We know too well that man is not a perfect being. Were he perfect, he would not reflect a vague resemblance of God; he would be God himself. He is imperfect, then,—subject to error and to suffering,—but, on the other hand, were he stationary, what title could he have to claim the unspeakable privilege of bearing in himself the image of a perfect being?
Moreover, if intelligence, which is the faculty of comparing, of judging, of rectifying errors, of learning, does not constitute individual perfectibility, what can constitute it?
And if the union of all individual perfectibilities, especially among beings capable of communicating to each other their acquisitions, does not afford a guarantee for collective perfectibility, we must renounce all philosophy and all moral and political science.
What constitutes man’s perfectibility is his intelligence, or the [p509] faculty which has been given to him of passing from error, which is the parent of evil, to truth, which is the generating principle of good.
It is science and experience which cause man to abandon, in his mind, error for truth, and afterwards, in his conduct, evil for good; it is the discovery which he makes, in phenomena and in acts, of effects which he had not suspected.
But to enable him to acquire this science, he must have an interest in acquiring it. In order that he should profit by this experience, he must have an interest in profiting by it. It is in the law of responsibility, then, that we must search for the means of realizing human perfectibility.
And as we can form no idea of responsibility apart from liberty; as acts which are not voluntary can afford neither instruction nor available experience; as beings capable of being improved or deteriorated by the exclusive action of external causes without the participation of choice, reflection, or free will (although this happens in the case of unconscious organized matter), could not be called perfectible, in the moral acceptation of the word, we must conclude that liberty is the very essence of progress. To impair man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and deaden in his noble nature that vital spark which glowed there from the beginning.
But in thus proclaiming aloud our fixed and unalterable belief in human perfectibility, and in progress, which is necessary in every sense, and which, by a marvellous correspondence, is as much more active in one direction as it is more active in all others, we must not be regarded as indulging in Utopianism, or be considered as optimists, believing “all to be for the best, in the best of worlds,” and expecting the immediate arrival of the millennium.
Alas! when we turn our regards on the world as it is, and see around us the enormous amount of mud and meanness, suffering and complaint, vice and crime, which still exist,—when we reflect on the moral action exerted on society by the classes who ought to point out to the lagging multitude the way to the New Jerusalem,—when we ask ourselves what use the rich make of their fortune, the poets of their genius, philosophers of their scientific lucubrations, journalists of the ministry with which they are invested, high functionaries, ministers of state, representatives of the people, kings, of the power which fate has placed in their hands,—when [p510] we witness revolutions like that which has recently agitated Europe, and in which each man seems to be in search of what must in the long-run prove fatal to himself and to society at large,—when we see cupidity in all shapes and among all ranks, the constant sacrifice of the interests of others to our own selfish interest, and of the future to the present,—when we see that great and inevitable moving spring of the human race, personal interest, still making its appearance only in manifestations the most material and the most improvident,—when we see the working classes, preyed upon by the parasitism of public functionaries, rise up in revolutionary convulsions, not against this withering parasitism, but against wealth legitimately acquired, that is to say, against the very element of their own deliverance and the principle of their own right and force,—when such spectacles present themselves to us on all sides, we get afraid of ourselves, we tremble for our faith in human perfectibility, the light would seem to waver, and be on the eve of extinction, leaving us in the fearful darkness of Pessimism.
But no—there is no ground for despair. Whatever be the impressions which too recent circumstances have made upon us, humanity still moves onward. What causes the illusion is that we measure the life of nations by the short span of our own individual lives; and because a few years are a long period for us, we imagine them also a long period for them. But even adopting this inadequate measure, the progress of society on all sides is visible. I need scarcely remind you of the marvels which have already been accomplished in what concerns material advantages, the improved salubrity of towns, and in the means of locomotion and communication, etc.