LECTURE XI.
PRIMARY NOTIONS OF COMMON SENSE.
Extent of the question of the good.—Position of the question according to the psychological method: What is, in regard to the good, the natural belief of mankind?—The natural beliefs of humanity must not be sought in a pretended state of nature.—Study of the sentiments and ideas of men in languages, in life, in consciousness.—Disinterestedness and devotedness.—Liberty.—Esteem and contempt.—Respect.—Admiration and indignation.—Dignity.—Empire of opinion.—Ridicule.—Regret and repentance.—Natural and necessary foundations of all justice.—Distinction between fact and right.—Common sense, true and false philosophy.
The idea of the true in its developments, comprises psychology, logic, and metaphysics. The idea of the beautiful begets what is called æsthetics. The idea of the good is the whole of ethics.
It would be forming a false and narrow idea of ethics to confine them within the inclosure of individual consciousness. There are public ethics, as well as private ethics, and public ethics embrace, with the relations of men among themselves, so far as men, their relations as citizens and as members of a state. Ethics extend wherever is found in any decree the idea of the good. Now, where does this idea manifest itself more, and where do justice and injustice, virtue and crime, heroism and weakness appear more openly, than on the theatre of civil life? Moreover, is there any thing that has a more decisive influence over manners, even of individuals, than the institutions of peoples and the constitutions of states? If the idea of the good goes thus far, it must be followed thither, as recently the idea of the beautiful has introduced us into the domain of art.
Philosophy usurps no foreign power; but it is not disposed to relinquish its right of examination over all the great manifestations of human nature. All philosophy that does not terminate in ethics, is hardly worthy of the name, and all ethics that do not terminate at least in general views on society and government, are powerless ethics, that have neither counsels nor rules to give humanity in its most difficult trials.
It seems that at the point where we have arrived, the metaphysics and æsthetics that we have taught evidently involve such a doctrine of morality and not such another, that, accordingly, the question of the good, that question so fertile and so vast, is for us wholly solved, and that we can deduce, by way of reasoning, the moral theory that is derived from our theory of the beautiful and our theory of the true. We might do this, perhaps, but we will not. This would be abandoning the method that we have hitherto followed, that method that proceeds by observation, and not by deduction, and makes consulting experience a law to itself. We do not grow weary of experience. Let us attach ourselves faithfully to the psychological method; it has its delays; it condemns us to more than one repetition, but it places us in the beginning, and a long time retains us at the source of all reality, and all light.
The first maxim of the psychological method is this: True philosophy invents nothing, it establishes and describes what is. Now here, what is, is the natural and permanent belief of the being that we are studying, to wit, man. What is, then, in relation to the good, the natural and permanent belief of the human race? Such is, in our eyes, the first question.
With us, in fact, the human race does not take one side, and philosophy the other. Philosophy is the interpreter of the human race. What the human race thinks and believes, often unconsciously, philosophy re-collects, explains, establishes. It is the faithful and complete expression of human nature, and human nature is entire in each of us philosophers, and in every other man. Among us, it is attained by consciousness; among other men, it manifests itself in their words and actions. Let us, then, interrogate the latter and the former; let us especially interrogate our own consciousness; let us clearly recognize what the human race thinks; we shall then see what should be the office of philosophy.
Is there a human language known to us that has not different expressions for good and evil, for just and unjust? Is there any language, in which, by the side of the words pleasure, interest, utility, happiness, are not also found the words sacrifice, disinterestedness, devotedness, virtue? Do not all languages, as well as all nations, speak of liberty, duty, and right?
Here, perhaps, some disciple of Condillac and Helvetius will ask us whether, in this regard, we possess authentic dictionaries of the language of savage tribes found by voyagers in the isles of the ocean? No; but we have not made our philosophic religion out of the superstitions and prejudices of a certain school. We absolutely deny that it is necessary to study human nature in the famous savage of Aveyron, or in the like of him of the isles of the ocean, or the American continent. The savage state offers us humanity in swaddling-clothes, thus to speak, the germ of humanity, but not humanity entire. The true man is the perfect man of his kind; true human nature is human nature arrived at its development, as true society is also perfected society. We do not think it worth the while to ask a savage his opinion on the Apollo Belvidere, neither will we ask him for the principles that constitute the moral nature of man, because in him this moral nature is only sketched and not completed. Our great philosophy of the seventeenth century was sometimes a little too much pleased with hypotheses in which God plays the principal part, and crushes human liberty.[187] The philosophy of the eighteenth century threw itself into the opposite extreme; it had recourse to hypotheses of a totally different character, among others, to a pretended natural state, whence it undertook, with infinite pains, to draw society and man as we now see them. Rousseau plunged into the forests, in order to find there the model of liberty and equality. That is the commencement of his politics. But wait a little, and soon you will see the apostle of the natural state, driven, by a necessary inconsequence, from one excess to an opposite excess, instead of the sweets of savage liberty, proposing to us the Contrat Social and Lacédémone. Condillac[188] studies the human mind in a statue whose senses enter into exercise under the magic wand of a systematic analysis, and are developed in the measure and progress that are convenient to him. The statue successively acquires our five senses, but there is one thing that it does not acquire, that is, a mind like the human mind, and a soul like ours. And this was what was then called the experimental method! Let us leave there all those hypotheses. In order to understand reality, let us study it, and not imagine it. Let us take humanity as it is incontestably shown to us in its actual characters, and not as it may have been in a primitive, purely hypothetical state, in those unformed lineaments or that degradation which is called the savage state. In that, without doubt, may be found signs or souvenirs of humanity, and, if this were the plea, we might, in our turn, examine the recitals of voyages, and find, even in that darkness of infancy or decrepitude, admirable flashes of light, noble instincts, which already appear, or still subsist, presaging or recalling humanity. But, for the sake of exactness of method and true analysis, we turn our eyes from infancy and the savage state, in order to direct them towards the being who is the sole object of our studies, the actual man, the real and completed man.