Paul Janet

“ The greatest of injustices, since it comprises all, is slavery. Slavery is the subjugation of all the faculties of a man for the benefit of another. Moral personality should be respected in you as well as in me, and for the same reason. In regard to myself it has imposed a duty on me; in you it becomes the foundation of a right, and imposes thereby, relatively to you, a new duty on me. I owe you the truth as I owe it to myself, and it is my strict duty to respect the development of your intelligence and not arrest its progress towards the truth. I must also respect your liberty ”

“ Repentance is a sadness of the soul; remorse is a torture and an anguish. Repentance is almost a virtue; remorse is a punishment; but the one leads to the other, and he who feels no remorse can feel no repentance.
Moral satisfaction, on the contrary, is a peace, a joy, a keen and delicious emotion born from the feeling of having accomplished one’s duty. It is the only remuneration that never fails us.
Among the sentiments called forth by our own actions, there are two which are the natural auxiliaries of the moral sentiment: they are the sentiment of honor and the sentiment of shame. ”

“ Give me a society of men who, while on earth, would look upon each other as members of one and the same family, whose Father is in heaven; give me men whose life was sunk in this love for their heavenly Father, men who loved their fellow-men and themselves only through love for Him; who were but one heart, one soul: will not in so godly a society the mouth always speak from the abundance of the heart? ”

“ It is this kind of courage which at every moment of life is most in requisition, and which is the rarest; for there will be found plenty of men capable of braving death when the occasion presents itself; but to bear with resignation the inevitable and constantly renewed ills of human life, is a virtue all the more rare as one is scarcely ever ashamed of its opposite vice. One would blush to fear peril, one does not blush for rebelling against destiny; one is willing to die if necessary, but not to be thwarted. ”

“ If a future life is a necessary consequence of the divine justice and bounty, we need not doubt its existence; if not, we have nothing to ask; it does not concern us. What especially concerns us is to know what we ought to do here below, and to have the strength to do it with. “Life is a meditation, not of death, but of life,” said Spinoza. But in order to live, and live well, one must believe in life, must believe in its healthy and holy significance, believe that it is not mere play, a mere mystification, but that it was given us by the principle of good for the success of good. ”

“ Duties towards the life of men.—We have seen above that self-preservation is the duty of every one, and that one should not attempt one’s own life, nor mutilate one’s self, nor injure one’s health. Now, all these obligations which we have towards ourselves, we have equally towards others; for that which each owes to himself, he owes it to his quality, as man, to his quality as a free and reasonable being, a moral person. It is, as Kant says, humanity itself that each one must respect in his own person; and it is also humanity which each must respect in others. ”

“ On whom is it incumbent to do away with such inequalities? On us all. Each of us, in his own individual sphere of life, must break down the barrier that separates him from the one above him; he must rise up to him, not so much through morality, for morality is the same below as above, but through his manners, his habits, his dignity, sobriety, politeness, he must win his esteem.
This is accomplished rather through education than instruction, for it is education that makes men good-natured, so that it will be through education that the last inequality between men will be effaced. ”

“ But is it the same with suicides instigated by a feeling of honor, either to avoid an outrage one is threatened with, or to escape the shame of an outrage one has suffered?
We should certainly not blame too severely acts that have their source in purity and greatness of soul, and in such matters it is yet better to forgive the excess, than accustom one’s mind, by too cold reasoning, to look upon dishonor with patience or complacency. After all, the love of life speaks enough for itself without its being necessary to give it too much encouragement. ”

“ But who does not know that to make a good use of a fortune is more profitable to society than dissipation? However that may be, nothing is more unworthy of youth than this nameless idleness, where all the strength of the body and soul, the energy of character, the life of the intelligence, all the gifts of nature are squandered. ”

“ It is the liberty of conscience in its essence, its first act, its indispensable basis. It is the liberty to believe, or faith. Free in the innermost of my thought, shall I be confined to a silent worship? Shall I not be allowed to express what I think? Faith is communicative, and will make itself felt by others. I cannot control its expressing itself without doing it violence, without offending God, without rendering myself guilty of ingratitude. I cannot, moreover, worship a God that is not my God. ”

“ Obedience to the laws.—The first of the civil duties, is obedience to the laws. The reason is evident. The State rests on the law. It is the law which substitutes, for the will of individuals, always more or less carried away by passion or governed by self-interest, a general, impartial, and disinterested rule. The law is the guaranty of all: it opposes itself to force, or rather puts force in the service of justice, instead of making of justice the slave of force. Pascal says: “Not being able to make that which is just, strong, men have wished that what is strong should be just.” ”

“ The relations between the sexes outside of marriage can only be adultery, seduction, or licentiousness. In the first case, the woman is induced to violate her duties, her vows, to give up all that alone can guarantee her dignity. In the second, the honor and dignity of a whole life is sacrificed to passion; in the third, you make yourself an accomplice to a public and deliberate shame—a shame which would not exist except for just such accomplices. At any rate, the dignity of the woman—that is to say, of the weaker sex—is sacrificed to the passion of the stronger. ”

“ Among the violations the liberty of work may suffer, we must not forget the threats and violences exercised by the workers themselves and inflicted upon each other. It is not rare, in fact, in times of strikes, to see the workmen who do not work try to impose, by main force, their will on those that are at work. Such violences, which have their source in false ideas of brotherhood (a mistaken esprit de corps) , and in a false sense of honor, constitute, nevertheless, even when free from the coarse enmity of laziness and vice, waging war with work and honesty—a grave violation of liberty ”

“ A sea-captain, who has endangered his ship, and who, instead of saving it, leaves his post; a general who, when the moment calls for it, refuses to die at the head of his army, lack courage; the chief of a State who, in times of revolt, or when the country is in peril, fears death; the president of a convention who takes to flight before a rebellion; the physician who runs away before an epidemic; the magistrate who is afraid to be just; all these are truly culpable. Every condition of life has its peculiar heroism, which at certain moments becomes a duty. ”

“ For when does rest, leisure, recreation give us most pleasure? Everybody knows, it is when we have worked. Recall to mind any unusually heavy work, any hurried and necessary task, or even our daily or weekly duty scrupulously fulfilled: what joy is it not when the task is done to give ourselves a holiday!
Idleness brings with it satiety, weariness, disgust, disorder, [Pg 258] the ruin of the family, the destruction of health, and other evils still more baleful. Work, on the contrary, makes repose enjoyable. Without the fatigue of the day’s work, no pleasure in sleep, and even no sleep at all. ”

“ In morals, as in legislation, no one is supposed to be ignorant of the law. There is, then, in every man a certain knowledge of the law, that is to say, a natural discernment of the right and the wrong. This discernment is what is called conscience, or sometimes the moral sense.
Conscience is an act of the mind, a judgment. But it is not only the mind that is made aware of the right and the wrong: it is the heart. Good and evil, done either by others or by ourselves, awaken in us emotions, affections of diverse nature. ”

“ There is another virtue to be distinguished from modesty, namely, humility. Humility should not be an abasement; for it is never a virtue in man to lower himself. But, even as dignity and true pride are virtues which spring from a proper sense of human greatness, so humility is a virtue which springs from a proper sense of human weakness. Remember that thou art a man and do not degrade thyself: this is self-respect. Remember that thou art but a man and do not allow thyself to indulge in vain pride; this is humility. Modesty relates to the individual; humility to human nature in general. ”

“ Laziness brings with it misery; misery beggary, and beggary is not always satisfied with asking merely—it steals.
Work is not only a pleasure or a necessity, it is also a duty; though painful and joyless, work is, nevertheless, an obligation for man; it were still an obligation for him if he could live without it. Work does not only insure security: it secures dignity. Man was created to exercise the faculties of his mind and body. ”

“ We should not do to others what we do not wish that they should do to us, or what we should not wish to do to ourselves. Now, no one wishes others to attempt his life; no one should wish to attempt it himself. For the same reason he should not wish to attempt the life of others.
These are such self-evident considerations that it is useless to insist on them. Let us add that this duty rests, besides, on one of the most powerful instincts of humanity, the instinct of sympathy for other men, the horror of their sufferings, the horror of spilt blood. ”

“ Slavery cannot arise from a contract between the master and the slave; for to consent to slavery is to renounce one’s manhood, of which no one can dispose at his will.
To renounce one’s liberty is to renounce one’s manhood, and the rights of humanity, even one’s duties. ”

“ To practice properly, in one’s relations with men, the divine science of charity, one must have learned it at home. What ineffable sweetness is there in the thought: ‘We are the children of the same mother!...’ If you wish to be a good brother, beware of selfishness. Let each of your brothers, each of your sisters, see that their interests are as dear to you as your own. ”

“ Before being a duty, self-preservation is for man an instinct, and even so energetic and so universal an instinct that there would seem to be very little need to transform it into duty: so much so is it an instinct that man has rather to combat in himself the cowardly tendency which attaches him to life, than that which induces him to seek death. Yet does it happen, and unfortunately too often, that men, crazed by despair, come to believe that they have a right to free themselves of life: this is what is called suicide. ”

“ This virtue, by which the soul commands its passions and does not allow itself to be subjugated by any of them, may be called courage or strength of soul. Courage thus understood is not only a virtue; it is virtue itself. [121] In fact, what is temperance, if it is not a certain kind of courage before the pleasures of the senses? what economy, if not courage before the temptations of fortune? what veracity, if not the courage to tell the truth under all circumstances? what justice and benevolence, if not the courage to sacrifice self-interest to the interest of others? ”

“ Let the ill-favored one accuse nature or Providence, and there will be some reason in it, though it is a bad feeling; for it is a want of resignation to a wisdom the motives of which we cannot always divine; but to accuse the favored of fortune, is a shocking baseness of the heart. It is the hateful feature of a celebrated sect of these present days; they desire not the happiness of all, but the misfortune of all. Unable to procure the same advantages to all men, their ideal is general destruction. Their utopia is just the reverse of all other utopias. ”