Lecture XVI

GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD.

Principle on which true theodicea rests. God the last foundation of moral truth, of the good, and of the moral person.--Liberty of God.--The divine justice and charity.--God the sanction of the moral law. Immortality of the soul; argument from merit and demerit; argument from the simplicity of the soul; argument from final causes.--Religious sentiment.--Adoration.--Worship.--Moral beauty of Christianity.

The moral order has been confirmed,--we are in possession of moral truth, of the idea of the good, and the obligation that is attached to it. Now, the same principle that has not permitted us to stop at absolute truth, and has forced us to seek its supreme reason in a real and substantial being, forces us here again to refer the idea of the good to the being who is its first and last foundation.

Moral truth, like every other universal and necessary truth, cannot remain in a state of abstraction. In us it is only conceived. There must somewhere be a being who not only conceives it, but constituted it.

As all beautiful things and all true things are related--these to a unity that is absolute truth, and those to another unity that is absolute beauty, so all moral principles participate in the same principle, which is the good. We thus elevate ourselves to the conception of the good in itself, of absolute good, superior to all particular duties, and determined in these duties. Now, can the absolute good be any thing else than an attribute of him who, properly speaking, is alone absolute being?

Would it be possible that there might be several absolute beings, and that the being in whom are realized absolute truth and absolute beauty might not also be the one who is the principle of absolute good? The very idea of the absolute implies absolute unity. The true, the beautiful, and the good, are not three distinct essences; they are one and the same essence considered in its fundamental attributes. Our mind distinguishes them, because it can comprehend them only by division; but, in the being in whom they reside, they are indivisibly united; and this being at once triple and one, who sums up in himself perfect beauty, perfect truth, and the supreme good, is nothing else than God.

So God is necessarily the principle of moral truth and the good. He is also the type of the moral person that we carry in us.

Man is a moral person, that is to say, he is endowed with reason and liberty. He is capable of virtue, and virtue has in him two principal forms, respect of others, and love of others, justice and charity.

Can there be among the attributes possessed by the creature something essential not possessed by the Creator? Whence does the effect draw its reality and its being, except from its cause? What it possesses, it borrows and receives. The cause at least contains all that is essential in the effect. What particularly belongs to the effect, is inferiority, is a lack, is imperfection: from the fact alone that it is dependent and derived, it bears in itself the signs and the conditions of dependence. If, then, we cannot legitimately conclude from the imperfection of the effect in that of the cause, we can and must conclude from the excellence of the effect in the perfection of the cause, otherwise there would be something prominent in the effect which would be without cause.

Such is the principle of our theodicea. It is neither new nor subtle; but it has not yet been thoroughly disengaged and elucidated, and it is, to our eyes, firm against every test. It is by the aid of this principle that we can, up to a certain point, penetrate into the true nature of God.

God is not a being of logic, whose nature can be explained by way of deduction, and by means of algebraic equations. When, setting out from a first attribute, we have deduced the attributes of God from each other, after the manner of geometricians and the schoolmen, what do we possess, I pray you, but abstractions? It is necessary to leave these vain dialectics in order to arrive at a real and living God.

The first notion that we have of God, to wit, the notion of an infinite being, is itself given to us independently of all experience. It is the consciousness of ourselves, as being at once, and as being limited, that elevates us directly to the conception of a being who is the principle of our being, and is himself without bounds. This solid and single argument, which is at bottom that of Descartes, opens to us a way that must be followed, in which Descartes too quickly stopped. If the being that we possess forces us to recur to a cause which possesses being in an infinite degree, all that we have of being, that is to say, of substantial attributes, equally requires an infinite cause. Then, God will no longer be merely the infinite, abstract, or at least indeterminate being in which reason and the heart know not where to betake themselves, he will be a real and determined being, a moral person like ours and psychology conducts us without hypothesis to a theodicea at once sublime and related to us.

Before all, if man is free, can it be that God is not free? No one contends that he who is cause of all causes, who has no cause but himself, can be dependent on any thing whatever. But in freeing God from all external constraint, Spinoza subjects him to an internal and mathematical necessity, wherein he finds the perfection of being. Yes, of being which is not a person; but the essential character of personal being is precisely liberty. If, then, God were not free, God would be beneath man. Would it not be strange that the creature should have the marvellous power of disposing of himself, and of freely willing, and that the being who has made him should be subjected to a necessary development, whose cause is only in himself, without doubt, but, in fine, is a sort of abstract power, mechanical or metaphysical, but very inferior to the personal and voluntary cause that we are, and of which we have the clearest consciousness? God is therefore free, since we are free. But he is not free as we are free; for God is at once all that we are, and nothing that we are. He possesses the same attributes that we possess, but elevated to infinity. He possesses an infinite liberty, joined to an infinite intelligence; and, as his intelligence is infallible, excepted from the uncertainties of deliberation, and perceiving at a glance where the good is, so his liberty spontaneously, and without effort, fulfils it.

In the same manner as we transfer to God the liberty that is the foundation of our being, we also transfer to him justice and charity. In man, justice and charity are virtues; in God, they are attributes. What is in us the laborious conquest of liberty, is in him his very nature. If respect of rights is in us the very essence of justice and the sign of the dignity of our being, it is impossible that the perfect being should not know and respect the rights of the lowest beings, since it is he, moreover, who has imparted to them those rights. In God resides a sovereign justice, which renders to each one his due, not according to deceptive appearances, but according to the truth of things. Finally, if man, that limited being, has the power of going out of himself, of forgetting his person, of loving another than himself, of devoting himself to another's happiness, or, what is better, to the perfecting of another, should not the perfect being have, in an infinite degree, this disinterested tenderness, this charity, the supreme virtue of the human person? Yes, there is in God an infinite tenderness for his creatures: he at first manifested it in giving us the being that he might have withheld, and at all times it appears in the innumerable signs of his divine providence. Plato knew this love of God well, and expressed it in those great words, "Let us say that the cause which led the supreme ordainer to produce and compose this universe is, that he was good; and he who is good has no species of envy. Exempt from envy, he willed that all things should be, as much as possible, like himself." Christianity went farther: according to the divine doctrine, God so loved men that he gave them his only Son. God is inexhaustible in his charity, as he is inexhaustible in his essence. It is impossible to give more to the creature; he gives him every thing that he can receive without ceasing to be a creature; he gives him every thing, even himself, so far as the creature is in him and he in the creature. At the same time nothing can be lost; for being absolute being, he eternally expands and gives himself without being diminished. Infinite in power, infinite in charity, he bestows his love in exhaustless abundance upon the world, to teach us that the more we give the more we possess. It is egoism, whose root is at the bottom of every heart, even by the side of the sincerest charity, that inculcates in us the error that we lose by self-devotion: it is egoism that makes us call devotion a sacrifice.

If God is wholly just and wholly good, he can will nothing but what is good and just; and, as he is all-powerful, every thing that he wills he can do, and consequently does do. The world is the work of God; it is therefore perfectly made, perfectly adapted to its end.

And nevertheless, there is in the world a disorder that seems to accuse the justice and goodness of God.

A principle that is attached to the very idea of the good, says to us that every moral agent deserves a reward when he does good, and a punishment when he does evil. This principle is universal and necessary: it is absolute. If this principle has not its application in this world, it must either be a lie, or this world is ordered ill.

Now, it is a fact that the good is not always followed by happiness, nor evil always by unhappiness.

Let us, in the first place, remark that if the fact exists, it is rare enough, and seems to present the character of an exception.

Virtue is a struggle against passion; this struggle, full of dignity, is also full of pain; but, on one side, crime is condemned to much harder pains; on the other, those of virtue are of short duration; they are a necessary and almost always beneficent trial.

Virtue has its pains, but the greatest happiness is still with it, as the greatest unhappiness is with crime; and such is the case in small and great, in the secret of the soul, and on the theatre of life, in the obscurest conditions and in the most conspicuous situations.

Good and bad health are, after all, the greatest part of happiness or unhappiness. In this regard, compare temperance and its opposite, order and disorder, virtue and vice; I mean a temperance truly temperate, and not an atrabilarious asceticism, a rational virtue, and not a fierce virtue.

The great physician Hufeland remarks that the benevolent sentiments are favorable to health, and that the malevolent sentiments are opposed to it. Violent and sinful passions irritate, inflame, and carry trouble into the organization as well as the soul; the benevolent affections preserve the measured and harmonious play of all the functions.

Hufeland again remarks that the greatest longevities pertain to wise and well-regulated lives.

Thus, for health, strength, and life, virtue is better than vice: it is already much, it seems to me.

I surely mean to speak of conscience only after health; but, in fine, with the body, our most constant host is conscience. Peace or trouble of conscience decides internal happiness or unhappiness. At this point of view, compare again order and disorder, virtue and vice.

And without us, in society, to whom come esteem and contempt, consideration and infamy? Certainly opinion has its mistakes, but they are not long. In general, if charlatans, intriguers, impostors of every kind, for some time surreptitiously get suffrages, it must be that a sustained honesty is the surest and the almost infallible means of reaching a good renown.

I regret that upon this point time does not allow of any development. It would have afforded me delight, after having distinguished virtue from happiness, to show them to you almost always united by the admirable law of merit and demerit. I should have been pleased to show you this beneficent law already governing human destiny, and called to preside over it more exactly from day to day by the ever-increasing progress of lights in governments and peoples, by the perfecting of civil and judicial institutions. It would have been my wish to make pass into your minds and hearts the consoling conviction that, after all, justice is already in this world, and that the surest road to happiness is still that of virtue.

This was the opinion of Socrates and Plato; and it is also that of Franklin, and I gather it from my personal experience and an attentive examination of human life. But I admit that there are exceptions; and were there but one exception, it would be necessary to explain it.

Suppose a man, young, beautiful, rich, amiable, and loved, who, placed between the scaffold and the betrayal of a sacred cause, voluntarily mounts the scaffold at twenty years of age. What do you make of this noble victim? The law of merit and demerit seems here suspended. Do you dare blame virtue, or how in this world do you accord to it the recompense that it has not sought, but is its due?

By careful search you will find more than one case analogous to that.

The laws of this world are general; they turn aside to suit no one: they pursue their course without regard to the merit or demerit of any. If a man is born with a bad temperament, it is in virtue of certain obscure but undeviating physical laws, to which he is subject, like the animal and the plant, and he suffers during his whole life, although personally innocent. He is brought up in the midst of flames, epidemics, calamities that strike at hazard the good as well as the bad.

Human justice condemns many that are innocent, it is true, but it absolves, in fault of proof, more than one who is culpable. Besides, it knows only certain derelictions. What faults, what basenesses occur in the dark, which do not receive merited chastisement! In like manner, what obscure devotions of which God is the sole witness and judge! Without doubt nothing escapes the eye of conscience, and the culpable soul cannot escape remorse. But remorse is not always in exact relation with the fault committed; its vivacity may depend on a nature more or less delicate, on education and habit. In a word, if it is in general very true that the law of merit and demerit is fulfilled in this world, it is not fulfilled with mathematical rigor.

What must we conclude from this? That the world is ill-made? No. That cannot be, and is not. That cannot be, for incontestably the world has a just and good author; that is not, for, in fact, we see order reigning in the world; and it would be absurd to misconceive the manifest order that almost everywhere shines forth on account of a few phenomena that we cannot refer to order. The universe endures, therefore it is well made. The pessimism of Voltaire is still more opposed to the aggregate of facts than an absolute optimism. Between these two systematic extremes which facts deny, the human race places the hope of another life. It has found it very irrational to reject a necessary law on account of some infractions; it has, therefore, maintained the law; and from infractions it has only concluded that they ought to be referred to the law, that there will be a reparation. Either this conclusion must be admitted, or the two great principles previously admitted, that God is just, and that the law of merit and demerit is an absolute law, must be rejected.

Now, to reject these two principles is to totally overthrow all human belief.

To maintain them, is implicitly to admit that actual life must be, elsewhere terminated or continued.

But is this continuation of the person possible? After the dissolution of the body, can any thing of us remain?

In truth, the moral person, which acts well or ill, which awaits the reward or punishment of its good or bad actions, is united to a body,--it lives with the body, makes use of it, and, in a certain measure, depends on it, but is not it. The body is composed of parts, may decrease or increase; is divisible, essentially divisible, and even infinitely divisible. But that something that has consciousness of itself, that says, I, me, that feels itself to be free and responsible, does it not also feel that there is in it no division, even no possible division, that it is a being one and simple? Is the me more or less me? Is there a half of me, a quarter of me? I cannot divide my person. It remains identical to itself under the diversity of the phenomena that manifest it. This identity, this indivisibility of the person, is its spirituality. Spirituality is, therefore, the very essence of the person. Belief in the spirituality of the soul is involved in the belief of this identity of the me, which no rational being has ever called in question. Accordingly, there is not the least hypothesis for affirming that the soul does not essentially differ from the body. Add that when we say the soul, we mean to say, and do say the person, which is not separated from the consciousness of the attributes that constitute it, thought and will. The being without consciousness is not a person. It is the person that is identical, one, simple. Its attributes, in developing it, do not divide it. Indivisible, it is indissoluble, and may be immortal. If, then, divine justice, in order to be exercised in regard to us, demands an immortal soul, it does not demand an impossible thing. The spirituality of the soul is the necessary foundation of immortality. The law of merit and demerit is the direct demonstration of this. The first proof is called the metaphysical proof, the second, the moral proof, which is the most celebrated, most popular, at once the most convincing and the most persuasive.

What powerful motives are added to these two proofs to fortify them in the heart! The following, for example, is a presumption of great value for any one that believes in the virtue of sentiment and instinct.

Every thing has its end. This principle is as absolute as that which refers every event to a cause. Man has, therefore, an end. This end is revealed in all his thoughts, in all his ways, in all his sentiments, in all his life. Whatever he does, whatever he feels, whatever he thinks, he thinks upon the infinite, loves the infinite, tends to the infinite. This need of the infinite is the mainspring of scientific curiosity, the principle of all discoveries. Love also stops and rests only there. On the route it may experience lively joys; but a secret bitterness that is mingled with them soon makes it feel their insufficiency and emptiness. Often, while ignorant of its true object, it asks whence comes that fatal disenchantment by which all its successes, all its pleasures are successively extinguished. If it knew how to read itself, it would recognize that if nothing here below satisfies it, it is because its object is more elevated, because the true bourne after which it aspires is infinite perfection. Finally, like thought and love, human activity is without limits. Who can say where it shall stop? Behold this earth almost known. Soon another world will be necessary for us. Man is journeying towards the infinite, which is always receding before him, which he always pursues. He conceives it, he feels it, he bears it, thus to speak, in himself,--how should his end be elsewhere? Hence that unconquerable instinct of immortality, that universal hope of another life to which all worships, all poesies, all traditions bear witness. We tend to the infinite with all our powers; death comes to interrupt the destiny that seeks its goal, and overtakes it unfinished. It is, therefore, likely that there is something after death, since at death nothing in us is terminated. Look at the flower that to-morrow will not be. To-day, at least, it is entirely developed: we can conceive nothing more beautiful of its kind; it has attained its perfection. My perfection, my moral perfection, that of which I have the clearest idea and the most invincible need, for which I feel that I am born,--in vain I call for it, in vain I labor for it; it escapes me, and leaves me only hope. Shall this hope be deceived? All beings attain their end; should man alone not attain his? Should the greatest of creatures be the most ill-treated? But a being that should remain incomplete and unfinished, that should not attain the end which all his instincts proclaim for him, would be a monster in the eternal order,--a problem much more difficult to solve than the difficulties that have been raised against the immortality of the soul. In our opinion, this tendency of all the desires and all the powers of the soul towards the infinite, elucidated by the principle of final causes, is a serious and important confirmation of the moral proof and the metaphysical proof of another life.

When we have collected all the arguments that authorize belief in another life, and when we have thus arrived at a satisfying demonstration, there remains an obstacle to be overcome. Imagination cannot contemplate without fright that unknown which is called death. The greatest philosopher in the world, says Pascal, on a plank wider than it is necessary in order to go without danger from one side of an abyss to the other, cannot think without trembling on the abyss that is beneath him. It is not reason, it is imagination that frightens him; it is also imagination that in great part causes that remnant of doubt, that trouble, that secret anxiety which the firmest faith cannot always succeed in overcoming in the presence of death. The religious man experiences this terror, but he knows whence it comes, and he surmounts it by attaching himself to the solid hopes furnished him by reason and the heart. Imagination is a child that must be educated, by putting it under the discipline and government of better faculties; it must be accustomed to go to intelligence for aid instead of troubling intelligence with its phantoms. Let us acknowledge that there is a terrible step to be taken when we meet death. Nature trembles when face to face with the unknown eternity. It is wise to present ourselves there with all our forces united,--reason and the heart lending each other mutual support, the imagination being subdued or charmed. Let us continually repeat that, in death as in life, the soul is sure to find God, and that with God all is just, all is good.

We now know what God truly is. We have already seen two of his adorable attributes,--truth and beauty. The most august attribute is revealed to us,--holiness. God is the holy of holies, as the author of the moral law and the good, as the principle of liberty, justice, and charity, as the dispenser of penalty and reward. Such a God is not an abstract God, but an intelligent and free person, who has made us in his own image, from whom we hold the law itself that presides over our destiny, whose judgments we await. It is his love that inspires us in our acts of charity; it is his justice that governs our justice, that of our societies and our laws. If we do not continually remind ourselves that he is infinite, we degrade his nature; but he would be for us as if he were not, if his infinite essence had no forms that pertain to us, the proper forms of our reason and our soul.

By thinking upon such a being, man feels a sentiment that is par excellence the religious sentiment. All the beings with whom we are in relation awaken in us different sentiments, according to the qualities that we perceive in them; and should he who possesses all perfections excite in us no particular sentiment? When we think upon the infinite essence of God, when we are penetrated with his omnipotence, when we are reminded that the moral law expresses his will, that he attaches to the fulfilment and the violation of this law recompenses and penalties which he dispenses with an inflexible justice, we cannot guard ourselves against an emotion of respect and fear at the idea of such a grandeur. Then, if we come to consider that this all-powerful being has indeed wished to create us, us of whom he has no need, that in creating us he has loaded us with benefits, that he has given us this admirable universe for enjoying its ever-new beauties, society for ennobling our life in that of our fellow-men, reason for thinking, the heart for loving, liberty for acting; without disappearing, respect and fear are tinged with a sweeter sentiment, that of love. Love, when it is applied to feeble and limited beings, inspires us with a desire to do good to them; but in itself it proposes to itself no advantage from the person loved; we love a beautiful or good object, because it is beautiful or good, without at first regarding whether this love may be useful to its object and ourselves. For a still stronger reason, love, when it ascends to God, is a pure homage rendered to his perfections; it is the natural overflow of the soul towards a being infinitely lovable.

Respect and love compose adoration. True adoration does not exist without possessing both of these sentiments. If you consider only the all-powerful God, master of heaven and earth, author and avenger of justice, you crush man beneath the weight of the grandeur of God and his own feebleness, you condemn him to a continual trembling in the uncertainty of God's judgments, you make him hate the world, life, and himself, for every thing is full of misery. Towards this extreme, Port-Royal inclines. Read the Pensees de Pascal. In his great humility, Pascal forgets two things,--the dignity of man and the love of God. On the other hand, if you see only the good God and the indulgent father, you incline to a chimerical mysticism. By substituting love for fear, little by little with fear, we run the risk of losing respect. God is no more a master, he is no more even a father; for the idea of a father still to a certain point involves that of a respectful fear; he is no more any thing but a friend, sometimes even a lover. True adoration does not separate love and respect; it is respect animated by love.

Adoration is a universal sentiment. It differs in degrees according to different natures; it takes the most different forms; it is often even ignorant of itself; sometimes it is revealed by an exclamation springing from the heart, in the midst of the great scenes of nature and life, sometimes it silently rises in the mute and penetrated soul; it may err in its expressions, even in its object; but at bottom it is always the same. It is a spontaneous, irresistible emotion of the soul; and when reason is applied to it, it is declared just and legitimate. What, in fact, is more just than to fear the judgments of him who is holiness itself, who knows our actions and our intentions, and will judge them according to the highest justice? What, too, is more just than to love perfect goodness and the source of all love? Adoration is at first a natural sentiment; reason makes it a duty.

Adoration confined to the sanctuary of the soul is what is called internal worship--the necessary principle of all public worships.

Public worship is no more an arbitrary institution than society and government, language and arts. All these things have their roots in human nature. Adoration abandoned to itself, would easily degenerate into dreams and ecstasy, or would be dissipated in the rush of affairs and the necessities of every day. The more energetic it is, the more it tends to express itself outwardly in acts that realize it, to take a sensible, precise, and regular form, which, by a proper reaction on the sentiment that produced it, awakens it when it slumbers, sustains it when it languishes, and also protects it against extravagances of every kind to which it might give birth in so many feeble or unbridled imaginations. Philosophy, then, lays the natural foundation of public worship in the internal worship of adoration. Having arrived at that point, it stops, equally careful not to betray its rights and not to go beyond them, to run over, in its whole extent and to its farthest limit, the domain of natural reason, as well as not to usurp a foreign domain.

But philosophy does not think of trespassing on the ground of theology; it wishes to remain faithful to itself, and also to follow its true mission, which is to love and favor every thing that tends to elevate man, since it heartily applauds the awakening of religious and Christian sentiment in all noble souls, after the ravages that have been made on every hand, for more than a century, by a false and sad philosophy. What, in fact, would not have been the joy of a Socrates and a Plato if they had found the human race in the arms of Christianity! How happy would Plato--who was so evidently embarrassed between his beautiful doctrines and the religion of his times, who managed so carefully with that religion even when he avoided it, who was forced to take from it the best possible part, in order to aid a favorable interpretation of his doctrine--have been, if he had had to do with a religion which presents to man, as at once its author and its model, the sublime and mild Crucified, of whom he had an extraordinary presentiment, whom he almost described in the person of a just man dying on the cross; a religion which came to announce, or at least to consecrate and expand the idea of the unity of God and that of the unity of the human race; which proclaims the equality of all souls before the divine law, which thereby has prepared and maintains civil equality; which prescribes charity still more than justice, which teaches man that he does not live by bread alone, that he is not wholly contained in his senses and his body, that he has a soul, a free soul, whose value is infinite, above the value of all worlds, that life is a trial, that its true object is not pleasure, fortune, rank, none of those things that do not pertain to our real destiny, and are often more dangerous than useful, but is that alone which is always in our power, in all situations and all conditions, from end to end of the earth, to wit, the improvement of the soul by itself, in the holy hope of becoming from day to day less unworthy of the regard of the Father of men, of the examples given by him, and of his promises. If the greatest moralist that ever lived could have seen these admirable teachings, which in germ were already at the foundation of his spirit, of which more than one trait can be found in his works, if he had seen them consecrated, maintained, continually recalled to the heart and imagination of man by sublime and touching institutions, what would have been his tender and grateful sympathy for such a religion! If he had come in our own times, in that age given up to revolutions, in which the best souls were early infected by the breath of skepticism, in default of the faith of an Augustine, of an Anselm, of a Thomas, of a Bossuet, he would have had, we doubt not, the sentiments at least of a Montesquieu, of a Turgot, of a Franklin, and very far from putting the Christian religion and a good philosophy at war with each other, he would have been forced to unite them, to elucidate and fortify them by each other. That great mind and that great heart, which dictated to him the Phedon, the Gorgias, the Republic, would also have taught him that such books are made for a few sages, that there is needed for the human race a philosophy at once similar and different, that this philosophy is a religion, and that this desirable and necessary religion is the Gospel. We do not hesitate to say that, without religion, philosophy, reduced to what it can laboriously draw from perfected natural reason, addresses itself to a very small number, and runs the risk of remaining without much influence on manners and life; and that, without philosophy, the purest religion is no security against many superstitions, which little by little bring all the rest, and for that reason it may see the best minds escaping its influence, as was the case in the eighteenth century. The alliance between true religion and true philosophy is, then, at once natural and necessary; natural by the common basis of the truths which they acknowledge; necessary for the better service of humanity. Philosophy and religion differ only in the forms that distinguish, without separating them. Another auditory, other forms, and another language. When St. Augustine speaks to all the faithful in the church of Hippone, do not seek in him the subtile and profound metaphysician who combated the Academicians with their own arms, who supports himself on the Platonic theory of ideas, in order to explain the creation. Bossuet, in the treatise De la Connaissance de Dieu et Soi-meme, is no longer, and at the same time he is always, the author of the Sermons, of the Elevations, and the incomparable Catechisme de Meaux. To separate religion and philosophy has always been, on one side or the other, the pretension of small, exclusive, and fanatical minds; the duty, more imperative now than ever, of whomsoever has for either a serious and enlightened love, is to bring together and unite, instead of dividing and wasting the powers of the mind and the soul, in the interest of the common cause and the great object which the Christian religion and philosophy pursue, each in its own way,--I mean the moral grandeur of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

Lectures 4 and 7.

Such is the common vice of nearly all theodiceas, without excepting the best--that of Leibnitz, that of Clarke; even the most popular of all, the Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard. See our small work entitled Philosophie Populaire, 3d edition, p. 82.

On the Cartesian argument, see above, part 1st, lecture 4; see also 1st Series, vol. iv., lecture 12, and especially vol. v., lecture 6.

Fragments de Philosophie Cartesienne, p. 24: "The infinite being, inasmuch as infinite, is not a mover, a cause; neither is he, inasmuch as infinite, an intelligence; neither is he a will; neither is he a principle of justice, nor much less a principle of love. We have no right to impute to him all these attributes in virtue of the single argument that every contingent being supposes a being that is not so, that every finite supposes an infinite. The God given by this argument is the God of Spinoza, is rigorously so; but he is almost as though he were not, at least for us who with difficulty perceive him in the inaccessible heights of an eternity and existence that are absolute, void of thought, of liberty, of love, similar to nonentity itself, and a thousand times inferior, in his infinity and eternity, to an hour of our finite and perishable existence, if during this fleeting hour we know what we are, if we think, if we love something else than ourselves, if we feel capable of freely sacrificing to an idea the few minutes that have been accorded to us."

This theodicea is here in resume, and in the 4th and 5th lectures of part first, as well as in the lecture that follows. The most important of our different writings, on this point, will be found collected and elucidated by each other, in the Appendix to the 5th lecture of the first volume of the 1st Series.--See our translation of this entire Series of M. Cousin's works, under the title of the History of Modern Philosophy.

3d Series, vol. iv., advertisement to the 3d edition: "Without vain subtilty, there is a real distinction between free will and spontaneous liberty. Arbitrary freedom is volition with the appearance of deliberation between different objects, and under this supreme condition, that when, as a consequence of deliberation, we resolve to do this or that, we have the immediate consciousness of having been able, and of being able still, to will the contrary. It is in volition, and in the retinue of phenomena which surround it, that liberty more energetically appears, but it is not thereby exhausted. It is at rare and sublime moments in which liberty is as much greater as it appears less to the eyes of a superficial observation. I have often cited the example of d'Assas. D'Assas did not deliberate; and for all that, was d'Assas less free, did he not act with entire liberty? Has the saint who, after a long and painful exercise of virtue, has come to practise, as it were by nature, the acts of self-renunciation which are repugnant to human weakness; has the saint, in order to have gone out from the contradictions and the anguish of this form of liberty which we called volition, fallen below it instead of being elevated above it; and is he nothing more than a blind and passive instrument of grace, as Luther and Calvin have inappropriately wished to call it, by an excessive interpretation of the Augustinian doctrine? No, freedom still remains; and far from being annihilated, its liberty, in being purified, is elevated and ennobled; from the human form of volition it has passed to the almost divine form of spontaneity. Spontaneity is essentially free, although it may be accompanied with no deliberation, and although often, in the rapid motion of its inspired action, it escapes its own observation, and leaves scarcely a trace in the depths of consciousness. Let us transfer this exact psychology to theodicea, and we may recognize without hypothesis, that spontaneity is also especially the form of God's liberty. Yes, certainly, God is free; for, among other proofs, it would be absurd that there should be less freedom in the first cause than in one of its effects, humanity; God is free, but not with that liberty which is related to our double nature, and made to contend against passion and error, and painfully to engender virtue and our imperfect knowledge; he is free, with a liberty that is related to his own divine nature, that is a liberty unlimited, infinite, recognizing no obstacle. Between justice and injustice, between good and evil, between reason and its contrary, God cannot deliberate, and, consequently, cannot will after our manner. Can one conceive, in fact, that he could take what we call the bad part? This very supposition is impious. It is necessary to admit that when he has taken the contrary part, he has acted freely without doubt, but not arbitrarily, and with the consciousness of having been able to choose the other part. His nature, all-powerful, all-just, all-wise, is developed with that spontaneity which contains entire liberty, and excludes at once the efforts and the miseries of volition, and the mechanical operation of necessity. Such is the principle and the true character of the divine action."

Timaeus, p. 119, vol. xii. of our translation.

De l'Art de prolonger sa Vie, etc.

On the spirituality of the soul, see all our writings. We will limit ourselves to two citations. 2d Series, vol. iii., lecture 25, p. 859: "It is impossible to know any phenomenon of consciousness, the phenomena of sensation, or volition, or of intelligence, without instantly referring them to a subject one and identical, which is the me; so we cannot know the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, of smell, of taste, etc., without judging that these are not phenomena in appearance, but phenomena which belong to something real, which is solid, impenetrable, figured, colored, odorous, savory, etc. On the other hand, if you did not know any of the phenomena of consciousness, you would never have the least idea of the subject of these phenomena; if you did not know any of the external phenomena of resistance, of solidity, of impenetrability, of figure, of color, etc., you would not have any idea of the subject of these phenomena: therefore the characters, whether of the phenomena of consciousness, or of exterior phenomena, are for you the only signs of the nature of the subjects of these phenomena. In examining the phenomena which fall under the senses, we find between them grave differences upon which it is useless here to insist, and which establish the distinction of primary qualities and of secondary qualities. In the first rank among the primary qualities is solidity, which is given to you in the sensation of resistance, and inevitably accompanied by form, etc. On the contrary, when you examine the phenomena of consciousness, you do not therein find this character of resistance, of solidity, of form, etc.; you do not find that the phenomena of your consciousness have a figure, solidity, impenetrability, resistance; without speaking of secondary qualities which are equally foreign to them, color, savor, sound, smell, etc. Now, as the subject is for us only the collection of the phenomena which reveal it to us, together with its own existence in so far as the subject of the inherence of these phenomena, it follows that, under phenomena marked with dissimilar characters and entirely foreign to each other, the human mind conceives dissimilar and foreign subjects. Thus as solidity and figure have nothing in common with sensation, will, and thought, as every solid is extended for us, and as we place it necessarily in space, while our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, are for us unextended, and while we cannot conceive them and place them in space, but only in time, the human mind concludes with perfect strictness that the subject of the exterior phenomena has the character of the latter, and that the subject of the phenomena of consciousness has the character of the former; that the one is solid and extended, and that the other is neither solid nor extended. Finally, as that which is solid and extended is divisible, and as that which is neither solid nor extended is indivisible, hence divisibility is attributed to the solid and extended subject, and indivisibility attributed to the subject which is neither extended nor solid. Who of us, in fact, does not believe himself an indivisible being, one and identical, the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow? Well, the word body, the word matter, signifies nothing else than the subject of external phenomena, the most eminent of which are form, impenetrability, solidity, extension, divisibility. The word mind, the word soul, signifies nothing else than the subject of the phenomena of consciousness, thought, will, sensation, phenomena simple, unextended, not solid, etc. Behold the whole idea of spirit, and the whole idea of matter! See, therefore, all that must be done in order to bring back matter to spirit, and spirit to matter: it is necessary to pretend that sensation, volition, thought, are reducible in the last analysis to solidity, extension, figure, divisibility, etc., or that solidity, extension, figure, etc., are reducible to thought, volition, sensation." 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture I, Locke. "Locke pretends that we cannot be certain by the contemplation of our own ideas, that matter cannot think; on the contrary, it is in the contemplation itself of our ideas that we clearly perceive that matter and thought are incompatible. What is thinking? Is it not uniting a certain number of ideas under a certain unity? The simplest judgment supposes several terms united in a subject, one and identical, which is me. This identical me is implied in every real act of knowledge. It has been demonstrated to satiety that comparison exacts an indivisible centre that comprises the different terms of the comparison. Do you take memory? There is no memory possible without the continuation of the same subject that refers to self the different modifications by which it has been successively affected. Finally, consciousness, that indispensable condition of intelligence,--is it not the sentiment of a single being? This is the reason why each man cannot think without saying me, without affirming that he is himself the identical and one subject of his thoughts. I am me and always me, as you are always yourself in the most different acts of your life. You are not more yourself to-day than you were yesterday, and you are not less yourself to-day than you were yesterday. This identity and this indivisible unity of the me inseparable from the least thought, is what is called its spirituality, in opposition to the evident and necessary characters of matter. By what, in fact, do you know matter? It is especially by form, by extension, by something solid that stops you, that resists you in different points of space. But is not a solid essentially divisible? Take the most subtile fluids,--can you help conceiving them as more or less susceptible of division? All thought has its different elements like matter, but in addition it has its unity in the thinking subject, and the subject being taken away, which is one, the total phenomenon no longer exists. Far from that, the unknown subject to which we attach material phenomena is divisible, and divisible ad infinitum; it cannot cease to be divisible without ceasing to exist. Such are the ideas that we have, on the one side, of mind, on the other, of matter. Thought supposes a subject essentially one; matter is infinitely divisible. What is the need of going farther? If any conclusion is legitimate, it is that which distinguishes thought from matter. God can indeed make them exist together, and their co-existence is a certain fact, but he cannot confound them. God can unite thought and matter, he cannot make matter thought, nor what is extended simple."

See 1st part, lecture 1.

See lecture 5, Mysticism.

4th Series, vol. iii., Santa-Rosa: "After all, the existence of a divine Providence is, to my eyes, a truth clearer than all lights, more certain than all mathematics. Yes, there is a God, a God who is a true intelligence, who consequently has a consciousness of himself, who has made and ordered every thing with weight and measure, whose works are excellent, whose ends are adorable, even when they are veiled from our feeble eyes. This world has a perfect author, perfectly wise and good. Man is not an orphan; he has a father in heaven. What will this father do with his child when he returns to him? Nothing but what is good. Whatever happens, all will be well. Every thing that he has done has been done well; every thing that he shall do, I accept beforehand, and bless. Yes, such is my unalterable faith, and this faith is my support, my refuge, my consolation, my solace in this fearful moment."

See our discussion on the Pensees de Pascal, vol. i. of the 4th Series.

See the end of the first book of the Republic, vol. ix. of our translation.

Esprit des Lois, passim.

Works of Turgot, vol. ii., Discours en Sorbonne sur les Avantages que l'etablissement du Christianism a procures au Genre Humain, etc.

In the Correspondence, the letter to Dr. Stiles, March 9, 1790, written by Franklin a few months before his death: "I am convinced that the moral and religious system which Jesus Christ has transmitted to us is the best that the world has seen or can see."--We here re-translate, not having the works of Franklin immediately at hand.

We have not ceased to claim, to earnestly call for, the alliance between Christianity and philosophy, as well as the alliance between the monarchy and liberty. See particularly 3d Series, vol. iv., Philosophie Contemporaine, preface of the second edition; 4th Series, vol. i., Pascal, 1st and 2d preface, passim; 5th Series, vol. ii., Discours a la Chambre des Paris pour le Defence de l'Universite et de la Philosophie. We everywhere profess the most tender veneration for Christianity,--we have only repelled the servitude of philosophy, with Descartes, and the most illustrious doctors of ancient and modern times, from St. Augustine and St. Thomas, to the Cardinal de la Lucerne and the Bishop of Hermopolis. Moreover, we love to think that those quarrels, originating in other times from the deplorable strife between the clergy and the University, have not survived it, and that now all sincere friends of religion and philosophy will give each other the hand, and will work in concert to encourage desponding souls and lift up burdened characters.