The philosophy of sensation continually appeals to experience. We also invoke experience; and it is experience that has given us certain facts mentioned in the preceding lecture, which constitute the primary notions of common sense. We admit the facts that serve as a foundation for the system of interest, and reject the system. The facts are true in their proper bearing,—the system is false in attributing to them an excessive, limitless bearing; and it is false again in denying other facts quite as incontestable. A sound philosophy holds for its primary law to collect all real facts and respect the real differences that also distinguish them. What it pursues before all, is not unity, but truth.[192] Now the ethics of interest mutilate truth,—they choose among facts those that agree with them, and reject all the others, which are precisely the very facts of morality. Exclusive and intolerant, they deny what they do not explain,—they form a whole well united, which, as an artificial work, may have its merit, but is broken to pieces as soon as it comes to encounter human nature with its grand parts.
We are about to show that the ethics of interest, an offspring of the philosophy of sensation, are in contradiction with a certain number of phenomena, which human nature presents to whomsoever interrogates it without the spirit of system.
1st. We have established, not in the name of a system, but in the name of the most common experience, that entire humanity believes in the existence, in each of its members, of a certain force, a certain power that is called liberty. Because it believes in liberty in the individual, it desires that this liberty should be respected and protected in society. Liberty is a fact that the consciousness of each of us attests to him, which, moreover, is enveloped in all the moral phenomena that we have signalized, in moral approbation and disapprobation, in esteem and contempt, in admiration and indignation, in merit and demerit, in punishment and reward. We ask the philosophy of sensation and the ethics of interest what they do with this universal phenomena which all the beliefs of humanity suppose, on which entire life, private and public, turns.
Every system of ethics, whatever it may be, which contains, I do not say a rule, but a simple advice, implicitly admits liberty. When the ethics of interest advise a man to sacrifice the agreeable to the useful, it apparently admits that man is free to follow or not to follow this advice. But in philosophy it does not suffice to admit a fact, there must be the right to admit it. Now, most moralists of interest deny the liberty of man, and no one has the right to admit it in a system that derives the entire human soul, all its faculties as well as all its ideas, from sensation alone and its developments.
When an agreeable sensation, after having charmed our soul, quits it and vanishes, the soul experiences a sort of suffering, a want, a need,—it is agitated, disquieted. This disquietude, at first vague and indecisive, is soon determined; it is borne towards the object that has pleased us, whose absence makes us suffer. This movement of the soul, more or less vivid, is desire.
Is there in desire any of the characters of liberty? What is it called to be free? Each one knows that he is free, when he knows that he is master of his action, that he can begin it, arrest it, or continue it as he pleases. We are free, when before acting we have taken the resolution to act, knowing well that we are able to take the opposite resolution. A free act is that of which, by the infallible testimony of my consciousness, I know that I am the cause, for which, therefore, I regard myself as responsible. God, the world, the body, can produce in me a thousand movements; these movements may seem to the eyes of an external observer to be voluntary acts; but any error is impossible to consciousness,—it distinguishes every movement not voluntary, whatever it may be, from a voluntary act.
True activity is voluntary and free activity. Desire is just the opposite. Desire, carried to its culmination, is passion; but language, as well as consciousness, says that man is passive in passion; and the more vivid passion is, the more imperative are its movements, the farther is it from the type of true activity in which the soul possesses and governs itself.
I am no more free in desire than in the sensation that precedes and determines it. If an agreeable object is presented to me, am I able not to be agreeably moved? If it is a painful object, am I able not to be painfully moved? And so, when this agreeable sensation has disappeared, if memory and imagination remind me of it, is it in my power not to suffer from no longer experiencing it, is it in my power not to feel the need of experiencing it again, and to desire more or less ardently the object that alone can appease the disquietude and suffering of my soul?
Observe well what takes place within you in desire; you recognize in it a blind emotion, that, without any deliberation on your part, and without the intervention of your will, rises or falls, increases or diminishes. One does not desire, and cease to desire, according to his will.
Will often combats desire, as it often also yields to it; it is not, therefore, desire. We do not reproach the sensations that objects produce, nor even the desires that these sensations engender; we do reproach ourselves for the consent of the will to these desires, and the acts that follow, for these acts are in our power.