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the celestial joy of causing the triumph of inclinations, which are not of the earth?

The soul is there, it is the soul which triumphs, which enjoys, which drives back crime, hatred, vengeance, and which from the summit of the cross, while the body suffered and the intellect grew dim, still prayed for the executioners.

CHAPTER VI.

OF THE TREATISE ON SENSATIONS."

"La réalité qui tombe sous nos sens n'est pas toute la réalité."

JOUFFROY.

DESIROUS of explaining the nature of man, Condillac supposes a statue; he presents to it odours, images, sounds. Each sense produces its ideas, each idea instructs the understanding. The statue thinks, compares, reasons, imagines, knows, and wills; the education of the senses is complete, and man appears, material, intelligent; the first among animals—no more.

The statue having received everything from without, man as a moral, infinite being does not exist. In fact, nothing is more variable than sensation, nothing more immutable than truth. How could sensation produce in man ideas independent of things, times, and places? The variable does not produce the immutable.

Unskilful sculptor! Condillac forgot to invoke a god

in beginning his work. He gives life to a statue, and refuses it immortality.

Let us observe, that the statue being once perfect in this sense, the author wishes for it nothing more. He desires to prove that one may form a man with sensations, and he sends forth nothing more than an ape or a parrot: such is the whole power of the materialist. In spite of himself, Condillac refutes Locke; the disciple destroys the master in the very book wherein he promises himself to establish his triumph.

CHAPTER VII.

OF THE TRUE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL.

"Revenons a l'homme maintenant, et laissons ce qu'il a de commun avec les plantes et avec les bèste."

SAINT AUGUSTIN. De la Verité religieuse. "Dans le sein de l'homme, je ne sais quel Dieu, mais il habite un Dieu."

SENEQUE.

OUR body partakes, at the same time, of the plant and of the animal: there takes place in us a multitude of operations, over which our will has no power. lates, the hair grows, the flesh is renewed; we vegetate, we

The blood circu

grow, we exist, and die without our own consent.

man, as a plant.

Thus is

It is the vegetative faculty which impresses matter with its forms; it is as the mould of all things, and of all beings.

Man, as an animal, unites within himself alone, the

inclinations, the passions, the instincts, the intelligence, of all organised beings: he is more industrious than the bee, more cruel than the tiger, more cunning than the fox; more terrible, more variable, more dissolute, more insatiable, than all the other animals together. This is so striking, that their names alone express his different characters; so that, at the first view, man with his armies, his towns, and his palaces, appears to be only the most intelligent of animals.

Let him speak of his affections, of his foresight, of his memory. I cast my eyes around, and I find all the faculties of which he boasts, attached to matter in the brute. The bird which measures its flight by the experience which it has acquired of the reach of gun-shot; the swallow which throws itself into the flames to save its brood; the fox which, by its ever-varying stratagems, puzzles the huntsman's pack, reveal to me treasures of imagination, of intelligence, tenderness, and judgment. I am forced to admit in animals, as in man, innate sentiments; attachment, hatred, jealousy, gratitude, revenge, are renewed in them at each generation. What we feel, they feel; what we will, they will; man has only more scope, because his organs are more perfect. He is an universal animal: a being who thinks, remembers, combines, reflects, desires, reasons, and wills.

:

But if I were to destroy all these faculties, all these passions, would man be annihilated to a certainty I should have only destroyed a plant, and an animal-the intelligent and thinking faculties which are possessed by the brute, and which exist in us. Is this, then, the whole man? Does his intelligence restrict itself to raising dykes like the beaver, or palaces like the bee, with all the developement which his organs permit him? Is all his soul concentrated in the wants of his body? are all his thoughts

in the perceptions of his senses, all the will of his passions in the fury of his jealousy? Certainly, if man be only composed of those faculties which brutes share with him, there is an end of his futurity. How can we immaterialise them in the one, and not in the other? how give these to eternity, those to annihilation? shall we lower ourselves to the level of the brute, or shall we raise the brute up to our own?

Nothing of the kind: we shall emerge from this slough, by reverting to ourselves; the internal operations of conscience will reveal to us that hidden being which lives in us, which constitutes ourselves, and which manifests itself by virtue.

The soul will warn us of its power by a will opposed to our animal passions; of its morality, by the sense of justice and injustice; of its greatness, by the spontaneous actions of a reason which aspires after eternal truths; of its celestial origin, by the sublime notions of the beau ideal; of its immortality, by the sense of infinity which expands until lost in the presence of a God.

Philosophers, who seek, as Montaigne says, whether man be anything else than an ox, now is the time to exercise your science; take this body, place it on your dissecting table-search in its heart, in its blood, its fibres, its entrails; display the innumerable folds of its brain, examining the matter, in every sense; handling it, dissecting it with the knife, studying it with the magnifying glass; recognize at a glance, memory, will, stratagem, avarice, the spirit of calculation; all the human arts, all the animal passions; measure the intelligence by the developement of the organs; suppress at pleasure, such or such function, by cutting such or such nerve; and when, after having become masters of your subject, you have well seized the relation of the fibres to sensation, of sensations to thoughts,-on the re

mains of this palpitating flesh; then tell me what is that powerful conscience, that severe master which commands the animal passions, which cuts short their pleasures, and which rejoices to see them overcome; tell me what sense could have given the idea of infinity to a creature so finite; and whence does he experience the sentiment of the beau ideal, the model of which is not to be found on earth? Lastly, I would ask you, what is it to act, think, suffer, and die, for the cause of truth? and to employ another expression of Montaigne, "What sort of beasts are virtue and justice?"

Morality, reason, beau ideal, conscience: such is man distinct from time and matter ; these are the faculties which he alone possesses on the earth. I have found his soul, and in his soul the moral source of the human being, —that is to say, the necessity of another life.

From these divine modifications, I see virtue emanate, which is the triumph of the soul over matter; the true love which dreams of eternity; the idea of order, which arises from conscience, and from reason-the relations of effects to causes in infinity; in short, a God.

And these faculties which are in me, independently of my senses, exist in all men. I find traces of them, more or less marked in each individual, in each nation: they unite, they constitute the human race.

For, it is not the intellect which produces civilisation.

Men and nations tend to separate themselves by their manners, habits, opinions, and animal passions. They unite only at one point-the moral sense, the sense of the beautiful; and this invisible link suffices to combine the great human family upon the earth.

In animals, on the other hand, the individual is always detached from the species. Its instinct isolates it, even when it becomes the instinct of a society. No instinct

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