But history mounts still higher by the aid of philosophy; its mission, in fact, is not merely to recount the life of certain individuals, who by their talents, their virtues, or their crimes have left a deep trace in the memory of generations: above all, it is the tableau of the destiny of peoples which it is called upon to paint; it is social events which, above all, form the interest of its pictures. Therein each people appears like a moral personality, with its infancy, its growth, its maturity and its decrepitude; its special character, its qualities and faults, its good points and its crimes, its prosperity and its misfortune. The life of each people is, then, a grand drama, wherein not one of the elements of the most moving interest is wanting; but this drama must have its moral, and, in order to give it one, history must have recourse anew to philosophy. Philosophy will not fail it; she will furnish it with the social laws, that is to say, those by which societies are constituted, governed, and developed. The application of these laws, which she deduces from the nature of man, she invites history to seek in the facts. If her theories are true, it is impossible that their accomplishment should not confer happiness on society, and their violation misfortune. History ought therefore, again, from this point of view to be the counter-proof of philosophy; and it ought to become so after a manner still more complete than when it occupied itself with the destiny of individuals. In truth, this destiny, playing its part chiefly on the invisible theatre of conscience and carrying it on into after-time, often escapes the application of history. Societies, on the contrary, having an existence temporal in its duration and public in its most important events, ought to show forth in their history with great clearness the award of the laws which the Creator has imposed upon them, and which philosophy establishes a priori by its deductions. The study of this award must purchase, then, at the price of very great difficulties, the precious advantages which it promises. It is this which constitutes the second degree of the philosophy of history, and which makes this science the best school of politics.
Lastly, history mounts a degree still higher: beyond the moral individualities which we call peoples, she discovers an individuality much more vast and much more lasting—humanity, the immense body whose members are all peoples, and in which each individual plays his rôle, like a living molecule which influences in its part the destinies of the whole. As each nation has its character and as it were its own style of feature which distinguish it from other nations, so humanity is distinguished from the other species of rational beings wherewith the Creator has peopled the universe, by prerogatives and by infirmities which no other shares with it. It also has had its infancy, its growth, its ripe age; and everything leads us to believe that it will one day have its decrepitude. It also, in fine, has its mission, which it accomplishes in the course of ages, and at the term of which its development will cease.
This common destiny of humanity constitutes, together with its common origin, the unity of this vast body. It permits us to lift ourselves up even to the divine thought, which, in sowing this innumerable multitude in the immensity of the ages, proposed to itself a plan as harmonious in its unity as when it launched into space this immense variety of globes and atoms which compose the universe. Behold herein the true unity of the human race, whose substantial unity, as seen by the pantheist, is nothing but an absurd parody.
It is here, in fact, that we find ourselves face to face with the two philosophies of history—the false and the true. Both wish for unity, because unity, which is the essence of God and the law of the world, is also the last want of our mind and the last end of science. But the first of these philosophies only establishes unity in the world by destroying its diversity, which is an essential condition of beauty and of life. In its eyes individuals are nothing but unreal phenomena, which appear, only to vanish; space alone is something; it alone remains while all the rest passes away. And as it would be too absurd to give space a separate reality, independent of that of individuals, to make humanity something existing outside of man, it is forced to conclude, in the final analysis, that this humanity, which alone truly exists, is nothing in itself but a form which is developed by some fatality in time and space; and all of us who persuade ourselves that we each have our own existence are in reality but the varied expressions of this form, the passing vibrations of an ideal fluid, the fleeting tints of a cloud. Behold the philosophy of history according to pantheism!
How much greater, how much more consoling, how much more beautiful is the true philosophy of history—that of which St. Augustine and Bossuet have made themselves the eloquent interpreters! And in the meantime, in the midst of all these varied existences, in the midst of these actions so divergent, in the midst of these liberties so often at war, she finds a perfect unity, the unity of the divine thought—bringing back to its end all these divergencies, and making of their very opposition so many means thereto. But what is this thought, what is this one end, which God is working in the world, and for the realization of which, willingly or unwillingly, all these individuals and peoples labor? For a reply to this mighty question, it has pleased God not to abandon us to uncertain conjecture. He hath spoken from the beginning of the world; and in proportion as the human race has developed has he manifested more clearly its destiny—a destiny thrice divine since it has God for its principle, God for its term, and God again for its means; it is the divinization of man by Jesus Christ the God-man, the conquest of eternal happiness by God himself, by the fulfilling of the earthly ordeal in the image of God Incarnate.
Such is the divine thought which it has pleased God to reveal to us from his own mouth. The incarnation of the Son of God is, therefore, the pivot around which roll the events of history—as the divinization of men in him is the term where these events ought to meet. The glory of the Word Incarnate: such is the closing scene to which all the catastrophes of this drama ought infallibly to lead up—a drama whose every historic period forms a scene, whose plot borrows a most captivating interest from the apparent triumph of human passions. Jesus Christ: such is the word which unlocks the great enigma of the ages—Jesus Christ: behold the Sun, whose dawn and coming form the natural division of the ancient and modern world, whose presence and whose absence make the day and the night in the moral order, and whose final triumphs over the mists and vapors, which to this day have striven against him, will give to the earth the unity and the happiness for which it sighs.
But one may stop me, and tell me that I am no longer treading on philosophic ground. I am happy to confess it. For the same reason that in seeking the final explanation of his individual destiny man is compelled to have recourse to his Creator, so must he abide his final explanation alone of the destiny of the world. Reason tells him that in the existence of humanity God pursues one end, and that this end should be the manifestation of his divine attributes. It can tell him no more. As for the mode of this manifestation, it rests entirely with the will of God; and it would consequently be a presumption on the part of philosophy to pretend to determine it, since its power does not stretch beyond necessary truths. We acknowledge, therefore, that, without the aid of faith, the science of history cannot reach its third degree. Therein we detract in no wise from philosophy; for, if it must necessarily borrow from revelation this fact of the free end of God, as it borrows from history the knowledge of the free actions of men, it is no less true that by its processes these different facts meet together to form the most harmonious of all the tableaux, and the most inspiring of all the poems which human thought has ever conceived—the divine epic of humanity.