set a whole party watching the child while
he recites his fables; when he is too old to recite them and old
enough to make use of them, they are altogether forgotten. Only
men, I repeat, can learn from fables, and Emile is now old enough
to begin.
I do not mean to tell you everything, so I only indicate the paths
which diverge from the right way, so that you may know how to
avoid them. If you follow the road I have marked out for you,
I think your pupil will buy his knowledge of mankind and his knowledge
of himself in the cheapest market; you will enable him to behold
the tricks of fortune without envying the lot of her favourites,
and to be content with himself without thinking himself better
than others. You have begun by making him an actor that he may
learn to be one of the audience; you must continue your task,
for from the theatre things are what they seem, from the stage
they seem what they are. For the general effect we must get a
distant view, for the details we must observe more closely. But
how can a young man take part in the business of life? What right
has he to be initiated into its dark secrets? His interests are
confined within the limits of his own pleasures, he has no power
over others, it is much the same as if he had no power at all.
Man is the cheapest commodity on the market, and among all our
important rights of property, the rights of the individual are
always considered last of all.
When I see the studies of young men at the period of their greatest
activity confined to purely speculative matters, while later on
they are suddenly plunged, without any sort of experience, into
the world of men and affairs, it strikes me as contrary alike
to reason and to nature, and I cease to be surprised that so few
men know what to do. How strange a choice to teach us so many
useless things, while the art of doing is never touched upon!
They profess to fit us for society, and we are taught as if each
of us were to live a life of contemplation in a solitary cell,
or to discuss theories with persons whom they did not concern.
You think you are teaching your scholars how to live, and you
teach them certain bodily contortions and certain forms of words
without meaning. I, too, have taught Emile how to live; for I
have taught him to enjoy his own society and, more than that,
to earn his own bread. But this is not enough. To live in the
world he must know how to get on with other people, he must know
what forces move them, he must calculate the action and re-action
of self-interest in civil society, he must estimate the results
so accurately that he will rarely fail in his undertakings, or
he will at least have tried in the best possible way. The law
does not allow young people to manage their own affairs nor to
dispose of their own property; but what would be the use of these
precautions if they never gained any experience until they were
of age. They would have gained nothing by the delay, and would
have no more experience at five-and-twenty than at fifteen. No
doubt we must take precautions, so that a youth, blinded by ignorance
or misled by passion, may not hurt himself; but at any age there
are opportunities when deeds of kindness and of care for the weak
may be performed under the direction of a wise man, on behalf
of the unfortunate who need help.
Mothers and nurses grow fond of children because of the care they
lavish on them; the practice of social virtues touches the very
heart with the love of humanity; by doing good we become good;
and I know no surer way to this end. Keep your pupil busy with
the good deeds that are within his power, let the cause of the
poor be his own, let him help them not merely with his money,
but with his service; let him work for them, protect them, let
his person and his time be at their disposal; let him be their
agent; he will never all his life long have a more honourable
office. How many of the oppressed, who have never got a hearing,
will obtain justice when he demands it for them with that courage
and firmness which the practice of virtue inspires; when he makes
his way into the presence of the rich and great, when he goes,
if need be, to the footstool of the king himself, to plead the
cause of the wretched, the cause of those who find all doors closed
to them by their poverty, those who are so afraid of being punished
for their misfortunes that they do not dare to complain?
But shall we make of Emile a knight-errant, a redresser of wrongs,
a paladin? Shall he thrust himself into public life, play the
sage and the defender of the laws before the great, before the
magistrates, before the king? Shall he lay petitions before the
judges and plead in the law courts? That I cannot say. The nature
of things is not changed by terms of mockery and scorn. He will
do all that he knows to be useful and good. He will do nothing
more, and he knows that nothing is useful and good for him which
is unbefitting his age. He knows that his first duty is to himself;
that young men should distrust themselves; that they should act
circumspectly; that they should show respect to those older than
themselves, reticence and discretion in talking without cause,
modesty in things indifferent, but courage in well doing, and
boldness to speak the truth. Such were those illustrious Romans
who, having been admitted into public life, spent their days in
bringing criminals to justice and in protecting the innocent,
without any motives beyond those of learning, and of the furtherance
of justice and of the protection of right conduct.
Emile is not fond of noise or quarrelling, not only among men,
but among animals. [Footnote: "But what will he do if any
one seeks a quarrel with him?" My answer is that no one will
ever quarrel with him, he will never lend himself to such a thing.
But, indeed, you continue, who can be safe from a blow, or an
insult from a bully, a drunkard, a bravo, who for the joy of killing
his man begins by dishonouring him? That is another matter. The
life and honour of the citizens should not be at the mercy of
a bully, a drunkard, or a bravo, and one can no more insure oneself
against such an accident than against a falling tile. A blow given,
or a lie in the teeth, if he submit to them, have social consequences
which no wisdom can prevent and no tribunal can avenge. The weakness
of the laws, therefore, so far restores a man's independence;
he is the sole magistrate and judge between the offender and himself,
the sole interpreter and administrator of natural law. Justice
is his due, and he alone can obtain it, and in such a case there
is no government on earth so foolish as to punish him for so doing.
I do not say he must fight; that is absurd; I say justice is his
due, and he alone can dispense it. If I were king, I promise you
that in my kingdom no one would ever strike a man or call him
a liar, and yet I would do without all those useless laws against
duels; the means are simple and require no law courts. However
that may be, Emile knows what is due to himself in such a case,
and the example due from him to the safety of men of honour. The
strongest of men cannot prevent insult, but he can take good care
that his adversary has no opportunity to boast of that insult.]
He will never set two dogs to fight, he will never set a dog to
chase a cat. This peaceful spirit is one of the results of his
education, which has never stimulated self-love or a high opinion
of himself, and so has not encouraged him to seek his pleasure
in domination and in the sufferings of others. The sight of suffering
makes him suffer too; this is a natural feeling. It is one of
the after effects of vanity that hardens a young man and makes
him take a delight in seeing the torments of a living and feeling
creature; it makes him consider himself beyond the reach of similar
sufferings through his superior wisdom or virtue. He who is beyond
the reach of vanity cannot fall into the vice which results from
vanity. So Emile loves peace. He is delighted at the sight of
happiness, and if he can help to bring it about, this is an additional
reason for sharing it. I do not assume that when he sees the unhappy
he will merely feel for them that barren and cruel pity which
is content to pity the ills it can heal. His kindness is active
and teaches him much he would have learnt far more slowly, or
he would never have learnt at all, if his heart had been harder.
If he finds his comrades at strife, he tries to reconcile them;
if he sees the afflicted, he inquires as to the cause of their
sufferings; if he meets two men who hate each other, he wants
to know the reason of their enmity; if he finds one who is down-trodden
groaning under the oppression of the rich and powerful, he tries
to discover by what means he can counteract this oppression, and
in the interest he takes with regard to all these unhappy persons,
the means of removing their sufferings are never out of his sight.
What use shall we make of this disposition so that it may re-act
in a way suited to his age? Let us direct his efforts and his
knowledge, and use his zeal to increase them.
I am never weary of repeating: let all the lessons of young people
take the form of doing rather than talking; let them learn nothing
from books which they can learn from experience. How absurd to
attempt to give them practice in speaking when they have nothing
to say, to expect to make them feel, at their school desks, the
vigour of the language of passion and all the force of the arts
of persuasion when they have nothing and nobody to persuade! All
the rules of rhetoric are mere waste of words to those who do
not know how to use them for their own purposes. How does it concern
a schoolboy to know how Hannibal encouraged his soldiers to cross
the Alps? If instead of these grand speeches you showed him how
to induce his prefect to give him a holiday, you may be sure he
would pay more attention to your rules.
If I wanted to teach rhetoric to a youth whose passions were as
yet undeveloped, I would draw his attention continually to things
that would stir his passions, and I would discuss with him how
he should talk to people so as to get them to regard his wishes
favourably. But Emile is not in a condition so favourable to the
art of oratory. Concerned mainly with his physical well-being,
he has less need of others than they of him; and having nothing
to ask of others on his own account, what he wants to persuade
them to do does not affect him sufficiently to awake any very
strong feeling. From this it follows that his language will be
on the whole simple and literal. He usually speaks to the point
and only to make himself understood. He is not sententious, for
he has not learnt to generalise; he does not speak in figures,
for he is rarely impassioned.
Yet this is not because he is altogether cold and phlegmatic,
neither his age, his character, nor his tastes permit of this.
In the fire of adolescence the life-giving spirits, retained in
the blood and distilled again and again, inspire his young heart
with a warmth which glows in his eye, a warmth which is felt in
his words and perceived in his actions. The lofty feeling with
which he is inspired gives him strength and nobility; imbued with
tender love for mankind his words betray the thoughts of his heart;
I know not how it is, but there is more charm in his open-hearted
generosity than in the artificial eloquence of others; or rather
this eloquence of his is the only true eloquence, for he has only
to show what he feels to make others share his feelings.
The more I think of it the more convinced I am that by thus translating
our kindly impulses into action, by drawing from our good or ill
success conclusions as to their cause, we shall find that there
is little useful knowledge that cannot be imparted to a youth;
and that together with such true learning as may be got at college
he will learn a science of more importance than all the rest together,
the application of what he has learned to the purposes of life.
Taking such an interest in his fellow-creatures, it is impossible
that he should fail to learn very quickly how to note and weigh
their actions, their tastes, their pleasures, and to estimate
generally at their true value what may increase or diminish the
happiness of men; he should do this better than those who care
for nobody and never do anything for any one. The feelings of
those who are always occupied with their own concerns are too
keenly affected for them to judge wisely of things. They consider
everything as it affects themselves, they form their ideas of
good and ill solely on their own experience, their minds are filled
with all sorts of absurd prejudices, and anything which affects
their own advantage ever so little, seems an upheaval of the universe.
Extend self-love to others and it is transformed into virtue,
a virtue which has its root in the heart of every one of us. The
less the object of our care is directly dependent on ourselves,
the less we have to fear from the illusion of self-interest; the
more general this interest becomes, the juster it is; and the
love of the human race is nothing but the love of justice within
us. If therefore we desire Emile to be a lover of truth, if we
desire that he should indeed perceive it, let us keep him far
from self-interest in all his business. The more care he bestows
upon the happiness of others the wiser and better he is, and the
fewer mistakes he will make between good and evil; but never allow
him any blind preference founded merely on personal predilection
or unfair prejudice. Why should he harm one person to serve another?
What does it matter to him who has the greater share of happiness,
providing he promotes the happiness of all? Apart from self-interest
this care for the general well-being is the first concern of the
wise man, for each of us forms part of the human race and not
part of any individual member of that race.
To prevent pity degenerating into weakness we must generalise
it and extend it to mankind. Then we only yield to it when it
is in accordance with justice, since justice is of all the virtues
that which contributes most to the common good. Reason and self-love
compel us to love mankind even more than our neighbour, and to
pity the wicked is to be very cruel to other men.
Moreover, you must bear in mind that all these means employed
to project my pupil beyond himself have also a distinct relation
to himself; since they not only cause him inward delight, but
I am also endeavouring to instruct him, while I am making him
kindly disposed towards others.
First I showed the means employed, now I will show the result.
What wide prospects do I perceive unfolding themselves before
his mind! What noble feelings stifle the lesser passions in his
heart! What clearness of judgment, what accuracy in reasoning,
do I see developing from the inclinations we have cultivated,
from the experience which concentrates the desires of a great
heart within the narrow bounds of possibility, so that a man superior
to others can come down to their level if he cannot raise them
to his own! True principles of justice, true types of beauty,
all moral relations between man and man, all ideas of order, these
are engraved on his understanding; he sees the right place for
everything and the causes which drive it from that place; he sees
what may do good, and what hinders it. Without having felt the
passions of mankind, he knows the illusions they produce and their
mode of action.
I proceed along the path which the force of circumstances compels
me to tread, but I do not insist that my readers shall follow
me. Long ago they have made up their minds that I am wandering
in the land of chimeras, while for my part I think they are dwelling
in the country of prejudice. When I wander so far from popular
beliefs I do not cease to bear them in mind; I examine them, I
consider them, not that I may follow them or shun them, but that
I may weigh them in the balance of reason. Whenever reason compels
me to abandon these popular beliefs, I know by experience that
my readers will not follow my example; I know that they will persist
in refusing to go beyond what they can see, and that they will
take the youth I am describing for the creation of my fanciful
imagination, merely because he is unlike the youths with whom
they compare him; they forget that he must needs be different,
because he has been brought up in a totally different fashion;
he has been influenced by wholly different feelings, instructed
in a wholly different manner, so that it would be far stranger
if he were like your pupils than if he were what I have supposed.
He is a man of nature's making, not man's. No wonder men find
him strange.
When I began this work I took for granted nothing but what could
be observed as readily by others as by myself; for our starting-point,
the birth of man, is the same for all; but the further we go,
while I am seeking to cultivate nature and you are seeking to
deprave it, the further apart we find ourselves. At six years
old my pupil was not so very unlike yours, whom you had not yet
had time to disfigure; now there is nothing in common between
them; and when they reach the age of manhood, which is now approaching,
they will show themselves utterly different from each other, unless
all my pains have been thrown away. There may not be so very great
a difference in the amount of knowledge they possess, but there
is all the difference in the world in the kind of knowledge. You
are amazed to find that the one has noble sentiments of which
the others have not the smallest germ, but remember that the latter
are already philosophers and theologians while Emile does not
even know what is meant by a philosopher and has scarcely heard
the name of God.
But if you come and tell me, "There are no such young men,
young people are not made that way; they have this passion or
that, they do this or that," it is as if you denied that
a pear tree could ever be a tall tree because the pear trees in
our gardens are all dwarfs.
I beg these critics who are so ready with their blame to consider
that I am as well acquainted as they are with everything they
say, that I have probably given more thought to it, and that,
as I have no private end to serve in getting them to agree with
me, I have a right to demand that they should at least take time
to find out where I am mistaken. Let them thoroughly examine the
nature of man, let them follow the earliest growth of the heart
in any given circumstances, so as to see what a difference education
may make in the individual; then let them compare my method of
education with the results I ascribe to it; and let them tell
me where my reasoning is unsound, and I shall have no answer to
give them.
It is this that makes me speak so strongly, and as I think with
good excuse: I have not pledged myself to any system, I depend
as little as possible on arguments, and I trust to what I myself
have observed. I do not base my ideas on what I have imagined,
but on what I have seen. It is true that I have not confined my
observations within the walls of any one town, nor to a single
class of people; but having compared men of every class and every
nation which I have been able to observe in the course of a life
spent in this pursuit, I have discarded as artificial what belonged
to one nation and not to another, to one rank and not to another;
and I have regarded as proper to mankind what was common to all,
at any age, in any station, and in any nation whatsoever.
Now if in accordance with this method you follow from infancy
the course of a youth who has not been shaped to any special mould,
one who depends as little as possible on authority and the opinions
of others, which will he most resemble, my pupil or yours? It
seems to me that this is the question you must answer if you would
know if I am mistaken.
It is not easy for a man to begin to think; but when once he has
begun he will never leave off. Once a thinker, always a thinker,
and the understanding once practised in reflection will never
rest. You may therefore think that I do too much or too little;
that the human mind is not by nature so quick to unfold; and that
after having given it opportunities it has not got, I keep it
too long confined within a circle of ideas which it ought to have
outgrown.
But remember, in the first place, that when I want to train a
natural man, I do not want to make him a savage and to send him
back to the woods, but that living in the whirl of social life
it is enough that he should not let himself be carried away by
the passions and prejudices of men; let him see with his eyes
and feel with his heart, let him own no sway but that of reason.
Under these conditions it is plain that many things will strike
him; the oft-recurring feelings which affect him, the different
ways of satisfying his real needs, must give him many ideas he
would not otherwise have acquired or would only have acquired
much later. The natural progress of the mind is quickened but
not reversed. The same man who would remain stupid in the forests
should become wise and reasonable in towns, if he were merely
a spectator in them. Nothing is better fitted to make one wise
than the sight of follies we do not share, and even if we share
them, we still learn, provided we are not the dupe of our follies
and provided we do not bring to them the same mistakes as the
others.
Consider also that while our faculties are confined to the things
of sense, we offer scarcely any hold to the abstractions of philosophy
or to purely intellectual ideas. To attain to these we require
either to free ourselves from the body to which we are so strongly
bound, or to proceed step by step in a slow and gradual course,
or else to leap across the intervening space with a gigantic bound
of which no child is capable, one for which grown men even require
many steps hewn on purpose for them; but I find it very difficult
to see how you propose to construct such steps.
The Incomprehensible embraces all, he gives its motion to the
earth, and shapes the system of all creatures, but our eyes cannot
see him nor can our hands search him out, he evades the efforts
of our senses; we behold the work, but the workman is hidden from
our eyes. It is no small matter to know that he exists, and when
we have got so far, and when we ask. What is he? Where is he?
our mind is overwhelmed, we lose ourselves, we know not what to
think.
Locke would have us begin with the study of spirits and go on
to that of bodies. This is the method of superstition, prejudice,
and error; it is not the method of nature, nor even that of well-ordered
reason; it is to learn to see by shutting our eyes. We must have
studied bodies long enough before we can form any true idea of
spirits, or even suspect that there are such beings. The contrary
practice merely puts materialism on a firmer footing.
Since our senses are the first instruments to our learning, corporeal
and sensible bodies are the only bodies we directly apprehend.
The word "spirit" has no meaning for any one who has
not philosophised. To the unlearned and to the child a spirit
is merely a body. Do they not fancy that spirits groan, speak,
fight, and make noises? Now you must own that spirits with arms
and voices are very like bodies. This is why every nation on the
face of the earth, not even excepting the Jews, have made to themselves
idols. We, ourselves, with our words, Spirit, Trinity, Persons,
are for the most part quite anthropomorphic. I admit that we are
taught that God is everywhere; but we also believe that there
is air everywhere, at least in our atmosphere; and the word Spirit
meant originally nothing more than breath and wind. Once you teach
people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to
get them to say anything you like.
The perception of our action upon other bodies must have first
induced us to suppose that their action upon us was effected in
like manner. Thus man began by thinking that all things whose
action affected him were alive. He did not recognise the limits
of their powers, and he therefore supposed that they were boundless;
as soon as he had supplied them with bodies they became his gods.
In the earliest times men went in terror of everything and everything
in nature seemed alive. The idea of matter was developed as slowly
as that of spirit, for the former is itself an abstraction.
Thus the universe was peopled with gods like themselves. The stars,
the winds and the mountains, rivers, trees, and towns, their very
dwellings, each had its soul, its god, its life. The teraphim
of Laban, the manitos of savages, the fetishes of the negroes,
every work of nature and of man, were the first gods of mortals;
polytheism was their first religion and idolatry their earliest
form of worship. The idea of one God was beyond their grasp, till
little by little they formed general ideas, and they rose to the
idea of a first cause and gave meaning to the word "substance,"
which is at bottom the greatest of abstractions. So every child
who believes in God is of necessity an idolater or at least he
regards the Deity as a man, and when once the imagination has
perceived God, it is very seldom that the understanding conceives
him. Locke's order leads us into this same mistake.
Having arrived, I know not how, at the idea of substance, it is
clear that to allow of a single substance it must be assumed that
this substance is endowed with incompatible and mutually exclusive
properties, such as thought and size, one of which is by its nature
divisible and the other wholly incapable of division. Moreover
it is assumed that thought or, if you prefer it, feeling is a
primitive quality inseparable from the substance to which it belongs,
that its relation to the substance is like the relation between
substance and size. Hence it is inferred that beings who lose
one of these attributes lose the substance to which it belongs,
and that death is, therefore, but a separation of substances,
and that those beings in whom the two attributes are found are
composed of the two substances to which those two qualities belong.
But consider what a gulf there still is between the idea of two
substances and that of the divine nature, between the incomprehensible
idea of the influence of our soul upon our body and the idea of
the influence of God upon every living creature. The ideas of
creation, destruction, ubiquity, eternity, almighty power, those
of the divine attributes--these are all ideas so confused and
obscure that few men succeed in grasping them; yet there is nothing
obscure about them to the common people, because they do not understand
them in the least; how then should they present themselves in
full force, that is to say in all their obscurity, to the young
mind which is still occupied with the first working of the senses,
and fails to realise anything but what it handles? In vain do
the abysses of the Infinite open around us, a child does not know
the meaning of fear; his weak eyes cannot gauge their depths.
To children everything is infinite, they cannot assign limits
to anything; not that their measure is so large, but because their
understanding is so small. I have even noticed that they place
the infinite rather below than above the dimensions known to them.
They judge a distance to be immense rather by their feet than
by their eyes; infinity is bounded for them, not so much by what
they can see, but how far they can go. If you talk to them of
the power of God, they will think he is nearly as strong as their
father. As their own knowledge is in everything the standard by
which they judge of what is possible, they always picture what
is described to them as rather smaller than what they know. Such
are the natural reasonings of an ignorant and feeble mind. Ajax
was afraid to measure his strength against Achilles, yet he challenged
Jupiter to combat, for he knew Achilles and did not know Jupiter.
A Swiss peasant thought himself the richest man alive; when they
tried to explain to him what a king was, he asked with pride,
"Has the king got a hundred cows on the high pastures?"
I am aware that many of my readers will be surprised to find me
tracing the course of my scholar through his early years without
speaking to him of religion. At fifteen he will not even know
that he has a soul, at eighteen even he may not be ready to learn
about it. For if he learns about it too soon, there is the risk
of his never really knowing anything about it.
If I had to depict the most heart-breaking stupidity, I would
paint a pedant teaching children the catechism; if I wanted to
drive a child crazy I would set him to explain what he learned
in his catechism. You will reply that as most of the Christian
doctrines are mysteries, you must wait, not merely till the child
is a man, but till the man is dead, before the human mind will
understand those doctrines. To that I reply, that there are mysteries
which the heart of man can neither conceive nor believe, and I
see no use in teaching them to children, unless you want to make
liars of them. Moreover, I assert that to admit that there are
mysteries, you must at least realise that they are incomprehensible,
and children are not even capable of this conception! At an age
when everything is mysterious, there are no mysteries properly
so-called.
"We must believe in God if we would be saved." This
doctrine wrongly understood is the root of bloodthirsty intolerance
and the cause of all the futile teaching which strikes a deadly
blow at human reason by training it to cheat itself with mere
words. No doubt there is not a moment to be lost if we would deserve
eternal salvation; but if the repetition of certain words suffices
to obtain it, I do not see why we should not people heaven with
starlings and magpies as well as with children.
The obligation of faith assumes the possibility of belief. The
philosopher who does not believe is wrong, for he misuses the
reason he has cultivated, and he is able to understand the truths
he rejects. But the child who professes the Christian faith--what
does he believe? Just what he understands; and he understands
so little of what he is made to repeat that if you tell him to
say just the opposite he will be quite ready to do it. The faith
of children and the faith of many men is a matter of geography.
Will they be rewarded for having been born in Rome rather than
in Mecca? One is told that Mahomet is the prophet of God and he
says, "Mahomet is the prophet of God." The other is
told that Mahomet is a rogue and he says, "Mahomet is a rogue."
Either of them would have said just the opposite had he stood
in the other's shoes. When they are so much alike to begin with,
can the one be consigned to Paradise and the other to Hell? When
a child says he believes in God, it is not God he believes in,
but Peter or James who told him that there is something called
God, and he believes it after the fashion of Euripides--
"O Jupiter, of whom I know nothing but thy name."
[Footnote: Plutarch. It is thus that the tragedy of Menalippus
originally began, but the clamour of the Athenians compelled Euripides
to change these opening lines.]
We hold that no child who dies before the age of reason will be
deprived of everlasting happiness; the Catholics believe the same
of all children who have been baptised, even though they have
never heard of God. There are, therefore, circumstances in which
one can be saved without belief in God, and these circumstances
occur in the case of children or madmen when the human mind is
incapable of the operations necessary to perceive the Godhead.
The only difference I see between you and me is that you profess
that children of seven years old are able to do this and I do
not think them ready for it at fifteen. Whether I am right or
wrong depends, not on an article of the creed, but on a simple
observation in natural history.
From the same principle it is plain that any man having reached
old age without faith in God will not, therefore, be deprived
of God's presence in another life if his blindness was not wilful;
and I maintain that it is not always wilful. You admit that it
is so in the case of lunatics deprived by disease of their spiritual
faculties, but not of their manhood, and therefore still entitled
to the goodness of their Creator. Why then should we not admit
it in the case of those brought up from infancy in seclusion,
those who have led the life of a savage and are without the knowledge
that comes from intercourse with other men. [Footnote: For the
natural condition of the human mind and its slow development,
cf. the first part of the Discours sur Inegalite.] For it is clearly
impossible that such a savage could ever raise his thoughts to
the knowledge of the true God. Reason tells that man should only
be punished for his wilful faults, and that invincible ignorance
can never be imputed to him as a crime. Hence it follows that
in the sight of the Eternal Justice every man who would believe
if he had the necessary knowledge is counted a believer, and that
there will be no unbelievers to be punished except those who have
closed their hearts against the truth.
Let us beware of proclaiming the truth to those who cannot as
yet comprehend it, for to do so is to try to inculcate error.
It would be better to have no idea at all of the Divinity than
to have mean, grotesque, harmful, and unworthy ideas; to fail
to perceive the Divine is a lesser evil than to insult it. The
worthy Plutarch says, "I would rather men said, 'There is
no such person as Plutarch,' than that they should say, 'Plutarch
is unjust, envious, jealous, and such a tyrant that he demands
more than can be performed.'"
The chief harm which results from the monstrous ideas of God which
are instilled into the minds of children is that they last all
their life long, and as men they understand no more of God than
they did as children. In Switzerland I once saw a good and pious
mother who was so convinced of the truth of this maxim that she
refused to teach her son religion when he was a little child for
fear lest he should be satisfied with this crude teaching and
neglect a better teaching when he reached the age of reason. This
child never heard the name of God pronounced except with reverence
and devotion, and as soon as he attempted to say the word he was
told to hold his tongue, as if the subject were too sublime and
great for him. This reticence aroused his curiosity and his self-love;
he looked forward to the time when he would know this mystery
so carefully hidden from him. The less they spoke of God to him,
the less he was himself permitted to speak of God, the more he
thought about Him; this child beheld God everywhere. What I should
most dread as the result of this unwise affectation of mystery
is this: by over-stimulating the youth's imagination you may turn
his head, and make him at the best a fanatic rather than a believer.
But we need fear nothing of the sort for Emile, who always declines
to pay attention to what is beyond his reach, and listens with
profound indifference to things he does not understand. There
are so many things of which he is accustomed to say, "That
is no concern of mine," that one more or less makes little
difference to him; and when he does begin to perplex himself with
these great matters, it is because the natural growth of his knowledge
is turning his thoughts that way.
We have seen the road by which the cultivated human mind approaches
these mysteries, and I am ready to admit that it would not attain
to them naturally, even in the bosom of society, till a much later
age. But as there are in this same society inevitable causes which
hasten the development of the passions, if we did not also hasten
the development of the knowledge which controls these passions
we should indeed depart from the path of nature and disturb her
equilibrium. When we can no longer restrain a precocious development
in one direction we must promote a corresponding development in
another direction, so that the order of nature may not be inverted,
and so that things should progress together, not separately, so
that the man, complete at every moment of his life, may never
find himself at one stage in one of his faculties and at another
stage in another faculty.
What a difficulty do I see before me! A difficulty all the greater
because it depends less on actual facts than on the cowardice
of those who dare not look the difficulty in the face. Let us
at least venture to state our problem. A child should always be
brought up in his father's religion; he is always given plain
proofs that this religion, whatever it may be, is the only true
religion, that all others are ridiculous and absurd. The force
of the argument depends entirely on the country in which it is
put forward. Let a Turk, who thinks Christianity so absurd at
Constantinople, come to Paris and see what they think of Mahomet.
It is in matters of religion more than in anything else that prejudice
is triumphant. But when we who profess to shake off its yoke entirely,
we who refuse to yield any homage to authority, decline to teach
Emile anything which he could not learn for himself in any country,
what religion shall we give him, to what sect shall this child
of nature belong? The answer strikes me as quite easy. We will
not attach him to any sect, but we will give him the means to
choose for himself according to the right use of his own reason.
Incedo per ignes Suppositos cineri doloso.--Horace, lib. ii. ode
I.
No matter! Thus far zeal and prudence have taken the place of
caution. I hope that these guardians will not fail me now. Reader,
do not fear lest I should take precautions unworthy of a lover
of truth; I shall never forget my motto, but I distrust my own
judgment all too easily. Instead of telling you what I think myself,
I will tell you the thoughts of one whose opinions carry more
weight than mine. I guarantee the truth of the facts I am about
to relate; they actually happened to the author whose writings
I am about to transcribe; it is for you to judge whether we can
draw from them any considerations bearing on the matter in hand.
I do not offer you my own idea or another's as your rule; I merely
present them for your examination.
Thirty years ago there was a young man in an Italian town; he
was an exile from his native land and found himself reduced to
the depths of poverty. He had been born a Calvinist, but the consequences
of his own folly had made him a fugitive in a strange land; he
had no money and he changed his religion for a morsel of bread.
There was a hostel for proselytes in that town to which he gained
admission. The study of controversy inspired doubts he had never
felt before, and he made acquaintance with evil hitherto unsuspected
by him; he heard strange doctrines and he met with morals still
stranger to him; he beheld this evil conduct and nearly fell a
victim to it. He longed to escape, but he was locked up; he complained,
but his complaints were unheeded; at the mercy of his tyrants,
he found himself treated as a criminal because he would not share
their crimes. The anger kindled in a young and untried heart by
the first experience of violence and injustice may be realised
by those who have themselves experienced it. Tears of anger flowed
from his eyes, he was wild with rage; he prayed to heaven and
to man, and his prayers were unheard; he spoke to every one and
no one listened to him. He saw no one but the vilest servants
under the control of the wretch who insulted him, or accomplices
in the same crime who laughed at his resistance and encouraged
him to follow their example. He would have been ruined had not
a worthy priest visited the hostel on some matter of business.
He found an opportunity of consulting him secretly. The priest
was poor and in need of help himself, but the victim had more
need of his assistance, and he did not hesitate to help him to
escape at the risk of making a dangerous enemy.
Having escaped from vice to return to poverty, the young man struggled
vainly against fate: for a moment he thought he had gained the
victory. At the first gleam of good fortune his woes and his protector
were alike forgotten. He was soon punished for this ingratitude;
all his hopes vanished; youth indeed was on his side, but his
romantic ideas spoiled everything. He had neither talent nor skill
to make his way easily, he could neither be commonplace nor wicked,
he expected so much that he got nothing. When he had sunk to his
former poverty, when he was without food or shelter and ready
to die of hunger, he remembered his benefactor.
He went back to him, found him, and was kindly welcomed; the sight
of him reminded the priest of a good deed he had done; such a
memory always rejoices the heart. This man was by nature humane
and pitiful; he felt the sufferings of others through his own,
and his heart had not been hardened by prosperity; in a word,
the lessons of wisdom and an enlightened virtue had reinforced
his natural kindness of heart. He welcomed the young man, found
him a lodging, and recommended him; he shared with him his living
which was barely enough for two. He did more, he instructed him,
consoled him, and taught him the difficult art of bearing adversity
in patience. You prejudiced people, would you have expected to
find all this in a priest and in Italy?
This worthy priest was a poor Savoyard clergyman who had offended
his bishop by some youthful fault; he had crossed the Alps to
find a position which he could not obtain in his own country.
He lacked neither wit nor learning, and with his interesting countenance
he had met with patrons who found him a place in the household
of one of the ministers, as tutor to his son. He preferred poverty
to dependence, and he did not know how to get on with the great.
He did not stay long with this minister, and when he departed
he took with him his good opinion; and as he lived a good life
and gained the hearts of everybody, he was glad to be forgiven
by his bishop and to obtain from him a small parish among the
mountains, where he might pass the rest of his life. This was
the limit of his ambition.
He was attracted by the young fugitive and he questioned him closely.
He saw that ill-fortune had already seared his heart, that scorn
and disgrace had overthrown his courage, and that his pride, transformed
into bitterness and spite, led him to see nothing in the harshness
and injustice of men but their evil disposition and the vanity
of all virtue. He had seen that religion was but a mask for selfishness,
and its holy services but a screen for hypocrisy; he had found
in the subtleties of empty disputations heaven and hell awarded
as prizes for mere words; he had seen the sublime and primitive
idea of Divinity disfigured by the vain fancies of men; and when,
as he thought, faith in God required him to renounce the reason
God himself had given him, he held in equal scorn our foolish
imaginings and the object with which they are concerned. With
no knowledge of things as they are, without any idea of their
origins, he was immersed in his stubborn ignorance and utterly
despised those who thought they knew more than himself.
The neglect of all religion soon leads to the neglect of a man's
duties. The heart of this young libertine was already far on this
road. Yet his was not a bad nature, though incredulity and misery
were gradually stifling his natural disposition and dragging him
down to ruin; they were leading him into the conduct of a rascal
and the morals of an atheist.
The almost inevitable evil was not actually consummated. The young
man was not ignorant, his education had not been neglected. He
was at that happy age when the pulse beats strongly and the heart
is warm, but is not yet enslaved by the madness of the senses.
His heart had not lost its elasticity. A native modesty, a timid
disposition restrained him, and prolonged for him that period
during which you watch your pupil so carefully. The hateful example
of brutal depravity, of vice without any charm, had not merely
failed to quicken his imagination, it had deadened it. For a long
time disgust rather than virtue preserved his innocence, which
would only succumb to more seductive charms.
The priest saw the danger and the way of escape. He was not discouraged
by difficulties, he took a pleasure in his task; he determined
to complete it and to restore to virtue the victim he had snatched
from vice. He set about it cautiously; the beauty of the motive
gave him courage and inspired him with means worthy of his zeal.
Whatever might be the result, his pains would not be wasted. We
are always successful when our sole aim is to do good.
He began to win the confidence of the proselyte by not asking
any price for his kindness, by not intruding himself upon him,
by not preaching at him, by always coming down to his level, and
treating him as an equal. It was, so I think, a touching sight
to see a serious person becoming the comrade of a young scamp,
and virtue putting up with the speech of licence in order to triumph
over it more completely. When the young fool came to him with
his silly confidences and opened his heart to him, the priest
listened and set him at his ease; without giving his approval
to what was bad, he took an interest in everything; no tactless
reproof checked his chatter or closed his heart; the pleasure
which he thought was given by his conversation increased his pleasure
in telling everything; thus he made his general confession without
knowing he was confessing anything.
After he had made a thorough study of his feelings and disposition,
the priest saw plainly that, although he was not ignorant for
his age, he had forgotten everything that he most needed to know,
and that the disgrace which fortune had brought upon him had stifled
in him all real sense of good and evil. There is a stage of degradation
which robs the soul of its life; and the inner voice cannot be
heard by one whose whole mind is bent on getting food. To protect
the unlucky youth from the moral death which threatened him, he
began to revive his self-love and his good opinion of himself.
He showed him a happier future in the right use of his talents;
he revived the generous warmth of his heart by stories of the
noble deeds of others; by rousing his admiration for the doers
of these deeds he revived his desire to do like deeds himself.
To draw him gradually from his idle and wandering life, he made
him copy out extracts from well-chosen books; he pretended to
want these extracts, and so nourished in him the noble feeling
of gratitude. He taught him indirectly through these books, and
thus he made him sufficiently regain his good opinion of himself
so that he would no longer think himself good for nothing, and
would not make himself despicable in his own eyes.
A trifling incident will show how this kindly man tried, unknown
to him, to raise the heart of his disciple out of its degradation,
without seeming to think of teaching. The priest was so well known
for his uprightness and his discretion, that many people preferred
to entrust their alms to him, rather than to the wealthy clergy
of the town. One day some one had given him some money to distribute
among the poor, and the young man was mean enough to ask for some
of it on the score of poverty. "No," said he, "we
are brothers, you belong to me and I must not touch the money
entrusted to me." Then he gave him the sum he had asked for
out of his own pocket. Lessons of this sort seldom fail to make
an impression on the heart of young people who are not wholly
corrupt.
I am weary of speaking in the third person, and the precaution
is unnecessary; for you are well aware, my dear friend, that I
myself was this unhappy fugitive; I think I am so far removed
from the disorders of my youth that I may venture to confess them,
and the hand which rescued me well deserves that I should at least
do honour to its goodness at the cost of some slight shame.
What struck me most was to see in the private life of my worthy
master, virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech
always plain and straightforward, and conduct in accordance with
this speech. I never saw him trouble himself whether those whom
he assisted went to vespers or confession, whether they fasted
at the appointed seasons and went without meat; nor did he impose
upon them any other like conditions, without which you might die
of hunger before you could hope for any help from the devout.
Far from displaying before him the zeal of a new convert, I was
encouraged by these observations and I made no secret of my way
of thinking, nor did he seem to be shocked by it. Sometimes I
would say to myself, he overlooks my indifference to the religion
I have adopted because he sees I am equally indifferent to the
religion in which I was brought up; he knows that my scorn for
religion is not confined to one sect. But what could I think when
I sometimes heard him give his approval to doctrines contrary
to those of the Roman Catholic Church, and apparently having but
a poor opinion of its ceremonies. I should have thought him a
Protestant in disguise if I had not beheld him so faithful to
those very customs which he seemed to value so lightly; but I
knew he fulfilled his priestly duties as carefully in private
as in public, and I knew not what to think of these apparent contradictions.
Except for the fault which had formerly brought about his disgrace,
a fault which he had only partially overcome, his life was exemplary,
his conduct beyond reproach, his conversation honest and discreet.
While I lived on very friendly terms with him, I learnt day by
day to respect him more; and when he had completely won my heart
by such great kindness, I awaited with eager curiosity the time
when I should learn what was the principle on which the uniformity
of this strange life was based.
This opportunity was a long time coming. Before taking his disciple
into his confidence, he tried to get the seeds of reason and kindness
which he had sown in my heart to germinate. The most difficult
fault to overcome in me was a certain haughty misanthropy, a certain
bitterness against the rich and successful, as if their wealth
and happiness had been gained at my own expense, and as if their
supposed happiness had been unjustly taken from my own. The foolish
vanity of youth, which kicks against the pricks of humiliation,
made me only too much inclined to this angry temper; and the self-respect,
which my mentor strove to revive, led to pride, which made men
still more vile in my eyes, and only added scorn to my hatred.
Without directly attacking this pride, he prevented it from developing
into hardness of heart; and without depriving me of my self-esteem,
he made me less scornful of my neighbours. By continually drawing
my attention from the empty show, and directing it to the genuine
sufferings concealed by it, he taught me to deplore the faults
of my fellows and feel for their sufferings, to pity rather than
envy them. Touched with compassion towards human weaknesses through
the profound conviction of his own failings, he viewed all men
as the victims of their own vices and those of others; he beheld
the poor groaning under the tyranny of the rich, and the rich
under the tyranny of their own prejudices. "Believe me,"
said he, "our illusions, far from concealing our woes, only
increase them by giving value to what is in itself valueless,
in making us aware of all sorts of fancied privations which we
should not otherwise feel. Peace of heart consists in despising
everything that might disturb that peace; the man who clings most
closely to life is the man who can least enjoy it; and the man
who most eagerly desires happiness is always most miserable."
"What gloomy ideas!" I exclaimed bitterly. "If
we must deny ourselves everything, we might as well never have
been born; and if we must despise even happiness itself who can
be happy?" "I am," replied the priest one day,
in a tone which made a great impression on me. "You happy!
So little favoured by fortune, so poor, an exile and persecuted,
you are happy! How have you contrived to be happy?" "My
child," he answered, "I will gladly tell you."
Thereupon he explained that, having heard my confessions, he would
confess to me. "I will open my whole heart to yours,"
he said, embracing me. "You will see me, if not as I am,
at least as I seem to myself. When you have heard my whole confession
of faith, when you really know the condition of my heart, you
will know why I think myself happy, and if you think as I do,
you will know how to be happy too. But these explanations are
not the affair of a moment, it will take time to show you all
my ideas about the lot of man and the true value of life; let
us choose a fitting time and a place where we may continue this
conversation without interruption."
I showed him how eager I was to hear him. The meeting was fixed
for the very next morning. It was summer time; we rose at daybreak.
He took me out of the town on to a high hill above the river Po,
whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks;
in the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of
the Alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains
and cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and
houses, and enriched with a thousand gleams of light the fairest
picture which the human eye can see. You would have thought that
nature was displaying all her splendour before our eyes to furnish
a text for our conversation. After contemplating this scene for
a space in silence, the man of peace spoke to me.
THE CREED OF A SAVOYARD PRIEST
My child, do not look to me for learned speeches or profound arguments.
I am no great philosopher, nor do I desire to be one. I have,
however, a certain amount of common-sense and a constant devotion
to truth. I have no wish to argue with you nor even to convince
you; it is enough for me to show you, in all simplicity of heart,
what I really think. Consult your own heart while I speak; that
is all I ask. If I am mistaken, I am honestly mistaken, and therefore
my error will not be counted to me as a crime; if you, too, are
honestly mistaken, there is no great harm done. If I am right,
we are both endowed with reason, we have both the same motive
for listening to the voice of reason. Why should not you think
as I do?
By birth I was a peasant and poor; to till the ground was my portion;
but my parents thought it a finer thing that I should learn to
get my living as a priest and they found means to send me to college.
I am quite sure that neither my parents nor I had any idea of
seeking after what was good, useful, or true; we only sought what
was wanted to get me ordained. I learned what was taught me, I
said what I was told to say, I promised all that was required,
and I became a priest. But I soon discovered that when I promised
not to be a man, I had promised more than I could perform.
Conscience, they tell us, is the creature of prejudice, but I
know from experience that conscience persists in following the
order of nature in spite of all the laws of man. In vain is this
or that forbidden; remorse makes her voice heard but feebly when
what we do is permitted by well-ordered nature, and still more
when we are doing her bidding. My good youth, nature has not yet
appealed to your senses; may you long remain in this happy state
when her voice is the voice of innocence. Remember that to anticipate
her teaching is to offend more deeply against her than to resist
her teaching; you must first learn to resist, that you may know
when to yield without wrong-doing.
From my youth up I had reverenced the married state as the first
and most sacred institution of nature. Having renounced the right
to marry, I was resolved not to profane the sanctity of marriage;
for in spite of my education and reading I had always led a simple
and regular life, and my mind had preserved the innocence of its
natural instincts; these instincts had not been obscured by worldly
wisdom, while my poverty kept me remote from the temptations dictated
by the sophistry of vice.
This very resolution proved my ruin. My respect for marriage led
to the discovery of my misconduct. The scandal must be expiated;
I was arrested, suspended, and dismissed; I was the victim of
my scruples rather than of my incontinence, and I had reason to
believe, from the reproaches which accompanied my disgrace, that
one can often escape punishment by being guilty of a worse fault.
A thoughtful mind soon learns from such experiences. I found my
former ideas of justice, honesty, and every duty of man overturned
by these painful events, and day by day I was losing my hold on
one or another of the opinions I had accepted. What was left was
not enough to form a body of ideas which could stand alone, and
I felt that the evidence on which my principles rested was being
weakened; at last I knew not what to think, and I came to the
same conclusion as yourself, but with this difference: My lack
of faith was the slow growth of manhood, attained with great difficulty,
and all the harder to uproot.
I was in that state of doubt and uncertainty which Descartes considers
essential to the search for truth. It is a state which cannot
continue, it is disquieting and painful; only vicious tendencies
and an idle heart can keep us in that state. My heart was not
so corrupt as to delight in it, and there is nothing which so
maintains the habit of thinking as being better pleased with oneself
than with one's lot.
I pondered, therefore, on the sad fate of mortals, adrift upon
this sea of human opinions, without compass or rudder, and abandoned
to their stormy passions with no guide but an inexperienced pilot
who does not know whence he comes or whither he is going. I said
to myself, "I love truth, I seek her, and cannot find her.
Show me truth and I will hold her fast; why does she hide her
face from the eager heart that would fain worship her?"
Although I have often experienced worse sufferings, I have never
led a life so uniformly distressing as this period of unrest and
anxiety, when I wandered incessantly from one doubt to another,
gaining nothing from my prolonged meditations but uncertainty,
darkness, and contradiction with regard to the source of my being
and the rule of my duties.
I cannot understand how any one can be a sceptic sincerely and
on principle. Either such philosophers do not exist or they are
the most miserable of men. Doubt with regard to what we ought
to know is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot
long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or
another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe
nothing.
My perplexity was increased by the fact that I had been brought
up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts,
so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject
the rest; as I could not accept absurd decisions, I was deprived
of those which were not absurd. When I was told to believe everything,
I could believe nothing, and I knew not where to stop.
I consulted the philosophers, I searched their books and examined
their various theories; I found them all alike proud, assertive,
dogmatic, professing, even in their so-called scepticism, to know
everything, proving nothing, scoffing at each other. This last
trait, which was common to all of them, struck me as the only
point in which they were right. Braggarts in attack, they are
weaklings in defence. Weigh their arguments, they are all destructive;
count their voices, every one speaks for himself; they are only
agreed in arguing with each other. I could find no way out of
my uncertainty by listening to them.
I suppose this prodigious diversity of opinion is caused, in the
first place, by the weakness of the human intellect; and, in the
second, by pride. We have no means of measuring this vast machine,
we are unable to calculate its workings; we know neither its guiding
principles nor its final purpose; we do not know ourselves, we
know neither our nature nor the spirit that moves us; we scarcely
know whether man is one or many; we are surrounded by impenetrable
mysteries. These mysteries are beyond the region of sense, we
think we can penetrate them by the light of reason, but we fall
back on our imagination. Through this imagined world each forces
a way for himself which he holds to be right; none can tell whether
his path will lead him to the goal. Yet we long to know and understand
it all. The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.
We prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true,
rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is.
A fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze,
a fragment abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we
are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole
and our own relations with regard to it.
If the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which
of them would care to do so? Every one of them knows that his
own system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he
maintains it because it is his own. There is not one of them who,
if he chanced to discover the difference between truth and falsehood,
would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered.
Where is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world
for his own glory? If he can rise above the crowd, if he can excel
his rivals, what more does he want? Among believers he is an atheist;
among atheists he would be a believer.
The first thing I learned from these considerations was to restrict
my inquiries to what directly concerned myself, to rest in profound
ignorance of everything else, and not even to trouble myself to
doubt anything beyond what I required to know.
I also realised that the philosophers, far from ridding me of
my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and
failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and
said, "Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me
so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my
own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own
illusions as if I trusted to their deceits."
I then went over in my mind the various opinions which I had held
in the course of my life, and I saw that although no one of them
was plain enough to gain immediate belief, some were more probable
than others, and my inward consent was given or withheld in proportion
to this improbability. Having discovered this, I made an unprejudiced
comparison of all these different ideas, and I perceived that
the first and most general of them was also the simplest and the
most reasonable, and that it would have been accepted by every
one if only it had been last instead of first. Imagine all your
philosophers, ancient and modern, having exhausted their strange
systems of force, chance, fate, necessity, atoms, a living world,
animated matter, and every variety of materialism. Then comes
the illustrious Clarke who gives light to the world and proclaims
the Being of beings and the Giver of things. What universal admiration,
what unanimous applause would have greeted this new system--a
system so great, so illuminating, and so simple. Other systems
are full of absurdities; this system seems to me to contain fewer
things which are beyond the understanding of the human mind. I
said to myself, "Every system has its insoluble problems,
for the finite mind of man is too small to deal with them; these
difficulties are therefore no final arguments, against any system.
But what a difference there is between the direct evidence on
which these systems are based! Should we not prefer that theory
which alone explains all the facts, when it is no more difficult
than the rest?"
Bearing thus within my heart the love of truth as my only philosophy,
and as my only method a clear and simple rule which dispensed
with the need for vain and subtle arguments, I returned with the
help of this rule to the examination of such knowledge as concerned
myself; I was resolved to admit as self-evident all that I could
not honestly refuse to believe, and to admit as true all that
seemed to follow directly from this; all the rest I determined
to leave undecided, neither accepting nor rejecting it, nor yet
troubling myself to clear up difficulties which did not lead to
any practical ends.
But who am I? What right have I to decide? What is it that determines
my judgments? If they are inevitable, if they are the results
of the impressions I receive, I am wasting my strength in such
inquiries; they would be made or not without any interference
of mine. I must therefore first turn my eyes upon myself to acquaint
myself with the instrument I desire to use, and to discover how
far it is reliable.
I exist, and I have senses through which I receive impressions.
This is the first truth that strikes me and I am forced to accept
it. Have I any independent knowledge of my existence, or am I
only aware of it through my sensations? This is my first difficulty,
and so far I cannot solve it. For I continually experience sensations,
either directly or indirectly through memory, so how can I know
if the feeling of self is something beyond these sensations or
if it can exist independently of them?
My sensations take place in myself, for they make me aware of
my own existence; but their cause is outside me, for they affect
me whether I have any reason for them or not, and they are produced
or destroyed independently of me. So I clearly perceive that my
sensation, which is within me, and its cause or its object, which
is outside me, are different things.
Thus, not only do I exist, but other entities exist also, that
is to say, the objects of my sensations; and even if these objects
are merely ideas, still these ideas are not me.
But everything outside myself, everything which acts upon my senses,
I call matter, and all the particles of matter which I suppose
to be united into separate entities I call bodies. Thus all the
disputes of the idealists and the realists have no meaning for
me; their distinctions between the appearance and the reality
of bodies are wholly fanciful.
I am now as convinced of the existence of the universe as of my
own. I next consider the objects of my sensations, and I find
that I have the power of comparing them, so I perceive that I
am endowed with an active force of which I was not previously
aware.
To perceive is to feel; to compare is to judge; to judge and to
feel are not the same. Through sensation objects present themselves
to me separately and singly as they are in nature; by comparing
them I rearrange them, I shift them so to speak, I place one upon
another to decide whether they are alike or different, or more
generally to find out their relations. To my mind, the distinctive
faculty of an active or intelligent being is the power of understanding
this word "is." I seek in vain in the merely sensitive
entity that intelligent force which compares and judges; I can
find no trace of it in its nature. This passive entity will be
aware of each object separately, it will even be aware of the
whole formed by the two together, but having no power to place
them side by side it can never compare them, it can never form
a judgment with regard to them.
To see two things at once is not to see their relations nor to
judge of their differences; to perceive several objects, one beyond
the other, is not to relate them. I may have at the same moment
an idea of a big stick and a little stick without comparing them,
without judging that one is less than the other, just as I can
see my whole hand without counting my fingers. [Footnote: M. de
le Cordamines' narratives tell of a people who only know how to
count up to three. Yet the men of this nation, having hands, have
often seen their fingers without learning to count up to five.]
These comparative ideas, 'greater', 'smaller', together with number
ideas of 'one', 'two', etc. are certainly not sensations, although
my mind only produces them when my sensations occur.
We are told that a sensitive being distinguishes sensations from
each other by the inherent differences in the sensations; this
requires explanation. When the sensations are different, the sensitive
being distinguishes them by their differences; when they are alike,
he distinguishes them because he is aware of them one beyond the
other. Otherwise, how could he distinguish between two equal objects
simultaneously experienced? He would necessarily confound the
two objects and take them for one object, especially under a system
which professed that the representative sensations of space have
no extension.
When we become aware of the two sensations to be compared, their
impression is made, each object is perceived, both are perceived,
but for all that their relation is not perceived. If the judgment
of this relation were merely a sensation, and came to me solely
from the object itself, my judgments would never be mistaken,
for it is never untrue that I feel what I feel.
Why then am I mistaken as to the relation between these two sticks,
especially when they are not parallel? Why, for example, do I
say the small stick is a third of the large, when it is only a
quarter? Why is the picture, which is the sensation, unlike its
model which is the object? It is because I am active when I judge,
because the operation of comparison is at fault; because my understanding,
which judges of relations, mingles its errors with the truth of
sensations, which only reveal to me things.
Add to this a consideration which will, I feel sure, appeal to
you when you have thought about it: it is this--If we were purely
passive in the use of our senses, there would be no communication
between them; it would be impossible to know that the body we
are touching and the thing we are looking at is the same. Either
we should never perceive anything outside ourselves, or there
would be for us five substances perceptible by the senses, whose
identity we should have no means of perceiving.
This power of my mind which brings my sensations together and
compares them may be called by any name; let it be called attention,
meditation, reflection, or what you will; it is still true that
it is in me and not in things, that it is I alone who produce
it, though I only produce it when I receive an impression from
things. Though I am compelled to feel or not to feel, I am free
to examine more or less what I feel.
Being now, so to speak, sure of myself, I begin to look at things
outside myself, and I behold myself with a sort of shudder flung
at random into this vast universe, plunged as it were into the
vast number of entities, knowing nothing of what they are in themselves
or in relation to me. I study them, I observe them; and the first
object which suggests itself for comparison with them is myself.
All that I perceive through the senses is matter, and I deduce
all the essential properties of matter from the sensible qualities
which make me perceive it, qualities which are inseparable from
it. I see it sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest, [Footnote:
This repose is, if you prefer it, merely relative; but as we perceive
more or less of motion, we may plainly conceive one of two extremes,
which is rest; and we conceive it so clearly that we are even
disposed to take for absolute rest what is only relative. But
it is not true that motion is of the essence of matter, if matter
may be conceived of as at rest.] hence I infer that neither motion
nor rest is essential to it, but motion, being an action, is the
result of a cause of which rest is only the absence. When, therefore,
there is nothing acting upon matter it does not move, and for
the very reason that rest and motion are indifferent to it, its
natural state is a state of rest.
I perceive two sorts of motions of bodies, acquired motion and
spontaneous or voluntary motion. In the first the cause is external
to the body moved, in the second it is within. I shall not conclude
from that that the motion, say of a watch, is spontaneous, for
if no external cause operated upon the spring it would run down
and the watch would cease to go. For the same reason I should
not admit that the movements of fluids are spontaneous, neither
should I attribute spontaneous motion to fire which causes their
fluidity. [Footnote: Chemists regard phlogiston or the element
of fire as diffused, motionless, and stagnant in the compounds
of which it forms part, until external forces set it free, collect
it and set it in motion, and change it into fire.]
You ask me if the movements of animals are spontaneous; my answer
is, "I cannot tell," but analogy points that way. You
ask me again, how do I know that there are spontaneous movements?
I tell you, "I know it because I feel them." I want
to move my arm and I move it without any other immediate cause
of the movement but my own will. In vain would any one try to
argue me out of this feeling, it is stronger than any proofs;
you might as well try to convince me that I do not exist.
If there were no spontaneity in men's actions, nor in anything
that happens on this earth, it would be all the more difficult
to imagine a first cause for all motion. For my own part, I feel
myself so thoroughly convinced that the natural state of matter
is a state of rest, and that it has no power of action in itself,
that when I see a body in motion I at once assume that it is either
a living body or that this motion has been imparted to it. My
mind declines to accept in any way the idea of inorganic matter
moving of its own accord, or giving rise to any action.
Yet this visible universe consists of matter, matter diffused
and dead, [Footnote: I have tried hard to grasp the idea of a
living molecule, but in vain. The idea of matter feeling without
any senses seems to me unintelligible and self-contradictory.
To accept or reject this idea one must first understand it, and
I confess that so far I have not succeeded.] matter which has
none of the cohesion, the organisation, the common feeling of
the parts of a living body, for it is certain that we who are
parts have no consciousness of the whole. This same universe is
in motion, and in its movements, ordered, uniform, and subject
to fixed laws, it has none of that freedom which appears in the
spontaneous movements of men and animals. So the world is not
some huge animal which moves of its own accord; its movements
are therefore due to some external cause, a cause which I cannot
perceive, but the inner voice makes this cause so apparent to
me that I cannot watch the course of the sun without imagining
a force which drives it, and when the earth revolves I think I
see the hand that sets it in motion.
If I must accept general laws whose essential relation to matter
is unperceived by me, how much further have I got? These laws,
not being real things, not being substances, have therefore some
other basis unknown to me. Experiment and observation have acquainted
us with the laws of motion; these laws determine the results without
showing their causes; they are quite inadequate to explain the
system of the world and the course of the universe. With the help
of dice Descartes made heaven and earth; but he could not set
his dice in motion, nor start the action of his centrifugal force
without the help of rotation. Newton discovered the law of gravitation;
but gravitation alone would soon reduce the universe to a motionless
mass; he was compelled to add a projectile force to account for
the elliptical course of the celestial bodies; let Newton show
us the hand that launched the planets in the tangent of their
orbits.
The first causes of motion are not to be found in matter; matter
receives and transmits motion, but does not produce it. The more
I observe the action and reaction of the forces of nature playing
on one another, the more I see that we must always go back from
one effect to another, till we arrive at a first cause in some
will; for to assume an infinite succession of causes is to assume
that there is no first cause. In a word, no motion which is not
caused by another motion can take place, except by a spontaneous,
voluntary action; inanimate bodies have no action but motion,
and there is no real action without will. This is my first principle.
I believe, therefore, that there is a will which sets the universe
in motion and gives life to nature. This is my first dogma, or
the first article of my creed.
How does a will produce a physical and corporeal action? I cannot
tell, but I perceive that it does so in myself; I will to do something
and I do it; I will to move my body and it moves, but if an inanimate
body, when at rest, should begin to move itself, the thing is
incomprehensible and without precedent. The will is known to me
in its action, not in its nature. I know this will as a cause
of motion, but to conceive of matter as producing motion is clearly
to conceive of an effect without a cause, which is not to conceive
at all.
It is no more possible for me to conceive how my will moves my
body than to conceive how my sensations affect my mind. I do not
even know why one of these mysteries has seemed less inexplicable
than the other. For my own part, whether I am active or passive,
the means of union of the two substances seem to me absolutely
incomprehensible. It is very strange that people make this very
incomprehensibility a step towards the compounding of the two
substances, as if operations so different in kind were more easily
explained in one case than in two.
The doctrine I have just laid down is indeed obscure; but at least
it suggests a meaning and there is nothing in it repugnant to
reason or experience; can we say as much of materialism? Is it
not plain that if motion is essential to matter it would be inseparable
from it, it would always be present in it in the same degree,
always present in every particle of matter, always the same in
each particle of matter, it would not be capable of transmission,
it could neither increase nor diminish, nor could we ever conceive
of matter at rest. When you tell me that motion is not essential
to matter but necessary to it, you try to cheat me with words
which would be easier to refute if there was a little more sense
in them. For either the motion of matter arises from the matter
itself and is therefore essential to it; or it arises from an
external cause and is not necessary to the matter, because the
motive cause acts upon it; we have got back to our original difficulty.
The chief source of human error is to be found in general and
abstract ideas; the jargon of metaphysics has never led to the
discovery of any single truth, and it has filled philosophy with
absurdities of which we are ashamed as soon as we strip them of
their long words. Tell me, my friend, when they talk to you of
a blind force diffused throughout nature, do they present any
real idea to your mind? They think they are saying something by
these vague expressions--universal force, essential motion--but
they are saying nothing at all. The idea of motion is nothing
more than the idea of transference from place to place; there
is no motion without direction; for no individual can move all
ways at once. In what direction then does matter move of necessity?
Has the whole body of matter a uniform motion, or has each atom
its own motion? According to the first idea the whole universe
must form a solid and indivisible mass; according to the second
it can only form a diffused and incoherent fluid, which would
make the union of any two atoms impossible. What direction shall
be taken by this motion common to all matter? Shall it be in a
straight line, in a circle, or from above downwards, to the right
or to the left? If each molecule has its own direction, what are
the causes of all these directions and all these differences?
If every molecule or atom only revolved on its own axis, nothing
would ever leave its place and there would be no transmitted motion,
and even then this circular movement would require to follow some
direction. To set matter in motion by an abstraction is to utter
words without meaning, and to attribute to matter a given direction
is to assume a determining cause. The more examples I take, the
more causes I have to explain, without ever finding a common agent
which controls them. Far from being able to picture to myself
an entire absence of order in the fortuitous concurrence of elements,
I cannot even imagine such a strife, and the chaos of the universe
is less conceivable to me than its harmony. I can understand that
the mechanism of the universe may not be intelligible to the human
mind, but when a man sets to work to explain it, he must say what
men can understand.
If matter in motion points me to a will, matter in motion according
to fixed laws points me to an intelligence; that is the second
article of my creed. To act, to compare, to choose, are the operations
of an active, thinking being; so this being exists. Where do you
find him existing, you will say? Not merely in the revolving heavens,
nor in the sun which gives us light, not in myself alone, but
in the sheep that grazes, the bird that flies, the stone that
falls, and the leaf blown by the wind.
I judge of the order of the world, although I know nothing of
its purpose, for to judge of this order it is enough for me to
compare the parts one with another, to study their co-operation,
their relations, and to observe their united action. I know not
why the universe exists, but I see continually how it is changed;
I never fail to perceive the close connection by which the entities
of which it consists lend their aid one to another. I am like
a man who sees the works of a watch for the first time; he is
never weary of admiring the mechanism, though he does not know
the use of the instrument and has never seen its face. I do not
know what this is for, says he, but I see that each part of it
is fitted to the rest, I admire the workman in the details of
his work, and I am quite certain that all these wheels only work
together in this fashion for some common end which I cannot perceive.
Let us compare the special ends, the means, the ordered relations
of every kind, then let us listen to the inner voice of feeling;
what healthy mind can reject its evidence? Unless the eyes are
blinded by prejudices, can they fail to see that the visible order
of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence? What sophisms
must be brought together before we fail to understand the harmony
of existence and the wonderful co-operation of every part for
the maintenance of the rest? Say what you will of combinations
and probabilities; what do you gain by reducing me to silence
if you cannot gain my consent? And how can you rob me of the spontaneous
feeling which, in spite of myself, continually gives you the lie?
If organised bodies had come together fortuitously in all sorts
of ways before assuming settled forms, if stomachs are made without
mouths, feet without heads, hands without arms, imperfect organs
of every kind which died because they could not preserve their
life, why do none of these imperfect attempts now meet our eyes;
why has nature at length prescribed laws to herself which she
did not at first recognise? I must not be surprised if that which
is possible should happen, and if the improbability of the event
is compensated for by the number of the attempts. I grant this;
yet if any one told me that printed characters scattered broadcast
had produced the Aeneid all complete, I would not condescend to
take a single step to verify this falsehood. You will tell me
I am forgetting the multitude of attempts. But how many such attempts
must I assume to bring the combination within the bounds of probability?
For my own part the only possible assumption is that the chances
are infinity to one that the product is not the work of chance.
In addition to this, chance combinations yield nothing but products
of the same nature as the elements combined, so that life and
organisation will not be produced by a flow of atoms, and a chemist
when making his compounds will never give them thought and feeling
in his crucible. [Footnote: Could one believe, if one had not
seen it, that human absurdity could go so far? Amatus Lusitanus
asserts that he saw a little man an inch long enclosed in a glass,
which Julius Camillus, like a second Prometheus, had made by alchemy.
Paracelsis (De natura rerum) teaches the method of making these
tiny men, and he maintains that the pygmies, fauns, satyrs, and
nymphs have been made by chemistry. Indeed I cannot see that there
is anything more to be done, to establish the possibility of these
facts, unless it is to assert that organic matter resists the
heat of fire and that its molecules can preserve their life in
the hottest furnace.]
I was surprised and almost shocked when I read Neuwentit. How
could this man desire to make a book out of the wonders of nature,
wonders which show the wisdom of the author of nature? His book
would have been as large as the world itself before he had exhausted
his subject, and as soon as we attempt to give details, that greatest
wonder of all, the concord and harmony of the whole, escapes us.
The mere generation of living organic bodies is the despair of
the human mind; the insurmountable barrier raised by nature between
the various species, so that they should not mix with one another,
is the clearest proof of her intention. She is not content to
have established order, she has taken adequate measures to prevent
the disturbance of that order.
There is not a being in the universe which may not be regarded
as in some respects the common centre of all, around which they
are grouped, so that they are all reciprocally end and means in
relation to each other. The mind is confused and lost amid these
innumerable relations, not one of which is itself confused or
lost in the crowd. What absurd assumptions are required to deduce
all this harmony from the blind mechanism of matter set in motion
by chance! In vain do those who deny the unity of intention manifested
in the relations of all the parts of this great whole, in vain
do they conceal their nonsense under abstractions, co-ordinations,
general principles, symbolic expressions; whatever they do I find
it impossible to conceive of a system of entities so firmly ordered
unless I believe in an intelligence that orders them. It is not
in my power to believe that passive and dead matter can have brought
forth living and feeling beings, that blind chance has brought
forth intelligent beings, that that which does not think has brought
forth thinking beings.
I believe, therefore, that the world is governed by a wise and
powerful will; I see it or rather I feel it, and it is a great
thing to know this. But has this same world always existed, or
has it been created? Is there one source of all things? Are there
two or many? What is their nature? I know not; and what concern
is it of mine? When these things become of importance to me I
will try to learn them; till then I abjure these idle speculations,
which may trouble my peace, but cannot affect my conduct nor be
comprehended by my reason.
Recollect that I am not preaching my own opinion but explaining
it. Whether matter is eternal or created, whether its origin is
passive or not, it is still certain that the whole is one, and
that it proclaims a single intelligence; for I see nothing that
is not part of the same ordered system, nothing which does not
co-operate to the same end, namely, the conservation of all within
the established order. This being who wills and can perform his
will, this being active through his own power, this being, whoever
he may be, who moves the universe and orders all things, is what
I call God. To this name I add the ideas of intelligence, power,
will, which I have brought together, and that of kindness which
is their necessary consequence; but for all this I know no more
of the being to which I ascribe them. He hides himself alike from
my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more
perplexed I am; I know full well that he exists, and that he exists
of himself alone; I know that my existence depends on his, and
that everything I know depends upon him also. I see God everywhere
in his works; I feel him within myself; I behold him all around
me; but if I try to ponder him himself, if I try to find out where
he is, what he is, what is his substance, he escapes me and my
troubled spirit finds nothing.
Convinced of my unfitness, I shall never argue about the nature
of God unless I am driven to it by the feeling of his relations
with myself. Such reasonings are always rash; a wise man should
venture on them with trembling, he should be certain that he can
never sound their abysses; for the most insolent attitude towards
God is not to abstain from thinking of him, but to think evil
of him.
After the discovery of such of his attributes as enable me to
conceive of his existence, I return to myself, and I try to discover
what is my place in the order of things which he governs, and
I can myself examine. At once, and beyond possibility of doubt,
I discover my species; for by my own will and the instruments
I can control to carry out my will, I have more power to act upon
all bodies about me, either to make use of or to avoid their action
at my pleasure, than any of them has power to act upon me against
my will by mere physical impulsion; and through my intelligence
I am the only one who can examine all the rest. What being here
below, except man, can observe others, measure, calculate, forecast
their motions, their effects, and unite, so to speak, the feeling
of a common existence with that of his individual existence? What
is there so absurd in the thought that all things are made for
me, when I alone can relate all things to myself?
It is true, therefore, that man is lord of the earth on which
he dwells; for not only does he tame all the beasts, not only
does he control its elements through his industry; but he alone
knows how to control it; by contemplation he takes possession
of the stars which he cannot approach. Show me any other creature
on earth who can make a fire and who can behold with admiration
the sun. What! can I observe and know all creatures and their
relations; can I feel what is meant by order, beauty, and virtue;
can I consider the universe and raise myself towards the hand
that guides it; can I love good and perform it; and should I then
liken myself to the beasts? Wretched soul, it is your gloomy philosophy
which makes you like the beasts; or rather in vain do you seek
to degrade yourself; your genius belies your principles, your
kindly heart belies your doctrines, and even the abuse of your
powers proves their excellence in your own despite.
For myself, I am not pledged to the support of any system. I am
a plain and honest man, one who is not carried away by party spirit,
one who has no ambition to be head of a sect; I am content with
the place where God has set me; I see nothing, next to God himself,
which is better than my species; and if I had to choose my place
in the order of creation, what more could I choose than to be
a man!
I am not puffed up by this thought, I am deeply moved by it; for
this state was no choice of mine, it was not due to the deserts
of a creature who as yet did not exist. Can I behold myself thus
distinguished without congratulating myself on this post of honour,
without blessing the hand which bestowed it? The first return
to self has given birth to a feeling of gratitude and thankfulness
to the author of my species, and this feeling calls forth my first
homage to the beneficent Godhead. I worship his Almighty power
and my heart acknowledges his mercies. Is it not a natural consequence
of our self-love to honour our protector and to love our benefactor?
But when, in my desire to discover my own place within my species,
I consider its different ranks and the men who fill them, where
am I now? What a sight meets my eyes! Where is now the order I
perceived? Nature showed me a scene of harmony and proportion;
the human race ........Continua
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