To-day, as in all time, two great wants are felt by man. The first, the most imperious, is that of fixed, immutable principles, which depend upon neither times nor places nor circumstances, and on which the mind reposes with an unbounded confidence. In all investigations, as long as we have seized only isolated, disconnected facts, as long as we have not referred them to a general law, we possess the materials of science, but there is yet no science. Even physics commence only when universal truths appear, to which all the facts of the same order that observation discovers to us in nature may be referred. Plato has said, that there is no science of the transitory.

This is our first need. But there is another, not less legitimate, the need of not being the dupe of chimerical principles, of barren abstractions, of combinations more or less ingenious, but artificial, the need of resting upon reality and life, the need of experience. The physical and natural sciences, whose regular and rapid conquests strike and dazzle the most ignorant, owe their progress to the experimental method. Hence the immense popularity of this method, which is carried to such an extent that one would not now condescend to lend the least attention to a science over which this method should not seem to preside.

To unite observation and reason, not to lose sight of the ideal of science to which man aspires, and to search for it and find it by the route of experience,—such is the problem of philosophy.

Now we address ourselves to your recollections of the last two years:—have we not established, by the severest experimental method, by reflection applied to the study of the human mind, with the deliberation and the rigor which such demonstrations exact,—have we not established that there are in all men, without distinction, in the wise and the ignorant, ideas, notions, beliefs, principles which the most determined skeptic cannot in the slightest degree deny, by which he is unconsciously, and in spite of himself, governed both in his words and actions, and which, by a striking contrast with our other knowledges, are marked with the at once marvellous and incontestable character, that they are encountered in the most common experience, and that, at the same time, instead of being circumscribed within the limits of this experience, they surpass and govern it, universal in the midst of particular phenomena to which they are applied; necessary, although mingled with things contingent; to our eyes infinite and absolute, even while appearing within us in that relative and finite being which we are? It is not an unpremeditated paradox that we present to you; we are only expressing here the result of numerous lectures.[18]

It was not difficult for us to show that there are universal and necessary principles at the head of all sciences.

It is very evident that there are no mathematics without axioms and definitions, that is to say, without absolute principles.

What would logic become, those mathematics of thought, if you should take away from it a certain number of principles, which are a little barbarous, perhaps, in their scholastic form, but must be universal and necessary in order to preside over all reasoning and every demonstration?

Are physics possible, if every phenomenon which begins to appear does not suppose a cause and a law?

Without the principle of final causes, could physiology proceed a single step, render to itself an account of a single organ, or determine a single function?

Is not the principle on which the whole of morals rests, the principle which obligates man to good and lays the foundation of virtue, of the same nature? Does it not extend to all moral beings, without distinction of time and place? Can you conceive of a moral being who does not recognize in the depth of his conscience that reason ought to govern passion, that it is necessary to preserve sworn faith, and, against the most pressing interest, to restore the treasure that has been confided to us?

And these are not mere metaphysical prejudices and formulas of the schools: I appeal to the most vulgar common sense.

If I should say to you that a murder has just been committed, could you not ask me when, where, by whom, wherefore? That is to say, your mind is directed by the universal and necessary principles of time, of space, of cause, and even of final cause.

If I should say to you that love or ambition caused the murder, would you not at the same instant conceive a lover, an ambitious person? This means, again, that there is for you no act without an agent, no quality and phenomenon without a substance, without a real subject.

If I should say to you that the accused pretends that he is not the same person who conceived, willed, and executed this murder, and that, at intervals, his personality has more than once been changed, would you not say he is a fool if he is sincere, and that, although the acts and the incidents have varied, the person and the being have remained the same?

Suppose that the accused should defend himself on this ground, that the murder must serve his interest; that, moreover, the person killed was so unhappy that life was a burden to him; that the state loses nothing, since in place of two worthless citizens it acquires one who becomes useful to it; that, in fine, mankind will not perish by the loss of an individual, &c.; to all these reasonings would you not oppose the very simple response, that this murder, useful perhaps to its author, is not the less unjust, and that, therefore, under no pretext was it permitted?

The same good sense which admits universal and necessary truths, easily distinguishes them from those that are not universal and necessary, and are only general, that is to say, are applied only to a greater or less number of cases.

For example, the following is a very general truth: the day succeeds the night; but is it a universal and necessary truth? Does it extend to all lands? Yes, to all known lands. But does it extend to all possible lands? No; for it is possible to conceive of lands plunged in eternal night, another system of the world being given. The laws of the material world are what they are; they are not necessary. Their Author might have chosen others. With another system of the world one conceives other physics, but we cannot conceive other mathematics and other morals. Thus it is possible to conceive that day and night may not be in the same relation to each as that in which we see them; therefore the truth that day succeeds night is a very general truth, perhaps even a universal truth, but by no means a necessary truth.

Montesquieu has said that liberty is not a fruit of warm climates. I acknowledge, if it is desired, that heat enervates the spirit, and that warm countries maintain free governments with difficulty; but it does not follow that there may be no possible exception to this principle: moreover, there have been exceptions; hence it is not an absolutely universal principle, much less is it a necessary principle. Could you say as much of the principle of cause? Could you in any way conceive, in any time and in any place, a phenomenon which begins to appear without a cause, physical or moral?

And were it possible to reduce universal and necessary principles to general principles, in order to employ and apply these principles thus abased, and to found upon them any reasoning whatever, it would be necessary to admit what is called in logic the principle of contradiction, viz., that a thing cannot at the same time be and not be, in order to maintain the integrity of each part of the reasoning; as well as the principle of sufficient reason, which alone establishes their connection and the legitimacy of the conclusion. Now, these two principles, without which there is no reasoning, are themselves universal and necessary principles; so that the circle is manifest.

Even were we to destroy in thought all existences, save that of a single mind, we should be compelled to place in that mind, in order that it might exercise itself at all—and the mind is such only on the condition that it thinks—several necessary principles; it would be beyond the power of thought to conceive it deprived of the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.

How many times have we demonstrated the vanity of the efforts of the empirical school to disturb the existence or weaken the bearing of universal and necessary principles! Listen to this school: it will say to you that the principle of cause, given by us as universal and necessary, is, after all, only a habit of the mind, which, seeing in nature a fact succeeding another fact, puts between these that connection which we have called the relation of effect to cause. This explanation is nothing but the destruction, not only of the principle of causality, but even of the notion of cause. The senses show me two balls, one of which begins to move, the other of which moves after it. Suppose that this succession is renewed and continues; it will be constancy added to succession; it will by no means be the connection of a causative power with its effect; for example, that which consciousness attests to us is the least effort of volition. Thus a consequent empiricist, like Hume,[19] easily proves that no sensible experience legitimately gives the idea of cause.

What we say of the notion of cause we might say of all notions of the same kind. Let us at least instance those of substance and unity.

The senses perceive only qualities, phenomena. I touch the extension, I see the color, I am sensible of the odor; but do our senses attain the substance that is extended, colored, or odorous? On this point Hume[20] indulges in pleasantries. He asks which one of our senses takes cognizance of substance. What, then, according to him and in the system of empiricism, is the notion of substance? An illusion like the notion of cause.

Neither do the senses give us unity; for unity is identity, is simplicity, and the senses show us every thing in succession and composition. The works of art possess unity only because Art, that is to say, the mind of man puts it there. If we perceive unity in the works of nature, it is not the senses that discover it to us. The arrangement of the different parts of an object may contain unity, but it is a unity of organization, an ideal and moral unity which the mind alone conceives, and which escapes the senses.

If the senses are not able to explain simple notions, much less still are they able to explain the principles in which these notions are met, which are universal and necessary. In fact, the senses clearly perceive such and such facts, but it is impossible for them to embrace what is universal; experience attests what is, it does not reach what cannot but be.

We go farther. Not only is empiricism unable to explain universal and necessary principles; but we maintain that, without these principles, empiricism cannot even account for the knowledge of the sensible world.

Take away the principle of causality, and the human mind is condemned never to go out of itself and its own modifications. All the sensations of hearing, of smell, of taste, of touch, of feeling even, cannot inform you what their cause is, nor whether they have a cause. But give to the human mind the principle of causality, admit that every sensation, as well as every phenomenon, every change, every event, has a cause, as evidently we are not the cause of certain sensations, and that especially these sensations must have a cause, and we are naturally led to recognize for those sensations causes different from ourselves, and that is the first notion of an exterior world. The universal and necessary principle of causality alone gives it and justifies it. Other principles of the same order increase and develop it.

As soon as you know that there are external objects, I ask you whether you do not conceive them in a place that contains them. In order to deny it, it would be necessary to deny that every body is in a place, that is to say, to reject a truth of physics, which is at the same time a principle of metaphysics, as well as an axiom of common sense. But the place that contains a body is often itself a body, which is only more capacious than the first. This new body is in its turn in a place. Is this new place also a body? Then it is contained in another place more extended, and so on; so that it is impossible for you to conceive a body which is not in a place; and you arrive at the conception of a boundless and infinite place, that contains all limited places and all possible bodies: that boundless and infinite place is space.

And I tell you in this nothing that is not very simple. Look. Do you deny that this water is in a vase? Do you deny that this vase is in this hall? Do you deny that this hall is in a larger place, which is in its turn in another larger still? I can thus carry you on to infinite space. If you deny a single one of these propositions, you deny all, the first as well as the last; and if you admit the first, you are forced to admit the last.

It cannot be supposed that sensibility, which is not able to give us even the idea of body, alone elevates us to the idea of space. The intervention of a superior principle is, therefore, here necessary.

As we believe that every body is contained in a place, so we believe that every event happens in time. Can you conceive an event happening, except in some point of duration? This duration is extended and successively increased to your mind's eye, and you end by conceiving it unlimited like space. Deny duration, and you deny all the sciences that measure it, you destroy all the natural beliefs upon which human life reposes. It is hardly necessary to add that sensibility alone no more explains the notion of time than that of space, both of which are nevertheless inherent in the knowledge of the external world.

Empiricism is, therefore, convicted of being unable to dispense with universal and necessary principles, and of being unable to explain them.

Let us pause: either all our preceding works have terminated in nothing but chimeras, or they permit us to consider as a point definitely acquired for science, that there are in the human mind, for whomsoever interrogates it sincerely, principles really stamped with the character of universality and necessity.

After having established and defended the existence of universal and necessary principles, we might investigate and pursue this kind of principles in all the departments of human knowledge, and attempt an exact and rigorous classification; but illustrious examples have taught us to fear to compromise truths of the greatest price by mixing with them conjectures which, in giving brilliancy, perhaps, to the spirit of philosophy, diminish its authority in the eyes of the wise. We, also, following the example of Kant, attempted before you, last year,[21] a classification, even a reduction of universal and necessary principles, and of all the notions that are connected with them. This work has not lost for us its importance, but we will not reproduce it. In the interest of the great cause which we serve, and taking thought here only to establish upon solid foundations the doctrine which is adapted to the French genius in the nineteenth century, we will carefully shun every thing that might seem personal and hazardous; and, instead of examining, criticising,[22] and reconstituting the classification which the philosophy of Kœnigsberg has given of universal and necessary principles, we prefer, we find it much more useful, to enable you to penetrate deeper into the nature of these principles, by showing you what faculty of ours it is that discovers them to us, and to which they are related and correspond.

The peculiarity of these principles is, that each one of us in reflection recognizes that he possesses them, but that he is not their author. We conceive them and apply them, we do not constitute them. Let us interrogate our consciousness. Do we refer to ourselves, for example, the definitions of geometry, as we do certain movements of which we feel ourselves to be the cause? If it is I who make these definitions, they are therefore mine, I can unmake them, modify them, change them, even annihilate them. It is certain that I cannot do it. I am not, then, the author of them. It has also been demonstrated that the principles of which we have spoken cannot be derived from sensation, which is variable, limited, incapable of producing and authorizing any thing universal and necessary. I arrive, then, at the following consequence, also necessary:—truth is in me and not by me. As sensibility puts me in relation with the physical world, so another faculty puts me in communication with the truths that depend upon neither the world nor me, and that faculty is reason.

There are in men three general faculties which are always mingled together, and are rarely exercised except simultaneously, but which analysis divides in order to study them better, without misconceiving their reciprocal play, their intimate connection, their indivisible unity. The first of these faculties is activity, voluntary and free activity, in which human personality especially appears, and without which the other faculties would be as if they were not, since we should not exist for ourselves. Let us examine ourselves at the moment when a sensation is produced in us; we shall recognize that there is perception only so far as there is some degree of attention, and that perception ends at the moment when our activity ends. One does not recollect what he did in perfect sleep or in a swoon; because then he had lost voluntary activity, consequently consciousness; consequently, again, memory. Passion often, in depriving us of liberty, deprives us, at the same time, of the consciousness of our actions and of ourselves; then, to use a just and common expression, one knows not what he does. It is by liberty that man is truly man, that he possesses himself and governs himself; without it, he falls again under the yoke of nature; he is, without it, only a more admirable and more beautiful part of nature. But while I am endowed with activity and liberty, I am also passive in other respects; I am subject to the laws of the external world; I suffer and I enjoy without being myself the author of my joys and my sufferings; I feel rising within me needs, desires, passions, which I have not made, which by turns fill my life with happiness and misery. Finally, besides volition and sensibility, man has the faculty of knowing, has understanding, intelligence, reason, the name matters little, by means of which he is elevated to truths of different orders, and among others, to universal and necessary truths, which suppose in reason, attached to its exercise, principles entirely distinct from the impressions of the senses and the resolutions of the will.[23]

Voluntary activity, sensibility, reason, are all equally certain. Consciousness verifies the existence of necessary principles, which direct the reason quite as well as that of sensations and volitions. I call every thing real that falls under observation. I suffer; my suffering is real, inasmuch as I am conscious of it: it is the same with liberty: it is the same with reason and the principles that govern it. We can affirm, then, that the existence of universal and necessary principles rests upon the testimony of observation, and even of the most immediate and surest observation, that of consciousness.

But consciousness is only a witness,—it makes what is appear; it creates nothing. It is not because consciousness announces it to you, that you have produced such or such a movement, that you have experienced such or such an impression. Neither is it because consciousness says to us that reason is constrained to admit such or such a truth, that this truth exists; it is because it exists that it is impossible for reason not to admit it. The truths that reason attains by the aid of universal and necessary principles with which it is provided, are absolute truths; reason does not create them, it discovers them. Reason is not the judge of its own principles, and cannot account for them, for it only judges by them, and they are to it its own laws. Much less does consciousness make these principles, or the truths which they reveal to us; for consciousness has no other office, no other power than in some sort to serve as a mirror for reason. Absolute truths are, therefore, independent of experience and consciousness, and at the same time, they are attested by experience and consciousness. On the one hand, these truths declare themselves in experience; on the other, no experience explains them. Behold how experience and reason differ and agree, and how, by means of experience, we come to find something which surpasses it.

So the philosophy which we teach rests neither upon hypothetical principles, nor upon empirical principles. It is observation itself, but observation applied to the higher portion of our knowledge, which furnishes us with the principles that we seek, with a point of departure at once solid and elevated.[24]

This point of departure we have found, and we do not abandon it. We remain immovably attached to it. The study of universal and necessary principles, considered under their different aspects, and in the great problems which they solve, is almost the whole of philosophy; it fills it, measures it, divides it. If psychology is the regular study of the human mind and its laws, it is evident that that of universal and necessary principles which preside over the exercise of reason, is the especial domain of psychology, which in Germany is called rational psychology, and is very different from empirical psychology. Since logic is the examination of the value and the legitimacy of our different means of knowing, its most important employment must be to estimate the value and the legitimacy of the principles which are the foundations of our most important cognitions. In fine, the meditation of these same principles conducts us to theodicea, and opens to us the sanctuary of philosophy, if we would ascend to their true source, to that sovereign reason which is the first and last explanation of our own.

LECTURE II.

ORIGIN OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.

In human intelligence, as it is now developed, universal and necessary principles are offered to us under forms in some sort consecrated. The principle of causality, for example, is thus enounced to us:—Every thing that begins to appear necessarily has a cause. Other principles have this same axiomatic form. But have they always had it, and did they spring from the human mind with this logical and scholastic apparel, as Minerva sprang all armed from the head of Jupiter? With what characters did they show themselves at first, before taking those in which they are now clothed, and which can scarcely be their primitive characters? In a word, is it possible to find the origin of universal and necessary principles, and the route which they must have followed in order to arrive at what they are to-day? A new problem, the importance of which it is easy to feel; for, if it can be resolved, what light will be shed upon these principles! On the other hand, what difficulties must be encountered! How can we penetrate to the sources of human knowledge, which are concealed, like those of the Nile? Is it not to be feared that, in plunging into the obscure past, instead of truth, one may encounter an hypothesis; that, attaching himself, then, to this hypothesis, he may transport it from the past to the present, and that, being deceived in regard to the origin of principles, he may be led to misconceive their actual and certain characters, or, at least, to mutilate and enfeeble those which the adopted origin would not easily explain? This danger is so great, this rock is so celebrated in shipwrecks, that before braving it one should know how to take many precautions against the seductions of the spirit of the system. It is even conceived that great philosophers, who were timid in no place, have suppressed the perilous problem. In fact, by undertaking to grapple with this problem at first, Locke and Condillac went far astray,[25] and it must be said, corrupted all philosophy at its source. The empirical school, which lauds the experimental method so much, turns its back upon it, thus to speak, when, instead of commencing by the study of the actual characters of our cognitions, as they are attested to us by consciousness and reflection, it plunges, without light and without guidance, into the pursuit of their origin. Reid[26] and Kant[27] showed themselves much more observing by confining themselves within the limits of the present, through fear of losing themselves in the darkness of the past. Both freely treat of universal and necessary principles in the form which they now have, without asking what was their primitive form. We much prefer this wise circumspection to the adventurous spirit of the empirical school. Nevertheless, when a problem is given out, so long as it is not solved, it troubles and besets the human mind. Philosophy ought not to shun it then, but its duty is to approach it only with extreme prudence and a severe method.

We cannot recollect too well, for the sake of others and ourselves, that the primitive state of human cognitions is remote from us; we can scarcely bring it within the reach of our vision and submit it to observation; the actual state, on the contrary, is always at our disposal: it is sufficient for us to enter into ourselves, to fathom consciousness by reflection, and make it give up what it contains. Setting out from certain facts, we shall not be liable to wander subsequently into hypotheses, or if, in ascending to the primitive state, we fall into any error, we shall be able to perceive it and repair it by the aid of the truth which an impartial observation shall have given us; every origin which shall not legitimately end at the point where we are, is by that alone convicted of being false, and will deserve to be discarded.[28]

You know that a large portion of the last year was spent upon this question. We took, one by one, universal and necessary questions submitted to our examination, in order to determine the origin of each one of them, its primitive form, and the different forms which have successively clothed it; only after having operated thus upon a sufficiently large number of principles, did we come slowly to a general conclusion, and that conclusion we believe ourselves entitled to express here briefly as the solid result of a most circumspect analysis, and, at least, a most methodical labor. We must either renew before you this labor, this analysis, and thereby run the risk of not being able to complete the long course that we have marked out for ourselves, or we must limit ourselves to reminding you of the essential traits of the theory at which we arrived.

This theory, moreover, is in itself so simple, that, without the dress of regular demonstrations upon which it is founded, its own evidence will sufficiently establish it. It wholly rests upon the distinction between the different forms under which truth is presented to us. It is, in its somewhat arid generality, as follows:

1st. One can perceive truth in two different ways. Sometimes one perceives it in such or such a particular circumstance. For example, in presence of two apples or two stones, and of two other similar objects placed by the side of the first, I perceive this truth with absolute certainty, viz., that these two stones and these two other stones make four stones,—which is in some sort a concrete apperception of the truth, because the truth is given to us in regard to real and determinate objects. Sometimes I also affirm in a general manner that two and two equal four, abstracting every determinate object,—which is the abstract conception of truth.

Now, of these two ways of knowing truth, which precedes in the chronological order of human knowledge? Is it not certain, may it not be avowed by every one, that the particular precedes the general, that the concrete precedes the abstract, that we begin by perceiving such or such a determinate truth, in such or such a case, at such or such a moment, in such or such a place, before conceiving a general truth, independently of every application and different circumstances of place and time?

2d. We can perceive the same truth without asking ourselves this question: Have we the ability not to admit this truth? We perceive it, then, by virtue alone of the intelligence which has been given us, and which enters spontaneously into exercise; or rather, we try to doubt the truth which we perceive, we attempt to deny it; we are not able to do it, and then it is presented to reflection as superior to all possible negation; it appears to us no longer only as a truth, but as a necessary truth.

Is it not also evident, that we do not begin by reflection, that reflection supposes an anterior operation, and that this operation, in order not to be one of reflection, and not to suppose another before it, must be entirely spontaneous; that thus the spontaneous and instinctive intuition of truth precedes its reflection and necessary conception?

Reflection is a progress more or less tardy in the individual and in the race. It is, par excellence, the philosophic faculty; it sometimes engenders doubt and skepticism, sometimes convictions that, for being rational, are only the more profound. It constructs systems, it creates artificial logic, and all those formulas which we now use by the force of habit as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous intuition is the true logic of nature. It presides over the acquisition of nearly all our cognitions. Children, the people, three-fourths of the human race never pass beyond it, and rest there with boundless security.

The question of the origin of human cognitions is thus resolved for us in the simplest manner: it is enough for us to determine that operation of the mind which precedes all others, without which no other would take place, and which is the first exercise, and the first form of our faculty of knowing.[29]

Since every thing that bears the character of reflection cannot be primitive, and supposes an anterior state, it follows, that the principles which are the subject of our study could not have possessed at first the reflective and abstract character with which they are now marked, that they must have shown themselves at their origin in some particular circumstance, under a concrete and determinate form, and that in time they were disengaged from this form, in order to be invested with their actual, abstract, and universal form. These are the two ends of the chain; it remains for us to seek how the human mind has been from one to the other, from the primitive state to the actual state, from the concrete state to the abstract state.

How can we go from the concrete to the abstract? Evidently by that well-known operation which is called abstraction. Thus far, nothing is more simple. But it is necessary to discriminate between two sorts of abstractions.

In presence of several particular objects, you omit the characters which distinguish them, and separately consider a character which is common to them all—you abstract this character. Examine the nature and conditions of this abstraction; it proceeds by means of comparison, and it is founded on a certain number of particular and different cases. Take an example: examine how we form the abstract and general idea of color. Place before my eyes for the first time a white object. Can I here at the first step immediately arrive at a general idea of color? Can I at first place on one side the whiteness, and on the other side the color? Analyze what passes within you. You experience a sensation of whiteness. Omit the individuality of this sensation, and you wholly destroy it; you cannot neglect the whiteness, and preserve or abstract the color; for, a single color being given, which is a white color, if you take away that, there remains to you absolutely nothing in regard to color. Let a blue object succeed this white object, then a red object, etc.; having sensations differing from each other, you can neglect their differences, and only consider what they have in common, that they are sensations of sight, that is to say, colors, and you thus obtain the abstract and general idea of color. Take another example: if you had never smelled but a single flower, the violet, for instance, would you have had the idea of odor in general? No. The odor of the violet would be for you the only odor, beyond which you would not seek, you could not even imagine another. But if to the odor of the violet is added that of the rose, and other different odors, in a greater or less number, provided there be several, and a comparison be possible, and consequently, knowledge of their differences and their resemblances, then you will be able to form the general idea of odor. What is there in common between the odor of one flower and that of another flower, except that they have been smelled by aid of the same organ, and by the same person? What here renders generalization possible, is the unity of the sentient subject which remembers having been modified, while remaining the same, by different sensations; now, this subject can feel itself identical under different modifications, and it can conceive in the qualities of the object felt some resemblance and some dissimilarity, only on the condition of a certain number of sensations experienced, of odors smelled. In that case, but in that case alone, there can be comparison, abstraction, and generalization, because there are different and similar elements.

In order to arrive at the abstract form of universal and necessary principles, we have no need of all this labor. Let us take again, for example, the principle of cause. If you suppose six particular cases from which you have abstracted this principle, it will contain neither more nor less ideas than if you had deduced it from a single one. To be able to say that the event which I see must have a cause, it is not indispensable to have seen several events succeed each other. The principle which compels me to pronounce this judgment, is already complete in the first as in the last event; it can change in respect to its object, it cannot change in itself; it neither increases nor decreases with the greater or less number of its applications. The only difference that it is subject to in regard to us, is, that we apply it whether we remark it or not, whether we disengage it or not from its particular application. The question is not to eliminate the particularity of the phenomenon, wherein it appears to us, whether it be the fall of a leaf or the murder of a man, in order immediately to conceive, in a general and abstract manner, the necessity of a cause for every thing that begins to exist. Here, it is not because I have been the same, or have been affected in the same manner in several different cases, that I have come to this general and abstract conception. A leaf falls: at the same instant I think, I believe, I declare that this falling of the leaf must have a cause. A man has been killed: at the same instant I believe, I proclaim that this death must have a cause. Each one of these facts contains particular and variable circumstances, and something universal and necessary, to wit, both of them cannot but have a cause. Now, I am perfectly able to disengage the universal from the particular, in regard to the first fact as well as in regard to the second fact, for the universal is in the first quite as well as in the second. In fact, if the principle of causality is not universal in the first fact, neither will it be in the second, nor in the third, nor in a thousandth; for a thousand are not nearer than one to the infinite, to absolute universality. It is the same, and still more evidently, with necessity. Pay particular attention to this point: if necessity is not in the first fact, it cannot be in any; for necessity cannot be formed little by little, and by successive increment. If, at the first murder that I see, I do not exclaim that this murder necessarily has a cause, at the thousandth murder, although it shall have been proved that all the others have had causes, I shall have the right to think that this new murder has, very probably, also its cause; but I shall never have the right to declare that it necessarily has a cause. But when necessity and universality are already in a single case, that case alone is sufficient to entitle us to deduce them from it.[30]

We have established the existence of universal and necessary principles: we have marked their origin; we have shown that they appear to us at first from a particular fact, and we have shown by what process, by what sort of abstraction the mind disengages them from the determinate and concrete form which envelops them, but does not constitute them. Our task, then, seems accomplished. But it is not,—we must defend the solution which we have just presented to you of the problem of the origin of principles against the theory of an eminent metaphysician, whose just authority might seduce you. M. Maine de Biran[31] is, like us, the declared adversary of the philosophy of sensation,—he admits universal and necessary principles; but the origin which he assigns to them, puts them, according to us, in peril, and would lead back by a detour to the empirical school.

Universal and necessary principles, if expressed in propositions, embrace several terms. For example, in the principle that every phenomenon supposes a cause; and in this, that every quality supposes a substance, by the side of the ideas of quality and phenomenon are met the ideas of cause and substance, which seem the foundation of these two principles. M. de Biran pretends that the two ideas are anterior to the two principles which contain them, and that we at first find these ideas in ourselves in the consciousness that we are cause and substance, and that, these ideas once being thus acquired, induction transports them out of ourselves, makes us conceive causes and substances wherever there are phenomena and qualities, and that the principles of cause and substance are thus explained. I beg pardon of my illustrious friend; but it is impossible to admit in the least degree this explanation.

The possession of the origin of the idea of cause is by no means sufficient for the possession of the origin of the principle of causality; for the idea and the principle are things essentially different. You have established, I would say to M. de Biran, that the idea of cause is found in that of productive volition:—you will to produce certain effects, and you produce them; hence the idea of a cause, of a particular cause, which is yourself; but between this fact and the axiom that all phenomena which appear necessarily have a cause, there is a gulf.

You believe that you can bridge it over by induction. The idea of cause once found in ourselves, induction applies it, you say, wherever a new phenomenon appears. But let us not be deceived by words, and let us account for this extraordinary induction. The following dilemma I submit with confidence to the loyal dialectics of M. de Biran:

Is the induction of which you speak universal and necessary? Then it is a different name for the same thing. An induction which forces us universally and necessarily to associate the idea of cause with that of every phenomenon that begins to appear is precisely what is called the principle of causality. On the contrary, is this induction neither universal nor necessary? It cannot supply the place of the principle of cause, and the explanation destroys the thing to be explained.

It follows from this that the only true result of these various psychological investigations is, that the idea of personal and free cause precedes all exercise of the principle of causality, but without explaining it.

The theory which we combat is much more powerless in regard to other principles which, far from being exercised before the ideas from which it is pretended to deduce them, precede them, and even give birth to them. How have we acquired the idea of time and that of space, except by aid of the principle that the bodies and events, which we see are in time and in space? We have seen[32] that, without this principle, and confined to the data of the senses and consciousness, neither time nor space would exist for us. Whence have we deduced the idea of the infinite, except from the principle that the finite supposes the infinite, that all finite and defective things, which we perceive by our senses and feel within us, are not sufficient for themselves, and suppose something infinite and perfect? Omit the principle, and the idea of the infinite is destroyed. Evidently this idea is derived from the application of the principle, and it is not the principle which is derived from the idea.

Let us dwell a little longer on the principle of substances. The question is to know whether the idea of subject, of substance, precedes or follows the exercise of the principle. Upon what ground could the idea of substance be anterior to the principle that every quality supposes a substance? Upon the ground alone that substance be the object of self-observation, as cause is said to be. When I produce a certain effect, I may perceive myself in action and as cause; in that case, there would be no need of the intervention of any principle; but it is not, it cannot be, the same, when the question is concerning the substance which is the basis of the phenomena of consciousness, of our qualities, our acts, our faculties even; for this substance is not directly observable; it does not perceive itself, it conceives itself. Consciousness perceives sensation, volition, thought, it does not perceive their subject. Who has ever perceived the soul? Has it not been necessary, in order to attain this invisible essence, to set out from a principle which has the power to bind the visible to the invisible, phenomenon to being, to wit, the principle of substances?[33] The idea of substance is necessarily posterior to the application of the principle, and, consequently, it cannot explain its formation.

Let us be well understood. We do not mean to say that we have in the mind the principle of substances before perceiving a phenomenon, quite ready to apply the principle to the phenomenon, when it shall present itself; we only say that it is impossible for us to perceive a phenomenon without conceiving at the same instant a substance, that is to say, to the power of perceiving a phenomenon, either by the senses or by consciousness, is joined that of conceiving the substance in which it inheres. The facts thus take place:—the perception of phenomena and the conception of the substance which is their basis are not successive, they are simultaneous. Before this impartial analysis fall at once two equal and opposite errors—one, that experience, exterior or interior, can beget principles; the other, that principles precede experience.[34]

To sum up, the pretension of explaining principles by the ideas which they contain, is a chimerical one. In supposing that all the ideas which enter into principles are anterior to them, it is necessary to show how principles are deduced from these ideas,—which is the first and radical difficulty. Moreover, it is not true that in all cases ideas precede principles, for often principles precede ideas,—a second difficulty equally insurmountable. But whether ideas are anterior or posterior to principles, principles are always independent of them; they surpass them by all the superiority of universal and necessary principles over simple ideas.[35]

We should, perhaps, beg your pardon for the austerity of this lecture. But philosophical questions must be treated philosophically: it does not belong to us to change their character. On other subjects, another language. Psychology has its own language, the entire merit of which is a severe precision, as the highest law of psychology itself is the shunning of every hypothesis, and an inviolable respect for facts. This law we have religiously followed. While investigating the origin of universal and necessary principles, we have especially endeavored not to destroy the thing to be explained by a systematic explanation. Universal and necessary principles have come forth in their integrity from our analysis. We have given the history of the different forms which they successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality and their necessity are manifest. Their certainty is the same under all their forms, in all their applications; it has neither generation nor origin; it is not born such or such a day, and it does not increase with time, for it knows no degrees. We have not commenced by believing a little in the principle of causality, of substances, of time, of space, of the infinite, etc., then believing a little more, then believing wholly. These principles have been, from the beginning, what they will be in the end, all-powerful, necessary, irresistible. The conviction which they give is always absolute, only it is not always accompanied by a clear consciousness. Leibnitz himself has no more confidence in the principle of causality, and even in his favorite principle of sufficient reason, than the most ignorant of men; but the latter applies these principles without reflecting on their power, by which he is unconsciously governed, whilst Leibnitz is astonished at their power, studies it, and for all explanation, refers it to the human mind, and to the nature of things, that is to say, he elevates, to borrow the fine expression of M. Royer-Collard,[36] the ignorance of the mass of men to its highest source. Such is, thank heaven, the only difference that separates the peasant from the philosopher, in regard to those great principles of every kind which, in one way or another, discover to men the same truths indispensable to their physical, intellectual, and moral existence, and, in their ephemeral life, on the circumscribed point of space and time where fortune has thrown them, reveal to them something of the universal, the necessary, and the infinite.

LECTURE III.

ON THE VALUE OF UNIVERSAL AND NECESSARY PRINCIPLES.