Ernest Renan

“ History proves this truth, that there is a transcendent instinct in human nature, which urges it to a nobler goal. The development of mankind is not to be explained by the hypothesis that man is only a finite being; virtue but a refinement of egoism; religion but a cheat. Our toil is not in vain, gentlemen. Whatever the author of The Book of Ecclesiastes may have said, in a moment of depression, science is not the worst pursuit which God has given to the sons of men. It is the best. If all is vanity, he who devotes his life to Truth will not be more deceived than others. ”

“ Europe will subdue the world, and will spread over it its religion, which is individual right, liberty, respect,—that belief which breathes a something divine into the heart of man. In the course of events, the progress of Indo-European nations will consist in separating itself more and more from the Shemitic mind. Our religion will retain less and less of Judaism; more and more will it resist all political organization in matters concerning the soul. It will become the religion of the heart,—the inmost poetry of each human being. ”

“ It is the privilege and the danger of Shemitic studies to touch on the most important problems in the history of the human race. Freedom of thought knows no limit; but it necessitates that mankind should have reached that degree of calm contemplation, where it is not required to recognise God in each particular order of facts, simply because He is seen in all things. Liberty, gentlemen, when thoroughly understood, allows these opposing claims to exist side by side. ”

“ We do not owe to the Shemitic race our political existence, our Art, our Poetry, our Philosophy, nor our Science. For what, then, are we indebted to it? We owe to them Religion. The whole world, with the exception of India, China, Japan, and nations yet altogether savage, has adopted Shemitic religions. The civilized world numbers only Jews, Christians, and Mussulmans. The Indo-European race, in particular, except the Brahmanic family and the feeble remnants of the Parsees, has passed entirely over to Shemitic creeds. ”

“ The moral education of mankind is not the exclusive merit of any race. The reason of this is perfectly simple. Morality does not teach more than Poetry; beautiful aphorisms do not make an honest man. Everyone finds good in the loftiness of his nature, and in the immediate revelation of his own heart.
As regards industry, invention, material civilization, we owe, beyond contradiction, much to the Shemitic nations. Our race, gentlemen, did not begin with a taste for comfort and for business. ”

“ The progress of science is compromised, if we do not profit by deep thought and reflection; if any one thinks he fulfils the duties of life in holding blindly the opinions of any party on all things; if fickleness, exclusive opinions, abrupt and peremptory forms, suppress problems, instead of solving them. Oh, that the fathers of modern intellect comprehended better the holiness of thought! Noble and venerable shades of Reuchlin, of Henry Stephens, of Casaubon, of Descartes, rise up and teach us what price you put upon truth ”

“ On the other hand the Shemitic character is generally hard, narrow, egotistical. In this race we find strong passions, perfect devotion, and incomparable qualities. It rarely possesses that delicacy of moral feeling which seems to be the peculiar inheritance of the Germanic and Celtic races. The tender, deep, melancholy emotions, those dreams of the infinite in which all the powers of the soul are mingled, that great consciousness of duty, which alone gives a solid basis to our faith and our hopes, are the work of our race and our climate. ”

“ In morality we shall attain to a delicate nicety unknown to the beings of the Old Alliance; we shall become more and more Christians. In politics we shall reconcile two things always ignored by Shemitic nations,—liberty, and a strong political organization. In poetry, we shall require an expression of that instinct of infinity which is at once our delight and our dread: in either case, our true nobility. In philosophy, instead of scholastic dogmatism, we shall open up vistas of the general system of the world. ”

“ Turn to solid studies; believe that true science is, above all, the result of cultivation of the mind, nobility of heart, independence of judgment. Prepare for our country generations ripe in all things which constitute the glory and ornament of life. Guard against unreflecting impulses, and remember that liberty can only be achieved by seriousness, respect for yourselves and for others, devotion to the public weal, and to that special work which each of us is sent into the world to commence or to continue. ”

“ European genius has been developing itself with incomparable grandeur; Islamism, on the contrary, has been as slowly crumbling away; in our times it is falling with a crash. In the present day, the one essential condition for the expansion of European civilization is the destruction of the principle of Shemitic action (chose) —the destruction of the theocratic power of Islamism, and consequently the destruction of Islamism itself; for Islamism can only exist as an official religion: reduce it to the position of a religion, free and individual, and it will perish. ”

“ Having attained a higher degree of religious eminence than man had ever reached before, having come to look upon God in the relation of a son to a father, devoted to his work, with an oblivion of all beside, and an abnegation never before so loftily carried out, the victim at last of his idea, and deified by his death, Jesus founded the eternal religion of mankind,—the religion of the soul set free from all priesthood, all worship, all observances ”

“ The Mussulman (the Shemitic mind is everywhere represented in our times by Islamism) and the European, in the presence of one another, are like beings of a different species, having no one habit of thought and feeling in common. But the progress of mankind is accomplished by the contest of contrary tendencies; by a sort of polarisation, in consequence of which each idea has its exclusive representatives in this world. It is as a whole, then, that these contradictions harmonise, and that profound peace results from the shock of apparently inimical elements. ”

“ Only those who believe they have a monopoly of truth. But such persons must renounce now their claims to the mastery of the world. The Galileo of our day will not retract what he knows to be the truth, on bended knee.
You will permit me, in the performance of my task, to descend to the smallest details, and to be habitually technical; and Science, gentlemen, only attains its sacred object, the discovery of truth, on condition of being special and rigorous. Everyone is not intended to be a chemist, physician, philologist ”

“ The Indo-European and the Shemitic nations are in our day still perfectly distinct. I say nothing of the Jews, whose singular and wonderful historical destiny, has given them an exceptional position among mankind, and who, except in France, which has set the world an example in upholding the principle of a purely ideal civilization, disregarding all difference of races, form everywhere a distinct and separate society. ”

“ In Science and Philosophy we are exclusively Greek. The search into causes, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, is a thing of which there is no trace previous to Greece; a process we have learnt from her alone. Babylon had Science, but not the real element of science, an absolute fixidity of the laws of Nature. Egypt had knowledge of geometry, but she did not produce the Elements of Euclid. As to the old Shemitic mind, it was in its nature anti-philosophical and anti-scientific. In Job, the search into causes is almost represented as impiety. In Ecclesiastes, science is declared a vanity. ”

“ Islamism is not a merely State religion, like Catholicism was in France under Louis XIV, and still is in Spain; it is a religion which excludes the State, an organization of which the Papal States offer the only type in Europe. War unceasing is there,—war which will only cease when the last son of Ismael shall have died with misery, or been driven by terror to the depths of the desert. ”

“ Islamism is the perfect negative of Europe; Islamism is fanaticism, such as Spain in the time of Philip II., and Italy in the time of Pius V., scarcely knew. Islamism is contempt of science, suppression of civil society; it is the frightful weakness of the Shemitic spirit, narrowing the mind of man ”

“ We should search in vain for an epic or a tragedy among the Shemitic nations; as vainly should we search among the Indo-European nations for anything analogous to the Kasida of the Arabs, and that species of eloquence which distinguishes the Jewish prophets and the Koran. ”

“ By the side of comparative philology in Germany there has of late years arisen the science of comparative mythology, which has shown that all the Indo-European nations had, in their beginning, with the same language also the same religion, of which each carried away scattered fragments on leaving their common cradle; this religion, the worship of the powers and phenomena of Nature leading by philosophical development to a sort of Pantheism. ”

“ But we never find amongst them those great single despotisms, destroying all individuality, and reducing man to a sort of abstract state and nameless function, as we see him in Egypt, Babylonia, China, and in Mussulman and Tartar despotisms. Take, one after another, the little municipal republics of Greece and Italy, the Germanic feudality, the grand centralized organizations of which Rome gave the first model, and of which the French Revolution reproduced the ideal, and you will always find a vigorous moral element, a strong sense of the public weal, and sacrifice to one general end. ”

“ The Psalms have become, in some respects, one of our sources of poetry. Hebrew poetry has taken its place among us, by the side of Greek poetry, not as furnishing any positive school, but as constituting a poetical ideality, a sort of Olympus, where, by dint of an accepted prestige, everything is tinted by a lambent glory. Milton, Lamartine, Lamennais, would not have existed at all, or certainly not as they are, without the Psalms. Here, again, all the shadows that are delicate, all that are profound, are our own work. The subject which is essentially poetic is the destiny of man ”

“ The East, especially the Shemitic East, has never known any medium between the complete anarchy of the wandering Arabs and sanguinary and unmitigated despotism. The idea of public weal, of public good, is completely wanting among these nations. True and complete liberty, such as the Anglo-Saxon race has realized, and grand State organizations, such as the Roman Empire and France have engendered, have been equally unknown to them. The ancient Hebrews and the Arabs have been, and are at short intervals, the most free of men ”

“ The most important results to which historical and philological science has arrived during the last half century, have been to shew, in the general development of our races, two elements of such a nature which, mixing in unequal proportions, have made the woof of the tissue of history. ”

“ Arabia especially, towards the seventh century, could not make up its mind to become Christian. Wavering between Judaism and Christianity, between native superstition and memories of the old patriarchal worship, disgusted by the mythological elements which the Indo-European race had introduced into the heart of Christianity, she would return to the religion of Abraham. She founded Islamism. Islamism rose up in its turn with an immense superiority in the midst of the debased religions of Asia. ”

“ Aristotle, nearly his contemporary, and who had more right to say that he had exhausted the universe, never speaks of weariness. The wisdom of Shemitic nations never rises above parables and proverbs. Arabian science and Arabian philosophy are often alluded to, and, in fact, during one or two centuries in the middle ages, the Arabs were our teachers; but it was only until we were acquainted with the Greek originals. This Arabian science and philosophy was only a puerile rendering of Greek science and philosophy. ”

“ To interrupt an intellectual exercise at which one is not compelled to be present, appears to me, at all times, to be an illiberal action; it is to oppose oneself with violence to the opinion of another ”

“ What of high cultivation of the intellect, if mere general expositions, well enough, perhaps, when delivered in the presence of a numerous audience, are to stifle instruction in a more severe form in an institution which, above all others, is destined to endure as the School of deep scientific research? ”

“ In short, we must study every delicacy of shade, require subtilty instead of dogmatism, the relative instead of the absolute. This is, in my opinion, our future, if the future mean progress. Shall we attain to a more certain knowledge of the destiny of Man and his connection with the Infinite? ”