第14章

and, in the state of your conscience, the surest course for you is to think nothing about him.Do you not see that it is with religion as with governments, the most perfect of which would be the denial of all? Then let no political or religious fancy hold your soul captive; in this way only can you now keep from being either a dupe or a renegade.Ah! said I in the days of my enthusiastic youth, shall I not hear the tolling for the second vespers of the republic, and our priests, dressed in white tunics, singing after the Doric fashion the returning hymn: Change, ô Dieu, notre servitude, comme le vent du desert en un souffle rafraîchissan!.....But I have despaired of republicans, and no longer know either religion or priests.

I should like also, in order to thoroughly secure your judgment, dear reader, to render your soul insensible to pity, superior to virtue, indifferent to happiness.But that would be too much to expect of a neophyte.Remember only, and never forget, that pity, happiness, and virtue, like country, religion, and love, are masks....

NOTES:

1.Ie-hovah, and in composition Iah, the Being; Iao, ioupitur, same meaning; ha-iah, Heb., he was; ei, Gr, he is, ei-nai, to be; an-i, Heb., and in conjugation th-i, me; e-go, io, ich, i, m-i, me, t-ibi, te, and all the personal pronouns in which the vowels i, e, ei, oi, denote personality in general, and the consonants, m or n, s or t, serve to indicate the number of the person.For the rest, let who will dispute over these analogies;

I have no objections: at this depth, the science of the philologist is but cloud and mystery.The important point to which I wish to call attention is that the phonetic relation of names seems to correspond to the metaphysical relation of ideas.

2.The Chinese have preserved in their traditions the remembrance of a religion which had ceased to exist among them five or six centuries before our era.(See Pauthier, "China," Paris, Didot.) More surprising still is it that this singular people, in losing its primitive faith, seems to have understood that divinity is simply the collective me of humanity: so that, more than two thousand years ago, China had reached, in its commonly- accepted belief, the latest results of the philosophy of the Occident."What Heaven sees and understands," it is written in the Shu-king, "is only that which the people see and understand.What the people deem worthy of reward and punishment is that which Heaven wishes to punish and reward.There is an intimate communication between Heaven and the people: let those who govern the people, therefore, be watchful and cautious." Confucius expressed the same idea in another manner: "Gain the affection of the people, and you gain empire.Lose the affection of the people, and you lose empire." There, then, general reason was regarded as queen of the world, a distinction which elsewhere has been bestowed upon revelations.The Tao-te- king is still more explicit.In this work, which is but an outline criticism of pure reason, the philosopher Lao-tse continually identifies, under the name of TAO, universal reason and the infinite being; and all the obscurity of the book of Lao tse consists, in my opinion, of this constant identification of principles which our religious and metaphysical habits have so widely separated.

3.See, among others, Auguste Comte, "Course of Positive Philosophy,"

and P.J.Proudhon, "Creation of Order in Humanity."

4.I do not mean to affirm here in a positive manner the transmutability of bodies, or to point it out as a subject for investigation; still less do I pretend to say what ought to be the opinion of savants upon this point.

I wish only to call attention to the species of scepticism generated in every uninformed mind by the most general conclusions of chemical philosophy, or, better, by the irreconcilable hypotheses which serve as the basis of its theories.Chemistry is truly the despair of reason: on all sides it mingles with the fanciful; and the more knowledge of it we gain by experience, the more it envelops itself in impenetrable mysteries.This thought was recently suggested to me by reading M.Liebig's "Letters on Chemistry"

(Paris, Masgana, 1845, translation of Bertet-Dupiney and Dubreuil Helion).

Thus M.Liebig, after having banished from science hypothetical causes and all the entities admitted by the ancients, -- such as the creative power of matter, the horror of a vacuum, the esprit recteur, etc.(p.22), -- admits immediately, as necessary to the comprehension of chemical phenomena, a series of entities no less obscure, -- vital force, chemical force, electric force, the force of attraction, etc.(pp.146, 149).One might call it a realization of the properties of bodies, in imitation of the psychologists'

realization of the faculties of the soul under the names liberty, imagination, memory, etc.Why not keep to the elements? Why, if the atoms have weight of their own, as M.Liebig appears to believe, may they not also have electricity and life of their own? Curious thing! the phenomena of matter, like those of mind, become intelligible only by supposing them to be produced by unintelligible forces and governed by contradictory laws: such is the inference to be drawn from every page of M.Liebig's book.

Matter, according to M.Liebig, is essentially inert and entirely destitute of spontaneous activity (p.148): why, then, do the atoms have weight?