My First Testament

Julien Benda

I

On emerging from the Dreyfus Affair I remained occupied in considering the political and religious ideas of men… I came rather quickly to think that, in general, these ideas are adopted, not insofar as they appear just or true or even in conformity with self-interest, but insofar as they come to satisfy the need that the thinking subject has of experiencing this or that feeling: that if, for example, certain people adopt the idea that the Jews are evil and contemptible, they adopt it, not insofar as it appears true (in consequence of historical knowledge, or of personal trials, or of confidence in those who affirm it), but insofar as it comes to satisfy the need they have of hating and of despising; that if, again, some think that the world was made in a sudden manner and others that it was made in a continuous manner, they think it, not insofar as that appears true to them (in consequence of experiences, or of reasonings, or of that adherence without proofs which is called faith), but insofar as the idea of a discontinuity contents in the one the need of surprise and the idea of a continuity contents in the other the need of serenity.

One sees that here it is not the ideas that provoke the feelings, but on the contrary the feelings that provoke the ideas; that, more exactly, it is the feelings — pre-existing in the state of pure feelings, that is to say deprived of any intellectual complement (idea or image) and consequently avid for such a complement — which seize in passing, and at need invent, ideas or images capable of satisfying them; just as certain chemical radicals, essentially restless in the state of purity, gluttonously seize an element capable of giving them rest: so that, for example, it is not antisemitism (1) that provokes hatred, but on the contrary hatred — pre-existing in the state of hatred without an object, or need to hate — which throws itself upon an idea of a “hateful object” that it finds ready-made in common circulation; as one sees, in certain mental states, a prior feeling of fear without an object, or need to be afraid, throw itself upon the first ideas of danger to come along.

The thesis here maintained is opposed to that of most men. These, indeed, whatever they may say about it, think that it is reason which dictates their ideas to them, and they think it not only for themselves but for their adversaries. One may even say that it is the thing on which all parties are agreed: thus some claim to make the so-called idea of miracle be abandoned by showing that it is false, while young thinkers hope to have the idea adopted that monarchism is the best regime by showing that it is just.

(1) There are, in the course of this writing, two doctrines that one will doubtless find too often invoked: antisemitism and spontaneism. It is that, besides, by our own fault, the first is the most preserved of the political hatreds, and the second is the only popular one among the indeterminist theses.

The political and religious ideas being adopted as we have just said, it follows that what causes the nature of a subject’s political ideas is at bottom what causes the need he has of experiencing this or that feeling. Now, what causes the need of experiencing this or that feeling is doubtless often a native disposition, (a) but it is still more often the habit of experiencing this feeling; a habit that can itself be caused by the fixed idea of a certain situation. Thus the need to hate, for example, can be caused by the habit of hating, which can itself be caused (in stable souls, in whom the idea persists of everything that happens to them) by the persistent idea of an inferior situation… It is thus that the ethnic “doctrines,” for example, of this or that great people are caused, in the last analysis, by the persistent wound of an old defeat, and that the “theories” of this or that fierce reactionary, whom everyone will name, plunge their first cause into an unforgettable conjugal misfortune, into a state of precarious fortune, or into an unfortunate physique.

The political and religious ideas being only objects of feelings, one sees that to consider these ideas apart from the feelings they satisfy is to consider signs apart from the things signified. To make the history of the political and religious ideas of men as ideas (Histories of Philosophy) is equivalent to studying the signs of a disease apart from that disease, and the “life of words” apart from their sense. (2)

To say that feelings seize in passing the political ideas capable of satisfying them is to say that what properly defines the thinking subject is the feelings that his ideas content, and not at all his ideas themselves, which come to him from outside:

(2) To believe that Philosophies are adopted insofar as they satisfy feelings is certainly in no way [to believe] (as some would wish) that they are themselves feelings and that they act as such. The Philosophies worthy of the name have been ideas, and have aimed to be ideas; and it is as ideas, not as felt feelings — who reads the authors? — that they are presented to thousands of minds, which then adopt them for sentimental reasons.

that, for example, in antisemitism, what defines the subject is the sentimental need that “something be hateful” and not at all the formal idea that “the Jews are hateful,” which is furnished to him from outside and would have been just as well some other idea of hatred (anticlericalism, for example) had he undergone another milieu. — Whence it follows that a natural and solid classification of men consists in classifying them, not according to the objects of their feelings, but according to their feelings themselves, of which these objects are only an occasion; in classifying them, not according to whether they love this thing or that other, but according to whether they love or whether they hate; for the object of their love or of their hatred will change, but hardly their need of loving or of hating. (3)

All that we have just said about what founds the political and religious ideas of men comes down to saying further that the true elements of their struggles are not their ideas, but are the wills they have to hold them:

(3) This is, evidently, only a “natural and solid” classification, a philosopher’s classification, and one that is hardly valid except for eternity. The practical classification is, of course, to classify men according to the objects of their feelings. One does not very well see a government that would classify the electors into “avid for surprise” and “avid for serenity.”

that, for example, the element of combat called “Catholicism” — that, properly, by which it is in the histories a phenomenon of force and of battle — is not that certain men believe in a marvelous nativity, it is that they wish to believe in it.

Whence it follows, as concerns the success of these struggles: that to attack a belief — that, for example, called the belief of the Christian miracle — only as a belief and apart from the need or the will that contents itself therein, as one does, is therefore only to attack a symptom of what one believes to be an ill and to leave entirely intact the ill itself (which is here the need of the irrational). It is true that the ruin of a symptom is the only form of victory that those who make these sorts of attacks can ordinarily conceive. — It remains to know whether to reach in itself, elsewhere than in its symptoms, in its true nature of need, a need of a soul (like the need of the irrational) is possible? But this is not our province, and falls perhaps under medicine.

Let us say nevertheless that it seems to us that one could, by education alone, approach this reaching more nearly than one does: first by clearly defining the need to be reached; then by denouncing this need under all the forms it assumes, which we shall show one does not do. Only this method supposes a faculty of defining the abstract clearly and a power to discern the like beneath the unlike that one could not expect of many teachers.

The ideas being adopted insofar as they satisfy feelings, and adopted all the more frantically as they satisfy them the more, it often happens that some idea, although already proper to satisfy some feeling, is afterward deformed in order to satisfy it still better: it is thus that the Evolutionism of Darwin, in which the transformations of living matter tolerate a first term “into which life was breathed by the Creator” (Origin of Species, peroration), gives place to an Evolutionism of the public meeting, negator of all creation; (b) that the Christianity of Jesus Christ, in which the idea of universal diffusion is limited by “thou shalt not kill” and “my kingdom is not of this world,” gives place to a Christianity freed of these constraints; that the Egalitarianism of the Constituent Assembly, which posits the equality of men only before the law, is transformed into another which wants total equality, of needs, of merits, of joys, of sorrows (c)… Naturally, it is the second form, by reason of its greater affective power, that alone is adopted by great human ensembles; (d) so that, for the historian of the ideas of men, the reality is not what the ideas have been in the mind of those who invented them, but what they have been in the mind of those who betrayed them.

What made me believe that the political and religious ideas are hardly adopted insofar as they seem true is first, for some of them, their improbability (idea of a woman fecundated by a spirit, of a god really present in some bread, etc…); — it is, for others, to see them form themselves and wish to form themselves outside any view upon verifiable things (ideas of absolute, infinite, unconditioned substance, etc…); — it is, for others, to see them peacefully cohabit with their contradictories: to see, for example, the idea that the body is contemptible and the soul alone precious cohabit in a Christian with the idea that the body is sacred (reprobation of the non-religious burial, of incineration…); — it is also, for others, to see them remain uncontested alongside the most numerous, the strongest, and sometimes the least seriously contested proofs of their non-truth (to the point that the falseness of an idea can be admitted and at the same time this idea conserved, as happens in the doctrine called “neo-Catholic,” in which one appears clearly to find that most of the dogmas are contrary to good sense and in which one works only to “modernize” them so as not to lose them); (4) — and it is again, for others, to see that they are not even really ideas, a representation of them before the mind not really taking place, and the subject confining himself in sum to “believing that he believes” (which moreover suffices to satisfy a feeling, as to believe that one believes oneself ill suffices to set off anxiety): such are the ideas that say that “something was made out of nothing,” the idea of nothingness being, as known analyses (5) have shown, properly unthought; such is the (Cartesian) idea of a God who causes himself, the idea of cause being here, as a celebrated analysis has shown, properly unthought. (6) — What made me believe that these ideas are not any more adopted by the subject insofar as they appear to him in conformity with his interest is first to see that they are often adopted against this interest: to see, for example, the ideas of militarism, of an absolute regime, sometimes even of socialism, adopted in good faith by persons who could not sincerely be unaware that of these regimes they would be the first victims; — and it is also to see the small success of the ideas that speak strictly of interests, figures, statistics, and the necessity in which they are, in order to popularize themselves, of sentimentalizing themselves: to see, for example, the isolation of that socialism made of purely economic considerations (which one could call of learned formation), and its necessary derivation into another (of popular formation) in which there is talk of the “sacred” character of the worker, of the “violation” there is in separating the worker from the instrument of labor, and other poetries… Besides, would it not be surprising that men, who in all things adopt not what is good for them but what is agreeable to them, giving themselves over to alcohol, to excesses of the table and of love, which they know to be murderous but which they love, should suddenly change their nature in the face of political ideas and set about opting here according to their interest and no longer according to their sensibility?

(4) [No footnote text appears in the source for this reference; the marker (4) stands in the text without a corresponding note. — bad scan]

(5) H. Spencer, Principles of Biology, I, p. 408. — H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 298 ff.

(6) Such too are certain modern political ideas, like that of “the State as value” or of “a ministry come from abroad,” [?], of which one must take care to believe that they correspond to true representations. Is it not again that one believes that one believes?

As for what made me believe that this or that political or religious idea is adopted above all insofar as it satisfies a feeling, it is first the passion with which it is adopted; — it is also to see that, if it comes to be supplanted in the thinking subject, it is so by an idea precisely capable of satisfying the same feeling, antisemitism for example being hardly replaced except by another occasion of hating (anticlericalism, or inversely), (7) the belief in the Christian miracle being hardly exchanged, when it is exchanged, except against the belief in another miracle (miracle of ‘89, miracle of Science…); — it is also and above all to see those who adopt this or that political or religious idea adopt besides a quantity of ideas, political or not, perfectly distinct from the first from the point of view of intellectual content, but precisely identical to it from the point of view of the feeling they can satisfy: to see, for example, those who adopt the idea that their nation is superior adopt almost infallibly the ideas that confer a superiority on their zoological species (alone thinking, alone made in the image of God…) and also the idea that superior are their class, their race, their “world,” etc., all ideas perfectly distinct from “nationalism” as pure ideas, but identical to it insofar as they can, like it, satisfy the pride of the one who thinks them; to see again those who admit that the world was made in a sudden manner be often those who want the appearance of the mountains upon the earth to have been sudden, the appearance of life sudden, the appearance of charity sudden, etc., and to be often those too who, in works of art and in current life, desire the accidental, the unforeseen, the “coup de théâtre,” the scandal, all that can give surprise… These ideas distinct from one another and that satisfy one same feeling can even, as ideas, be contradictory, and it is thus that the ideas of one same person, apparently incoherent, set about presenting a sudden unity if, in order to judge them, one takes it into one’s head to pass from the point of view of their intellectual content to that of their affective power: it is thus, for example, that the idea that the body is contemptible and the idea that the body is sacred present unity from this point of view, that the one and the other satisfy pride, the first by telling the subject of his superiority over the animal and the second by telling him of the supreme importance of all that is himself; and it is thus again that the contradiction, so much pointed out in the French, of the spirit of discipline and of a certain revolutionary spirit ceases to be a contradiction if one remarks that the one and the other again satisfy pride, the first by telling the subject that there is greatness in obedience and the second by telling him that one is superior to what one destroys.

(7) See certain political conversions of these last years (G. Goblet, J. Soury…).

From the fact that the sense of a subject’s political or religious ideas is found again, as we have just said, in states of mind of his current life, one sees of what interest is the observation of these latter states of mind. — Sometimes this observation will permit the foreseeing of the nature of a subject’s political or religious ideas: it is thus that, of a creature all of whose states of mind in current life — in the town, at the spectacle, in the alcoves — signify belief in his superiority, one can foresee that he will hardly admit that his species is only a perfected ape, or that, in other terms, in countries where women reign Catholicism is eternal. — Sometimes, in the presence of a political or religious idea with multiple senses, the observation of current life will permit the discerning of in what sense the subject adopts it: it is thus that, of the Catholicism of this one (as of the republicanism of that one) one will be able to say whether it signifies pride or love, instruction or sympathy, according to the nature of his states of mind in his current relations with his children, with his servants, with the animals… Moreover, these states of mind of current life being adopted with all the more inattention — and therefore independence — than the political or religious ideas, one can say that they are signs all the more faithful of the affective need they reveal, so that, by the sole fact that it is opposed to the states of mind of current life, one can almost affirm of a political or religious idea that it is adopted apart from any affective need, that is to say wholly intellectually, ready to detach itself from the subject at the first breath of its true nature: that is why we shall leave off counting on the “humanitarianism” of this one who, in daily life, takes pleasure only in “humiliating” either women, or subordinates, or his best friend by a “witticism”; or on the “egalitarianism” of that one who, in his milieu, has consideration only for the “arrived”; or on the “relativism” of this other whose current judgments are that “nothing in the world is more beautiful than…,” “no one in the world is greater than…,” etc… (e) — Finally this observation of the states of mind of current life is indispensable to whoever claims, not only to combat ideas, but to reform minds: what is to be said of that one who, claiming to reach the so-called spirit of miracle, proscribes the Gospels and permits the newspaper-serial novel!…

Finally, there exist concerning the affective needs of a subject, and consequently concerning the possible nature of his political ideas, and concerning their sincerity, other still more certain pieces of information, in that they are no longer signs of the affective needs, but are these needs themselves, at least in their organic portion: we mean to speak of the gestures or movements of the body — properly the tendencies — in which the subject takes pleasure… It is thus that it suffices to look at some marked xenophobe (son of the works of his father) with his fists naturally clenched, his teeth gritted, his spasmodic gesture, his whole body disposed in rage and in violence, to suspect that he was not about to choose a doctrine of love; and to look at some inveterate “liberal” (poet and Girondin) who without any reason advances himself with leg outstretched, mask grave, of whom not a muscle plays freely, to greatly mistrust his liberalism.

A first practical effect of the belief here confessed was that — since I thought that I had adopted my political and philosophical ideas not because I found them just but because I found them agreeable — I rather quickly spared myself the effort of justifying them to myself (notably by those long inquiries into history or into nature). Whence this double advantage that, on the one hand, I had of my ideas an enjoyment far less tormented and far more immediate; and that, on the other hand, looking at history and nature without seeking there the justification of my ideas (since I loved them without that), I looked at them far more freely.

Another practical effect of this belief was that — considering that I would think clumsily the ideas that I would adopt apart from my tendency — I took the course of beginning by knowing my tendency and of choosing only afterward the ideas that contented it; that, in other terms (since my tendency was known to me only by my acts), I took the course, not, as I was invited to do, of conforming my acts to my words, but rather my words to my acts.

Finally, another practical effect was again that — since I thought that the political and religious ideas of most people are adopted not by their intelligence but by their affective need — I ceased rather young, in order to change their ideas, to seek to prove to them that theirs were false and that others were just (which earned me a good reputation for tolerance), but confined myself to awaiting this change either from a change of object on the part of their affective need, or from a change of this need itself: so that I ceased, for example, to represent to an antisemite the merits of the people of Israel, or to a proud bourgeois the defects of the capitalist regime, but trained myself to hope of the first that another object of hatred might mask Israel from him, or that a little more health might render him less hateful, and of the second that some inclination might come to bend his pride…

Persuaded again that to illustrate the intellectual poverty of an idea serves only to flatter the author of that illustration, to delight the adversaries of that idea, and to irritate its adepts by attaching them more closely to it; that to have found, for example, that the god of the Christians is in the last analysis a “gaseous vertebrate” has no other effect than to do great honor to the spirit of Ernst Haeckel, to amuse certain persons, and to irritate the friends of Christ by increasing their faith, I rather quickly left off pausing at the oddities and the contradictions of a system, but judged it more practical to seek out in what consists its unity and its gravity… Finally, believing in a still wider action of the affective needs, believing that it is these again and not the intelligence that dictate to men, for example, their judgments of the things of art, that, in other terms, if some admire this and others denigrate that, it is above all that some have the prior need of admiring and the others that of denigrating, I attached myself to seeking out the former for their loving nature and to fleeing the latter for their hateful nature, without attempting to show the former that sometimes they admired the bad, and still less the latter that they denigrated the good…; and believing again that it is the affective needs and not the intelligence that dictate to men their judgments upon other men, (8) and believing it in particular of their judgments upon my own person, I left off hoping that those who hated me would do me justice by ceasing to refuse me certain qualities I had, and fearing that those who loved me would do me [justice] by ceasing to find in me certain merits I did not have.

(8) There is indeed here some spirit of system.

II

Trying then to interpret and to classify the principal political and religious ideas according to the feelings they satisfy, I discerned first a set of ideas which tell the subject of some wickedness or some harmfulness toward him and thus satisfy a need of hatred or of mistrust or of the one and the other: such are the xenophobias, such are the ideas that posit the wickedness of this or that race, of this or that class, the harmfulness of this or that religion… — I ranged in the same class, as equally proper to content the need of hating (by the spectacle they give of things that hate each other), the ideas that essentially state some opposition (of Man and of Nature, of Science and of Religion…) — Finally I ranged again in this class, as satisfying feelings neighboring on hatred in that they are, like it, a retraction of the organism, namely the feeling of fear and that of respect, the ideas that state some terrificness or impose some respectability: terrificness of Hell, respectability of God, of parents, of the officer…

Facing this class, I ranged a set of ideas which tell the subject of some goodness or some innocence and thus satisfy a need of love or of confidence: such is cosmopolitanism, such is a certain tolerance (the one that applies itself to denying some harmfulness of others, by distinction from another tolerance which admits this harmfulness, but wants it to be borne), (9) and those social doctrines which suppose the native or possible goodness of man… — I added to it those doctrines which propose some spectacle of love, those for example which want (rather than they demonstrate) some “reconciliation”… — I added to it finally, as satisfying feelings neighboring on love in that they state, like it, the [expansion] of the organism, namely the feeling of security and that of irreverence, those ideas which deny some terrificness or dispute some respectability (of God, of parents, of the officer…). (f)

(9) The first says, for example: “The harmfulness of the Jews (or of the Clericals) is a phantom.” The other says: “It exists, but it must be borne.” The first alone satisfies a feeling. The second seems indeed a pure state of the mind, unless it satisfy the pleasure of pain.

(10) It is a matter, of course, of love and not of the passion of love.

I discerned next a set of ideas which tell the subject of a superiority or primacy of his own, or of a privilege of his own, and thus satisfy a need of pride: superiority of his nation, of his religion, of his race, primacy of his class (bourgeois or working), privilege of his zoological species in that it would be the object of an exceptional place in nature, of a turn of favor in creation; (g) — I discerned again and ranged in the same class, as satisfying again the need of pride (more exactly of affirmation of the self), those ideas which tell the subject that he exists; — that he will always exist; — those which assure him of the identity of his self beneath its changing aspects; — those which tell him of the importance of his existence (by solemnizing its principal moments, birth, marriage, death); — those which speak to him of his dignity (Christianity, democratism); — of his rights: rights of man, of the citizen, of the father of a family, right to life, “right to happiness”; — of his greatness: greatness of Man, greatness of sacrifice, of humility, of tolerance, of “death on the field of honor”; (11) — I ranged there again, as satisfying again pride, the vulgar idea of liberty, insofar as it tells the subject of an increase of his own, a dilatation of his self, an advancement of his personal frontier (by opposition to another liberty (Stoic) which tells him of its abolition); the idea of family, insofar as it tells him of a prolongation of his own in space and time; the idea of property, insofar as it identifies the possessor with the thing possessed (to the point that often he calls himself like it: Enghien, Montmorency…) and enlarges him by so much; (h) — I ranged there again the ideas which tell the subject of a victory of his own: victory over his passions, victory over heredity (“evasion”)… — those which tell him of an independence of his own: independence of his will (free will), of his political person (modern regimes)…; — those above all (how much pride contents itself therein!) which tell him that he is a cause, which tell him for example that he “transforms nature” or that he “creates his milieu” and (to the working world) that he arrests social life by his immobility.

(11) I say “which speak of the greatness of sacrifice, of humility…” and not “which speak of sacrifice, of humility, etc.”

— Finally, I ranged in the same class, as satisfying again (by manners I shall tell of further on) the pride of the subject who contemplates them, a set of ideas which posit, no longer the subject himself, but some element affected by one of those qualities or by one of those movements the consciousness of which is naturally accompanied by pride: those ideas for example which posit some element affected by primacy, some first element (ideas of order, hierarchies, principles from which everything flows); — those which posit some existence: existence of God, of matter, of the external world; personifications (of the Empire, of the Republic, of Society, etc…), and those ideas which want causes to be beings (“theological,” “metaphysical” explanations); — those (empiricism, positivism) which take account only of the determined, of the sensible; — those in which appears some identity, that is, in which some element succeeds in maintaining beneath its changing aspects identity to itself: the Platonic Idea beneath its “earthly forms,” the Hypostasis beneath its “species,” the Substance beneath its “modes,” (12) and in our day the Force beneath its “manifestations”; — those in which appears some rigidity, that is, an element that stiffens against tendencies to change: such are the ideas of Fatality (Aeschylus, Hervieu), of Tradition, of “immutable” Law (political or scientific), of “indelible” Race…; such again the ideas of Irrevocability (of Christian marriage, of the vows of the Catholic priest, of the state of academician); of Systematization, insofar as a system is a “stiffening” against the mobility of facts; and that doctrine (R. Quinton), more loved than studied, and precisely dear to those who do not deny that life is only a “stiffening” (of a thermal, chemical, etc. state) against any variation; — those in which appears some victorious element: the Kings, the military Chiefs, conquerors of men; the Mystery, the Irrational, the Unconscious, conquerors of Reason; and certain victories in the inverse sense, more recent and less popular, the Peoples conquerors of the Kings, “good sense” conqueror of the Mystery, Reason victorious over Superstition; — those in which appears some independent element, for example some arbitrary will (God, the Kings, the Sovereign Nation…); — those finally in which appears some causing element, for example some creative or perturbing power: God, creator of the world or perturber (by miracles); the King, creator of happiness or of suffering, and perturber of the just course of things (by undeserved punishment or by pardon); the Genius, creator of his epoch, etc…, and, more generally, all the ideas of transitive cause insofar as the cause is therein properly creative of the effect… These ideas, or rather these images of proud gestures, give in several manners to the pride of the subject who thinks them the occasion to precipitate itself — as a liquid mass precipitates itself into crystals by the sole presence of a crystal of the same nature —, whether the subject imagines between himself and the element contemplated an identity (communion, transubstantiation, incarnation…), whether, not even taking this trouble, he simply substitutes his image for that of this element (such a one, for example, who posits some existence — of God, of Matter — truly posits his own existence; such a faithful adherent of Tradition regards himself therein in the place of that which maintains itself against innovation; and such a contemplator of the doctrines of Quinton contemplates himself therein in the place of that which stiffens itself against variation), or whether, still more simply, the image of movements of pride arouses in him who sees them identical movements together with the corresponding feelings, as the image of movements of love arouses movements and feelings of love, or as the spectacle of the victorious bullfighter provokes movements and feelings of triumph.

(12) It is known that, for Spinoza, the Substance is not at all “identical to itself” beneath its Modes, since it is “indeterminate.” But, once again, what the systems were in the mind of their inventors has here no importance.

Facing this class I ranged a set of ideas which tell the subject, no longer of a superiority of his own or a privilege of his own, but of an equality of his own in relation to others, and can thus satisfy a feeling rather difficult to make understood because account is rarely taken of it, which is not a purely negative feeling of non-pride, still less of humility, but which one might call relaxation of the self, that is, the evanescence of the self in what it has of harshly defined and the advent of a freer self, rather ill adjusted to itself, something like what the lovers of morphine mean to say when they speak of the “lightness” they experience in being: such, for example, are the doctrines which tell the subject, no longer of the superiority, but of the equality of the merits of his nation, of his religion, of his race in relation to others; those again which tell him that his species is no longer in creation the object of a privilege, but that it is, like the others, a passing and provisional term in a series… I ranged naturally in the same class those theories of knowing which envelop the human consciousness, no longer with a precise line, but with a troubled and flocculent fringe (praises of intoxication, of dreaming, of ecstasy, etc…), and also the doctrines which invite the subject desirous of truly knowing, no longer to espouse the contours of the object, but on the contrary to dissipate these contours in order to mingle with its interior essence (knowledge “of the third kind,” Hegelian “chemism,” “intuitions” of every sort, etc…). And I ranged in the same class, as satisfying in the first degree the relaxation of the self, the ideas which tell the subject of the illusory nature of his personal existence and invite him to a dissolution of his partial being in a total being, on the express condition (without which it would be pride that would be satisfied and not relaxation) that they speak to him not at all of the greatness of this dissolution, and above all that they make him not find again in the total being, with magnitude and perennity added, precisely all the affirmation of the self which he renounces by his dissolution: such therefore are not, and in spite of appearances, certain social doctrines (Hegelian Statism, State socialism), which do indeed speak of a dissolution of the individual in the State, but of a glorious dissolution and into a State which takes up on its own account all the attributes renounced by the individual (personal existence, initiative, command, causing power…); nor certain religious doctrines which do indeed tell the subject to “deny himself in order to know God” (Saint Ambrose), but speak of the greatness of this negation and ask it in favor of a God who is at bottom only sublimated human matter and to whom, to crown all, one is “transubstantiated”; such is, on the contrary, and eminently, that doctrine which speaks, not of the greatness, but of the beatitude there is in losing oneself in God, and that in a God who — indeterminate, endowed with a power “which has nothing in common with that of the great or of kings,” with an Intelligence “which differs from that of man as much as the Constellation of the Dog differs from the animal that bears this name” — could restore to the subject none of the goods he abandons… — I ranged again in the same class the ideas (Hume) which contest to the subject the identity of his self; — those which tell him of a dependence of his own (philosophical determinism, social “interdependence”…) — Finally, I ranged there again, as satisfying relaxation in the one who contemplates them (by the affective contagion or sympathy which, as we have seen, takes place between him and what he contemplates), the ideas which posit some one of those states, or more exactly some one of those suppressions of state the consciousness of which is naturally accompanied by the feeling of relaxation: those ideas for example which state some equality, or some suppression of primacy (egalitarianism, an-archy, or absence of “beginning,” Eternity insofar as it is the suppression of the idea of order, insofar as it is the suppression of the categories of the before and the after); — those which deny some existence: of God, of matter (Berkeley, G. Le Bon), etc…; — those which posit essentially some indeterminate, some insensible, that is, some non-existent (the Unknowable, the Infinite, the Power or Virtuality, Movement, the Ether, etc…) on condition that they do not come surreptitiously to restore some existence to this non-existent, like those who take the Incommensurable for a number, like those (Maine de Biran, Bergson) who “see” the Force or touch the “being-made,” or like that “agnostic” (Kant) who believes he “knows” God because he knows that he does not know him; — those which deny some identity (phenomenism, or negation of a substance identical to itself in the diversity of qualities); — those which deny some rigidity, that is, which propose some fluidity: those, for example, in which everything “flows,” those more recent in which everything “becomes,” those still more recent in which everything “is tendency,” those in which the world “emanates” from a God who “spreads himself,” those in which matter “pours itself” into the spirit, and those moral ideas in which man must “be enraptured,” those more recent in which he must “constantly surpass himself,” and those political ideas in which something “dissolves,” whether the governmental power, whether the paternal power, whether marriage…; — those which deny some independence, those for example (Plotinus, Spinoza) in which the will of God is no longer arbitrary, but is subjected to agreeing with its definition; — those finally which deny some causing power, that is, the ideas of immanent cause, that is to say in which the cause is bound to the effect as the definition of a figure is bound to one of its properties, those for example in which God is no longer creator and perturber of the world, but is the world itself otherwise expressed, in which the Head of State is only an expression of the State, the Poet an expression of his time…

I discerned finally a set of ideas which posit essentially a difference and thus satisfy a need of surprise. Such are the ideas which posit some plurality or some duality: plurality of the gods, of chemical substances…, duality of the body and the soul, of Good and Evil, of God and the Devil…; — such are again the ideas of discontinuity or of absolute beginning, that is, those ideas according to which, given a succession of states of one same quality, there is one which is the first, that is to say which insists upon maintaining with the zero state of this quality a determinate difference: absolute beginning of the world, of man, of each species, of the present state of the globe (Volcanism, Cataclysmism), of the living in relation to the inanimate, of language in relation to the cry of the animals, etc…; absolute beginning of nations (Rome with Romulus, France with Francus, etc…); — such (that is to say, positing a difference and satisfying surprise) are again those ideas one might call of external cause, I mean ideas in which the changes of things take their cause outside of those things: in which the changes of the world take their cause in Gods, those of societies in kings, those of the body in external things called microbes; (i) — such are again, and eminently, the ideas of unforeseeability: the idea of miracle, become for our use the idea of Evolution creative of the unforeseen, and many modern systems (pragmatism, intuitionism), naïve tributaries of the need of surprise, which, under the appearance of attacking false knowledge, want to ruin all Science — the good as well as the bad — insofar as it wants to foresee; — such again the ideas of active cause (Hume), insofar as the effect is therein something radically different from the cause; and such again, at bottom, all the doctrines of action, insofar as an action is essentially the creation of a difference; — such finally those ideas one might call of haecceity (in our day: pluralism), insofar as they want, in a set of objects of one same genus, to ignore the genus and to see only the objects, that is to say the differences: those doctrines for example which propose only “facts,” only “cases” (not in the interest of a generalization, but for the love of themselves), those doctrines which would give the most fruitful ideas upon the nature of an ill in order to be amazed at a “fine sick man,” and the truest views upon the sense of histories in order to know that “John Lackland passed this way.”

[One can bring back into this class of ideas which posit a difference and content surprise the ideas, signaled above, which tell the subject of “his own existence” (and satisfy pride), insofar as they tell him at bottom of a difference, namely that which there is between him and the external world… Whence, laterally, this aspect of pride: pride is the surprise provoked by the idea of the difference of the self and the non-self.]

Facing this third class, I ranged a set of ideas which posit essentially an in-difference, a monotony, and thus satisfy a need of non-surprise, of non-disturbance (ataraxy), that is — positively — of serenity. (j) Such are the ideas which dissolve some plurality or some duality and posit essentially some uniqueness: such are those ideas which state the uniqueness of God, of substance, of chemical matter, etc…; such are those doctrines (Aristotle, Descartes) in which the Good is the unique Being, in which “all that is, is good, in the measure in which it is,” in which Evil is therefore not another being opposed to the first, but the illusory limitation of that which alone exists; such above all that philosophy (Plotinus) which defines its god by the progressive and supreme extinction of all duality of attributes; (k) — such (that is to say, positing an in-difference, or at least wanting it) are again the ideas of continuity, that is, those ideas according to which a certain difference insists upon being made smaller than any given magnitude, however small it be, that is to say, according to which this difference tends not to exist at all (insofar as to exist means to be determined, at least determinable): such for example, and perfectly, the idea of “mathematical continuity”; such the idea of the indefinite origin of the world; such, but less perfectly, those (evolutionist) ideas (13) in which one passes from one species to another, from one state of the globe to the next, and from the worse to the better by small differences which seem as if to suffer at being always too perceptible; (l) — such again the ideas of internal cause, I mean ideas in which the changes of things (of the world, of societies, of the body) take their cause in those things themselves; (m) — such again the ideas of foreseeability (idea of scientific law, that is to say, according to which the relations of consequent to antecedent are in-different from one another); — such again the ideas of immanent cause, insofar this time as the effect is therein in some sort in-different from the cause, in which for example “the idea of the son may be vivid enough in the mind of the father to form but one with him”; — such finally those ideas one might call of quiddity, insofar as they want, in a set of objects of one same genus, to ignore the objects and to know only the genus, that is to say the in-difference: such are those ideas which speak of defining instead of describing, which substitute for the sick persons the sickness, and adore beyond the differing men the indifferent essence of that which is human.

(13) Evolutionism, insofar as it believes it can, by smaller and smaller changes, reach the indefinitely small (popular Evolutionism, nothing in common with that of Spencer), is a good example of an idea adopted through affection (for continuity) and properly unthought: that one can pass from the finite to the infinite is what no one thinks when he thinks. — What is curious is that the adversaries of this doctrine propose exactly the same error, only in the inverse sense: they install themselves in the “being-made,” and it is from there that they descend again to the sensible world (Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 19, etc.). All this is only a refusal of the human heart to accept the solid logic of the Infinite.

[It is understood that most of these ideas can be adopted apart from any prior affective need: that the idea, for example, of the superiority of one’s nation, of one’s race, or of one’s species can be adopted by the subject apart from any satisfaction of pride — as a piece of information, (n) — the idea of the opposition of Science and Religion apart from any need of hating, and the idea of transformism apart from any serenity… They can even be adopted while, for the satisfaction of his feelings, the subject would prefer the contrary ideas: such the case of those thinkers of the great century who adopted the idea that “individuals alone exist,” while their will was visibly that it should be the genera that existed, so much so that they could not refuse them existence at least in the mind of the one who conceives them, and to certain of them (Extension and Thought) they did not resist according full reality; such again the case of that modern thinker who instituted the idea of the “struggle for life,” while all that we know of his heart tells of his tenderness and his touching need of happy spectacles; (o) and of that other who adopted the idea that the people should govern itself while his pleasure was that a “good despot” should dispense it from this care… (p) We say only that, adopted thus — intellectually — these ideas hardly occupy any but the reasonable world; that, if they occupy the world, it is adopted sentimentally. (q)

One sees that, just as one same feeling can signify itself in different and politically opposed doctrines (hatred in anticlericalism and antisemitism, surprise in the Christian miracle and the revolutionary miracle, etc…), just so one same doctrine can satisfy different and even contrary feelings: such militarism, such Catholicism, etc…, insofar as they are command or obedience (omission made, of course, of the greatness of obedience); such democratism, insofar as it is love (of the people) or it is hatred (of every elite); such anarchism, insofar as it is suppression of differences or exaltation of the individual. (14)

(14) Such “Dreyfusism” insofar as it was defense of the laws of the spirit or republican romanticism.

(15) It is a matter, of course, of the liberty of the child.

One can even observe that the most expressive formulas, and those one would think best guarded against the plurality of significations, do not escape this fate: the need to govern souls — notably to teach — claims kinship with “liberty,” as if liberty were not by essence the negation of all teaching, (15) and the need to love succeeds in finding a conciliatory sense (Lacordaire, Gratry) for the religion which posits: “outside of me no salvation.” — This equivocity of ideas serves them much in their defense: attacked in Borgia, the Church responds with Vincent de Paul; attacked in its levelings, the Republic responds with its love of the humble; attacked in the egoism of the chiefs, the Army responds with the abnegation of the troopers. It serves them also in their propaganda, for it is clear that a doctrine propagates itself all the more widely the apter it is to satisfy a greater number of diverse feelings: such socialism which, for its happiness, has not yet known how to make itself precise; such feminism which conquers all together the proud liberators and the tender men; such “nationalism” which contents at once the grave patriotism and the taste for legends; such above all Christianity which not only can, by choosing its pose, satisfy hatred or love, pride or relaxation, surprise or serenity, but moreover has this chance almost unique among all the religions of being able to offer, by the martyrdom of its founder, an image together with an idea: to the romantics the image of a violent death, to the coquettes the image of a young man dead for them, to the artists the aesthetic image of a setting upon the cross. If only Jesus, instead of having been crucified, had been acquitted, what a change in the fortune of Christianity! (r)

These significations and affective powers found in the political and religious ideas, I found them again necessarily in many a state of mind of current life: I found again, for example, the idea that one is a cause (and therefore the contentment of pride) in the ideas which support those current acts called of altruism, of assistance, of charity and of goodness…, ideas which consist essentially in this, that the subject thinks that through him misery is changed into happiness (as one will convince oneself by remarking how much the idea of the same relief of others obtained apart from his action leaves the same subject indifferent); — I found again the idea that one is a cause, that one is superior, that one is important, in the ideas which preside over education, over proselytism, over “influences” and over “advice,” far more than I found there the idea that those whom one educates or whom one advises will be better or happier; — the need to solemnize the stages of life, honestly avowed in the religions, I found again at those marriages and burials called civil which disappear beneath the flowers and beneath the speeches; — the need to contemplate privileged ones, victorious ones, of whom one believes oneself to be by the effect of this contemplation, I found again in the incredible attention accorded to actors, to “masters” of every sort, to fashionable persons; — I found again the need to believe that one exists in the taste for the theater (insofar as it speaks to man only of himself); the need to feel oneself victorious, in the taste for sport; the need to believe in a difference, in the taste for “current events”; — the pleasure of seeing only oppositions I perceived in most of the “comparisons” that men make, just as I recognized the joy of bathing in accord in that immortal gesture which envelops a beloved and invites her to the voyage in a country “which resembles her”; — the need of surprise, I found it in the vogue of those who have “invention,” who have “many ideas,” while I recognized the love of the Eternal in the love of those masters (Stendhal, Comte, Wagner) who ask their effects above all from the internal power of very few ideas, not necessarily new; — in the taste for painting, for sculpture, for literature, I found again the need to believe in existences (and therefore in one’s own existence), while I found again the tendency to evanescence in the taste for music and for philosophy, these first arts consisting essentially in images, that is to say in determinations (or existences) of things that the second arts can leave in their unconditioned depth, the first being able to say for example only the calm of a wood, the sadness of a face, the movement of a brook, while the second will say calm, sadness, movement…; — finally I found again the will to believe oneself a cause, distinct, victorious, important, etc., together with the taste for the accidental, in a certain love which speaks only of favors, of possession, of surprise, of conquest, of defeat, and other military terms, and also of sin, of crisis, of madness…, while another love states the abolition of a duality in a kiss “without end, without trouble, without awakening.”

III

To say that certain ideas satisfy hatred, pride, surprise, and that others satisfy love, relaxation, serenity, is to say that the first satisfy the need that certain men have of a circulation in starts, of a panting respiration, of a hampered gesticulation…, in short of a difficult or pathetic vital functioning, and that the second satisfy the need that other men have of a gentle circulation, of an easy breath, of a free gesture…, in short of an easy or happy functioning: and, since the habit (and consequently the need) of a difficult functioning is essentially bound to the conditions of a life still to be made, while the habit of an easy functioning is bound to the conditions of a less uncertain life, and in some measure already made, (s) it is finally to say that the first ideas suit above all the elementary forms of life, of which they are as it were the roots, and the second the evolved forms which are as it were the flowers of it.

[Which is verified: one knows the attraction of the affirmative for children, for women, for the people, their aversion for the indeterminate, for doubt, for irony, of which one knows the attraction for less natural [beings].] Hence — from their suitability to radical life — the indestructibility of the first doctrines, if not in their present forms at least in their spirit; and, from their suitability to the flowered life alone, the extreme fragility of the second.

— Hence again, for the second, a constant impurity, insofar as they keep as it were a lingering odor of the first, from which they have ill escaped: such the republican idea, so naïvely relapsed into authoritarianism and into the taste for icons; such all those Infinites which cannot get themselves out of finite number, nor resolve themselves to comprehend without imagining; such all those Eternals not one of which consents to be only eternal, and all of which know how to turn their essence so as to keep some reality, whether that Spiritual god who incarnates himself in his Son, or that Universal Idea which intends to be also sometimes Nature, or finally that Substance — which one believed pure of such weaknesses — and which marks in its Modes its “determinations”…, sincere lovers of the Infinite

But who, knowing how to love it, have not known how to die of it;

— And hence again, for these second ideas, an incredible rarity, not only as constituted systems (how many fewer examples of them we have found than of the others!), but as humbler manifestations: whereas the pathetic life has covered the world with images in which it contemplates itself and with moral systems in which it honors itself, the easy life has almost not yet posited its value: whereas one can no longer count the paintings of the man who kills, of the man who suffers, of the man who enjoys, of the man who founds, one searches for the paintings of the man who is; whereas the praise of peaks, of chasms, of tempests and other outbursts of nature swarms, one can count those who have honored the plain or the desert and posited the value of a monotony; and, while all tell of the assiduity of God, his attachments, his hatreds, his angers and his unforeseen acts, one can count those who have known how to tell of his relaxation and to be intoxicated with his equality. (16)

(16) Hence, in the West, the unique place of a Lamartine.

What is more, the easy life continues by routine to posit the value of the difficult life, and for the ones as for the others “easy morals” signify contemptible morals: so much so that the beings apt for the easy life, being raised to admire only the difficult life, let themselves go to it, and so that thus are spoiled in labor admirable powers of supple and light life… And the easy life not only cannot admire itself nor honor itself, but it can scarcely name itself: what they call life is, without their needing to say it, the violent life, what they call love is convulsed love, what they call joy is the joy of swooning; and what, on the contrary, they call calm is not the ease of being, it is the privation of being, it is not the warm life of those who, having things, savor them without contraction, it is the shivering life of those who, not having them, resign themselves to not having them, it is not the blossoming of those who rise from the embrace to felicity, it is the misery of those who “watch, livid, the whirlwind of Dionysiac delirium pass by”… The aesthetic, the morality, the language of ease remain to be made. (17)

1908

(17) It is fitting to leave no equivocation upon what is here called “ease.” It is not a matter of “cowardice” or “incapacity for firmness.” It is a matter of the moment when a being arrived, on the contrary, and by a long effort, at a great and lasting firmness — affords itself the luxury of relaxing this effort become useless, and of endowing its firmness with that supreme smile with which Minucius wished that Carmosine should rejoice her own perfection.

NOTES

a). — … what causes the nature of the political and religious ideas of a subject is at bottom what causes the need he has of experiencing this or that feeling. Now, what causes the need of experiencing this or that feeling is doubtless often a native disposition…

Thus, the need of experiencing surprise is evidently bound to the active temperament, and the need of experiencing serenity to a certain nonchalance: whence it would follow that it is not by chance that those Philosophies which found Knowledge upon contrast and shock were born to the English people, and the infinitist doctrines to sons of the Orient.

b). — … it is thus that the Evolutionism of Darwin… gives place to another Evolutionism, of the public meeting, negator of all creation.

Another deformation of Darwin’s Evolutionism, evidently adjusted so as better to satisfy the need of continuity, was to retain as the sole factor of evolution the slow transformations or variations (popular Evolutionism), whereas Darwin had glimpsed the abrupt transformations (mutations) just as well as the variations. (See on this subject Hugo de Vries: Species and Varieties, p. 292.)

c). — [Examples of ideas which the common run deform in order better to content their affective need.]

It is thus, again, that the Bergsonism of M. Bergson — or praise of an Intuition which seems indeed to consist in surpassing the Intelligence but in supposing it and in calling for it — gives place to a five-o’clock Bergsonism which is nothing other than the eternal and superb rejection of intelligence by divinatory Ignorance. [The OCR of this sentence is corrupt — the French reads “le rejet de l’intelligence par l’ignorance par l’Ignorance divinatrice”; rendering the most likely intended sense. — bad scan]

d). — Naturally, it is the second form, by reason of its greater affective power, that alone is adopted by great human ensembles.

Thus would be explained that fact — several times pointed out by Macaulay (Political Essays, p. 88, p. 290) and which astonished him so much — namely that, each time an atheist comes to Christianity, he comes to Catholicism and not at all to Protestantism: if one admits that an atheist who seeks a religion does so under the goad of needs of the soul rather well determined (need to believe in transcendence, in the “eternity” of oneself, need to feel oneself a member of a great and ancient association, need of the Irrational, etc…), is it not natural that he should not stop at a religion which lacks antiquity, which ratiocinates the arbitrary, which is stingy with the marvelous…, and that he should run straight to that one in which these sweetnesses are poured out brimful?

e). — That is why we shall leave off counting on the humanitarianism of this one… on the egalitarianism of that one… on the relativism of this other…

That is why, in particular, we left off being astonished — some ten years ago, during a great civic crisis — by the attitude that a certain man of letters, then illustrious, took up therein, an attitude which astonished so many people: what “skepticism” could indeed be expected (if one understands by that the liberty of the mind and not a certain schoolboyishness of a pedagogue ashamed of being one) on the part of a man who frowned at the analyses of a Stendhal in that they “insult certain sentiments which we judge sacred and beyond discussion”; who had grown angry, as is known, at the success “of the literatures of the North,” and who sharply rebuked an anglophile colleague (Paul Bourget) not without scolding in passing intellectual “vanity”? (“It is not the moment, when almost all the peoples close in upon themselves and observe us with a hateful eye, it is not the moment to pride ourselves on doing them justice… I am cosmopolitan neither by my life, nor by my mind, nor by my heart. Why should I be? For the vanity of understanding the greatest possible number of things? Let us do without that vanity. Let us be unintelligent, etc…” Les Contemporains, 1889.)

f). — … those ideas which deny some terrificness.

Among the systems which deny some terrificness, there is one which interests us particularly by the appearance it has of having formed itself rather far from the concern for truth, above all by an affective need (the need of dissipating the fear from which the men of that time suffered): it is the system of the Latin poet Lucretius. The author of this system seems not even to have sought to know the science of his time. For example, he advances — after the works of Pythagoras, of Aristarchus of Samos and of Hipparchus — that the size of the sun is about such as it appears to us (V, 564 ff.); he inclines to believe that the solar disk takes the trouble to reform itself each morning by the reunion of fiery atoms, in order to perish each evening (V, 659 ff.), etc…

g). — … ideas which tell the subject of a superiority of his own…: of his nation, of his religion, of his race, … of his class…

One can see among these various ideas of superiority a sort of faculty of mutual replacement, a sort of “metastasis,” the ones quickening when for some reason the others dull, the pride of race or of nation quickening for example when the political regime renders the pride of class impossible… Thus would be explained that in France antisemitism has become so accentuated under the Republic. (Unless it be because one sees there certain Jews closer up.)

h). — … the idea of property insofar as it identifies the possessor with the thing possessed… and enlarges him by so much.

Buddhism denounces this enlargement of the possessor by the object possessed. It is remarkable that it constantly associates the feeling “this is mine” with the feeling “this is me.” “Abandon the paradise of the wicked,” says the Buddhist, “renounce ‘this is me,’ ‘this is mine.’” And again: “As long as you pronounce words like ‘this is me,’ like ‘this is mine,’…”

i). — … in which the changes of the body take their causes in external things called microbes.

The idea that the ills of the body are caused by microbes appears, by the manner in which certain people adopt it (for cases, for example, where it is not at all proven), to be eminently one of those ideas which one often adopts less because one judges them true than because they satisfy a need of the mind. — The need that this idea satisfies seems to be composed thus: 1st, need of discontinuity (between the so-called normal state and the pathological state); 2nd, need that the changes of things take their cause outside of those things; 3rd, need that causes be beings. — It is the same bundle of needs that founds the idea of “Romulus cause of Rome,” “Francus cause of France,” etc…

j). — … which posit some in-difference… and thus satisfy a need of serenity.

That the idea productive of serenity, of non-disturbance, is indeed at bottom an idea of non-difference (of equality), is what men have inscribed in the expression “it is all the same to me [ça m’est égal].”

k). — … that philosophy which defines its god by the progressive and supreme extinction of all duality of attributes.

It is known that the One of Plotinus is obtained by melting into a single Being the duality “subject-object,” then by making, in the Being thus obtained, the duality “intelligent-intelligible” melt into a single attribute.

Of a frequent equivocation upon the idea of Unity. — Here again, as just now for those ideas which tell the subject of the illusory nature of his personal existence and invite him to a dissolution of his partial being in a total being, one must not confound the idea we are considering with another idea which bears the same name and which is precisely proper to satisfy the exactly contrary feeling: one must not confound the Unity here regarded — which is properly the vanishing of a plurality of things in favor of something which is none of them — with another Unity eminently proper, this one, to satisfy pride, which is the disappearance of a plurality of things (only insofar as plurality) for the benefit of one of them which absorbs the others. This last Unity — which knows very well how to exploit the prestige of its homonym — is by far the more sought after: it is evidently for the love of it that the Catholics want to make the principles of the modern States re-enter the commandments of the Church, that the socialists want all men to become workers, that Louis XIV destroyed Port-Royal, and that the Germans annexed Alsace-Lorraine.

l). — … those (evolutionist) ideas in which one passes from one species to another, from one state of the globe to the next, etc…, by small differences…

Among the thinkers who adopted the idea of the slow and continuous evolution of the globe, Goethe touches us above all by the clarity with which it appears that he adopted it with his heart: see his ill humor (Zahme Xenien, VII) at the appearance of the opposing system (Volcanism), to which he responds above all by satire and by a hymn to Continuity (Classical Walpurgis Night, III). Besides, that his scientific ideas were the expression of his temperament, Goethe avowed not without candor: “Certainly one would dispute less,” he says at the beginning of a writing nevertheless quite serious, “one would dispute less, I am convinced of it, over scientific facts, their consequences, their explanations, if beforehand each one learned to know himself, if he knew to which party he ranges himself and what is the manner of thinking most in conformity with his nature…” (Letter to M. de Leonhard on the terrains of Carlsbad).

The evolutionist ideas of Kant, too, are considerable to us by the evidence with which it appears that they are much more concerned to satisfy their author’s love of continuity than to be true. His theory of the Heavens (continuous evolution of the sun and the planets) is formed in contempt of a truth (the principle of areas) already current, it seems, at the time when he was writing. (G. Milhaud, The Scientific Preoccupations of Kant.) Likewise his ideas upon the evolution of the globe and of the human species seem to have had a formation singularly foreign to experience. It is at Königsberg, where he was born, where he lived, where he taught, and where he died, that he discoursed upon the Oceans which he never saw, upon the Volcanoes, upon the distant races, upon all the upheavals and all the transformations of the terrestrial crust. Not only did he never have near him anything which from near or far could be called a laboratory, but he does not even seem to have observed the least “natural object, animal or plant, with the simple resources of his organs, and with the intention of giving a scientific description of it.” (Loc. cit.) — Besides, as for the fact that his scientific views contented desires, Kant too avowed it: “I have the satisfaction of seeing arise from this chaos a well-ordered whole…”

m). — … the ideas in which the changes of things (of the world, of societies, of the body) take their cause in those things themselves.

Those ideas in which the ills of the body take their cause in the body itself (that is to say, again, in which the morbid state is only a particular continuation of the normal state) are above all those of Virchow and of Cl. Bernard. (See, for example, Cl. Bernard, Experimental Pathology, pp. 8, 9, 50.) It is to be remarked, moreover, how the taste for non-difference impregnates all their thought. (See Virchow: Scientific Medicine in its Tendencies toward Unity; Cl. Bernard: on the identity of essence of the anatomical elements, on a profound identity — more profound than their differences — between the nutrition of animals and that of vegetables, on the identity of essence between generation and nutrition, etc… (Properties of the Tissues, p. 93; General Physiology, pp. 133-136, 140.) — See also in the latter the repugnance for the idea of absolute beginnings (General Physiology, p. 148), the taste for great men being only an expression of their time (Introduction to Experimental Medicine, pp. 356-357), etc…]

n). — … that the idea of the superiority of one’s species can be adopted by the subject apart from any satisfaction of pride — as a piece of information.

One can then conceive what one might call the “skeptical” spiritualist. He thinks that the intelligence of Man is a special thing; that it is impossible to see in it a simple increase, by way of continuity, of the intelligence of the animals; impossible to deny, for example, that there is a discontinuity between the highest forms of animal intelligence and the faculty of forming concepts. Only this discontinuity, he takes it as a fact, like a thousand other leaps of nature. He neither loves it nor hates it, neither venerates it nor despises it.

o). — … that modern thinker who instituted the idea of the “struggle for life” while all that we know of his heart tells of his tenderness and his touching need of happy spectacles.

“Although my father was very desirous,” says Francis Darwin, “of noting exactly the expression of a weeping child, the sympathy he felt for the latter’s grief spoiled his observation.” And again: “A novel that ended tragically caused him no pleasure. — ‘A novel, according to my taste,’” says Darwin himself, “‘is a first-rate work only if it contains some character whom one can love; and if this character is a pretty woman, all is for the best.’” (Life and Correspondence of Ch. Darwin, II, 149, 213, 169.)

— And this conclusion of the chapter on Vital Competition: “The thought of this universal combat is sad; but, to console us, we have the certainty that natural war is not incessant, that fear is unknown there, that death is generally prompt, and that it is the most vigorous beings, the healthiest and the happiest, that survive and that multiply.” (Origin of Species, III, x.)

p). — … who adopted the idea that the people should govern itself while his pleasure was that a “good despot” should dispense it from this care.

To meditate again, of the same thinker, this remark which we underline: “The great liberal life of the beautiful epochs of antiquity must have been [unforeseeable] the day (and yet may that day be welcome!) when the slave was regarded as a religious being and capable of merit.” (Studies of Religious History, p. 69.) [The OCR of the bracketed words within this quotation is corrupt. — bad scan]

Among those thinkers who adopted an idea while, for the satisfaction of their feelings, they would have preferred the contrary idea, let us cite again Tocqueville: who, of so clearly aristocratic a tendency — “one of the men most disdainful of others who have ever existed” — adopted the idea of the necessity of Democracies. “It is not without pain,” he says, “that I have surrendered to this idea…” [Cited by Pierre-Marcel, Political Essay on Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 67-69.]

q). — [On the ideas adopted apart from the affective needs which might content themselves therein.]

It would be well, concerning some given idea, to make clearly this distinction between those who adopt it and those who love it: concerning, for example, that idea (positivism) which wants to take account only of the sensible and banishes every mystical explanation, it would be well to distinguish between those who range themselves with it (sometimes not without melancholy: for example Spencer, First Principles, pp. 67 ff.) and those who exult in it (Littré, Berthelot); likewise, concerning the “impotence of Science to explain everything,” it would be just to separate those who resign themselves to it (Spencer, Renan) and those who dilate in it (Brunetière, Bergson). — Let us note moreover that the ideas adopted “without love” are rather badly propagated: see how, for example, the socialist or transformist ideas are propagated by the neo-Catholics, and the militarist ideas by the republicans.

r). — [Examples of ideas endowed with equivocity and of the fruit they draw from it.]

A philosophical idea whose equivocity, rather unperceived, is all the more fruitful, is the idea of tendency: on the one hand, it states an indetermination, insofar as it states that a moment A implies, at the same time as itself, something other than itself, B, and by this indetermination it satisfies the need of relaxation or of serenity; on the other hand, it states a causing power, insofar as the moment A is therein in some sort creator of the moment B, and under this face, it satisfies the need of pride. Hence it comes that the philosophies of tendency serve so often at once the sectaries of the dissolute and those of the absolute (Hegel claimed at once by the founders of German power and by the “[Cabin Boys] of the North,” Bergson by the ultra-Catholics and the revolutionary syndicalists). [The OCR of “cautines du Nord” is uncertain; sense rendered tentatively. — bad scan]

As for seeing in the idea of tendency, as one does so often, the idea of continuity, it is one more example of those deformations of ideas pointed out above: what the idea of tendency states, what it states only, is that, given a moment A, this moment implies another than itself; it states not at all (which is properly continuity) that this other than itself is infinitely near to it. Certain protagonists, and not the least illustrious (Leibniz, Renouvier), of the idea of tendency seem even to mean that this other moment implied by A is indeed finitely distinct from it. (See Renouvier, Personalism, p. 374.)

s). — … since the habit of a difficult functioning is essentially bound to the conditions of a life still to be made, while the habit of an easy functioning is bound to the conditions of a less uncertain life, and in some measure already made…

Where one can well follow this correspondence between the increase of ease in the functional habits of man and the increase of safety of his life (I do not say of the “idea of safety”), is for example in the successive stages of his struggle with the wild beasts.

First stage: hand-to-hand struggle: minimum of safety; panting respiration, contractile gestures… Second stage: struggle with the knife, with the bow…: increase of safety; respiration, circulation, etc., more easy. Third stage: struggle by shooting: maximum of safety; easy functioning, laughter, the attitude of play (the hunt). The same evolution in the struggle of man with man, from the gravity which accompanies the ancient hand-to-hand combat to the gaiety which accompanies the present-day “hunt” of man, or colonial war… What makes the comic of the modern “contracted ones” (of a certain great Italian novelist, for example) is the rupture of this correspondence, it is the contrast between their “contraction” and the high security of their life; when they call for war, the return of the age of iron and greater chances of death, they only want a little more agreement between the conditions of their life and their gesticulation.