De la méthode analytique appliquée à l’étude de la morale et de la législation, et des effets de cet

CHAP. 2: > Of the analytical method applied to the study of morality and of legislation, and of the effects of this method on the improvement of morals and laws.

The first difficulty one encounters, when proposing to treat of the science of legislation, is to determine clearly what objects one's research should focus on. All the phenomena of nature are so linked to one another that one cannot separate them without a kind of violence, and there is always something arbitrary in the lines one draws to distinguish them. Thus, among the moral sciences, there is none that can be treated completely if one does not take a few steps into the domain of those closest to it. It would not be possible for political economy, for example, to show us the causes of the increase and decrease of wealth if it remained foreign to the domain of legislation by not exposing the effects of a multitude of laws, regulations, and treaties relating to currency, commerce, manufactures, banking establishments, and the commercial relations of nations. In turn, the scholar who occupies himself with legislation would treat laws only in a very imperfect manner if he did not show the influence they have on the increase, distribution, and diminution of wealth. One cannot treat of morality without investigating the effects that certain habits produce on man's physical being, and consequently without encroaching upon another branch of our knowledge. It is impossible for the physician who investigates the causes of certain physical or moral disorders, and the moralist who describes the effects of a pernicious habit, not to meet on the same ground. It is equally impossible for the scholar who describes the effects of a people's civil or political institutions, and the moralist who investigates the causes of that people's vices or virtues, not to pass alternately into each other's territory.

But if, in treating a science, one is obliged by the very nature of things to make incursions into the domain of other sciences, one is no less obliged to restrict one's research within certain limits and to neglect matters one could treat without leaving one's subject. For example, if the scholar writing on political economy wished to leave nothing unsaid about the causes that influence the increase and decrease of wealth, he would be obliged to write a treatise on morality and another on legislation. This is because there is no law or habit that does not influence, more or less, the prosperity of a people, and consequently its wealth. Likewise, if he who treats of laws wished to describe all the effects they produce, he would leave nothing for the moralist or the political economist to say. It is for want of having felt this necessity to restrict oneself that some writers have considered laws on social organization an essential part of political economy, while others have reproached economists for not having spoken of the form of governments in treatises where they set forth the principles of the formation, distribution, and consumption of wealth.

Since several branches of our knowledge are intimately linked and mutually enlighten one another, it is impossible to treat one without touching upon the others. The difficulty is to grasp the point at which it is suitable to stop. One cannot draw up invariable rules in this regard; in each particular case, one is obliged to let oneself be directed more or less by accidental circumstances. If the subject one is writing about is well developed in another science to which it also belongs, it is enough to present it in a summary manner and to refer readers to the works that have specially treated it. If, on the contrary, the subject has been neglected by other sciences of which it could also have been a part, or if it has been treated in a false or incomplete manner, it is difficult to restrict oneself exactly to the science at hand and not to make more or less lengthy incursions into other sciences. Domestic slavery, for example, is a subject that belongs to several fields. It belongs to political economy through its effects on a people's industry and wealth; to morality through its effects on the morals of masters and slaves; and to legislation through its general effects on public prosperity. But if political economy has considered slavery from too restricted, and consequently inaccurate, a point of view, and if, on the other hand, moralists have neglected it or have considered it only in its relations with this or that religion, it is evident that the scholar who deals with the same subject when treating of legislation will be obliged to engage in much more extensive developments than if the subject had been treated completely by the first two sciences.

I have said that the sciences of morality and legislation consist in the simple description and classification of the facts that fall within the domain of these two sciences; but one must not imagine that this description and classification oblige one to present a picture of all the usages or customs that have been adopted, and of all the laws that have been made; to expose each of the particular causes that contributed to producing them, and to make known all the effects that have resulted from them. Such an undertaking would far exceed the strength of one man, and even if it were executed, it would perhaps not be of great utility. Some French writers have attempted to collect and classify the ordinances made by the kings of France of the third race. The collection they have formed contains neither the description of the Roman laws that governed a part of France, nor that of the customs that were particular to each province; and yet it consists of 16 folio volumes; so that, if one were to add to this collection all the acts that, in France, have had the character of law, from the beginning of the monarchy to this day, one would form a library of a medium size. But, as the governments of other nations have not been much less productive in this regard than the governments of France, one sees that a man's life would not suffice to collect the usages that have existed, or to assemble the laws that have been enacted in various times and various countries, and that one could consequently not have the time to read them all, let alone to investigate their causes and ascertain their particular effects.

From this impossibility of knowing each of the laws and customs that have been enacted or adopted in various places and at various times, one must not conclude that the sciences of morality and legislation cannot be formed. A physician cannot know the illnesses with which each individual of the human species has been afflicted, the causes that produced them, and the circumstances that accompanied them in each particular case; must one conclude from this that medicine is not a science, and that it is impossible to arrive at any general truth? The number of laws to which peoples have been subjected since the most remote times of their history is incalculable; but, in this number, how many will be found that are permanent, general, and have a character of originality? If one were to suppress from these immense compilations that scholars form, the transient or transitory provisions, those that are only repetitions, those that are only exceptions to general laws, and those that regulate only details of execution, one would reduce them to a small number of volumes. When it has been well established, moreover, that such an institution produces such an effect on a people, one can be assured that it will produce similar effects on all peoples who adopt it, unless accidental circumstances modify its power.

One can therefore, in treating the science of legislation, occupy oneself only with general and permanent laws, with those that exercise a great influence on the fate of nations; it is these whose causes we must investigate, whose nature we must determine, and whose effects we must expose. We can hope to find their causes only by tracing back to the facts that gave rise to them. We can determine their nature only by examining their provisions, the force that is proper to them, and the various elements of which this force is composed. Finally, we can know their results only by examining the facts they have engendered. The facts that produced them are in things or in men; the facts that have resulted from them can likewise be found only there. But as things have importance only by the way they affect us, the phenomena relating to them can be appreciated only by the action they exercise upon us. Thus, in investigating the causes and describing the results of any habit, law, or institution, we need only take account of those that affect peoples, whether by acting on the objects that are for their use, or by acting immediately upon them.

But what are the causes and consequences that must be described to have a complete knowledge of the object one is studying? It is evident that one must describe them all: those that exist in man, and those that exist in things; those we judge to be good, as well as those we judge to be bad. An incomplete description would have the same disadvantages as a false one. A naturalist who, in describing a substance, made known the pleasant effects it produces on the taste, and who, through ignorance or calculation, abstained from describing the effects it produces on the viscera of the stomach, would not only be a scholar of little repute, he would be a very dangerous man. Likewise, a writer who, in analyzing an action, a habit, or a law, attributed it to false causes, who exposed its good effects and did not describe its bad ones, or described only a part of them, would be a man of very little repute as a scholar, if he acted thus only out of ignorance. But if he left his description incomplete out of self-interest or corruption, if, after having spoken as a scholar, he acted as a legislator, he would be in the same case as the naturalist who would use force to oblige men to take the poison he had presented to them as a pleasant substance.

It is not rare to see most of the good and evil that affect peoples attributed to their moral habits, their laws, their governments. One would be mistaken, however, if one believed that these are the primary causes that act upon men and that make them happy or miserable. The laws and morals of nations are often themselves, as we shall see later, only effects of anterior and more powerful causes. If one does not trace back to the latter, or if one has no means of acting upon them, it is in vain that one would attempt to modify the former. It is not enough, therefore, to advance legislation or morality, to expose the good and bad effects that result from morals, laws, or institutions. One must, moreover, trace back to the causes by which these institutions, these laws, and these morals were produced; one must, in going from one fact to another, arrive at primitive facts, that is, at those whose causes it is no longer possible for us to find.

The primitive facts to which one must trace back are either in men or in things. The former are found in man's physical constitution or his organization; in the nature of his ideas or his opinions; in his moral, political, or religious systems; in the relations that exist, either between individuals or between peoples. The latter are found in the nature and configuration of the soil, in the course of the waters, in the geographical position, in the temperature of the atmosphere, in the division of the seasons, and even in the direction and force of the winds. There is, in effect, none of these circumstances that does not influence, more or less, the products by means of which a nation provides for its existence, the various kinds of industry in which it can engage, the relations it can have with other peoples, and the size of the population. In turn, each of these circumstances influences morals, laws, and governments: to attempt to modify the effects as long as the causes subsist is the vainest of undertakings.

Does not applying the analytical method to the study of morality and legislation, by requiring a description of the good and bad effects that result from human habits and institutions, mean reproducing, in a new form, the system that founds these two sciences on the principle of utility? If by principle one means a general maxim or a rule of conduct, I will answer that the sciences serve to form principles, but that, properly speaking, they have none. They are merely the methodical exposition of what is. A scholar describes what he sees, but he creates nothing, he does not even advise anything. He can indeed say that such a phenomenon is the consequence of such another; but it would be folly to consider him the author of this or that phenomenon. The moral sciences differ from the others by the nature of the facts that are their object; they cannot differ from them either by the method, or by the power that is proper to truth. I will therefore follow no system; I will propose no maxim as a rule of conduct. If, when a scholar has accurately described the effects that result from certain causes, nations tend to destroy the causes that are harmful to them and to multiply those that are useful; and if this tendency is an evil, the reproach should not be made to the science, but to him who creates the power of truth, or who has given human nature the tendency it obeys. The description of effects, and of the causes that engender them, imposes, moreover, no obligation on the adversaries of the principle of utility; after having read it and verified its accuracy, they may, if they please, take no account of it. They may, as before, direct their conduct by their moral sense, their inner sentiment, their well-understood interest, the principle of utility, or by any other principle they please. In reading the description of the causes and effects of an action or a law, they will have acquired only one thing: the knowledge, in advance, of the results of that law or action, and of how one must go about preserving or destroying it [4].Descriptions of this kind can doubtless have their dangers; this is a flaw common to all the sciences. It is clear that the day a chemist proved that a certain substance, used in a certain way, caused death, all men in possession of that substance had the means to poison themselves, or even to poison other people. Analysis, applied to morality and legislation, can also show peoples the means to destroy themselves or to make themselves miserable, if they so choose. When it has been demonstrated to them, for example, that a certain habit enervates the physical organs and weakens the intelligence, all those who wish to produce similar effects upon themselves or upon others will have a sure means of doing so. Likewise, when it has been demonstrated to them that a certain institution is an obstacle to their prosperity, or a cause of degradation and ruin, any people or any government that wishes to obtain one of these effects will have an infallible means. But these disadvantages, which are inevitable and which one encounters in all the sciences, are not very dangerous; for them to be feared, the inclination of the human race would have to lead it toward its own destruction, and if it were so inclined, it would not be for lack of means of execution.

If the application of the analytical method to the study of morality and legislation has no other goal than to make known the causes and effects of human actions and institutions, one cannot say that it is dangerous, unless one claims that good morals and good laws are inseparable from ignorance and error, and that men cease to conduct themselves well and to govern themselves well as soon as they know the misfortunes attached to a vicious legislation and conduct. J.-J. Rousseau did indeed maintain, without being persuaded of it, that the development of the sciences had contributed to the corruption of morals; but he did not go so far as to maintain that the corruption of morals must be attributed to the science of morality, and bad laws to the science of legislation. A science destroys only two things, ignorance and error; it is fatal only to one class of persons, to that which finds in the ignorance and errors of men the means to live at their expense.

If the science of morality and that of legislation consist only in describing facts and showing their chain of connection, if they give neither precepts nor advice, if they do not trace the rules of our duties, if they even abstain from exhortations, of what good can they be? Is it not a waste of time to teach them, or at least to study them? One can speak to men of their duties when one is the interpreter of a superior will that has traced out the rules for them. Thus, I can conceive that a minister of religion who speaks in the name of the divinity; a magistrate who speaks in the name of the laws of his country; a father who speaks to his children in the name of his own authority; finally, a superior who speaks to his subordinates, may trace out duties for them and demand their fulfillment. But by what title, in the name of what authority, would a man who studies a science take it upon himself to impose duties on his fellow men, to trace out rules of conduct for them, to give them advice, to make exhortations to them? A scholar who conducts research on the causes, nature, and consequences of human actions or institutions has no more authority over peoples than a man who conducts research on mechanics has over the industrial classes. Both can describe the phenomena relative to the sciences with which they are occupied; both must expose the consequences of a good or a bad procedure; but it no more belongs to the former than to the latter to speak of duties.

There are persons who will perhaps hasten to conclude from this that, in treating the moral sciences thus, they are useless if they are not fatal. I would not even be astonished if this reproach were addressed to me by the same writers who consider utility the most dangerous enemy of morality, and who believe that the human race was lost the day it began to consult its well-understood interest. These writers are men who are difficult to satisfy: if one sets aside considerations of utility, they complain that one says useless things; if one judges things by their utility, one is accused by them of corrupting morals. It is impossible to write on the moral sciences and to escape one or the other of these two accusations. I will endeavor, however, at the risk of incurring the latter reproach, to prove that by reducing the sciences of morality and legislation to the observation of facts, they are by no means useless. I will examine elsewhere whether other ways of treating the same sciences can produce greater advantages, or even if there can exist other ways of treating them.

It is evident, for any man who has studied the morals and institutions of peoples, from their crudest state to the highest degree of civilization they have reached, that as they have moved away from times of barbarism, as they have become more enlightened and more industrious, their morals and their legislation have been perfected, and that those whom accidental circumstances have held back or plunged back into ignorance are also those who have been the most corrupt and who have had the worst laws. Men who have read with some attention the descriptions that historians and travelers have given us of the morals and laws of ancient and modern nations have no need for this proposition to be demonstrated to them; as for the others, they will find the demonstration in the course of this work. I will confine myself here to a general exposition of this phenomenon, and to seeking its principal causes.

If we compare among themselves the peoples we know, which are those among whom we will find the most given to intemperance, to perfidy, to vengeance, to cruelty, to theft, to contempt for commitments, to the oppression of women, children, and all weak beings? Are they not, first, the most savage peoples, the hordes who live in the forests of America, in the deserts of Africa, or in the islands of the South Seas? Is it not, next, among the nations that despotism has plunged back into barbarism and in some way returned to the savage state, that all the same vices develop? Would it be possible to find in a savage nation a single vice that does not belong to a nation that has been brutalized by slavery? Are not the cruelty, the treason, the intemperance, the venality, the perfidy, and the other vices that manifest themselves within Asiatic palaces the same as those to which the most savage hordes give themselves over?

If we compare the ancient peoples to the most advanced modern peoples in civilization, we will find the same differences between them. In reading in our childhood the history of a few famous men of antiquity, we acquire the habit of attributing to entire populations the virtues of a very small number of individuals. We do not notice that these virtues must have struck historians all the more for being less common, and that the praise accorded to a few great men is a satire on the nations of which they were a part. We admire the chastity of a general who does not do violence to his female captives, and the probity of an administrator who does not steal from the public treasury, as if our morals or our customs made such conduct truly extraordinary! as if we were accustomed to considering as prodigies those of our generals who have done violence to no woman after a victory, or who have not enriched themselves by the pillage of vanquished nations!

But without wishing to belittle the merit of a few famous men of antiquity, it is not by comparing a small number of individuals that one can judge the morals of nations. One must examine what the general morals of the various classes of the population were among the ancients, and compare them to the morals of the same classes among more enlightened nations. Now, judging them in this manner, the entire advantage is on the side of the peoples whose intellectual faculties have been the most developed. Is there among the somewhat civilized peoples of Europe a government that uses more impostures and deceptions toward its population than the Roman senate used toward the Roman people? Is there in Europe a population more avid and more venal than the Roman population was, as soon as there were men rich enough to pay it? Is there in the entire world an aristocracy more disposed to enrich itself by pillage and rapine than the Roman aristocracy was, from its origin to its annihilation? Is there, even among the least enlightened peoples, an army as avid for pillage before combat, as ferocious after victory, as the Roman armies were from the beginning to the end of the republic? Is there among the moderns a population that has ever taken the same pleasure in seeing human blood shed as the people of Rome? Is there, finally, a people that has abandoned itself with less restraint to more debauched pleasures, when the pillage of nations had furnished it the means?

If, turning our gaze to one of the nations of modern Europe, we compare the morals that have existed at the various epochs of its history, we will find exactly the same differences that we notice when we compare nations among themselves. We will see vices decrease as intellects develop; we will see them gradually restricted to the classes of society that remain most foreign to the progress of the human mind. A few centuries ago, the crimes and vices that most offend society were principally noticeable in that part of the population which, in all countries, is most in the public eye. Murders, thefts, violences of all kinds, in short, the vices that we today judge to be the basest, seemed to belong exclusively to the dominant part of the population, not that the morals of the other classes were better, but it was judged that they were not deemed worthy of observation. One finds almost no difference between the morals that reigned in Europe in the Middle Ages and the morals of the barbarians who populate the western coast of Africa. As enlightenment has spread, as industry has made progress, vices and crimes have been restricted to a narrower circle. The judicial annals of France and England prove that, in the last century, a large part of criminals still belonged to the middle and upper classes of society. Today, if one makes an exception for political crimes, which the laws do not reach, nothing is rarer than to encounter criminals in one or the other of these classes: they emerge almost all from the lowest ranks of the social order. Not only have crimes become less common; they have also become less atrocious: one rarely finds them accompanied by those cold and calculated cruelties so common among the peoples of the Middle Ages and in Asiatic courts.

Laws have generally made the same progress as morals. However far they may still be from perfection, they have made immense progress in the last two centuries. In almost all the countries of Europe, they better fix the status of individuals and families; they better guarantee the security of persons and properties against private attacks; they better enforce conventions, better assure to owners the disposition of their goods, and regulate their distribution among the members of families in a more equitable manner; finally, justice is administered in a more regular manner, both in criminal and in civil matters. The least industrious and least enlightened countries, such as Russia, Poland, Spain, and Austria, are also the countries where legislation has remained the most vicious. The countries where enlightenment has made the most progress, such as England, France, the Netherlands, and a part of Switzerland, are those where it is the most advanced. It is not to the difference that may exist between the courts that this perfection must be attributed; for they all have both the same enlightenment and the same morals [5].

The progress of morality and legislation in Europe being incontestable, it remains to know what its causes have been. The spirit of system is naturally inclined to attribute all happy events to a single principle, and all fatal events to everything that is contrary to that principle. Thus, I do not doubt that some persons will attribute to the Christian religion all the progress that has been made in morality and legislation, and that they will attribute to incredulity all the vices and all the crimes that have existed, without considering that the Christian religion was in the Middle Ages what it is today; that the peoples of the time of the Crusades had a faith at least as robust as the peoples of our day, and that all the nations of Europe have not made the same progress, although they have had the same gospel. Others will attribute the progress of morals solely to the increase of wealth and to the ease that is its consequence, forgetting that the Romans, in the last days of their republic, were much richer than their ancestors, without, however, being much better. Others, finally, will attribute this phenomenon to the triumph of the moral sense or the religious sentiment, without taking the trouble to explain to us what this sense or this sentiment is, or to investigate the causes that have brought about its triumph.

A multitude of causes have contributed to the perfection of morals and laws; he who wished to expound them all would be obliged to write the history of civilization, and to trace the picture of all human knowledge; for all have more or less contributed to it. I do not, therefore, claim to attribute this perfection to a single principle: all that I propose here is to show how our knowledge of the causes and results of human habits and institutions acts upon the perfection of both.

To apply the analytical method to an action, a habit, a law, is, we have said, to expound clearly and methodically the causes, the nature, and the effects of that action, that habit, or that law. But what can be the result of this exposition upon men's minds? We can answer, without hesitation, that if the evil produced exceeds the good, the action, habit, or law will be generally condemned, and that it will, on the contrary, be approved, if it is the good that exceeds the evil. For, in considering a nation in its entirety, one does not see it act differently from individuals: it reproves what harms it; it applauds what is useful to it. But as an action, a habit, and a law generally produce a mixture of good and evil; as this good and evil do not arrive simultaneously, and are not distributed in an equal manner over all men, the judgments that each individual makes of the cause that engenders them must be diverse. Now, it is the influence of these judgments that must be shown: let us take for example intemperance, a habit that has been common to all barbarous peoples when they have had the means to indulge in it, and which we see disappearing little by little from all the nations of Europe.

This habit unquestionably produces a mixture of good and evil, or, if you will, of pleasures and pains. The effects that result from it do not arrive at the same time: some are experienced at the very instant of the action, others often make themselves felt only later. They are distributed over several persons, but do not affect them in the same way. If this habit is appreciated only by the immediate effects it produces; if, for want of judgment or foresight, its ulterior effects are not observed or are attributed to other causes, it will be considered good. One will be all the more disposed to indulge in it, the fewer the number of persons who condemn it; one will consider it honorable, and will take pride in being able to indulge in it with impunity, if no one disapproves of it. This is what we saw, not very long ago, in almost all the States of Europe, and what one would perhaps still find in some of them.But if a moralist, subjecting this habit to analysis, exposes all its effects, for good and for ill; if, after having described, on the one hand, the pleasures that result from it for him who indulges in it, and for those who sell him the objects of his consumption, he describes, on the other hand, the evils that are its consequences; if he shows how it weakens the intellectual and moral faculties of him who abandons himself to it; how it alters his physical organs, and renders him incapable of engaging in any sustained work, whether of body or of mind; how, at the same time that it multiplies his needs, it causes him to lose the means to satisfy them; how it deprives his wife, his children, his elderly parents, of their means of existence, and of the support they found in him; how it destroys the confidence he inspired in them, destroys their affections, and makes them victims of his brutality; how it exposes them to perishing from misery or to giving themselves over to shameful vices; how, finally, it harms not only him and his family, but all those he leads astray by his example, and those to whom he would have been useful had he not contracted such a vice: it is clear that the same judgment will no longer be made of this habit; it will first be decidedly condemned by all those who, finding no advantage in its being satisfied, must bear a part of the bad effects it produces; it will be condemned, in the second place, by those very people who believe they will not have to suffer from it, if they have no advantage to find in it; for, when a habit or an action produces evidently baneful effects, all men who cannot take part in the pleasures that result from it generally agree in condemning it; finally, the very man who has already contracted it will cease to believe it good, when he sees very clearly all the effects it produces, whether on himself or on others; he may still indulge in it, but it will be while condemning it, and he will prevent, if he can, his wife or his children from following his example.

Applied to a habit of another kind, analysis will produce analogous effects. If, for example, one subjects to it the habit of economy, which is scarcely less decried among semi-barbarous peoples than intemperance is approved, one will again have to describe two series of facts. In the first will be found the evils that result from certain privations; in the second, the advantages that result from the accumulation of wealth. The privations will be felt by the individual himself who has contracted this habit; in part by the members of his family, and especially by the individuals who might have hoped to profit from his prodigality. But the advantages will equally be experienced by his family; they will be experienced, moreover, by all the individuals whose industry can be set in motion only by the accumulation of capital; these advantages will be more extensive, more durable, and will spread over a greater number of persons, than the privations at the price of which they will be purchased. In this case, as in the preceding one, the effect of a complete description of all the results of this habit will be to have it approved, in the first place, by all those for whom it will produce good unmixed with evil; in the second place, by all those who will find more advantages than disadvantages in it; and, finally, by all those who believe they have no interest in it, but who, at the same time, will experience no harm from it.

Thus, the first effect of analysis applied to morality is to divide human actions or habits into two classes; to put on one side those that produce for humanity more good than evil, and to place on the other those that produce more evil than good. The second effect is to cause malevolent actions to be condemned by all the persons they harm, and even by those who do not suffer from them, but who cannot profit from them. Whenever, in effect, it becomes evident that an action or habit produces more evil than good, the public naturally classes it among vicious or condemned actions or habits. Those who previously indulged in it publicly and with a sort of ostentation become ashamed of it. If they still abandon themselves to it, it is in secret; if such a habit is imputed to them, they deny it, or seek to excuse themselves by particular circumstances; if they cannot correct themselves, they at least ensure that their children do not imitate them. When, on the contrary, the effect of analysis is to show that a habit or an action, previously judged indifferent or even baneful, produces for the human race more good than evil, the public moves it to the rank of virtuous or approved actions or habits. Those who indulged in it only in secret cease to be ashamed of it; even those who do not have it often boast of putting it into practice, and ensure that their children contract it, or at least that they give the appearance of it. This is the third result of the use of analysis.

One must not imagine, however, that the exposition of the effects of a vicious habit or a virtuous habit is sufficient to destroy the first or to establish the second, if the causes that produced the one, or that oppose the establishment of the other, continue to exist. Intemperance and prodigality, for example, are not produced only by ignorance of the effects that result from them: they are also produced by the continual dangers to which either property or persons are exposed. The individual for whom nothing guarantees the enjoyment of the fruit of his labors ceases to work, or immediately consumes what he has produced: for him, laziness, intemperance, and prodigality are foresight. Likewise, he who sees himself constantly exposed to the danger of losing his life is little touched by the description of the physical or moral evils that bad habits engender: for him, nothing is certain in this world but the present. There are few soldiers whom the fear of gout makes temperate on the eve of a battle; and savages or slaves impose few privations on themselves to enrich their heirs. It is not enough, therefore, to advance morality and legislation, to expose the consequences of bad laws and bad morals; one must, moreover, indicate their causes, and show how these causes can be destroyed. If one confines oneself to exposing their effects, one turns against them the sentiment that carries human nature toward its preservation and its prosperity; but, whatever the force of this sentiment, it cannot destroy what is, by its nature, indestructible; and one must consider as such any effect whose cause is not attacked, even when that effect is a vice [6].

If one were to write the history of human habits, going back to the savage state and coming down to the epochs when civilization has made the most progress, one would find that they have changed character as their effects have been better established and their causes better known. The first actions that were placed in the ranks of criminal actions are those that could produce the least good, and whose bad effects were the most evident. Thus, murder and assassination were condemned as baneful, even by barbarous peoples; but these acts did not have the same character they have today. They were considered as concerning only the relatives or friends of the assassinated persons; one could engage in them without dishonor, and without running any other risk than paying a compensation, or being exposed to reprisals. Attacks on property were not viewed from a different point of view; robbing merchants on their way to a fair, plundering travelers, or holding Jews for ransom were acts that did not dishonor powerful men a few centuries ago. Even under the reign of Louis XIV, cheating at cards was not a dishonorable action in good society.

One finds, it is true, that barbarous peoples have pronounced very severe punishments against actions that are punished less cruelly today. The Germanic tribes punished with death a woman guilty of adultery; and, in the Middle Ages, men who did not belong to the dominant caste were not treated less severely for acts that were no more serious. But this severity was the result, not of the hatred inspired by the vice, but of the contempt one had for women and for subjugated men, a contempt one encounters among the savage or barbarous peoples of all countries.

What, even today, are the most common vicious habits among us? They are those whose good and bad effects have not been clearly exposed or perfectly understood; those on which the opinion of men is undecided, and especially those whose causes have not been destroyed. But cause these habits, by a rigorous analysis, to lose the doubtful character they retain; enable the public to see all their effects clearly, and they will immediately return to the rank to which they belong; they will be considered as vices by all who suffer from them, and those who profit from them will cease to avow them. Doubtless, they will still exist in a great number of individuals, if their causes are not known, or if one does not have the means to make them cease; but the persons afflicted with them will be obliged to hide; they will lose the support that public ignorance lends them, and the necessity of acting in isolation will cause them to lose the means of having accomplices. If it were demonstrated, for example, that the corruption of an elector or a deputy by a minister produces, for a nation, effects infinitely more baneful than the corruption of a magistrate by an individual who wishes to obtain from him an unjust judgment, the first kind of prevarication would be kept even more secret than the second, and the necessity of secrecy would often suffice to make the act impossible.

Such is, in morality, the power of an opinion whose truth is uncontested, that an individual who avows an obviously bad action, without alleging any excuse to justify himself, appears to us either a madman or a kind of monster; and that he who wishes to commit a malevolent action, or to lead one of his fellow men to participate in it, always seeks to prove that he has some good reason: he cannot become a wrongdoer without first being a sophist.

The effects that the application of the analytical method produces on laws are as great and even more incontestable than the effects it produces on morals. To expose the first of these effects completely, it would be necessary to give the history of all the perfections that legislation has undergone in all countries. What is it, in effect, that has determined some of the governments of Europe to make a great number of malevolent provisions disappear from the civil or penal legislation of their country? What is it that has ended the secrecy of procedures, abolished torture, reduced penalties, established the freedom of defense? What is it that has removed from the class of crimes imaginary acts, innocent opinions, witchcraft, and heresy? What is it that has ended religious persecutions, abrogated laws against foreigners, abolished confiscations? Is it not the exposition of the effects produced on society by the legislation? In other words, is it not the application of the analytical method? I would not wish to belittle the importance of any political discussion, nor offend the self-esteem of any party; but I confess that discussions on the origin of powers, on divine right or on the sovereignty of the people, have never seemed to me to have very considerable effects on legislation or on morals. Never would Beccaria have produced a revolution in criminal legislation if, instead of exposing the effects of some vicious laws, he had confined himself to giving us the development of his principles on the right to punish; and the discussions to which some famous trials gave rise in the last century did more to advance the science than the Social Contract.

Thus, the analytical method acts in the moral sciences in the same way that it acts in the others. It gives neither precepts nor advice; it imposes neither duties nor obligations; it confines itself to exposing the causes, the nature, and the consequences of each procedure. It has no other force than that which belongs to truth. But one must be very careful, for that reason, not to believe that it is powerless; the effect it produces is, on the contrary, all the more irresistible for commanding conviction. When scholars had discovered the power of certain machines, the efficacy of certain remedies, it was not necessary, to have them adopted, to speak of duties, or to make use of force; it was enough to demonstrate their effects. Likewise, in morality and in legislation, the best means of having a good procedure adopted, and a bad one abandoned, is to show clearly the causes and effects of both. If we are exempt from certain vicious habits, and if we have seen some bad laws disappear, it is to the use of this means that we must attribute it. Bad governments know its power so well that all their efforts tend only to prevent it.

A grave reproach has been made to the philosophers who have brought to light the causes and effects of a certain number of laws; they have been accused of having destroyed everything and of having known how to found nothing. This reproach has even made such an impression that writers whose intentions one cannot suspect have hastened to declare that it was time to abandon criticism and to take on the role of founders: our predecessors, they have said, demolished the old social order; it is for us to construct the new one. Other writers, of a different opinion, have also pronounced against criticism; they too have reproached the philosophers of the last century for having destroyed everything and for having known how to construct nothing; but these, instead of wanting to found a new edifice, have claimed that the old ruins must be re-established.

There is in some of these reproaches an appearance of moderation that one is very disposed to consider as wisdom. Men who place themselves between two parties, with a view to making peace between them, and who condemn them both at the same time, have an air of impartiality and superiority very apt to seduce the multitude. I doubt, however, that those who make this reproach, and those who believe it well-founded, know well in what it consists. Do they mean to proscribe the study of facts? Do they imagine that to destroy a malevolent law, one must abstain from seeking its causes, from examining its results? If they do not proscribe the study of facts, do they wish us to consider only those that are of the same nature? Must one, in analyzing a habit, an action, or a law, see only the pleasures or the goods that result from it, and abstain from examining its bad consequences? Do they wish to arrive at the perfection of legislation and morality by replacing laws with other laws, habits with other habits, without having examined the consequences of the laws and habits one abandons, nor the consequences of those by which one replaces them? Do they believe, finally, their ideas so just, their projects so essentially good, that future races will have nothing to change in them? Would they wish to insinuate to us that they have reached the final terms of perfection, and that nothing remains for the human race but to enjoy in peace the product of their vigils? If, in this regard, their modesty is not an obstacle to their conviction, they are still wrong to proscribe reasoning; for, when one is sure of having discovered the truth, one invites examination, but one does not command faith.

The reproach made to criticism of having destroyed everything and founded nothing is all the more misapplied because, in morality and in legislation, these two things are almost always inseparable. Are not the philosophers who succeeded in destroying the secrecy of procedures the founders of public trials? Have not those who brought about the abolition of torture guaranteed all unjustly accused men from a horrible torment? Have not those who broke the shackles that resulted, within States, from a multitude of fiscal laws, founded the freedom of commerce? Have not those who brought about the abolition of corporations, guilds, and masterships founded the freedom of industry? Would not he who succeeded in destroying all the bonds in which despotism ensnares men be the founder of liberty? To hear the reproaches addressed to the writers who have succeeded in showing us the vices of some institutions, one would say that it has been agreed to count for nothing the advantages that the public has drawn from its emancipation, and that one must see only the loss that peoples have suffered when baneful codes have remained without force in the hands of those who possessed them, or who applied them.It is true that philosophers have not only destroyed institutions, but they have also destroyed false opinions or false beliefs; we no longer believe in witchcraft, and we do not attribute most of the phenomena of nature to a malevolent spirit. But when one destroys an error, does one not found the contrary truth? When one destroys a vice, does one not by that very act found a virtue? To prove, against common opinion, that a certain effect is not produced by a certain cause, is that not to dry up a source of errors and facilitate the discovery of truth? If medicine ever made enough progress to extirpate the germs of all diseases, would physicians incur a great responsibility? Would it be necessary to accuse them of having destroyed everything, and of having known how to found nothing? Must we think that the diseases of the human mind deserve particular regards that are not owed to physical diseases? Or would one believe that so much progress has already been made that there no longer exist any errors, vices, or bad laws [7]?

All the reproaches addressed to some philosophers for having pointed out the baneful consequences of certain institutions can equally be addressed to the analytical method, since this method consists principally in exposing the good and bad consequences of human institutions and laws, or in showing the connection of effects and causes. However, one could not proscribe the use of this method from the moral sciences without thereby proscribing the study of facts, that is, the sciences themselves. For one could not count as a science the knowledge of certain opinions or certain systems, even if these opinions or systems were expounded in large books, with a more or less scientific apparatus.

Timid and well-intentioned minds, while recognizing that analysis has produced good effects in a great number of cases, fear that it may produce bad ones if applied to all our habits and all our institutions. There are, they say, institutions and habits on which the opinion of peoples is highly pronounced. Whenever the judgment that has been passed on them is just, what good is it to call them back into question? Is it not better to hold to what has been decided than to compromise, by a new examination, the conquests one has already made?

The persons who reason thus resemble those litigants who have but mediocre confidence in the enlightenment and integrity of their judges, and who have obtained an unexpected triumph. The thought of the dangers they have run makes them tremble: they cannot bear the idea of an appeal that would expose them to losing what they have won. If one could guarantee them that they will not be stripped of what they have acquired, they would willingly consent to the abolition of the courts, so as to no longer have to fear judgments.

The application of the analytical method appears equally dangerous to the men who have imagined or adopted systems; it can destroy the conceptions of some, and erase the science of others. When one has spent the most considerable part of one's life combining certain ideas, on whose success one has made the happiness of the human race depend along with one's own reputation, it is vexing to suddenly perceive that the work to which one has devoted oneself reduces to a simple arrangement of words; it is no less so to have employed one's life to furnish one's mind with false systems, and to discover that one knows nothing, when one imagined one had acquired claims to the quality of a scholar.

Finally, there is a third class of persons who consider the application of the analytical method dangerous; these are those who enjoy, in the social order, certain advantages baneful to their fellow men, and who fear to see their possessions compromised by an impartial examination. It is ordinarily the persons of this last class who pronounce themselves with the most energy against all research, and who excite the alarms of the first. If we are to believe them, nothing is more apt to propagate vice than to show its causes and consequences, and to shake virtue than to examine its effects. For good institutions to be durable, the peoples must not see their results; to shelter oneself from bad laws, one must abstain from looking at what they produce. Finally, the examination of facts and their consequences is fit only to shake long-established rights, and there are things that must not be called into question when one is concerned with the tranquility of peoples.

Thus speak, in all countries, the men who profit from abuses; and it is probably in the same manner that wolves would speak, if they could speak, who had introduced themselves during the night into the heart of a sheepfold: Beware, they would say, of bringing light in here, if you do not wish to disturb the security of the flock.

I do not know if there exist, in fact, things that must not be examined when one is concerned with the tranquility of peoples; but those who reject examination doubtless do not wish to make us believe that those things are baneful to the human species. If the facts that are called long-established rights produce only happy consequences, examination can only be favorable to them; for the more their utility is demonstrated, the more the peoples will attach themselves to them. If, on the contrary, they have only baneful results, what motive would one have to respect them and to forbid oneself from examining them? Will it be enough for a harmful thing to have taken the name of right for human reason to have to stop before it? No one, moreover, could complain that, by abstracting from what are called rights, one examines things in themselves, and by the results they produce; for from the moment one sets aside from the discussion the rights of the strongest as well as the rights of the weakest, the condition is equal for all, and no one would dare to avow that he defends as rights prerogatives that are baneful to the human race. The examination of facts can have no other result than to show what is good and bad in each thing, and since all agree in recognizing the utility of rights, one has nothing to fear from it; it is natural, on the contrary, that everyone should request it.

One dreads the weakness of human reason; one fears that everyone will go astray the moment he consults his intelligence. But these fears, which seem to announce such great modesty in those who experience them or who wish to inspire them in us, would they not be in fact a disguised pride? Would not those who wish to inspire them in others have for their goal to secure for themselves the monopoly of intelligence and judgment? If reason is so weak, if it is so dangerous to make use of it, what is the instrument with whose help we shall discern, among a hundred religions offered to us, the only one it is important for us to follow? What is the instrument with whose help we shall manage to choose, from among the thousands of sects into which a given religion has divided, the one among them that has excluded no truth, or that has protected itself from all error? And if, in such matters, it is impossible for each person to have a surer, more impartial guide, more interested in not being mistaken, than his own intelligence, how would it be possible to have a better one in questions of legislation or morality?

But if egoism, vanity, laziness, and fear cause the application of the analytical method to be rejected from the moral sciences, one must not believe that all the fears manifested in this regard are the result of a prejudice or a vice. Similar fears can be conceived by men who lack neither enlightenment nor disinterestedness, and who are the protectors of neither prejudices, nor ignorance, nor any kind of abuse. For the analytical method to have no danger, it must be employed by men who have not only good faith, but also enough sagacity to know how to trace each effect back to the cause that produces it, and to follow all the effects that result from a single cause; an incomplete or vicious analysis can have results as baneful as any system whatsoever. The same method that, in the hands of an enlightened man with an upright mind, leads to the most useful discoveries, can lead to the most baneful aberrations in the hands of a man without enlightenment and with a false mind.

I will examine, in the following chapter, what are, in legislation and morality, the consequences of either an incomplete analysis, or the use of sophisms and false systems.