Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good

by Victor Cousin

Look at men in action, and you will see them imposing upon themselves great sacrifices in order to conquer the suffrages of their fellows. The empire of opinion is immense,—vanity alone does not explain it; it doubtless also pertains to vanity, but it has deeper and better roots. We judge that other men are, like us, sensible to good and evil, that they distinguish between virtue and vice, that they are capable of being indignant and admiring, of esteeming and respecting, as well as despising. This power is in us, we have consciousness of it, we know that other men possess it as well as we, and it is this power that frightens us. Opinion is our own consciousness transferred to the public, and there disengaged from all complaisance and armed with an inflexible severity. To the remorse in our own hearts, responds the shame in that second soul which we have made ourselves, and is called public opinion. We must not be astonished at the sweets of popularity. We are more sure of having done well, when to the testimony of our consciousness we are able to join that of the consciousness of our fellow-men. There is only one thing that can sustain us against opinion, and even place us above it: it is the firm and sure testimony of our consciousness, because, in fine, the public and the whole human race are compelled to judge us according to appearance, whilst we judge ourselves infallibly and by the most certain of all knowledge.

Ridicule is the fear of opinion in small things. The force of ridicule is wholly in the supposition that there is a common taste, a common type of what is proper, that directs men in their judgments, and even in their pleasantries, which in their way are also judgments. Without this supposition, ridicule falls of itself, and pleasantry loses its sting. But it is immortal, as well as the distinction between good and evil, between the beautiful and the ugly, between what is proper and what is improper.

When we have not succeeded in any measure undertaken for our interest and prosperity, we experience a sentiment of pain that is called regret. But we do not confound regret with that other sentiment that rises in the soul when we are conscious of having done something morally bad. This sentiment is also a pain, but of quite a different nature,—it is remorse, repentance. That we have lost in play, for example, is disagreeable to us; but if, in gaining, we have the consciousness of having deceived our adversary, we experience a very different sentiment.

We might prolong and vary these examples. We have said enough to be entitled to conclude that human language and the sentiments that it expresses are inexplicable, if we do not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, between virtue and crime, crime founded on interest, virtue founded on disinterestedness.

Disturb this distinction, and you disturb human life and entire society. Permit me to take an extreme, tragic, and terrible example. Here is a man that has just been judged. He has been condemned to death, and is about to be executed—to be deprived of life. And why? Place yourself in the system that does not admit the essential distinction between good and evil, and ponder on what is stupidly atrocious in this act of human justice. What has the condemned done? Evidently a thing indifferent in itself. For if there is no other outward distinction than that of pleasure and pain, I defy any one to qualify any human action, whatever it may be, as criminal, without the most absurd inconsequence. But this thing, indifferent in itself, a certain number of men, called legislators, have declared to be a crime. This purely arbitrary declaration has found no echo in the heart of this man. He has not been able to feel the justice of it, since there is nothing in itself just. He has therefore done, without remorse, what this declaration arbitrarily interdicted. The court proceeds to prove to him that he has not succeeded, but not that he has done contrary to justice, for there is no justice. I maintain that every condemnation, be it to death, or to any punishment whatever, imperatively supposes, in order to be any thing else than a repression of violence by violence, the four following points:—1st, That there is an essential distinction between good and evil, justice and injustice, and that to this distinction is attached, for every intelligent and free being, the obligation of conforming to good and justice; 2d, That man is an intelligent and free being, capable of comprehending this distinction, and the obligation that accompanies it, and of adhering to it naturally, independently of all convention, and every positive law; capable also of resisting the temptations that bear him towards evil and injustice, and of fulfilling the sacred law of natural justice; 3d, That every act contrary to justice deserves to be repressed by force, and even punished in reparation of the fault committed, and independently too of all law and all convention; 4th, That man naturally recognizes the distinction between the merit and demerit of actions, as he recognizes the distinction between the just and the unjust, and knows that every penalty applied to an unjust act is itself most strictly just.

Such are the foundations of that power of judging and punishing which is entire society. Society has not made those principles for its own use; they are much anterior to it, they are contemporaneous with thought and the soul, and upon these rests society, with its laws and its institutions. Laws are legitimate by their relation to these eternal laws. The surest power of institutions resides in the respect that these principles bear with them and extend to every thing that participates in them. Education develops them, it does not create them. They direct the legislator who makes the law, and the judge who applies it. They are present to the accused brought before the tribunal, they inspire every just sentence, they give it authority in the soul of the condemned, and in that of the spectator, and they consecrate the employment of force necessary for his execution. Take away a single one of these principles, and all human justice is overthrown, no longer is there any thing but a mass of arbitrary conventions which no one in conscience is bound to respect, which may be violated without remorse, which are sustained only by the display of extreme punishments. The decisions of such a justice are not true judgments, but acts of force, and civil society is only an arena where men contend with each other without duties and rights, without any other object than that of procuring for themselves the greatest possible amount of enjoyment, of procuring it by conquest and preserving it by force or cunning, save throwing over all that the cloak of hypocritical laws.

It is true, such is the aspect under which skepticism makes us consider society and human justice, driving us through despair to revolt and disorder, and bringing us back through despair again to quite another yoke than that of reason and virtue, to that regulated disorder which is called despotism. The spectacle of human things, viewed coolly, and without the spirit of system, is, thank God, less sombre. Without doubt, society and human justice have still many imperfections which time discovers and corrects; but it may be said, that in general they rest on truth and natural equity. The proof of it is, that society everywhere subsists, and is even developed. Moreover, facts, were they such as the melancholy pen of a Pascal or a Rousseau represent them to be, facts are not all,—before facts is right; and this idea of right alone, if it is real, suffices to overturn an abasing system, and save human dignity. Now, is the idea of right a chimera? I again appeal to languages, to individual consciousness, to the human race,—is it not true that fact is everywhere distinguished from right, fact which too often, perhaps, but not always, as it is said, is opposed to right; and right that subdues and rules fact, or protests against it? What word is it that restrains most in human societies? Is it not that of right? Look for a language that does not contain it. On all sides, society is bristling with rights. There is even a distinction made between natural right and positive right, between what is legal and what is equitable. It is proclaimed that force should be in the service of right, and not right at the mercy of force. The triumphs of force, wherever we perceive them, either under our eyes, or by the aid of history in bygone centuries, or by favor of universal publicity beyond the ocean, and in foreign continents, rouse indignation in the disinterested spectator or reader. On the contrary, he who inscribes on his banner the name of right, by that alone interests us; the cause of right, or what we suppose to be the cause of right, is for us the cause of humanity. It is also a fact, and an incontestable fact, that in the eyes of man fact is not every thing, and that the idea of right is a universal idea, graven in shining and ineffaceable characters, if not in the visible world, at least in that of thought and the soul; concerning that is the question; it is also that which in the long run reforms and governs the other.

Individual consciousness, conceived and transferred to the entire species, is called common sense. It is common sense that has made, that sustains, that develops languages, natural and permanent beliefs, society and its fundamental institutions. Grammarians have not invented languages, nor legislators societies, nor philosophers general beliefs. All these things have not been personally done, but by the whole world,—by the genius of humanity.

Common sense is deposited in its works. All languages, and all human institutions contain the ideas and the sentiments that we have just called to mind and described, and especially the distinction between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between free will and desire, between duty and interest, between virtue and happiness, with the profoundly rooted belief that happiness is a recompense due to virtue, and that crime in itself deserves to be punished, and calls for the reparation of a just suffering.

These things are attested by the words and actions of men. Such are the sincere and impartial, but somewhat confused, somewhat gross notions of common sense.