De la discordance qui existe, en morale et en législation, entre les systèmes adoptés en théorie, et

CHAP. 10: > Of the discordance that exists, in morality and in legislation, between the systems adopted in theory, and the rules followed in practice; and of the necessity of putting the intelligence of men in harmony with their conduct. Conclusion of this book.

We have seen previously that the effect produced by a false system is, either to cause actions or laws that are baneful to the human race to be considered useful, or to cause actions or laws that are useful to it to be considered baneful. By thus distorting the judgment of nations, a vicious system strengthens the bad laws and bad habits that already exist, or it multiplies their number; or else it undermines the good laws or good habits already established, or it prevents their number from increasing.

But, as the consequences produced by laws and habits are independent of the judgment we pass on these habits or these laws, and as, by their own nature, men tend to repel what harms them, and to establish what is useful to them, a people cannot adopt a false system without a struggle immediately being established between the movement inherent in its own nature, and the opinions it has adopted.

This struggle between the tendency that carries the human race toward its development and its prosperity, and the ideas that tend to make it stationary or to impress upon it a retrograde movement, has for its effect, not to immediately rectify the false opinions one has adopted, but to weaken their influence insensibly. At first, one seeks to put into practice all the opinions one has received; the good effects one hopes for from them inspire a zeal that belongs only to conviction; but soon the tendency inherent in human nature prevails over artificial opinions; slackening arrives; actions cease to be in harmony with doctrines; and opinions that one has adopted as the very expression of truth are no more than empty formulas that one repeats by habit, and which have no other result than to obscure the understanding. Sometimes, while preserving the words of the system, one attaches other ideas to them; one lends to the author thoughts he did not have; one supposes that he was at first misinterpreted, and one pays homage to his reason, rather than recognize that he was mistaken, and that one went astray in following him.

Religious systems are less subject than philosophical or political systems to undergoing revolutions of this kind, because all religions make promises or threats whose fulfillment it is not easy to verify. However, religious systems themselves are modified by the tendency that carries the human race toward its prosperity; as a false religion ages, one sees the zeal of the nations that have adopted it weaken. The first practices to be renounced are those that are most contrary to the nature of man; the last to be observed are those that require the fewest sacrifices. Sects are formed when the mind ceases to be convinced, and so as not to accuse the founders of having been mistaken, one supposes that they have been misunderstood. One then attributes to them the ideas one believes oneself to be the most reasonable; religious zeal is rekindled; and, if it can sustain itself only by combating tendencies inherent in the nature of man, it still ends by succumbing.

The most durable of false systems are those that are adopted by legislators, and which are confounded with some religion. It is this alliance of politics and legislation with religious ideas that has made for the duration of the system of Mohammed. It is also because the power of this alliance is known, that there is no bad government that does not seek to confound itself with religion, nor any false religion that does not seek to ally itself with the laws. However, even when this alliance exists, the force inherent in human nature weakens its empire, and sometimes even ends by triumphing over it.

Much has been boasted of the wisdom of the kings and priests of Egypt; but what remains to us of either, if not a few fragments of monuments and inexplicable signs? The laws of Lycurgus have been the admiration of modern philosophers; yet what have they become, and what people has ever thought of appropriating them? The so-admired institutions of the other peoples of Greece or of the people of Rome have likewise fallen, without anyone having thought of raising them up again. Domestic slavery, which was linked to everything, was sufficient to corrupt everything; it brought about the ruin of all the systems to which it was attached, and it itself ended by disappearing. The pagan religion suffered the same destiny; it could be sustained neither by the genius of the greatest poets, nor by the efforts of its priests, nor by the power of the emperors. The feudal system that covered Europe after the fall of the Roman empire died out after a reign of a few centuries. The church of Rome, whose power was sufficient to shake Europe, now treats as an equal power with a few handfuls of brigands. The Muslim empire is shaken to its foundations by men who were taken for the last and most cowardly of their slaves; and the fall of this empire is not the greatest of the ruins to which we are witness. Thus perish the errors and the false systems that seemed destined to halt the march of the human race.

But if, in the midst of these vast destructions that peoples leave in their wake, there are found observations taken from nature; if a philosopher paints for us with a severe exactitude the somber furies of a tyrant, or the outbursts of an ignorant multitude; if a poet gives us a picture of the passions and discords that agitate the chiefs of an army, or if he teaches us what were the domestic morals of his fellow citizens; if a sculptor, animating the marble under his chisel, shows us the human species in its most beautiful proportions; if a profound observer traces for us the characters of the infirmities to which men are subject, and makes known to us their remedies; if a learned jurisconsult pronounces a decision that is founded on the invariable nature of man; the works of the ones and the observations or decisions of the others will go, through the centuries and the revolutions, to serve as a model or a guide to the most remote generations. Men of systems may make us admire legislators who, by force or by skill, have succeeded in having certain institutions adopted by more or less barbarous populations; but when we see, on the one hand, these celebrated institutions fall into ruin without anyone thinking of raising them up again; and when, on the other hand, we see the decisions of the Roman jurisconsults, which a happy chance caused to be discovered after several centuries of barbarism, adopted and converted into law by almost all the peoples of Europe, without the intervention of either miracles or violence, it is permissible to believe in the power of truth, and in the duration of laws that have been taken from the very nature of man.

If the systems established or supported by the power of governments and by the authority of religions insensibly lose their influence, and fall into ruin when they are in opposition to the movement that carries the human race toward its development, systems that have for support only the sophisms and the eloquence of the writers who have imagined them could not have a long influence on the conduct of men. One can adopt them in a moment of excitement and enthusiasm; but, if the effects they produce do not answer to the hopes they have raised, one does not let oneself be long directed by them; it is even rare that one adopts a false system in its entirety, and that one follows all its consequences. As false systems can multiply to infinity, and as it is not possible for a long series of errors to be voluntarily and unanimously adopted, false opinions neutralize one another. An individual who has adopted false ideas, and who would wish to put them into practice, would have to struggle against a host of other individuals who have adopted other ideas. It follows from this that each is obliged to seek reasons and to adopt laws that can suit the greatest number, and that one thus makes, of the system one has adopted, formulas of one's belief, without making them the rules of one's conduct. There are then two beings in the same individual: the one who thinks, and the one who acts: the latter conforms as much as he can to the movement that suits his own nature; the former exists only in an imaginary world.

The experience of every day proves to us that the understanding of men is no longer in harmony, either with their interests, or with their conduct. A writer can maintain, as a general thesis, that conscience is the only enlightened judge of laws and of actions, or that, to know what is good and what is bad, it is enough to consult the moral sense or the inner sentiment; but, if he finds himself in an assembly where a question of morality is controverted, and where someone maintains an opinion contrary to his own by principle of conscience, he will affirm without the slightest hesitation that the conscience of his adversary is mistaken; he will prove to him, by reasons drawn from good and evil, that he is wrong to take it for a guide, and that one must follow the movements of one's conscience only when one has enlightened one's judgment.A political writer may maintain that religious sentiment is the sole principle of good laws and good morals, and that morality and liberty were lost the day men judged actions and laws by the good and evil they produce, and consulted their well-understood interest; he will prove his system by the history of savage hordes and civilized nations, by that of modern peoples and that of ancient peoples; but if this same writer is called into a legislative assembly, and has to combat a law he believes to be bad, he will set aside his system on religious sentiment; to impartial men, he will expound the good or bad consequences of the proposed law; he will show them that the good it is to produce is null, or at least infinitely small, while the evil that will result from it will be immense, quite convinced that, if he succeeds in proving to them that the bad effects exceed the good, he will determine them to reject the law; to avid or fearful men, he will prove that the law must be baneful to them; that it is contrary to their well-understood interests, and that, for this reason, they must reject it. After the statesman has thus fulfilled his duty, the philosopher will go and do his; he will return to his system; he will prove that the writers who have taught men to consult their well-understood interest, and to judge laws and actions by the good and bad consequences they produce, have been the destroyers of morality and good laws, and that there is nothing to hope for from nations, as long as one does not renounce these baneful doctrines.

A third, after having filled his mind with the maxims of Grotius or Burlamaqui, will present a system of natural laws; if he is a professor, he will teach that these laws, engraved in all hearts, admitted by the entire human race, are eternal and immutable, and that no human authority can change them; but, if he is called into a council, and it is a question of taking some energetic measures, it will be other doctrines and another language; then the necessity will be proclaimed of modifying, even of suspending the eternal, immutable, invariable laws; the salvation of the monarch or the people will become the supreme law under which all others will bend; anyone who takes it into his head to speak, otherwise than in theory, of the immutable laws that no power can either suspend or modify will be pursued and shut up in dungeons.

A fifth, imbued with the dogmas of the Social Contract, will recognize, in theory, the character of laws only in acts that are the expression of the general will; he will establish that there exist among men no other obligations than those that result from conventions; but, if it is then a question of making laws, he will find that one can make no good ones, unless one removes all manner of influence from ninety-nine hundredths of the population; he will proclaim the sovereignty of the people, provided that there exist neither assemblies, nor popular nominations, and that no one, except the ministers, has the faculty of publishing a fact or an opinion.

From this multitude of systems, and from this continual opposition that exists between the doctrines one professes and the principles one puts into practice, it results that nations know neither what they must do, nor what they must think; and, what is most remarkable, is that the men who thus have a double doctrine reproach them, sometimes for not being passionate about their systems, sometimes for attaching themselves to one and doing violence to the other: as if it were possible to be passionate about contradictions, and to march at the same time toward two opposite points!

The men who imagine systems generally limit themselves to having two; that of theory, which is that of an imaginary world endowed with perfection, and that of practice, which one is obliged to conform to the imperfections of human nature. But men who do not have enough confidence in their judgment to have opinions of their own, and who dare not think except according to books, do not stick to two contradictory systems. They often study all those that fall into their hands, and receive them all with the same confidence, provided that the authors do not belong to opposing parties. Their understanding thus becomes a veritable chaos, formed of words to which they attach no precise meaning, but which serve them to manifest sentiments of satisfaction or discontent, whose true causes they do not discern. If a law seems bad to them, they will say that it is so because it is a violation either of the principles of natural right, or of the Social Contract, or of the rights of man. If it seems good to them, they will manifest their approval by opposite words, to which they will not attach more precise ideas. It is not that peoples do not make progress, despite this confusion. There are many just ideas that are found outside the circle of all systems, and which, consequently, are little contradicted. There is, moreover, even in the simplest men, a foundation of good sense that all sophisms cannot stifle, and which, in practice, has more influence than the words that obscure the understanding. But, if peoples advance, it is, so to speak, only by groping and hesitating; they are not sure of the ground on which they walk; and, after having taken a few steps, it is not rare to see them turn back, for fear of having engaged on a false path.

In all sciences, errors have been committed; in all, false systems have been imagined; but it is only in politics or in legislation that one observes this lack of harmony between theory and practice. Physicists, chemists, physicians, act as they think; they do not fill their minds with all the false systems imagined by their predecessors. For them, all that is not recognized as good in practice is rejected as bad even in theory; a demonstrated error is a destroyed opinion; a proven truth is a conquest that can no longer be lost; their understanding is never behind their procedures. It is quite otherwise in legislation; in this science, there are, for most men, neither truths nor errors; there are only opinions; one admires in theory what one would reject in practice; and it is never certain that action will correspond to thought.

All governments make laws, and governments can be composed only of men. One must not be surprised, therefore, if laws have almost never been considered except in their relations with established forms of government, and if one has sought in turn to make democratic, aristocratic, or monarchical laws. Nor must one be surprised if, in general, one concerns oneself with the form of government in order to then investigate what laws are suitable for that form. For most men who concern themselves with legislation or politics, the first need is to possess authority, the second to maintain oneself in it. In itself, this tendency is not an evil, since it is not impossible to desire power in order to use it in the public interest, even more than in one's own interest. But if, in itself, this tendency is not vicious, it is not scientific either: it is not a very sure means of arriving at the discovery of truth. What we have to investigate are the laws by which peoples prosper or decline; when we have found these laws, we can investigate which governments best ensure their duration, or which tend with the most force to destroy them. Laws, to be good, must emerge from the very nature of man; a government, to be good, must be such that it tends, by its own nature, toward the exact observance of these same laws.

It results from this way of viewing things that, in studying legislation as a science, one does not have to investigate whether such a law is democratic, aristocratic, oligarchic, or monarchical; and that, consequently, one does not have to concern oneself with the various forms of government. The words by means of which one designates these forms recall only indeterminate and confused ideas; they are fit only to awaken blind sentiments of sympathy or antipathy. Such an individual will believe he has stigmatized a law by saying that it is antimonarchical; such another will believe he has made a very good argument, by saying that it is bad because it is aristocratic. The systems that are made on governments are neither better conceived nor better followed than those that have been made on the foundations of legislation: but this is not the place to examine them.

It results from this chapter that, if the various systems that have been made on legislation serve to obscure the understanding of peoples, they do not direct their conduct; that they are even often abandoned in practice by the very writers who imagined them; that they are consequently no more than formulas that one studies and repeats without believing in them. They are kinds of religions whose substance has disappeared, and whose forms are preserved out of propriety or habit; one invokes the Social Contract as poets invoke Jupiter, without having more faith in the one than in the other. But, as a false religion disappears entirely only when it has been replaced by a new religion, false systems, in legislation and in politics, will fall into oblivion only when they have been replaced by something more fit to satisfy the mind. What, then, can replace them? What will establish harmony between the understanding of men and their conduct? The study, the observation of facts: this is a repetition; but it is a truth to which it will be necessary to return more than once, before it is understood.

But will facts resolve all questions? Will they cast light on all that is obscure? No, doubtless. When one studies a science, and has well established some facts, one can go back to those that produced them or down to those that result from them. Whether one goes up from effects to causes, or down from causes to effects, one must go as far as they can lead us. But when they stop and cease to enlighten us, we must stop with them; we cannot go beyond, without immediately entering the empire of darkness, of vague conjectures, and of interminable disputes. If important questions remain to be resolved, one must leave to time and experience the care of giving the solution. There are no sciences that were formed spontaneously; there is none that has taken upon itself to resolve all the questions raised by our interest or by our curiosity. A well-established fact is worth more than the most ingenious imaginary system. If we do not wish to engage on the path of error, let us not forget that truth has for its motto:

I am the daughter of Time, and owe everything to my father.