Victor Cousin

“ Let us, then, interrogate the latter and the former; let us especially interrogate our own consciousness; let us clearly recognize what the human race thinks; we shall then see what should be the office of philosophy.
Is there a human language known to us that has not different expressions for good and evil, for just and unjust? Is there any language, in which, by the side of the words pleasure, interest, utility, happiness, are not also found the words sacrifice, disinterestedness, devotedness, virtue? Do not all languages, as well as all nations, speak of liberty, duty, and right? ”

“ Truth enlightens the mind; sentiment warms the soul and leads to action. It is not cold reason that determines a Codrus to devote himself for his countrymen, a d'Assas to utter, beneath the steel of the enemy, the generous cry that brings him death and saves the army. Let us guard ourselves, then, from weakening the authority of sentiment; let us honor and sustain enthusiasm; it is the source whence spring great and heroic actions.
And shall interest be entirely banished from our system? No; we recognize in the human soul a desire for happiness which is the work of God himself. ”

“ Finally, if we consider the moral world and its laws, the idea of liberty, virtue, and devotedness, here the austere justice of an Aristides, there the heroism of a Leonidas, the prodigies of charity or patriotism, we shall certainly find a third order of beauty that still surpasses the other two, to wit, moral beauty.
Neither let us forget to apply to all these beauties the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. There are, then, the beautiful and the sublime at once in nature, in ideas, in sentiments, in actions. What an almost infinite variety in beauty! ”

“ It is, therefore, likely that there is something after death, since at death nothing in us is terminated. Look at the flower that to-morrow will not be. To-day, at least, it is entirely developed: we can conceive nothing more beautiful of its kind; it has attained its perfection. My perfection, my moral perfection, that of which I have the clearest idea and the most invincible need, for which I feel that I am born,—in vain I call for it, in vain I labor for it; it escapes me, and leaves me only hope. Shall this hope be deceived? All beings attain their end; should man alone not attain his? ”

“ For justice, the formula is clear,—to respect the rights of another. But charity knows neither rule nor limit. It transcends all obligation. Its beauty is precisely in its liberty.
But it must be acknowledged that charity also has its dangers. It tends to substitute its own action for the action of him whom it wishes to help; it somewhat effaces his personality, and makes itself in some sort his providence,—a formidable part for a mortal! In order to be useful to others, one imposes himself on them, and runs the risk of violating their natural rights. Love, in giving itself, enslaves. ”

“ Lower down, humanity reappears somewhat; and that is very necessary, in order to interest humanity in the works of art. In that satisfied look, in the distension of the nostrils, in the elevation of the under lip, are at once felt anger mingled with disdain, pride of victory, and the little fatigue which it has cost. Weigh well each word of Winkelmann: you will find there a moral impression. The tone of the learned antiquary is elevated, little by little, to enthusiasm, and his analysis becomes a hymn to spiritual beauty.
Instead of a statue, observe a real and living man. ”

“ Mysticism goes farther: it attacks liberty itself; it orders liberty to renounce itself, in order to identify itself by love with him from whom the infinite separates us. The ideal of virtue is no longer the courageous perseverance of the good man, who, in struggling against temptation and suffering, makes life holy; it is no longer the free and enlightened devotion of a loving soul; it is the entire and blind abandonment of ourselves, of our will, of our being, in a barren contemplation of thought, in a prayer without utterance, and almost without consciousness. ”

“ I respect humanity alone, and by that I mean all free natures, for every thing that is not free in man is foreign to him. Man is therefore the equal of man precisely in every thing that makes him man, and the reign of true equality exacts on the part of all only the same respect for what each one possesses equally in himself, both young and old, both ugly and beautiful, both rich and poor, both the man of genius and the mediocre man, both woman and man, whatever has consciousness of being a person and not a thing. The equal respect of common liberty is the principle at once of duty and right ”

“ After all, the existence of a divine Providence is, to my eyes, a truth clearer than all lights, more certain than all mathematics. Yes, there is a God, a God who is a true intelligence, who consequently has a consciousness of himself, who has made and ordered every thing with weight and measure, whose works are excellent, whose ends are adorable, even when they are veiled from our feeble eyes. This world has a perfect author, perfectly wise and good. Man is not an orphan; he has a father in heaven. What will this father do with his child when he returns to him? Nothing but what is good. ”

“ We think, with Quintilian and Vauvenargues, that the nobility of sentiment makes the nobility of thought. Enthusiasm is the principle of great works as well as of great actions. Without the love of the beautiful, the artist will produce only works that are perhaps regular but frigid, that will possibly please the geometrician, but not the man of taste. In order to communicate life to the canvas, to the marble, to speech, it must be born in one's self. It is the heart mingled with logic that makes true eloquence; it is the heart mingled with imagination that makes great poetry. ”

“ Soon another world will be necessary for us. Man is journeying towards the infinite, which is always receding before him, which he always pursues. He conceives it, he feels it, he bears it, thus to speak, in himself,—how should his end be elsewhere? Hence that unconquerable instinct of immortality, that universal hope of another life to which all worships, all poesies, all traditions bear witness. We tend to the infinite with all our powers; death comes to interrupt the destiny that seeks its goal, and overtakes it unfinished. ”

“ If your desires are impetuous and violent, will not the idea of the pleasures of virtue be in you much more easily overcome by the force of passion than if nature had given you a tranquil temperament? The state of the atmosphere, health, sickness, calm or rouse our moral sensibility. Solitude, by delivering man up to himself, leaves to remorse all its energy, the presence of death redoubles it; but the world, noise, force of example, habit, without power to smother it, in some sort stun it. The spirit has a little season of rest. We are not always in the vein of enthusiasm. ”

“ Let us be thoroughly penetrated with the thought, that art is also to itself a kind of religion. God manifests himself to us by the idea of the true, by the idea of the good, by the idea of the beautiful. Each one of them leads to God, because it comes from him. True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the infinite. So, independently of all official alliance with religion and morals, art is by itself essentially religious and moral; for, far from wanting its own law, its own genius, it everywhere expresses in its works eternal beauty. ”

“ No, the less noise music makes, the more it touches. Give some notes to Pergolese, give him especially some pure and sweet voices, and he returns a celestial charm, bears you away into infinite spaces, plunges you into ineffable reveries. The peculiar power of music is to open to the imagination a limitless career, to lend itself with astonishing facility to all the moods of each one, to arouse or calm, with the sounds of the simplest melody, our accustomed{173} sentiments, our favorite affections. In this respect music is an art without a rival:—however, it is not the first of arts. ”

“ Divided by interest, united by sentiment, men respect each other in the name of justice. Let us add that they love each other in virtue of natural charity. In the sight of justice, equal in right, charity inspires us to consider ourselves as brethren, and to give each other succor and consolation. Wonderful thing! God has not left to our wisdom, nor even to experience, the care of forming and preserving society,—he has willed that sociability should be a law of our nature, and a law so imperative that no tendency to isolation, no egoism, no distaste even, can prevail against it. ”

“ The supreme rule of which philosophy reminds politics, is that politics ought, in consulting all circumstances, to seek always those social forms and institutions that best realize those eternal principles. Yes, they are eternal; because they are drawn from no arbitrary hypothesis, because they rest on the immutable nature of man, on the all-powerful instincts of the heart, on the indestructible notion of justice, and the sublime idea of charity, on the consciousness of person, liberty, and equality, on duty and right, on merit and demerit. ”

“ Without doubt, unity, order, proportion, symmetry even, are in it; for, without these qualities, reason would be absent from it, and all things are made with a marvellous reason. But, at the same time, what a diversity! How many shades in the color, what richness in the least details! Even in mathematics, what is beautiful is not an abstract principle, it is a principle carrying with itself a long chain of consequences. There is no beauty without life, and life is movement, is diversity. ”

“ Is there in desire any of the characters of liberty? What is it called to be free? Each one knows that he is free, when he knows that he is master of his action, that he can begin it, arrest it, or continue it as he pleases. We are free, when before acting we have taken the resolution to act, knowing well that we are able to take the opposite resolution. A free act is that of which, by the infallible testimony of my consciousness, I know that I am the cause, for which, therefore, I regard myself as responsible. God, the world, the body, can produce in me a thousand movements ”

“ We have said that with man, and with the animal even, the figure is beautiful on account of the expression. But, when you are on the summit of the Alps, or before the immense Ocean, when you behold the rising or setting of the sun, at the beginning or the close of the day, do not these imposing pictures produce on you a moral effect? Do all these grand spectacles appear only for the sake of appearing? Do we not regard them as manifestations of an admirable power, intelligence, and wisdom? And, thus to speak, is not the face of nature expressive like that of man? ”

“ It is a wonderful thing that a being strayed into one corner of the universe, alone charged with sustaining himself against so many obstacles, who, it would seem, has enough to do to think of himself, to preserve and somewhat embellish his life, is capable of loving what is not related to him, and exists only in an invisible world! This disinterested love of truth gives evidence of the greatness of him who feels it.
Reason takes one step more:—it is not contented with truth, even absolute truth, when convinced that it possesses it ill, that it does not possess it as it really is ”

“ Liberty consists in the struggle of will against this tyranny and this anarchy. But this combat must have an aim, and this aim is the duty of obeying reason, which is our true sovereign, and justice, which reason reveals to us and prescribes for us. The duty of obeying reason is the law of will, and will is never more itself than when it submits to its law. We do not possess ourselves, as long as to the domination of desire, of passion, of interest, reason does not oppose the counterpoise of justice. Reason and justice free us from the yoke of passions, without imposing upon us another yoke. ”

“ Its height is above that of man, and its attitude proclaims the divine grandeur with which it is filled. A perennial spring-time, like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, clothes with lovable youth the beautiful body, and shines with sweetness over the noble structure of the limbs. In order to feel the merit of this chef-d'œuvre of art, we must be penetrated with intellectual beauty, and become, if possible, the creatures of a celestial nature; for there is nothing mortal in it, nothing subject to the wants of humanity. ”

“ Noble liberty has nothing to settle with the furies of pride and envy. As it does not aspire to domination, so, and by virtue of the same principle, it does not more aspire to a chimerical equality of mind, of beauty, of fortune, of enjoyments. Moreover, such an equality, were it possible, would be of little value in its own eyes; it asks something much greater than pleasure, fortune, rank, to wit, respect. Respect, an equal respect of the sacred right of being free in every thing that constitutes the person, that person which is truly man ”

“ He who has made man has not confided the care of his work to virtue alone, to devotedness and sublime charity,—he has willed that the duration and development of the race and human society should be placed upon simpler and surer foundations; and this is the reason why he has given to man the love of self, the instinct of preservation, the taste of pleasure and happiness, the passions that animate life, hope and fear, love, ambition, personal interest, in fine, a powerful, permanent, universal motive that urges us on to continually ameliorate our condition upon the earth. ”