Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good

by Victor Cousin

Philosophy, in all times, turns upon the fundamental ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good. The idea of the true, philosophically developed, is psychology, logic, metaphysic; the idea of the good is private and public morals; the idea of the beautiful is that science which, in Germany, is called æsthetics, the details of which pertain to the criticism of literature, the criticism of arts, but whose general principles have always occupied a more or less considerable place in the researches, and even in the teaching of philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Hutcheson and Kant.

Upon these essential points which constitute the entire domain of philosophy, we will successively interrogate the principal schools of the eighteenth century.

When we examine them all with attention, we can easily reduce them to two,—one of which, in the analysis of thought, the common subject of all their works, gives to sensation an excessive part; the other of which, in this same analysis, going to the opposite extreme, deduces consciousness almost wholly from a faculty different from that of sensation—reason. The first of these schools is the empirical school, of which the father, or rather the wisest representative, is Locke, and Condillac the extreme representative; the second is the spiritualistic or rationalistic school, as it is called, which reckons among its illustrious interpreters Reid, who is the most irreproachable, and Kant, who is the most systematic. Surely there is truth in these two schools, and truth is a good which must be taken wherever one finds it. We willingly admit, with the empirical school, that the senses have not been given us in vain; that this admirable organization which elevates us above all other animate beings, is a rich and varied instrument, which it would be folly to neglect. We are convinced that the spectacle of the world is a permanent source of sound and sublime instruction. Upon this point neither Aristotle, nor Bacon, nor Locke, has in us an adversary, but a disciple. We acknowledge, or rather we proclaim, that in the analysis of human knowledge, it is necessary to assign to the senses an important part. But when the empirical school pretends that all that passes beyond the reach of the senses is a chimera, then we abandon it, and go over to the opposite school. We profess to believe, for example, that, without an agreeable impression, never should we have conceived the beautiful, and that, notwithstanding, the beautiful is not merely the agreeable; that, thank heaven, happiness is usually added to virtue, but that the idea itself of virtue is essentially different from that of happiness. On this point we are openly of the opinion of Reid and Kant. We have also established, and will again establish, that the reason of man is in possession of principles which sensation precedes but does not explain, and which are directly suggested to us by the power of reason alone. We will follow Kant thus far, but not farther. Far from following him, we will combat him, when, after having victoriously defended the great principles of every kind against empiricism, he strikes them with sterility, in pretending that they have no value beyond the inclosure of the reason which possesses them, condemning also to impotence that same reason which he has just elevated so high, and opening the way to a refined and learned skepticism which, after all, ends at the same abyss with ordinary skepticism.

You perceive that we shall be by turns with Locke, with Reid, and with Kant, in that just and strong measure which is called eclecticism.

Eclecticism is in our eyes the true historical method, and it has for us all the importance of the history of philosophy; but there is something which we place above the history of philosophy, and, consequently, above eclecticism,—philosophy itself.

The history of philosophy does not carry its own light with it, it is not its own end. How could eclecticism, which has no other field than history, be our only, our primary, object?

It is, doubtless, just, it is of the highest utility, to discriminate in each system what there is true in it from what there is false in it; first, in order to appreciate this system rightly; then, in order to render the false of no account, to disengage and re-collect the true, and thus to enrich and aggrandize philosophy by history. But you conceive that we must already know what truth is, in order to recognize it, and to distinguish it from the error with which it is mixed; so that the criticism of systems almost demands a system, so that the history of philosophy is constrained to first borrow from philosophy the light which it must one day return to it with usury.

In fine, the history of philosophy is only a branch, or rather an instrument, of philosophical science. Surely it is the interest which we feel for philosophy that alone attaches us to its history; it is the love of truth which makes us everywhere pursue its vestiges, and interrogate with a passionate curiosity those who before us have also loved and sought truth.

Thus philosophy is at once the supreme object and the torch of the history of philosophy. By this double title it has a right to preside over our instruction.