Veracity is also a great virtue. Falsehood, by breaking the natural alliance between man and truth, deprives him of that which makes his dignity. This is the reason why there is no graver insult than giving the lie, and why the most honored virtues are sincerity and frankness.
One may degrade the moral person by wounding it in its instruments. For this reason the body is to man the object of imperative duties. The body may become an obstacle or a means. If you refuse it what sustains and strengthens it, or if you demand too much from it by exciting it beyond measure, you exhaust it, and by abusing it, deprive yourself of it. It is worse still if you pamper it, if you grant every thing to its unbridled desires, if you make yourself its slave. It is being unfaithful to the soul to enfeeble its servant; it is being much more unfaithful to it still, to enslave it to its servant.
But it is not enough to respect the moral person, it is necessary to perfect it; it is necessary to labor to return the soul to God better than we received it; and it can become so only by a constant and courageous exercise. Everywhere in nature, all things are spontaneously developed, without willing it, and without knowing it. With man, if the will slumbers, the other faculties degenerate into languor and inertion; or, carried away by the blind impulse of passion, they are precipitated and go astray. It is by the government and education of himself that man is great.
Man must, before every thing else, occupy himself with his intelligence. It is in fact our intelligence that alone can give us a clear sight of the true and the good, that guides liberty by showing it the legitimate object of its efforts. No one can give himself another mind than the one that he has received, but he may train and strengthen it as well as the body, by putting it to a task of some kind, by rousing it when it is drowsy, by restraining it when it is carried away, by continually proposing to it new objects,—for it is only by continually enriching it that it does not grow poor. Sloth benumbs and enervates the mind; regular work excites and strengthens it, and work is always in our power.
There is an education of liberty as well as our other faculties. It is sometimes in subduing the body, sometimes in governing our intelligence, especially in resisting our passions, that we learn to be free. We encounter opposition at each step,—the only question is not to shun it. In this constant struggle liberty is formed and augmented, until it becomes a habit.
Finally, there is a culture of sensibility itself. Fortunate are those who have received from nature the sacred fire of enthusiasm! They ought religiously to preserve it. But there is no soul that does not conceal some fortunate vein of it. It is necessary to watch it and pursue, to avoid what restrains it, to seek what favors it, and, by an assiduous culture, draw from it, little by little, some treasures. If we cannot give ourselves sensibility, we can at least develop what we have. We can do this by giving ourselves up to it, by seizing all the occasions of giving ourselves up to it, by calling to its aid intelligence itself; for, the more we know of the beautiful and the good, the more we love it. Sentiment thereby only borrows from intelligence what it returns with usury. Intelligence in its turn finds, in the heart, a rampart against sophism. Noble, sentiments, nourished and developed, preserve from those sad systems that please certain spirits so much only because their hearts are so small.
Man would still have duties, should he cease to be in relation with other men.[234] As long as he preserves any intelligence and any liberty, the idea of the good dwells in him, and with it duty. Were we cast upon a desert island, duty would follow us thither. It would be beyond belief strange that it should be in the power of certain external circumstances to affranchise an intelligent and free being from all obligation towards his liberty and his intelligence. In the deepest solitude he is always and consciously under the empire of a law attached to the person itself, which, by obligating him to keep continual watch over himself, makes at once his torment and his grandeur.
If the moral person is sacred to me, it is not because it is in me, it is because it is the moral person; it is in itself respectable; it will be so, then, wherever we meet it.
It is in you as in me, and for the same reason. In relation to me it imposes on me a duty; in you it becomes the foundation of a right, and thereby imposes on me a new duty in relation to you.
I owe to you truth as I owe it to myself; for truth is the law of your reason as of mine. Without doubt there ought to be measure in the communication of truth,—all are not capable of it at the same moment and in the same degree; it is necessary to portion it out to them in order that they may be able to receive it; but, in fine, the truth is the proper good of the intelligence; and it is for me a strict duty to respect the development of your mind, not to arrest, and even to favor its progress towards truth.