right.

It would be impossible, Gentlemen, to pursue this reasoning to its extreme limits without offending against the commonest decency. We should have to descend into blood and mire, continuing to declare the while that everything is right. I pause therefore, and leave the rest to your imaginations. Open the most dismal pages of history. Choose out the acts which inspire the most vivid horror and disgust, the blackest examples of ingratitude, the meanest instances of cowardice, the cases of most refined cruelty, and the most hideous debaucheries: thence let your thoughts pass to facts which bedew the eyelid with the tear of tenderest emotion, to the cases of most heroic self-devotion, to sacrifices the most humble in their greatness; and then try to apply the rule of the modern savant, and to say that all this is equally right and good, and that whatever is has the right to be. Open the book of your own heart. Think of one of those base temptations which assault the best of us, one of those thoughts which raise a blush in solitude; then think of the best, the purest, the most disinterested of the feelings which have ever been given to your soul; and try again to apply the rule of the modern savant, and to affirm that all this is equally good, and that all that is has the right to be. I know very well that in general these doctrines are applied to things looked at in the mass, and to the far-off past of history; but this is a poor subterfuge for the defenders of these monstrous theses. Things viewed in the mass are only the assemblage of things viewed in detail. If the distinction of good and evil do not exist for general facts, how should it exist for particular facts? And how can we apply to the past a rule which we refuse to apply to the present, seeing that the present is nothing else than the past of the future, and that the facts of our own time are matter for history to our posterity? These, I repeat, are but vain subterfuges. If humanity is always adorable, it is so in the faults of the meanest of men as in the splendid sins of the magnates of the earth; it is so to-day as it was thirty centuries ago; the god in growing old does not cease to be the same.

When the mind is engaged in these pernicious ways, the spring of the moral life is broken, and the practical consequence is not long in appearing. The philosophers of success, having become the philosophers of the _fait accompli_, accept all and endure all; but in another sense than that in which charity accepts all, that it may transform all by the power of love. It is the morality of Philinte:

I take men quietly, and as they are:
And what they do I train my soul to bear.[151]

These instructions are not very necessary. There will always be people enough found ready to applaud victory, and to fall in with the _fait accompli_. But is it not sad to see men of mind, men of heart too, perhaps, making themselves the theorists of baseness, and the philosophers of cowardice?

There is still more to be said. From the glorification of success the mind passes necessarily, as we have just seen, to the glorification alike of all that is. It would appear at first sight that the adept in the doctrine must find himself in a condition of indifference with regard to what prejudiced men continue to call good and evil. This indifference however is only apparent. When it is granted that nothing is evil, the part of good disappears in the end. There had been formed in ancient Rome, under pretence of religion, a secret society, which had as its fundamental dogma the aphorism that _nothing is evil_.[152] The members of the society did not practise good and evil, it appears, with equal indifference, for the magistrates of the republic took alarm, and smothered, by a free employment of death and imprisonment, a focus of murders, violations, false witness, and forged signatures. This fact reveals, with ominous clearness, a movement of thought on the nature of which it is easy to speculate.

When man casts a vague glance over the world, extinguishing the while the inner light of conscience; when he resigns himself to the things he contemplates without applying to them any standard, what first strikes his attention, as we have said before, is success. And what next? Scandal. Nothing comes more into view than scandal. In a vast city, thousands of young men gain their livelihood laboriously, and devote themselves to the good of their families: no one speaks of them. A libertine loses other men's money at play, and blows out his brains: all the city knows it. Honest women live in retirement; the king's mistresses form the subject of general conversation. Crime and baseness hide themselves; but up to the limits of what the world calls infamy, evil delights in putting itself forward, because _éclat_ and noise supply the means of deadening the conscience; while, as regards the grand instincts of charity, it has been well said that--"the obscure acts of devotedness are the most magnificent." The poor and wretched shed tears in obscurity over benefits done secretly, while folly loves to display its glittering spangles, and shakes its bells in the public squares. There is in each one of us more evil than we think; but there is in the world more good than is commonly known. There are concealed virtues which only show themselves to the eye of the faith which looks for them, and of the attention which discovers them. Bethink you, especially, how the laws of morality set at defiance appear again triumphant in the sorrows of repentance; those laws have their hour, and that hour is usually a silent one. Let a poet of genius defile his works by the impure traces of a life spent in dissipation, and his brow shall shine in the sight of all with the twofold splendor of success and of scandal. But if, stretched on a bed of pain, he renders a tardy but sincere homage to the law which he has violated, to the truth which he has ignored, his voice will often be confined to the sick chamber; his companions in debauchery and infidelity will mount guard perhaps around his dwelling, in order to prevent the public from learning that their friend is a _defaulter_. The ball and the theatre make a noise and attract observation; but men turn their eyes from hospitals, those abodes in which, in the silence of sickness, or amidst the dull cries of pain, there germinate so many seeds of immortality. Yes, Sirs, evil is more apparent than good. The violations of the divine law have more _éclat_ than penitence. And what is the consequence? The man who abandons himself to the spectacle of the world, and who takes that spectacle for the rule of his thoughts, will see the world under a false aspect, and, in his estimation, evil will have more advantage over good than it has in reality. It will appear to him altogether dominant, and will thenceforward become his rule. From the glorification of success, we passed to the glorification of fact; from the glorification of fact, we arrive at last at the glorification of evil. We have seen how is illustrated the morality of victory. In the same current of ideas, a book famous now-a-days, and quite full of outrages to the conscience, supplies us with illustrations of the morality of falsehood. M. Ernest Renan, in his explanation of Christianity, has applied, point after point, the theory which I have just set forth to you. In order to estimate the grand movements of the human mind, he frees himself from the vulgar prejudices which make up the ordinary morals, and abandons himself to the impression of the spectacle which he contemplates. Jesus had a success without parallel. This success was based on charlatanism; and it is habitually so. To lead the nations by deceiving them is the lesson of history, and the good rule to follow. We find falsehood fortunate as matter of fact, we explain it, we approve it.

Whither then are we bound, under the guidance of modern science? An irresistible current is drawing us on, and causing us to leave the morals of Philinthe in our rear. We are coming to those which Racine has engraven in immortal traits in the person of Mathan. When once conscience is put aside, all means are good in order to succeed; and the experience of the world teaches us that, to succeed, the worst means are often the best.

It is not only at the theatre that such lessons are received; they come out but too commonly from the ordinary dealings of life. Set a young man face to face with the world as it exhibits itself, and tell him to give himself up to what he sees, to let himself be fashioned by life. He will soon come to know that strict probity is a virtue of the olden times, chastity a fantastic excellence, and conscientious scruples an honorable simplicity. Evil will become in his eyes the ordinary rule of life. When the socialist Proudhon wrote that celebrated sentence, "Property is robbery," there arose an immense outcry. Ought there not to arise a louder outcry around a theory which arrives by a fatal necessity at this consequence: "Evil is good"?