From earliest infancy to extreme old age, our life is only a long apprenticeship. By frequently falling, we learn to walk. By rude and reiterated experiments, we are taught to avoid heat, cold, hunger, thirst, excess. Do not let us complain of the roughness of this experience. If it were not so, it would teach us nothing.
The same thing holds in the social order. From the unhappy consequences of cruelty, of injustice, of fear, of violence, of deceit, of idleness, we learn to be gentle, just, brave, moderate, truthful, and industrious. Experience is protracted; it will never come to an end; but it will never cease to be efficacious.
Man being so constituted, it is impossible that we should not recognise in responsibility the mainspring to which social progress is specially confided. It is the crucible in which experience is elaborated. They, then, who believe in the superiority of times past, like those who despair of the future, fall into the most manifest contradiction. Without being aware of it, they extol error, and calumniate knowledge. It is as if they said, “The more I have learnt, the less I know. The more clearly I discern what is [p476] hurtful, the more I shall be exposed to it.” Were humanity constituted on such a basis as this, it would in a short time cease to exist.
Man’s starting-point is ignorance and inexperience. The farther we trace back the chain of time, the more destitute we find men of that knowledge which is fitted to direct their choice,—of knowledge which can be acquired only in one of two ways: by reflection or by experience.
Now it so happens that man’s every action includes, not one consequence only, but a series of consequences. Sometimes the first is good, and the others bad; sometimes the first is bad, and the others good. From one of our determinations there may proceed good and bad consequences, combined in variable proportions. We may venture to term vicious those actions which produce more bad than good effects, and virtuous those which produce a greater amount of good than of evil.
When one of our actions produces a first consequence which we approve, followed by many other consequences which are hurtful, so that the aggregate of bad predominates over the aggregate of good, such an action tends to limit and restrain itself, and to be abandoned in proportion as we acquire more foresight.
Men naturally perceive the immediate consequences of their actions before they perceive those consequences which are more remote. Whence it follows that what we have denominated vicious acts are more multiplied in times of ignorance. Now the repetition of the same acts constitutes habit. Ages of ignorance, then, are ages of bad habits.
Consequently, they are ages of bad laws, for acts which are repeated, habits which are general, constitute manners, upon which laws are modelled, and of which, so to speak, they are the official expression.
How is this ignorance to be put an end to? How can men be taught to know the second, the third, and all the subsequent consequences of their acts and their habits?
The first means is the exercise of that faculty of discerning and reasoning which Providence has vouchsafed them.