Des divers éléments de puissance qui constituent les lois ; ou des causes générales de l’action que

CHAP. 14: > Of the diverse elements of power that constitute laws; or of the general causes of the action that men exercise upon one another.

A great part of the forces that compose the power of laws are in the very nature of man; and yet it is principally on men that the action of this power manifests itself; if it acts on things, it is only in the relations they have with us.

To know the manner in which laws act, the elements of force of which they are composed, and the consequences that result from their action, one must therefore consider men, by turns, as agents and as subjects. One must examine, on the one hand, what are the causes that determine them to act on themselves or on their fellows; and, on the other hand, what are the causes that oblige them to yield to the action that is exercised upon them.

It has already been observed that divisions and classifications are but methods proper to facilitating the operations of our mind; I reproduce this observation here, so that one does not imagine that, in considering man from diverse points of view, I suppose that there are in him as many distinct beings as there are points from which one can view him.

In order to put order into my ideas, I will consider men from three different points of view: in their physical organs, in their intellectual faculties, and in their moral faculties or in their affections. These diverse parts of themselves are not separated in nature as they are in our mind. One can even be divided on the name it is suitable to give to each of them; but, to make myself understood, I have no need here for greater precision.

Everyone understands very well what I designate by the words physical organs; they are the material parts of our being, internal or external: such are the organs of touch, of sight, of hearing, of taste, and others.

By our moral faculties, I mean the affections or sentiments of which we are susceptible: love, hatred, vengeance, hope, fear, in a word all our passions whatever their nature.

I mean by our intellectual faculties the diverse operations of the mind, which we designate by the names of perception, comparison, reasoning, imagination and others, and the organs in which or by means of which these operations are executed.

Including, in these three parts, the whole man, it is impossible for us to find the causes of the action that one part of the human race exercises on another, unless we seek it in physical needs, in passions, in ideas or judgments. We must likewise find, in one of these parts of man, the causes that determine him to yield to the action that is exercised upon him by his fellows.

I do not propose, at this moment, to expound the diverse causes under whose influence the physical organs and intellectual faculties of man develop, or remain without development. Nor do I wish to expound the circumstances under which certain affections manifest themselves in preference to others; these are subjects that I will treat in the following books. The only object I propose here is to show what are the general causes that determine one part of the human race to act on another, and the causes that oblige the latter to obey or to evade the action of the former. It is only by forming just ideas of these causes that we will know what are the diverse elements of which these powers to which we give the name of laws are composed.

We have consciousness of our existence and of the diverse objects that surround us only by what happens within us, or by the impressions that external objects have made on our organs. We could not know that we exist, or that something exists outside of us, if no internal or external object made any impression on us.

An impression that would produce in us neither pleasure, nor hope of pleasure, nor pain, nor fear of pain, would be for us as if non-existent; it could neither make us execute an action that did not suit us, nor prevent us from executing one toward which we felt ourselves carried. To determine us to act, we must be affected either by agreeable sentiments or by painful sentiments.

Each of these two kinds of sensations is divided into several species; one can make as many classes of them as we have counted diverse parts in man. Man can be affected in his physical organs, in his moral sentiments, and in his intellectual faculties.

The name of physical pleasures or pains is given to the agreeable or painful sensations produced immediately on one of our material organs, by the contact of any object, by the enjoyment or by the privation of a thing necessary to our existence, or by the lesion of one of our organs.

The name of moral pains or pleasures is given to the painful or agreeable sensations that we feel within ourselves, without our being able to attribute them to any particular organ, and which are the result of the impression that external objects have made on our imagination, such as the pleasures or sufferings experienced by beings for whom we feel sympathy or antipathy.

The name of intellectual pleasures or pains is given to those that affect our intelligence: thus, the reading of a good work, the search for, and especially the discovery of a truth, the solution of a difficult problem, the refutation of a dangerous error, are so many pleasures that are proper to the intelligence.

All the parts of man, forming but a single system, act continually upon one another; it is the same with his affections. A physical pain often produces a moral pain; and a moral pain, however little it may be strong or prolonged, does not delay in producing physical ills. The pain caused us by the loss of a person who is dear to us, the loss of our fortune or our reputation, can produce in us physical disorders grave enough to cause our death. Likewise, purely physical pains can affect our moral character to the point of making it unrecognizable. They can destroy our hopes, inspire fears in us, even weaken the sentiments we have for our friends or for our relatives.

If physical ills often bring moral pains in their wake, and are confounded with them, the physical pleasures that have their source in a good constitution often also produce moral pleasures. A man whose organs all easily fulfill the diverse functions to which nature has destined them, who has satisfied all his needs, and who experiences that kind of contentment that health and the absence of all pain give, abandons himself much more easily to hope and to all sweet and benevolent affections than he would in a different situation; his life is more expansive; he identifies more with his fellows. In general, a happy man is a good man: a wicked man is a miserable man, in the proper sense of the word. This may allow us to judge the pleasures enjoyed by tyrants, and the morals of peoples who are made miserable to make them more docile instruments [77].

Physical pains or sorrows do not, however, always engender corresponding moral pains: it happens, on the contrary, very often, that one procures moral pleasures by the physical pains one gives oneself; the latter are, in a way, the currency with which one buys the former. It is by a painful and assiduous labor that one acquires one's independence, and that one assures for one's children means of existence or a good education.

Physical pleasures sometimes produce moral enjoyments; but they do not always produce them. It is not rare, on the contrary, for them to produce a multitude of ills. Habitual excesses of food or drink, whatever the pleasures that accompany them, are not long in being followed by pains of all kinds.

Moral enjoyments, like physical pleasures, often engender pains of the same nature. Thus, the individual who satisfies a moral affection, such as hatred, envy, anger, or vengeance, certainly experiences a pleasure at the moment he gives himself over to one of these passions; but the pleasure is always followed by moral pains more or less grave, more or less durable; such as fear, repentance, self-contempt, dishonor.

There is, in a word, no kind of pleasure or pain that cannot engender other pleasures or pains; and not only for him who gives himself over to them, but for an immense crowd of individuals. A great discovery can produce very keen and very durable pleasures for him who is its author; but it will also produce them for most of the men who will come after him.

Pains propagate neither with less rapidity, nor with less extent than pleasures: the pleasures that Caesar and his successors gave themselves were paid for by the misfortunes of a multitude of nations.The distinction between the diverse kinds of pleasures and pains that we are susceptible to experiencing is very important in morality and legislation. It is for not having made it that men have engaged in so many disputes over the true causes of their actions and judgments, and that punishable acts have often been left unpunished. Some philosophers have said that, in his actions and judgments, man is guided only by the agreeable or painful sentiments he experiences, by pleasures or by pains; and they have meant by this all the kinds of affections of which we are susceptible; not only our physical pleasures or pains, but also our moral and intellectual pains and pleasures, our fears, our hopes, and all the sentiments that arise from sympathy and antipathy. Other writers, restricting the meaning of the words pleasures and pains to purely physical pains and pleasures, have claimed with reason that man was not always guided by pleasure or by pain; and, to justify their opinion, they have not lacked for examples: they have accused the former of slandering the human race and of corrupting morality; and, in order to make men better, they have tried to make them believe in effects without causes, and to persuade them that they ought to impose privations on themselves or submit to pains without motives.

The errors into which men have fallen in legislation have been neither less numerous, nor less grave. Sometimes it has been claimed that, to appreciate the happiness of a people, one must take no account of its physical pleasures, and that the happiest nation was the one that had the fewest needs to satisfy, as if happiness were composed only of negations. Sometimes also it has been claimed that physical pleasures and pains were the only ones that should be taken into consideration; that a people that had the means to quench its thirst, to sate its appetite, and to shelter itself from the inclemency of the weather, was the happiest of peoples and had nothing more to desire, thus putting men on the level of the stupid animals that are fattened only to be delivered to the butcher. Sometimes, finally, it has been claimed that if peoples could aspire to moral or intellectual pleasures, governments were the supreme judges of the quality and quantity that should be permitted to them. It has indeed been admitted that men could, without danger, be judges of the quality and quantity of food required by the needs of their stomach; but it has not been equally admitted that they could, without danger, be judges of the quality and quantity of instruction required by their mind.

They went further; they attempted to subject their moral affections to the same rules as their intellectual faculties: they claimed that one must love certain individuals to the point of being killed for them; others to the point only of making oneself their slaves and working for their service; others for the purpose of exclusively buying their merchandise, even when it is expensive and of poor quality; others, finally, to the point only of delivering to them one’s surplus, and preventing them from dying of hunger. Antipathies have been regulated like sympathies; and they have been so with the same spirit.

We do not have to examine these different systems here: the only thing I proposed to observe is that, to know the causes and effects of the action that men exercise upon one another, one must examine the diverse kinds of affections of which they are susceptible; one must examine all the pleasures and all the pains, whatever their nature, that are the cause or the result of this action.