The doctrine, its pretensions, and its character.—A newauthority for Reason in the regulation of human affairs.—Government thus far traditional.
OUT of the scientific acquisitions thus set forth, elaborated by the spirit we have just described, is born a doctrine, seemingly a revelation, and which, under this title, was to claim the government of human affairs. On the approach of 1789 it is generally admitted that man is living in "a century of light," in "the age of Reason;" that, previously, the human species was in its infancy and that now it has attained to its "majority." Truth, finally, is made manifest and, for the first time, its reign on earth is apparent. The right is supreme because it is truth itself. It must direct all things because through its nature it is universal. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, in these two articles of faith, resembles a religion, the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, and Islam in the seventh century. We see the same outburst of faith, hope and enthusiasm, the same spirit of propaganda and of dominion, the same rigidity and intolerance, the same ambition to recast man and to remodel human life according to a preconceived type. The new doctrine is also to have its scholars, its dogmas, its popular catechism, its fanatics, its inquisitors and its martyrs. It is to speak as loudly as those preceding it, as a legitimate authority to which dictatorship belongs by right of birth, and against which rebellion is criminal or insane. It differs, however, from the preceding religions in this respect, that instead of imposing itself in the name of God, it imposes itself in the name of Reason.
The authority, indeed, was a new one. Up to this time, in the control of human actions and opinions, Reason had played but a small and subordinate part. Both the motive and its direction were obtained elsewhere; faith and obedience were an inheritance; a man was a Christian and a subject because he was born Christian and subject.—Surrounding the nascent philosophy and the Reason which enters upon its great investigation, is a system of recognized laws, an established power, a reigning religion; all the stones of this structure hold together and each story is supported by a preceding story. But what does the common cement consist of, and where is the basic foundation?—Who sanctions all these civil regulations which control marriages, testaments, inheritances, contracts, property and persons, these fanciful and often contradictory regulations? In the first place immemorial custom, varying according to the province, according to the title to the soil, according to the quality and condition of the person; and next, the will of the king who caused the custom to be inscribed and who sanctioned it.—Who authorizes this will, this sovereignty of the prince, this first of public obligations? In the first place, eight centuries of possession, a hereditary right similar to that by which each one enjoys his own field and domain, a property established in a family and transmitted from one eldest son to another, from the first founder of the State to his last living successor; and, in addition to this, a religion directing men to submit to the constituted powers.—And who, finally, authorizes this religion? At first, eighteen centuries of tradition, the immense series of anterior and concordant proofs, the steady belief of sixty preceding generations; and after this, at the beginning of it, the presence and teachings of Christ, then, farther back, the creation of the world, the command and the voice of God.—Thus, throughout the moral and social order of things the past justifies the present; antiquity provides its title, and if beneath all these supports which age has consolidated, the deep primitive rock is sought for in subterranean depths, we find it in the divine will.—During the whole of the seventeenth century this theory still absorbs all souls in the shape of a fixed habit and of inward respect; it is not open to question. It is regarded in the same light as the heart of the living body; whoever would lay his hand upon it would instantly draw back, moved by a vague sentiment of its ceasing to beat in case it were touched. The most independent, with Descartes at the head, "would be grieved" at being confounded with those chimerical speculators who, instead of pursuing the beaten track of custom, dart blindly forward "in a direct line across mountains and over precipices." In subjecting their belief to systematic investigation not only do they leave out and set apart "the truths of faith,"3301but again the dogma they think they have thrown out remains in their mind latent and active, to guide them on unconsciously and to convert their philosophy into a preparation for, or a confirmation of, Christianity.3302—Summing it all up, faith, the performance of religious duties, with religious and political institutions, are at base of all thought of the seventeenth century. Reason, whether she admits it or is ignorant of it, is only a subaltern, an oratorical agency, a setter-in-motion, forced by religion and the monarchy to labor in their behalf. With the exception of La Fontaine, whom I regard as unique in this as in other matters, the greatest and most independent, Pascal, Descartes, Bossuet, La Bruyère, borrows from the established society their basic concepts of nature, man, society, law and government.3303So long as Reason is limited to this function its work is that of a councilor of State, an extra preacher dispatched by its superiors on a missionary tour in the departments of philosophy and of literature. Far from proving destructive it consolidates; in fact, even down to the Regency, its chief employment is to produce good Christians and loyal subjects.
But now the roles are reversed; tradition descends from the upper to the lower ranks, while Reason ascends from the latter to the former.—On the one hand religion and monarchy, through their excesses and misdeeds under Louis XIV, and their laxity and incompetence under Louis XV, demolish piece by piece the basis of hereditary reverence and filial obedience so long serving them as a foundation, and which maintained them aloft above all dispute and free of investigation; hence the authority of tradition insensibly declines and disappears. On the other hand science, through its imposing and multiplied discoveries, erects piece by piece a basis of universal trust and deference, raising itself up from an interesting subject of curiosity to the rank of a public power; hence the authority of Reason augments and occupies its place.—A time comes when, the latter authority having dispossessed the former, the fundamental ideas tradition had reserved to itself fall into the grasp of Reason. Investigation penetrates into the forbidden sanctuary. Instead of deference there is verification, and religion, the state, the law, custom, all the organs, in short, of moral and practical life, become subject to analysis, to be preserved, restored or replaced, according to the prescriptions of the new doctrine.
Origin, nature and value of hereditary prejudice.—How farcustom, religion and government are legitimate.
Nothing could be better had the new doctrine been complete, and if Reason, instructed by history, had become critical, and therefore qualified to comprehend the rival she replaced. For then, instead of regarding her as an usurper to be repelled she would have recognized in her an elder sister whose part must be left to her. Hereditary prejudice is a sort of Reason operating unconsciously. It has claims as well as reason, but it is unable to present these; instead of advancing those that are authentic it puts forth the doubtful ones. Its archives are buried; to exhume these it is necessary to make researches of which it is incapable; nevertheless they exist, and history at the present day is bringing them to light.—Careful investigations shows that, like science, it issues from a long accumulation of experiences; a people, after a multitude of gropings and efforts, has discovered that a certain way of living and thinking is the only one adapted to its situation, the most practical and the most salutary, the system or dogma now seeming arbitrary to us being at first a confirmed expedient of public safety. Frequently it is so still; in any event, in its leading features it is indispensable; it may be stated with certainty that, if the leading prejudices of the community should suddenly disappear, Man, deprived of the precious legacy transmitted to him by the wisdom of ages, would at once fall back into a savage condition and again become what he was at first, namely, a restless, famished, wandering, hunted brute. There was a time when this heritage was lacking; there are populations to day with which it is still utterly lacking.3304To abstain from eating human flesh, from killing useless or burdensome aged people, from exposing, selling or killing children one does not know what to do with, to be the one husband of but one woman, to hold in horror incest and unnatural practices, to be the sole and recognized owner of a distinct field, to be mindful of the superior injunctions of modesty, humanity, honor and conscience, all these observances, formerly unknown and slowly established, compose the civilization of human beings. Because we accept them in full security they are not the less sacred, and they become only the more sacred when, submitted to investigation and traced through history, they are disclosed to us as the secret force which has converted a herd of brutes into a society of men. In general, the older and more universal a custom, the more it is based on profound motives, on physiological motives on those of hygiene, and on those instituted for social protection. At one time, as in the separation of castes, a heroic or thoughtful stock must be preserved by preventing the mixtures by which inferior blood introduces mental debility and low instincts.3305At another, as in the prohibition of spirituous liquors, and of animal food, it is necessary to conform to the climate prescribing a vegetable diet, or to the race-temperament for which strong drink is pernicious.3306At another, as in the institution of the right of first-born to inherit title and castle, it was important to prepare and designate beforehand the military commander who the tribe would obey, or the civil chieftain that would preserve the domain, superintend its cultivation, and support the family.3307—If there are valid reasons for legitimizing custom there are reasons of higher import for the consecration of religion Consider this point, not in general and according to a vague notion, but at the outset, at its birth, in the texts, taking for an example one of the faiths which now rule in society, Christianity, Hinduism, the law of Mohammed or of Buddha. At certain critical moments in history, a few men, emerging from their narrow and daily routine of life, are seized by some generalized conception of the infinite universe; the august face of nature is suddenly unveiled to them; in their sublime emotion they seem to have detected its first cause; they have at least detected some of its elements. Through a fortunate conjunction of circumstances these elements are just those which their century, their people, a group of peoples, a fragment of humanity is in a state to comprehend. Their point of view is the only one at which the graduated multitudes below them are able to accept. For millions of men, for hundreds of generations, only through them is any access to divine things to be obtained. Theirs is the unique utterance, heroic or affecting, enthusiastic or tranquilizing; the only one which the hearts and minds around them and after them will heed; the only one adapted to profound cravings, to accumulated aspirations, to hereditary faculties, to a complete intellectual and moral organism; Yonder that of Hindostan or of the Mongolian; here that of the Semite or the European; in our Europe that of the German, the Latin or the Slave; in such a way that its contradictions, instead of condemning it, justify it, its diversity producing its adaptation and its adaptation producing benefits.—This is no barren formula. A sentiment of such grandeur, of such comprehensive and penetrating insight, an idea by which Man, compassing the vastness and depth of things, so greatly oversteps the ordinary limits of his mortal condition, resembles an illumination; it is easily transformed into a vision; it is never remote from ecstasy; it can express itself only through symbols; it evokes divine figures.3308Religion in its nature is a metaphysical poem accompanied by faith. Under this title it is popular and efficacious; for, apart from an invisible select few, a pure abstract idea is only an empty term, and truth, to be apparent, must be clothed with a body. It requires a form of worship, a legend, and ceremonies in order to address the people, women, children, the credulous, every one absorbed by daily cares, any understanding in which ideas involuntarily translate themselves through imagery. Owing to this palpable form it is able to give its weighty support to the conscience, to counterbalance natural egoism, to curb the mad onset of brutal passions, to lead the will to abnegation and devotion, to tear Man away from himself and place him wholly in the service of truth, or of his kind, to form ascetics, martyrs, sisters of charity and missionaries. Thus, throughout society, religion becomes at once a natural and precious instrumentality. On the one hand men require it for the contemplation of infinity and to live properly; if it were suddenly to be taken away from them their souls would be a mournful void, and they would do greater injury to their neighbors. Besides, it would be vain to attempt to take it away from them; the hand raised against it would encounter only its envelope; it would be repelled after a sanguinary struggle, its germ lying too deep to be extirpated.
And when, at length, after religion and custom, we regard the State, that is to say, the armed power possessing both physical force and moral authority, we find for it an almost equally noble origin. It has, in Europe at least, from Russia to Portugal and from Norway to the two Sicilies, in its origin and essence, a military foundation in which heroism constitutes itself the champion of right. Here and there in the chaos of tribes and crumbling societies, some man has arisen who, through his ascendancy, rallies around him a loyal band, driving out intruders, overcoming brigands, re-establishing order, reviving agriculture, founding a patrimony, and transmitting as property to his descendants his office of hereditary justiciary and born general. Through this permanent delegation a great public office is removed from competition, fixed in one family, sequestered in safe hands; thenceforth the nation possesses a vital center and each right obtains a visible protector. If the sovereign confines himself to his traditional responsibilities, is restrained in despotic tendencies, and avoids falling into egoism, he provides the country with the best government of which the world has any knowledge. Not alone is it the most stable, capable of continuation, and the most suitable for maintaining together a body of 20 or 30 million people, but again one of the most noble because devotion dignifies both command and obedience and, through the prolongation of military tradition, fidelity and honor, from grade to grade, attaches the leader to his duty and the soldier to his commander.—Such are the strikingly valid claims of social traditions which we may, similar to an instinct, consider as being a blind form of reason. That which makes it fully legitimate is that reason herself, to become efficient, is obliged to borrow its form. A doctrine becomes inspiring only through a blind medium. To become of practical use, to take upon itself the government of souls, to be transformed into a spring of action, it must be deposited in minds given up to systematic belief, of fixed habits, of established tendencies, of domestic traditions and prejudice, and that it, from the agitated heights of the intellect, descends into and become amalgamated with the passive forces of the will; then only does it form a part of the character and become a social force. At the same time, however, it ceases to be critical and clairvoyant; it no longer tolerates doubt and contradiction, nor admits further restrictions or nice distinctions; it is either no longer cognizant of, or badly appreciates, its own evidences. We of the present day believe in infinite progress about the same as people once believed in original sin; we still receive ready-made opinions from above, the Academy of Sciences occupying in many respects the place of the ancient councils. Except with a few special savants, belief and obedience will always be unthinking, while Reason would wrongfully resent the leadership of prejudice in human affairs, since, to lead, it must itself become prejudiced.
The classic intellect incapable of accepting this point ofview.—The past and present usefulness of tradition aremisunderstood.—Reason undertakes to set them aside.
Unfortunately, in the eighteenth century, reason was classic; not only the aptitude but the documents which enable it to comprehend tradition were absent. In the first place, there was no knowledge of history; learning was, due to its dullness and tediousness, refused; learned compilations, vast collections of extracts and the slow work of criticism were held in disdain. Voltaire made fun of the Benedictines. Montesquieu, to ensure the acceptance of his "Esprit des lois," indulged in wit about laws. Reynal, to give an impetus to his history of commerce in the Indies, welded to it the declamation of Diderot. The Abbé Barthélemy covered over the realities of Greek manners and customs with his literary varnish. Science was expected to be either epigrammatic or oratorical; crude or technical details would have been objectionable to a public composed of people of the good society; correctness of style therefore drove out or falsified those small significant facts which give a peculiar sense and their original relief to ancient personalities.—Even if writers had dared to note them, their sense and bearing would not have been understood. The sympathetic imagination did not exist3309; people were incapable of going out of themselves, of betaking themselves to distant points of view, of conjecturing the peculiar and violent states of the human brain, the decisive and fruitful moment during which it gives birth to a vigorous creation, a religion destined to rule, a state that is sure to endure. The imagination of Man is limited to personal experiences, and where in their experience, could individuals in this society have found the material which would have allowed them to imagine the convulsions of a delivery? How could minds, as polished and as amiable as these, fully adopt the sentiments of an apostle, of a monk, of a barbarian or feudal founder; see these in the milieu which explains and justifies them; picture to themselves the surrounding crowd, at first souls in despair and haunted by mystic dreams, and next the rude and violent intellects given up to instinct and imagery, thinking with half-visions, their resolve consisting of irresistible impulses? A speculative reasoning of this stamp could not imagine figures like these. To bring them within its rectilinear limits they require to be reduced and made over; the Macbeth of Shakespeare becomes that of Ducis, and the Mahomet of the Koran that of Voltaire. Consequently, as they failed to see souls, they misconceived institutions. The suspicion that truth could have been conveyed only through the medium of legends, that justice could have been established only by force, that religion was obliged to assume the sacerdotal form, that the State necessarily took a military form, and that the Gothic edifice possessed, as well as other structures, its own architecture, proportions, balance of parts, solidity, and even beauty, never entered their heads.—Furthermore, unable to comprehend the past, they could not comprehend the present. They knew nothing about the mechanic, the provincial bourgeois, or even the lesser nobility; these were seen only far away in the distance, half-effaced, and wholly transformed through philosophic theories and sentimental haze. "Two or three thousand"3310polished and cultivated individuals formed the circle of ladies and gentlemen, the so-called honest folks, and they never went outside of their own circle. If they fleeting had a glimpse of the people from their chateaux and on their journeys, it was in passing, the same as of their post-horses, or of the cattle on their farms, showing compassion undoubtedly, but never divining their anxious thoughts and their obscure instincts. The structure of the still primitive mind of the people was never imagined, the paucity and tenacity of their ideas, the narrowness of their mechanical, routine existence, devoted to manual labor, absorbed with the anxieties for daily bread, confined to the bounds of a visible horizon; their attachment to the local saint, to rites, to the priest, their deep-seated rancor, their inveterate distrust, their credulity growing out of the imagination, their inability to comprehend abstract rights, the law and public affairs, the hidden operation by which their brains would transform political novelties into nursery fables or into ghost stories, their contagious infatuations like those of sheep, their blind fury like that of bulls, and all those traits of character the Revolution was about to bring to light. Twenty millions of men and more had scarcely passed out of the mental condition of the middle ages; hence, in its grand lines, the social edifice in which they could dwell had necessarily to be mediaeval. It had to be cleaned up, windows put in and walls pulled down, but without disturbing the foundations, or the main building and its general arrangement; otherwise after demolishing it and living encamped for ten years in the open air like savages, its inmates would have been obliged to rebuild it on the same plan. In uneducated minds, those having not yet attained to reflection, faith attaches itself only to the corporeal symbol, obedience being brought about only through physical restraint; religion is upheld by the priest and the State by the policeman.—One writer only, Montesquieu, the best instructed, the most sagacious, and the best balanced of all the spirits of the age, made these truths apparent, because he was at once an erudite, an observer, a historian and a jurisconsult. He spoke, however, as an oracle, in maxims and riddles; and every time he touched matters belonging to his country and epoch he hopped about as if upon red hot coals. That is why he remained respected but isolated, his fame exercising no influence. The classic reason refused3311to go so far as to make a careful study of both the ancient and the contemporary human being. It found it easier and more convenient to follow its original bent, to shut its eyes on man as he is, to fall back on its stores of current notions, to derive from these an idea of man in general, and build in empty space.—Through this natural and complete state of blindness it no longer heeds the old and living roots of contemporary institutions; no longer seeing them makes it deny their existence. Custom now appears as pure prejudice; the titles of tradition are lost, and royalty seems based on robbery. So from now on Reason is armed and at war with its predecessor to wrench away its control over the minds and to replace a rule of lies with a rule of truth.
Two stages in this operation.—Voltaire, Montesquieu, thedeists and the reformers represent the first one.—What theydestroy and what they respect.
In this great undertaking there are two stages. Owing to common sense or timidity many stop half-way. Motivated by passion or logic others go to the end.—A first campaign results in carrying the enemy's out-works and his frontier fortresses, the philosophical army being led by Voltaire. To combat hereditary prejudice, other prejudices are opposed to it whose empire is as extensive and whose authority is not less recognized. Montesquieu looks at France through the eyes of a Persian, and Voltaire, on his return from England, describes the English, an unknown species. Confronting dogma and the prevailing system of worship, accounts are given, either with open or with disguised irony, of the various Christian sects, the Anglicans, the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Socinians, those of ancient or of remote people, the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Muslims, and Guebers, of the worshippers of Brahma, of the Chinese and of pure idolaters. In relation to established laws and customs, expositions are made, with evident intentions, of other constitutions and other social habits, of despotism, of limited monarchy, of a republic, here the church subject to the state, there the church free of the state, in this country castes, in another polygamy, and, from country to country, from century to century, the diversity, contradiction and antagonism of fundamental customs which, each on its own ground, are all equally consecrated by tradition, all legitimately forming the system of public rights. From now on the charm is broken. Ancient institutions lose their divine prestige; they are simply human works, the fruits of the place and of the moment, and born out of convenience and a covenant. Skepticism enters through all the breaches. With regard to Christianity it at once enters into open hostility, into a bitter and prolonged polemical warfare; for, under the title of a state religion this occupies the ground, censuring free thought, burning writings, exiling, imprisoning or disturbing authors, and everywhere acting as a natural and official adversary. Moreover, by virtue of being an ascetic religion, it condemns not only the free and cheerful ways tolerated by the new philosophy but again the natural tendencies it sanctions, and the promises of terrestrial felicity with which it everywhere dazzles the eyes. Thus the heart and the head both agree in their opposition.—Voltaire, with texts in hand, pursues it from one end to the other of its history, from the first biblical narration to the latest papal bulls, with unflagging animosity and energy, as critic, as historian, as geographer, as logician, as moralist, questioning its sources, opposing evidences, driving ridicule like a pick-ax into every weak spot where an outraged instinct beats against its mystic walls, and into all doubtful places where ulterior patchwork disfigures the primitive structure.—He respects, however, the first foundation, and, in this particular, the greatest writers of the day follow the same course. Under positive religions that are false there is a natural religion that is true. This is the simple and authentic text of which the others are altered and amplified translations. Remove the ulterior and divergent excesses and the original remains; this common essence, on which all copies harmonize, is deism.—The same operation is to be made on civil and political law. In France, where so many survive their utility, where privileges are no longer paid for with service, where rights are changed into abuses, how incoherent is the architecture of the old Gothic building! How poorly adapted to a modern nation! Of what use, in an unique and compact state, are those feudal compartments separating orders, corporations and provinces? What a living paradox is the archbishop of a semi-province, a chapter owning 12,000 serfs, a drawing room abbé well supported by a monastery he never saw, a lord liberally pensioned to figure in antechambers, a magistrate purchasing the right to administer justice, a colonel leaving college to take the command of his inherited regiment, a Parisian trader who, renting a house for one year in Franche-Comté, alienates through this act alone the ownership of his property and of his person. Throughout Europe there are others of the same character. The best that can be said of "a civilized nation"3312is that its laws, customs and practices are composed "one-half of abuses and one-half of tolerable usage".—But, underneath these concrete laws, which contradict each other, and of which each contradicts itself, a natural law exists, implied in the codes, applied socially, and written in all hearts.
"Show me a country where it is honest to steal the fruits of my labor, to violate engagements, to lie for injurious purposes, to calumniate, to assassinate, to poison, to be ungrateful to one's benefactor, to strike one's father and mother on offering you food".—"Justice and injustice is the same throughout the universe," and, as in the worst community force always, in some respects, is at the service of right, so, in the worst religion, the extravagant dogma always in some fashion proclaims a supreme architect.—Religions and communities, accordingly, disintegrated under the investigating process, disclose at the bottom of the crucible, some residue of truth, others a residue of justice, a small but precious balance, a sort of gold ingot of preserved tradition, purified by Reason, and which little by little, freed from its alloys, elaborated and devoted to all usage, must solely provide the substance of religion and all threads of the social warp.
The second stage, a return to nature.—Diderot, d'Holbachand the materialists.—Theory of animated matter andspontaneous organization.—The moral of animal instinct andself-interest properly understood.
Here begins the second philosophic expedition. It consists of two armies: the first composed of the encyclopedists, some of them skeptics like d'Alembert, others pantheists like Diderot and Lamarck, the second open atheists and materialists like d'Holbach, Lamettrie and Helvétius, and later Condorcet, Lalande and Volney, all different and independent of each other, but unanimous in regarding tradition as the common enemy. As a result of prolonged hostilities the parties become increasingly exasperated and feel a desire to be master of everything, to push the adversary to the wall, to drive him out of all his positions. They refuse to admit that Reason and tradition can occupy and defend the same citadel together; as soon as one enters the other must depart; henceforth one prejudice is established against another prejudice.—In fact, Voltaire, "the patriarch, does not desire to abandon his redeeming and avenging God;"3313let us tolerate in him this remnant of superstition on account of his great services; let us nevertheless examine this phantom in man which he regards with infantile vision. We admit it into our minds through faith, and faith is always suspicious. It is forged by ignorance, fear, and imagination, which are all deceptive powers. At first it was simply the fetish of savages; in vain have we striven to purify and aggrandize it; its origin is always apparent; its history is that of a hereditary dream which, arising in a rude and doting brain, prolongs itself from generation to generation, and still lasts in the healthy and cultivated brain. Voltaire wanted that this dream should be true because, otherwise, he could not explain the admirable order of the world. Since a watch suggests a watchmaker he had firstly to prove that the world is a watch and, then see if the half-finished arrangement, such as it is and which we have observed, could not better be explained by a simpler theory, more in conformity with experience, that of eternal matter in which motion is eternal. Mobile and active particles, of which the different kinds are in different states of equilibrium, these are minerals, inorganic substances, marble, lime, air, water and coal.3314I form humus out of this, "I sow peas, beans and cabbages;" plants find their nourishment in the humus, and "I find my nourishment in the plants." At every meal, within me, and through me, inanimate matter becomes animate; "I convert it into flesh. I animalize it. I render it sensitive." It harbors latent, imperfect sensibility rendered perfect and made manifest. Organization is the cause, and life and sensation are the effects; I need no spiritual monad to account for effects since I am in possession of the cause. "Look at this egg, with which all schools of theology and all the temples of the earth can be overthrown. What is this egg? An inanimate mass previous to the introduction of the germ. And what is it after the introduction of the germ? An insensible mass, an inert fluid." Add heat to it, keep it in an oven, and let the operation continue of itself, and we have a chicken, that is to say, "sensibility, life, memory, conscience, passions and thought." That which you call soul is the nervous center in which all sensitive chords concentrate. Their vibrations produce sensations; a quickened or reviving sensation is memory; our ideas are the result of sensations, memory and signs. Matter, accordingly, is not the work of an intelligence, but matter, through its own arrangement, produces intelligence. Let us fix intelligence where it is, in the organized body; we must not detach it from its support to perch it in the sky on an imaginary throne. This disproportionate conception, once introduced into our minds, ends in perverting the natural play of our sentiments, and, like a monstrous parasite, abstracts for itself all our substance.3315The first interest of a sane person is to get rid of it, to discard every superstition, every "fear of invisible powers."3316—Then only can he establish a moral order of things and distinguish "the natural law." The sky consisting of empty space, we have no need to seek commands from on high. Let us look down to the ground; let us consider man in himself, as he appears in the eyes of the naturalist, namely, an organized body, a sensitive animal possessing wants, appetites and instincts. Not only are these indestructible but they are legitimate. Let us throw open the prison in which prejudice confines them; let us give them free air and space; let them be displayed in all their strength and all will go well. According to Diderot,3317a lasting marriage is an abuse, being "the tyranny of a man who has converted the possession of a woman into property." Purity is an invention and conventional, like a dress;3318happiness and morals go together only in countries where instinct is sanctioned; as in Tahiti, for instance, where marriage lasts but a month, often only a day, and sometimes a quarter of an hour, where, in the evening and with hospitable intent, a host offers his daughters and wife to his guests, where the son espouses his mother out of politeness, where the union of the sexes is a religious festivity celebrated in public.—And, pushing things to extremes, the logician ends with five or six pages calculated "to make one's hair stand on end,"3319himself avowing that his doctrine is "neither suited for children nor for adults."—With Diderot, to say the least, these paradoxes have their correctives. In his pictures of modern ways and habits, he is the moralist. He not only is familiar with all the chords of the human keyboard, but he classifies each according to its rank. He loves fine and pure tones, and is full of enthusiasm for noble harmonies; his heart is equal to his genius.3320And better still, on the question of primitive impulses arising, he assigns, side by side with vanity, an independent and superior position to pity, friendship, kindness and charity; to every generous affection of the heart displaying sacrifice and devotion without calculation or personal benefit.—But associated with him are others, cold and narrow, who form moral systems according to the mathematical methods of the ideologists,3321after the style of Hobbes. One motive alone satisfies these, the simplest and most palpable, utterly gross, almost mechanical, completely physiological, the natural animal tendency of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure:
"Pain and pleasure," says Helvétius, "form the only springs of the moral universe, while the sentiment of vanity is the only basis on which we can lay the foundations of moral usefulness. What motive but that of self-interest could lead a man to perform a generous action? He can as little love good for the sake of good as evil for the sake of evil."3322"The principles of natural law, say the disciples, are reduced to one unique and fundamental principle, self-preservation."3323"To preserve oneself, to be happy," is instinct, right and duty. "Oh, yea,"3324says nature, "who, through the impulsion I bestow on you, tending towards happiness at every moment of your being, resist not my sovereign law, strive for your own felicity, enjoy fearlessly and be happy!" But to be happy, contribute to the happiness of others; if you wish them to be useful to you, be useful to them. "every man, from birth to death, has need of mankind." "Live then for them, that they may live for you." "Be good, because goodness links hearts together; be gentle, because gentleness wins affection; be modest, because pride repels beings full of their self-importance. . . . Be citizens, because your country is necessary to ensure your safety and well-being. Defend your country, because it renders you happy and contains your possessions."
Virtue thus is simply egotism furnished with a telescope; man has no other reason for doing good but the fear of doing himself harm, while self-devotion consists of self-interest.
One goes fast and far on this road. When the sole law for each person is to be happy, each wishes to be so immediately and in his own way; the herd of appetites is let loose, rushing ahead and breaking down all barriers. And the more readily because it has been demonstrated to them that every barrier is an evil, invented by cunning and malicious shepherds, the better to milk and shear them:
"The state of society is a state of warfare of the sovereign against all, and of each member against the rest.3325. . We see on the face of the globe only incapable, unjust sovereigns, enervated by luxury, corrupted by flattery, depraved through unpunished license, and without talent, morals, or good qualities. . . . Man is wicked not because he is wicked, but because he has been made so."-"Would you know the story, in brief, of almost all our wretchedness? Here it is. There existed the natural man, and into this man was introduced an artificial man, whereupon a civil war arose within him, lasting through life.3326. . If you propose to become a tyrant over him,. . . do your best to poison him with a theory of morals against nature; impose every kind of fetter on him; embarrass his movements with a thousand obstacles; place phantoms around him to frighten him. . . . Would you see him happy and free? Do not meddle with his affairs. . . Remain convinced of this, (wrote Diderot) that these wise legislators have formed and shaped you as they have done, not for your benefit, but for their own. I appeal to every civil, religious, and political institution; examine these closely, and, if I am not mistaken, you will find the human species, century after century, subject to a yoke which a mere handful of knaves chose to impose on it.... Be wary of him who seeks to establish order; to order is to obtain the mastery of others by giving them trouble."
There nothing any more to be ashamed of; the passions are good, and if the herd would eat freely, its first care must be to trample under its wooden shoes the mitered and crowned animals who keep it in the fold for their own advantage.3327
Rousseau and the spiritualists.—The original goodness ofman.—The mistake committed by civilization.—The injusticeof property and of society.
A return to nature, meaning by this the abolition of society, is the war-cry of the whole encyclopedic battalion. The same shout is heard in another quarter, coming the battalion of Rousseau and the socialists who, in their turn, march up to the assault of the established régime. The mining and the sapping of the walls practiced by the latter seems less extensive, but are nevertheless more effective, and the destructive machinery it employs consists of a new conception of human nature. This Rousseau has drawn exclusively from the spectacle in his own heart:3328Rousseau, a strange, original and superior man, who, from his infancy, harbored within him a germ of insanity, and who finally became wholly insane; a wonderful, ill-balanced mind in which sensations, emotions and images are too powerful: at once blind and perspicacious, a veritable poet and a morbid poet, who, instead of things and events beheld reveries, living in a romance and dying in a nightmare of his own creation; incapable of controlling and of behaving himself, confounding resolution with action, vague desire with resolution, and the role he assumed with the character he thought he possessed; wholly disproportionate to the ordinary ways of society, hitting, wounding and soiling himself against every hindrance on his way; at times extravagant, mean and criminal, yet preserving up to the end a delicate and profound sensibility, a humanity, pity, the gift of tears, the faculty of living, the passion for justice, the sentiment of religion and of enthusiasm, like so many vigorous roots in which generous sap is always fermenting, whilst the stem and the branches prove abortive and become deformed or wither under the inclemency of the atmosphere. How explain such a contrast? How did Rousseau himself account for it? A critic, a psychologist would merely regard him as a singular case, the effect of an extraordinarily discordant mental formation, analogous to that of Hamlet, Chatterton, René or Werther, adopted to poetic spheres, but unsuitable for real life. Rousseau generalizes; occupied with himself, even to infatuation, and, seeing only himself, he imagines mankind to be like himself, and "describes it as the feels it inside himself". His pride, moreover, finds this profitable; he is gratified at considering himself the prototype of humanity; the statue he erects of himself becomes more important; he rises in his own estimation when, in confessing to himself, he thinks he is confessing the human species. Rousseau convokes the assembly of generations with the trumpet of the day of judgment, and boldly stands up in the eyes of all men and of the Supreme Judge, exclaiming, "Let anyone say, if he dares: 'I was a better man than Thou!'"3329All his blemishes must be the fault of society; his vices and his baseness must be attributed to circumstances:
"If I had fallen into the hands of a better master....I should have been a good Christian, a good father, a good friend, a good workman, a good man in all things."
The wrong is thus all on the side of society.—In the same way, with Man in general, his nature is good.
"His first impulses are always right..... The fundamental principle of all moral questions which I have argued in all my writings, is that Man is naturally good, and loving justice and order..... 'Emile,' especially, is a treatise on the natural goodness of Man, intended to show how vice and error, foreign to his constitution, gradually find their way into it from without and insensibly change him.....Nature created Man happy and good, while society has depraved him and made him miserable."3330
Imagine him divested of his factitious habits, of his superadded necessities, of his false prejudices; put aside systems, study your own heart, listen to the inward dictates of feeling, let yourself be guided by the light of instinct and of conscience, and you will again find the first Adam, like an incorruptible marble statue that has fallen into a marsh, a long time lost under a crust of slime and mud, but which, released from its foul covering, may be replaced on its pedestal in the completeness of its form and in the perfect purity of its whiteness.
Around this central idea a reform occurs in the spiritualistic doctrine.—A being so noble cannot possibly consist of a simple collection of organs; he is something more than mere matter; the impression he derives from his senses do not constitute his full being.
"I am not merely a sensitive and passive being, but an active and intelligent being, and, whatever philosophy may say, I dare claim the honor of thinking."
And better still, this thinking principle, in Man, at least, is of a superior kind.
"Show me another animal on the globe capable of producing fire and of admiring the sun. What? I who am able to observe, to comprehend beings and their associations; who can appreciate order, beauty and virtue; who can contemplate the universe and exalt myself to the hand which controls it; who can love the good and do good, should I compare myself to brutes!" Man is free, capable of deciding between two actions, and therefore the creator of his actions; he is accordingly a first and original cause, "an immaterial substance," distinct from the body, a soul hampered by the body and which may survive the body.—This immortal soul imprisoned within the flesh has conscience for its organ. "O Conscience, divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice, unfailing guide of an ignorant and finite but free and intelligent being, infallible judge between good and evil, and rendering Man similar to God, Thou foremost the superiority of his nature!"
Alongside of vanity, by which we subordinate everything to ourselves, there is a love of order by which we subordinate ourselves to the whole. Alongside of egoism, by which Man seeks happiness even at the expense of others, is sympathy, by which he seeks the happiness of others even at the expense of his own. Personal enjoyment does not suffice him; he still needs tranquillity of conscience and the effusions of the heart.—Such is Man as God designed and created him; in his organization there is no defect. Inferior elements are as serviceable as the superior elements; all are essential, proportionate, in proper place, not only the heart, the conscience, the intellect, and the faculties by which we surpass brutes, but again the inclinations in common with animals, the instinct of self-preservation and of self-defense, the need of physical activity, sexual appetite, and other primitive impulses as we observe them in the child, the savage and the uncultivated Man.3331None of these in themselves are either vicious or injurious. None are too strong, even the love of self. None come into play out of season. If we would not interfere with them, if we would impose no constraint on them, if we would permit these sparkling fountains to flow according to their bent, if we would not confine them to our artificial and foul channels, we should never see them boiling over and becoming turbid. We look with wonder on their ravages and on their stains; we forget that, in the beginning, they were pure and undefiled. The fault is with us, in our social arrangements, in our encrusted and formal channels whereby we cause deviations and windings, and make them heave and bound. "Your very governments are the cause of the evils which they pretend to remedy. Ye scepters of iron! ye absurd laws, ye we reproach for our inability to fulfill our duties on earth!" Away with these dikes, the work of tyranny and routine! An emancipated nature will at once resume a direct and healthy course and man, without effort, will find himself not only happy but virtuous as well.3332On this principle the attack begins: there is none that is pushed further, nor conducted with more bitter hostility. Thus far existing institutions are described simply as oppressive and unreasonable; but now they are now they are accused of being unjust and corrupting as well. Reason and the natural desires were the only insurgents; conscience and pride are now in rebellion. With Voltaire and Montesquieu all I might hope for is that fewer evils might be anticipated. With Diderot and d'Holbach the horizon discloses only a glowing El Dorado or a comfortable Cythera. With Rousseau I behold within reach an Eden where I shall immediately recover a nobility inseparable from my happiness. It is my right; nature and Providence summon me to it; it is my heritage. One arbitrary institution alone keeps me away from it, the creator of my vices as of my misery. With what rage and fury I will overthrow this ancient barrier!—We detect this in the vehement tone, in the embittered style, and in the sombre eloquence of the new doctrine. Fun and games are no longer in vogue, a serious tone is maintained; people become exasperated, while the powerful voice now heard penetrates beyond the drawing-room, to the rude and suffering crowd to which no word had yet been spoken, whose mute resentment for the first time finds an interpreter, and whose destructive instincts are soon to be set in motion at the summons of its herald.—Rousseau is a man of the people, and not a man of high society. He feels awkward in a drawing-room.3333He is not capable of conversing and of appearing amiable; the nice expressions only come into his head too late, on the staircase as he leaves the house; he keeps silent with a sulky air or utters stupidities, redeeming his awkwardness with the sallies of a clown or with the phrases of a vulgar pedant. Elegance annoys him, luxury makes him uncomfortable, politeness is a lie, conversation mere prattle, ease of manner a grimace, gaiety a convention, wit a parade, science so much charlatanry, philosophy an affection and morals utter corruption. All is factitious, false and unwholesome,3334from the make-up, toilet and beauty of women to the atmosphere of the apartments and the ragouts on the dinner-table, in sentiment as in amusement, in literature as in music, in government as in religion. This civilization, which boasts of its splendor, is simply the restlessness of over-excited, servile monkeys each imitating the other, and each corrupting the other to, through sophistication, end up in worry and boredom. Human culture, accordingly, is in itself bad, while the fruit it produces is merely excrescence or poison.—Of what use are the sciences? Uncertain and useless, they afford merely a pasture-ground for idlers and wranglers.3335
"Who would want to pass a lifetime in sterile observation, if they, apart from their duties and nature's demands, had had to bestow their time on their country, on the unfortunate and on their friends!"—Of what use are the fine arts? They serve only as public flattery of dominant passions. "The more pleasing and the more perfect the drama, the more baneful its influence;" the theater, even with Molière, is a school of bad morals, "inasmuch as it excites deceitful souls to ridicule, in the name of comedy, the candor of artless people." Tragedy, said to be moralizing, wastes in counterfeit effusions the little virtue that still remains. "When a man has been admiring the noble feats in the fables what more is expected of him? After paying homage to virtue is he not discharged from all that he owes to it? What more would they have him do? Must he practice it himself? He has no part to play, he is not a comedian."—The sciences, the fine arts, the arts of luxury, philosophy, literature, all this serve only to effeminate and distract the mind; all that is only made for the small crowd of brilliant and noisy insects buzzing around the summits of society and sucking away all public substance.—As regards the sciences, but one is important, that of our duties, and, without so many subtleties and so much study, our innermost conscience suffice to show us the way.—As regards the arts and the skills, only those should be tolerated which, ministering to our prime necessities, provide us with bread to feed us, with a roof to shelter us, clothing to cover us, and arms with which to defend ourselves.—In the way of existence that only is healthy which enables us to live in the country, artlessly, without display, in family union, devoted to cultivation, living on the products of the soil and among neighbors that are equals and with servants that one trusts as friends.3336—As for the classes, but one is respectable, that of laboring men, especially that of men working with their own hands, artisans and mechanics, only these being really of service, the only ones who, through their situation, are in close proximity to the natural state, and who preserve, under a rough exterior, the warmth, the goodness and the integrity of primitive instincts.—Accordingly, let us call by its true name this elegance, this luxury, this urbanity, this literary delicacy, this philosophical eccentricity, admired by the prejudiced as the flower of the life of humanity; it is only mold and mildew. In like manner esteem at its just value the swarm that live upon it, namely, the indolent aristocracy, the fashionable world, the privileged who direct and make a display, the idlers of the drawing room who talk, divert themselves and regard themselves as the elect of humanity, but who are simply so many parasites. Whether parasitic or excretory, one attracts the other, and the tree can only be well if we get rid of both.
If civilization is bad, society is worse.3337For this could not have been established except by destroying primitive equality, while its two principal institutions, property and government, are encroachments.
"He who first enclosed a plot of ground, and who took it into his to say this belongs to me, and who found people simple enough to believe him,3338was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, what wars, what murders, what misery and what horrors would have been spared the human race if he who, pulling up the landmark and filling up the ditch, had cried out to his fellows: Be wary of that impostor; you are lost if you forget that no one has a right to the land and that its fruits are the property of all!"—The first ownership was a robbery by which an individual abstracted from the community a portion of the public domain. Nothing could justify the outrage, nothing added by him to the soil, neither his industry, nor his trouble, nor his valor. "In vain may he assert that he built this wall, and acquired this land by his labor. Who marked it out for him, one might ask, and how do you come to be paid for labor which was never imposed on you? Are you not aware that a multitude of your brethren are suffering and perishing with want because you have too much, and that the express and unanimous consent of the whole human species is requisite before appropriating to yourself more than your share of the common subsistence?"—
Underneath this theory we recognize the personal attitude, the grudge of the poor embittered commoner, who, on entering society, finds the places all taken, and who is incapable of creating one for himself; who, in his confessions, marks the day when he ceased to feel hungry; who, for lack of something better, lives in concubinage with a serving-woman and places his five children in an orphanage; who is in turn servant, clerk, vagabond, teacher and copyist, always on the look-out, using his wits to maintain his independence, disgusted with the contrast between what he is outwardly and what he feels himself inwardly, avoiding envy only by disparagement, and preserving in the folds of his heart an old grudge "against the rich and the fortunate in this world as if they were so at his expense, as if their assumed happiness had been an infringement on his happiness."3339—Not only is there injustice in the origin of property but again there is injustice in the power it secures to itself, the wrong increasing like a canker under the partiality of law.
"Are not all the advantages of society for the rich and for the powerful?3340Do they not absorb to themselves all lucrative positions? Is not the public authority wholly in their interest? If a man of position robs his creditors or commits other offenses is he not certain of impunity? Are not the blows he bestows, his violent assaults, the murders and the assassinations he is guilty of, matters that are hushed up and forgotten in a few months?—Let this same man be robbed and the entire police set to work, and woe to the poor innocents they suspect!—Has he to pass a dangerous place, escorts overrun the country. If the axle of his coach breaks down everybody runs to help him.—Is a noise made at his gate, a word from him and all is silent.—Does the crowd annoy him, he makes a sign and order reigns.—Does a carter chance to cross his path, his attendants are ready to knock him down, while fifty honest pedestrians might be crushed rather than delaying a rascal in his carriage.—All these considerations do not cost him a penny.; they are a rich man's entitlements and not the price for being rich.—What a different picture of the poor! The more humanity owes them the more it refuses them. All doors are closed to them even when they have the right to have them opened, and if they sometimes obtain justice they have more trouble than others in obtaining favors. If there is statute labor to be carried out, a militia to raise, the poor are the most eligible. It always bears burdens from which its wealthier neighbor with influence secures exemption. At the least accident to a poor man everybody abandons him. Let his cart topple over and I regard him as fortunate if he escapes the insults of the smart companions of a young duke passing by. In a word all assistance free of charge is withheld from him in time of need, precisely because he cannot pay for it. I regard him as a lost man if he is so unfortunate as to be honest and have a pretty daughter and a powerful neighbor.—Let us sum up in a few words the social pact of the two estates:
You need me because I am rich and you are poor: let us then make an agreement together. I will allow you the honor of serving me on condition that you give me the little that remains to you for the trouble I have in governing you."
This shows the spirit, the aim and the effect of political society.—At the start, according to Rousseau, it consisted of an unfair bargain, made by an adroit rich man with a poor dupe, "providing new fetters for the weak and fresh power for the rich," and, under the title of legitimate property, consecrating the usurpation of the soil.—To day the contract is still more unjust "by means of which a child may govern an old man, a fool lead the wise, and a handful of people live in abundance whilst a famished multitude lack the necessities for life." It is the nature of inequality to grow; hence the authority of some increases along with the dependence of the rest, so that the two conditions, having at last reached their extremes, the hereditary and perpetual objection of the people seems to be a divine right equally with the hereditary and perpetual despotism of the king.—This is the present situation and, any change, will be for the worse. "For,3341the occupation of all kings, or of those charged with their functions, consists wholly of two objects, to extend their sway abroad and to render it more absolute at home." When they plead some other cause it is only a pretext. "The terms public good, happiness of subjects, the glory of the nation, so heavily employed in government announcements, never denote other than disastrous commands, and the people shudder beforehand when its masters allude to their paternal solicitude."—However, this fatal point once reached, "the contract with the government is dissolved; the despot is master only while remaining the most powerful, and, as soon as he can be expelled, it is useless for him to cry out against violence." Because right can only exist through consent, and no consent nor right can exist between master and slave.
Whether between one man and another man, or between one man and a people, the following is an absurd address: 'I make an agreement with you wholly at your expense and to my advantage which I shall respect as long as I please and which you shall respect as long as it pleases me.'"—
Only madmen may sign such a treaty, but, as madmen, they are not in a condition to negotiate and their signature is not binding. Only the vanquished on the ground, with swords pointed at their throats, may accept such conditions but, being under constraint, their promise is null and void. Madmen and the conquered may for a thousand years have bound over all subsequent generations, but a contract for a minor is not a contract for an adult, and on the child arriving at the age of Reason he belongs to himself. We at last have become adults, and we have only to make use of our rights to reduce the pretensions of this self-styled authority to their just value. It has power on its side and nothing more. But "a pistol in the hand of a brigand is also power," but do you think that I should be morally obliged to give him my purse?—I obey only compelled by force and I will have my purse back as soon as I can take his pistol away from him.