Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good

by Victor Cousin

And I tell you in this nothing that is not very simple. Look. Do you deny that this water is in a vase? Do you deny that this vase is in this hall? Do you deny that this hall is in a larger place, which is in its turn in another larger still? I can thus carry you on to infinite space. If you deny a single one of these propositions, you deny all, the first as well as the last; and if you admit the first, you are forced to admit the last.

It cannot be supposed that sensibility, which is not able to give us even the idea of body, alone elevates us to the idea of space. The intervention of a superior principle is, therefore, here necessary.

As we believe that every body is contained in a place, so we believe that every event happens in time. Can you conceive an event happening, except in some point of duration? This duration is extended and successively increased to your mind's eye, and you end by conceiving it unlimited like space. Deny duration, and you deny all the sciences that measure it, you destroy all the natural beliefs upon which human life reposes. It is hardly necessary to add that sensibility alone no more explains the notion of time than that of space, both of which are nevertheless inherent in the knowledge of the external world.

Empiricism is, therefore, convicted of being unable to dispense with universal and necessary principles, and of being unable to explain them.

Let us pause: either all our preceding works have terminated in nothing but chimeras, or they permit us to consider as a point definitely acquired for science, that there are in the human mind, for whomsoever interrogates it sincerely, principles really stamped with the character of universality and necessity.

After having established and defended the existence of universal and necessary principles, we might investigate and pursue this kind of principles in all the departments of human knowledge, and attempt an exact and rigorous classification; but illustrious examples have taught us to fear to compromise truths of the greatest price by mixing with them conjectures which, in giving brilliancy, perhaps, to the spirit of philosophy, diminish its authority in the eyes of the wise. We, also, following the example of Kant, attempted before you, last year,[21] a classification, even a reduction of universal and necessary principles, and of all the notions that are connected with them. This work has not lost for us its importance, but we will not reproduce it. In the interest of the great cause which we serve, and taking thought here only to establish upon solid foundations the doctrine which is adapted to the French genius in the nineteenth century, we will carefully shun every thing that might seem personal and hazardous; and, instead of examining, criticising,[22] and reconstituting the classification which the philosophy of Kœnigsberg has given of universal and necessary principles, we prefer, we find it much more useful, to enable you to penetrate deeper into the nature of these principles, by showing you what faculty of ours it is that discovers them to us, and to which they are related and correspond.

The peculiarity of these principles is, that each one of us in reflection recognizes that he possesses them, but that he is not their author. We conceive them and apply them, we do not constitute them. Let us interrogate our consciousness. Do we refer to ourselves, for example, the definitions of geometry, as we do certain movements of which we feel ourselves to be the cause? If it is I who make these definitions, they are therefore mine, I can unmake them, modify them, change them, even annihilate them. It is certain that I cannot do it. I am not, then, the author of them. It has also been demonstrated that the principles of which we have spoken cannot be derived from sensation, which is variable, limited, incapable of producing and authorizing any thing universal and necessary. I arrive, then, at the following consequence, also necessary:—truth is in me and not by me. As sensibility puts me in relation with the physical world, so another faculty puts me in communication with the truths that depend upon neither the world nor me, and that faculty is reason.

There are in men three general faculties which are always mingled together, and are rarely exercised except simultaneously, but which analysis divides in order to study them better, without misconceiving their reciprocal play, their intimate connection, their indivisible unity. The first of these faculties is activity, voluntary and free activity, in which human personality especially appears, and without which the other faculties would be as if they were not, since we should not exist for ourselves. Let us examine ourselves at the moment when a sensation is produced in us; we shall recognize that there is perception only so far as there is some degree of attention, and that perception ends at the moment when our activity ends. One does not recollect what he did in perfect sleep or in a swoon; because then he had lost voluntary activity, consequently consciousness; consequently, again, memory. Passion often, in depriving us of liberty, deprives us, at the same time, of the consciousness of our actions and of ourselves; then, to use a just and common expression, one knows not what he does. It is by liberty that man is truly man, that he possesses himself and governs himself; without it, he falls again under the yoke of nature; he is, without it, only a more admirable and more beautiful part of nature. But while I am endowed with activity and liberty, I am also passive in other respects; I am subject to the laws of the external world; I suffer and I enjoy without being myself the author of my joys and my sufferings; I feel rising within me needs, desires, passions, which I have not made, which by turns fill my life with happiness and misery. Finally, besides volition and sensibility, man has the faculty of knowing, has understanding, intelligence, reason, the name matters little, by means of which he is elevated to truths of different orders, and among others, to universal and necessary truths, which suppose in reason, attached to its exercise, principles entirely distinct from the impressions of the senses and the resolutions of the will.[23]

Voluntary activity, sensibility, reason, are all equally certain. Consciousness verifies the existence of necessary principles, which direct the reason quite as well as that of sensations and volitions. I call every thing real that falls under observation. I suffer; my suffering is real, inasmuch as I am conscious of it: it is the same with liberty: it is the same with reason and the principles that govern it. We can affirm, then, that the existence of universal and necessary principles rests upon the testimony of observation, and even of the most immediate and surest observation, that of consciousness.

But consciousness is only a witness,—it makes what is appear; it creates nothing. It is not because consciousness announces it to you, that you have produced such or such a movement, that you have experienced such or such an impression. Neither is it because consciousness says to us that reason is constrained to admit such or such a truth, that this truth exists; it is because it exists that it is impossible for reason not to admit it. The truths that reason attains by the aid of universal and necessary principles with which it is provided, are absolute truths; reason does not create them, it discovers them. Reason is not the judge of its own principles, and cannot account for them, for it only judges by them, and they are to it its own laws. Much less does consciousness make these principles, or the truths which they reveal to us; for consciousness has no other office, no other power than in some sort to serve as a mirror for reason. Absolute truths are, therefore, independent of experience and consciousness, and at the same time, they are attested by experience and consciousness. On the one hand, these truths declare themselves in experience; on the other, no experience explains them. Behold how experience and reason differ and agree, and how, by means of experience, we come to find something which surpasses it.