Des peines et des plaisirs physiques considérés comme éléments de la puissance des lois. — Des jugem

CHAP. 15: > Of physical pains and pleasures considered as elements of the power of laws. — Of the judgments that have been passed on pleasures and pains of this kind, by religious sects and by philosophical sects.

If we observe what are the causes that determine one part of the human race to act upon other parts, we will find, among the principal ones, the desire to obtain physical pleasures, and the desire to avoid pains of the same nature. It is to escape the pains that labor requires, and to obtain abundant sustenance, agreeable clothing, and comfortable dwellings, that some men possess others as slaves. It is for the same end that, among all nations, one part of the population dominates, or seeks to dominate, the others; and it is in order not to expose themselves to physical evils of a more or less grave nature that the men designated by the names of the governed, subjects, or slaves, obey the action that is exercised upon them. The history of the human race, in a word, is composed only of the struggles to which the desire to monopolize physical pleasures of all kinds, and to cast upon others all pains of the same kind, has given birth.

If we were to analyze all laws, we would find that the aversion to physical pains, and the desire for pleasures of the same nature, are one of the principal elements of power of which each of them is composed. It is not a question here of examining whether this double tendency is a good or an evil; it is enough for me to observe that it exists, that it is in the nature of man, and that, consequently, it is not in anyone's power to destroy it. Nations have always considered as a good the physical pleasures procured for them, and as an evil the pains that have been made to fall upon them.

The judgments that have been passed on pleasures and pains of this nature, however, appear not to have always been uniform among all individuals. In all times, there have been persons who have made it a glory to endure or even to confront a certain kind of pain, and to despise a certain kind of pleasure, and these persons have been generally admired. Men have even gone so far as to reduce to a system the contempt for physical sensations, agreeable or painful: there is no one who does not know the maxims of the Stoics, and of some sects of devotees, in this regard. These maxims having been admired by a great number of persons, must we believe that the men who made it a duty for their fellows to avoid pleasures, and to practice enduring pain, wished to impress upon the human race a movement contrary to its nature? Or must we consider as vicious in itself the inclination that leads us to seek what gratifies us, and to avoid what injures us?

When a system is adopted by a considerable number of men who have no connection of interest among them; when, among those who have adopted it, there are several who are no less remarkable for their capacity than for the purity of their morals; when, finally, this system passes from one generation to another, and is found among peoples who have no resemblance to one another, and who even appear not to have the same origin, one can be assured that, if the whole of it is not true, there are at least, at its foundation, important truths that strike the mind, and that prevent it from perceiving the errors that are mixed therein: such is the system that rests morality on the contempt for physical pleasures and pains; a system that has been adopted by devotees and by philosophers, that has been admitted among the peoples of antiquity as among the moderns, that is found among Asians and among Europeans, and that we encounter even among savages.

We admit, in our theaters, that characters be represented to us who are happy through their moral or intellectual pleasures: a father who finds children he believed lost, a mother who enjoys her daughter's happiness, a lover who finds his mistress, inspire in us a keen sympathy; we take part in their joy, as we have taken part in their pains. But we would not tolerate characters who were happy only through their physical pleasures: however keen the pleasure a hero might feel in having a good meal, in savoring exquisite dishes, delicious wines, we could not take part in his pleasures; the more vivid they were, the more disgust they would inspire in us. The spectacle of physical pleasures seems tolerable to us only when these pleasures are produced by causes that appear to us, in a way, immaterial; a pure air, sweet odors, harmonious sounds.

We make the same distinction between physical pains and moral pains. We take part in the pains of Andromache, in the despair of Clytemnestra; but a heroine who complained of a migraine or a toothache could not touch us, however keen her sufferings might be. We admit that physical evils may be represented to us only when they serve to make moral pains more grave; such as wounds that render a man unable to bring aid to his son or his friend, or to repel an injury. We also admit that we may be given the spectacle of physical pains, provided that the individual who is affected by them despises them and counts them for nothing. The Roman who places on a brazier the hand that failed to strike the enemy of his fatherland causes us astonishment and admiration. If this hand were burned by order of Porsenna, and by that prince's soldiers, such a spectacle would cause us only horror. We admire the savage who, in the midst of torments, braves his enemy and incites him to vengeance; but he would seem a monster to us if he braved moral pains as he braves physical pains; if, at the spectacle of the torture of his children, his wife, or his father, he manifested the sentiments he shows at the moment of his own destruction.

The admiration that the contempt for physical pleasures and pains causes in us cannot be an effect of education and of prejudices particular to a people or an epoch; for we find it among all nations, at all degrees of civilization, and under all religions. We see that, in all countries, the most infallible means of gaining the confidence and exciting the admiration of the multitude has been to affect contempt for physical pleasures and pains, or even to avoid the ones and to run toward the others. Several priests of India voluntarily impose privations on themselves, and submit to pains that seem to us to exceed what human nature can bear; and the respect, the veneration they inspire, are in proportion to the pleasures they refuse themselves, and the rigors to which they submit. In the Christian religion, only those men have been numbered among the elect who have renounced the pleasures of the senses, and who have known how to brave pain: never would the church of Rome have placed on the catalogue of saints the name of a voluptuous man, even had that man been the benefactor of the world. The Stoics have, in general, condemned physical pleasures, and recommended contempt for pain, with no less zeal than the devotees; and if modern philosophers are, in some respects, less austere, they nonetheless despise individuals who show themselves passionate for pleasures of this kind, and they always grant their esteem to those who know how to show themselves superior to pain.

What are the facts that have served as the basis for these opinions? Could physical pains be by their nature useful to the human race, and must one say, with some Stoics, that they are not an evil? Could pleasures of the same kind be, in themselves, truly baneful, and must one not consider them a good?

We must observe first that, although men, in general, manifest admiration for those of their fellows who despise physical pains and pleasures, the universal tendency of the human race is to avoid the former and to seek the latter. Everywhere, men tend to protect themselves from cold, from hunger, from diseases; everywhere they aspire to obtain comfortable dwellings, healthy and abundant food, and warm or light clothing, according to the season or the climate; the tendency of the individuals who admire the contempt for pleasures and pains is no less strong than that of the rest of men.

We must observe, in the second place, that the contempt for physical pains and pleasures causes us admiration only when the individual who feels this contempt does not extend it to the physical pains and pleasures of others. The man who, after having admitted in principle that pain is not an evil, and that we must despise it, were to draw the consequence that he can let his children or his wife die of hunger; he who would base himself on the same principle to praise Tiberius or Charles IX, would be admired by no philosophical or religious sect. Nor would one admire him who would base himself on his contempt for physical pleasures to deprive of pleasures of this kind the individuals over whose fate he had some influence.

If peoples honor individuals who despise physical pains, they honor even more those who deliver them from them. A savage must know how to sing in the midst of torments and die like a man, to be admired even by his enemies; but he will be more admired still if, by his valor, he preserves one of his companions from torture. A man, to obey the precepts of his religion, must know how to endure hunger and thirst, and to despise sensualities of all kinds; but he will be greatly approved, even in his religion, if he gives food to those who are hungry, drink to those who are thirsty, and thus procures for them the most vivid physical pleasures that a man can experience in such a situation.

There is nothing contradictory in these two opinions; one is, on the contrary, a consequence of the other. We want our fellows to despise the pains that affect only them, so that they will take the trouble to deliver us from those that may fall upon us; we want them to despise the enjoyments that would be felt only by them, so that our share may be a little larger. We consent to pay them in esteem for the pains they take in our service, or for the pleasures they renounce to oblige us. A people admiring in an individual the contempt he shows for physical pleasures resembles a multitude that would praise the contempt for riches to a miser, and that would await the moment to see him scatter his treasures to pounce on them. No one ought, in this regard, to complain of falsity or injustice, since what others admire in us, we admire in others, and thus everything is perfectly equal among men. It results from this double disposition that, among no people, nor in any sect, have physical pains been considered desirable in themselves, nor have pleasures of the same nature been considered as essentially baneful. It can therefore only be a question of investigating what are the circumstances that have influenced or that still influence the appreciation of the ones and the others.

A man who was destitute of all intelligence and all affection, and who possessed great strength, would derive no advantage from it; it is not enough, to act with utility, to possess strength; one needs moreover a desire that impresses movement upon it, and an intelligence that directs it. Likewise, he who was provided with intelligence and who experienced desires could not by himself exercise any action, if he were devoid of strength, if he had no instrument to execute what he had conceived and desired. Now, man's first instruments are his limbs, his physical organs; and the more these instruments have of strength, of suppleness, of agility, of perfection, in a word, the better he can profit from his intellectual and moral faculties.

A man endowed with a good physical organization has, over a poorly constituted man, all other things being equal, a multitude of advantages: whatever the kind of occupation to which he devotes himself, he can work better and longer: if he is a worker or an artisan, he does more work, and does it with more perfection; if he is a soldier, he better endures the fatigues of war, commands with more ease, attacks and defends himself with more advantage; if he is an artist, his organs having more suppleness, more delicacy, he has, by that very fact, more skill; if he is a scholar, a magistrate, he is capable of a more sustained attention, and the faculty of enduring longer fatigues gives him the means to devote himself to more work, and to make more progress; finally, he can render more services to his family, to his friends, to his country, and consequently to himself; having more confidence in himself, he inspires more in others; the security he enjoys is communicated to those whose existence rests on his own.But a good physical organization cannot be acquired and preserved by a continuity of privations and sufferings. It is acquired only by making use of healthy and abundant food; by breathing salubrious air; by sheltering oneself from excesses of cold and heat; by engaging in moderate exercise; by enjoying security for oneself and for the persons in whom one is interested; by granting, in a word, to nature all that it demands to develop our strength, or to repair it when it is exhausted. It is therefore by a continuity of physical pleasures that man develops his organs, that he gives them the perfection of which they are susceptible, and that he places at the service of his intelligence and his moral faculties the instruments that can give them the most utility. It is remarkable that the more perfection an individual’s physical faculties have received, the more vivid are the pleasures that arise from the satisfaction of his needs; and that the more moderation he puts into his pleasures, the longer he preserves the faculty of renewing them. It thus happens that he whose organs have received the most perfection and who has preserved them the best and the longest, is also he who, on the whole, has experienced the most considerable sum of physical pleasures.

If the causes that produce and preserve a good organization are at the same time productive of pleasures, the causes that produce a weak or defective constitution are also productive of pains. An individual who habitually suffers from thirst or hunger, who eats only unhealthy foods, who breathes an insalubrious air, who is exposed sometimes to excesses of cold, and sometimes to excesses of heat, who passes alternately from absolute idleness to excessive labor, can only have a weak constitution, and be assailed by continual sufferings. The same causes that make him suffer make him decline, and it is no more possible to separate decline from pain than to make the effect independent of the cause. A continuity of physical sufferings therefore produces the weakening of our organs, just as the continuity of well-being produces their development. As they weaken or degrade, the vivacity of sensations weakens, and the number of services that the individual can render decreases in the same proportion. From which it follows that the more an individual has been assailed, during the course of his life, by privations and physical pains, the less he has been able to be useful to his fellows. From which it also follows that the more miserable the individuals of whom a people is composed become, the more they find themselves isolated from one another, and one can say of nations what I say of individuals.

Since the continuity of physical well-being increases the means a man possesses to be useful to his fellows, and since pains of the same kind weaken these means, how has it happened that peoples have honored with their esteem the individuals who have despised pleasure and braved pain? Was their object to encourage what produces the degradation and decadence of the human race?

Let us observe first that, among no people, in no religion, in no sect, has one made it a duty to confront every kind of physical pain. An individual who gave himself over to intemperance in the hope of being tormented by gout at the end of his days, who overloaded his stomach to procure for himself the sufferings of an indigestion, or who gave himself over to any other vice to reap the infirmities that are its consequence, would be an object of veneration for no one; in such a case, no one would be grateful to him for his contempt for pain. One would equally little esteem an individual who exposed himself gratuitously to a physical suffering from which no good could result for anyone. To train oneself in pain with a view to learning to resist baneful temptations, or to exposing oneself to a great danger in a case where it would be commanded of us for the interest of our fellows, can be considered an honorable exercise; but to expose oneself to pain for its own sake is an act of a madman in all countries.

Men are particularly disposed to honor those of their fellows who despise physical pains in three circumstances: in the savage state, in the state of domestic slavery, and in the state of political enslavement. The same causes produce, in these three states, similar effects.

In the savage state, men can preserve themselves only by submitting to continual pains and excessive labors, and by making themselves terrible to their enemies. To procure their subsistence by hunting or fishing, especially in the bad season, they must give themselves over to fatigues and pains without measure; they must pursue game through impenetrable forests; they must take fish in lakes covered with ice, and sometimes they must remain several days without subsistence. He who then most easily endures hunger and fatigue, and who can pursue his prey with the most constancy, must necessarily be the most honored. One esteems in him qualities that preserve him from destruction; knowing how to choose, between two evils, the one that is least baneful, although it is the most immediate, is an act of wisdom. It is by the same rule that one esteems him who, being taken by the enemy, shows the most courage in the midst of torments: his firmness becomes the safeguard of his compatriots, by becoming an object of terror for those who witness his torture.

Domestic slavery produces on the individuals who are enslaved an effect analogous to that which the miserable state in which they live produces on savages. Obliged to perform labors whose fruit they cannot gather, delivered without defense to the arbitrary will and caprices of their masters, they have but one means left to preserve some independence, and to taste some fleeting pleasures, in the midst of the calamities that surround them: it is to show themselves insensitive to pain, and to despise death. The slave who sees in his own destruction a means of freeing himself feels protected by the avarice of his master. Thus the blacks, whom the Christians of Europe hold in chains under the tropics, show, in the midst of tortures, a courage that exceeds even the cruelty of their tormentors.

The same dangers and the same needs develop similar sentiments under all despotic governments. Knowing how to suffer and die is the last virtue that remains to enslaved men; and, under whatever form slavery is established, this virtue develops. It is the same in Constantinople and in Saint Petersburg; it was in Rome, under the first emperors, what it is still today in Persia, and under all the despots of Asia. Men always accommodate their maxims to their position, and the summary of these maxims reduces to making the least bad use possible of that position. As long as the Romans were poor and free, virtue was to conquer peoples, and to enrich the republic with their spoils; when they were the slaves of their emperors, or, to put it better, of their freedmen, and they could not escape the evils that despotism engenders, virtue was to brave pain, and to despise pleasures and riches that escaped them.

The Stoics have been accused of having condemned pleasures and despised pains only out of envy.

“Whence comes,” says Diderot, “the intolerance of the Stoics? From the same source as that of overzealous devotees; they are ill-humored because they struggle against nature, because they deprive themselves and they suffer; if they wished to question themselves in good faith about the hatred they bear for those who profess a less austere morality, they would admit to themselves that it is born of the secret jealousy of a happiness they envy, and which they have forbidden themselves, without believing in the rewards that compensate them for their sacrifice [79].”

Although this opinion on the Stoics has been adopted by a learned philosopher [80], I cannot believe it to be founded. I cannot persuade myself that Cato of Utica envied the pleasures of Antony, Epictetus the pleasures of Epaphroditus, and Marcus Aurelius the enjoyments of Vitellius. The Stoics measured the value of physical pains and pleasures on exactly the same scale as we measure them ourselves, and the social order in which they lived is more than sufficient to account for their doctrines.

However bloody the revolutions and wars that have taken place among the moderns may have been, one would form a false idea of the social order of the ancients if one judged their state by our own. In civil wars, the victory of a faction delivered the vanquished party to an almost complete destruction: the weakest were banished or put to death by the strongest, and their property was confiscated; often vengeance even extended to the entire family, to the old, the children, and the women.

“We have among us,” said Appius Claudius to the Roman senate, speaking of the population that had withdrawn from the city, “we have among us hostages who belong to the rebels, and we could not wish for more precious ones. We are masters of their wives, of their fathers and mothers, and of all their posterity; and it will be up to us to slaughter them in their presence, if they have the audacity to attack us, and to let them know that they themselves must expect similar treatment [81].”

These were not vain threats; they were the maxims of the public law of the peoples of that time [82].

In a foreign war, defeat made the vanquished the property of the victors; it delivered cities to pillage and fire, lands were confiscated, women, children, and the old were led into slavery and sold like vile herds, without distinction of rank or condition; the scholar was exposed to the same dangers as the ignorant: Plato could be sold next to a seller of herbs, and Aristotle could figure in the inventory of a fishmonger. No one could therefore have any security, either for his property, or for his family, or for his person. The dangers to which one saw oneself exposed had multiplied especially in Greece, during the Peloponnesian Wars, and in the civil troubles that accompanied or followed them. It was in these circumstances that the sect of the Stoics was born.

The same circumstances that had produced it in Greece caused its maxims to be adopted in Rome. What man, indeed, endowed with some foresight, could believe in the security of his fortune, his family, his life, or even his reputation, after the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the triumvirs, and after the reigns of Tiberius and Nero! All kinds of evils having become plausible, it was necessary to prepare for them all, so as to be neither surprised nor overwhelmed by them. It was necessary to foresee exile, confiscation, the loss of one’s family, and proscription, as one foresees the simplest events in the ordinary course of life. The maxims of Epictetus would suit a slave of our modern colonists no less than a subject of Nero. “If I love my body, if I am attached to my property,” he says, “I am a slave; I have shown where I can be taken.” These maxims could also suit an individual who, having been condemned to death, waits with patience for the caprices of a favorite to grant him his pardon, or to fix the hour of his execution. The Stoics said to the miserable: do not be frightened by the evils that threaten you; they are not as terrible as your imagination represents them; you will find them bearable, if you have prepared for them. But they did not say to the tyrants: exile, proscribe men, for neither exile nor proscription is an evil.

The religions that have made a precept of the contempt for pain, and that have taught man to bear the calamities that multiply under bad governments, were likewise formed in circumstances where peoples had to struggle against calamities that it was not in their power to overcome. There is, between a great number of the maxims of Christianity and the principles of the Stoics, a perfect identity, and we should be astonished if it were otherwise, since these principles and these maxims arose at the same epoch, and were addressed to the same men.

Contempt for physical pains has therefore never been a motive for esteem, except because men have always had for pain an invincible aversion. Whenever an individual has found himself placed between two sums of equally inevitable evils, and has given preference to the smaller sum, though it was the more immediate, that individual has been honored by his fellows. One has likewise honored him who, unable to deliver men from certain calamities, has taught them the means of softening them. But the principle or the cause of this honor has been, not the love of pain, but the aversion one has had for it, or the inclination that men have for pleasure; for they esteem no less the individual who submits to pains to procure them enjoyments, than they esteem him who submits to them to spare them pains.

The same cause that has made estimable the men who have known how to despise physical pains has made honorable those who have despised pleasures of the same kind. This contempt may have been carried to excess; its cause may have been poorly expounded; but it had a more solid foundation than the envy or jealousy to which it has been attributed.

Our organs can develop, acquire, and preserve the degree of perfection of which they are susceptible, only insofar as we satisfy the needs that are in our own nature. We cannot abstain from satisfying these needs without suffering resulting from it; and it is impossible for us to satisfy them without the satisfaction producing pleasures. As long as an individual limits himself to pleasures of this nature, as long as he gives himself only the pleasures that are necessary for his development or his preservation, or that at least cannot harm it, he is not an object of blame, if moreover he harms no one. But, when he wishes to renew his pleasures without waiting for the needs to renew themselves, and to unite, in the shortest possible space of time, the pleasures that nature has willed to give us only at intervals and by spreading them over the entire course of life, then antipathy begins. One despises or hates him, not because one envies him, but for the reason that one considers him a madman who destroys himself and renders himself useless to his fellows, or because the pleasures he gives himself are purchased by the misfortune of others.

Man is a being limited in the pains he can bear, and in the pleasures of which he is susceptible: when sufferings reach a certain degree, he dies or becomes insensitive. Pleasures produce a similar effect on him: when they have a degree of intensity or duration that his nature does not allow, they make him insensitive or destroy him. By reducing to a very short space of time all the pains or sufferings that a man is destined to experience in the course of a long life, one would probably cause his death. A man would no less ruin his constitution if he wished to concentrate in a space of a few hours, a few days, or even a small number of years, all the pleasures he could experience in the course of a long life. The art of distributing pleasures and pains, so that the latter affect us the least, and the former are prolonged the most, is at bottom only the art of morality.

When pleasures that are too keen and too often repeated have worn out the organs, one can restore their sensitivity only by artificial and ever new means. Then, needs have no more bounds, and the pleasures of an individual may require the sacrifice of the well-being of a nation. A man whom physical pleasures have worn out no longer experiences pleasure in satisfying the most natural needs; he can no longer be moved except by the most energetic means: to experience some sensations, Tiberius needs the debaucheries of Capri, and Nero the burning of Rome.

Five circumstances can concur to determine men to concentrate in the shortest space of time the most pleasures possible: 1st, idleness of mind and body, which makes a continual need of physical sensations; 2nd, the lack of intellectual development, which does not permit one to see the distant consequences of the actions to which one gives oneself over; 3rd, the absence of benevolent affections, which prevents one from imposing any privation on oneself in the interest of one’s fellows; 4th, wealth or a power that gives the means to give oneself over to all one’s passions, at the same time that it dispenses with all occupation; 5th, finally, the continual danger of losing one’s life or fortune, a danger that may not leave the time to profit from the privations to which one submits; it is natural that he who believes he has but a few moments to live should seek to concentrate in these few moments all the pleasures he could hope for in the ordinary course of life.Almost all these circumstances were met when the doctrines of the Stoics and those of certain religious sects spread. The multiplication of slaves had made all labors that did not have domination as their goal or result odious and vile in the eyes of free men: the labor of man upon nature was exclusively abandoned to the enslaved population. When the Romans no longer had nations to fight, and the republic had been overthrown, there remained, for the class of masters, no subject of physical or intellectual exercise. The men of this class could no longer feel their existence except by a continuity of physical enjoyments: sensuality was for them a distraction and a need.

One must not judge the intelligence of ancient peoples by that of a small number of extraordinary men who appeared at certain epochs, especially in a time when printing did not give nations the means to instruct themselves. If one excepts the knowledge relative to the art of war, there could not exist a more ignorant or more superstitious nation than the Roman population, even in the most flourishing times of the republic. A learned writer, who had made a particular study of the customs of ancient peoples and the customs of savages, was struck by the analogy that exists between the picture of Roman customs and that of Iroquois customs [83]. It is impossible, in effect, to pass from reading ancient historians to studying the voyages that have been made into the interior of the American forests, without being struck by this resemblance.

The absence of benevolent affections was in the same proportion as the lack of intellectual development, and it was produced in large part by the same causes. All the hateful passions had a degree of energy unknown among us. Cruelty, vengeance, and especially perfidy, were distinctive characteristics of the peoples of that time. This character manifested itself not only with regard to foreign nations; it was the same with regard to foreigners and citizens. The word virtue never signified, among the Romans, anything but military courage [84].

Several centuries of wars and pillage had concentrated in Rome all the riches of the civilized world; but these riches were distributed in a very unequal manner. The generals, the magistrates, the governors of the provinces, had immense fortunes. The mass of the population was plunged in frightful misery, and had no means of escaping it; for the trades, the arts, commerce, were exercised for the profit of the great by their slaves [85].

Immense riches, all acquired by pillage and oppression, and an excessive contempt for all kinds of useful labors, inspired in the Romans, for physical enjoyments, a passion that went as far as fury; and this passion was further increased by the dangers of war and by the fear of proscription. If it is true, as is said, that Nero desired that the Roman people have but one head, so that he could destroy it in a single blow, one would be tempted to believe that the great desired to concentrate, in a single enjoyment, all the pleasures that an immense fortune and a long life could give, so as not to remain exposed to the danger of losing a single one.

The satiety of innocent pleasures made them seek ferocious enjoyments. Women, after having extinguished all sentiment of modesty, went to seek more vivid emotions at the circus, and took pleasure in seeing the blood of gladiators flow. Public meals took place in the midst of proscriptions; and, to make the sensations stronger, the heads of the proscribed were brought to the tables [86]. At feasts over which debauchery presided, consuls, to give favorites an agreeable spectacle, had the heads of slaves cut off [87]. Finally, even in conspiracies, they mixed cruelty with enjoyments; they immolated human victims; they drank their blood; they devoured their flesh [88].

Seeing the state of brutalization and ferocity to which the abuse of physical enjoyments had brought the great men of the empire, should we be surprised that the Stoics attempted to put a check on enjoyments of this nature? Should we be surprised that they sometimes overshot the mark? To bring the high classes back to innocent and simple pleasures would have required a power that belonged then to no man. When the Stoics condemned physical pleasures, they generally meant only baneful pleasures; when they manifested contempt for riches, they wished to designate only ill-gotten wealth.

“Amass wealth, I am told, so that we may have some too. If I can have it while preserving my modesty, my fidelity, my magnanimity, show me, said Epictetus, the path one must take to become rich, and I will be so; but if you wish me to lose my true goods, so that you may acquire false ones, see for yourself how unequally you hold the balance [89].”

The same causes that made the philosophers of antiquity condemn the abuse of physical pleasures also made the various religions condemn them; but it is no more in the power of any religion to make man insensitive to pleasure than to make him insensitive to pain; and it would be a contradiction to impose duties on men toward one another, and to wish at the same time that they not be happy.

Far from the Stoics having thought that, by themselves, physical pains were desirable, and that enjoyments should always be avoided, they thought, on the contrary, that man should repel the former, and seek the latter.

Every animal, according to Zeno, has been recommended to its own care by nature; it has been endowed with self-love, so that it might preserve itself, and each of the parts of which it is composed, in the whole state of perfection of which they are susceptible.

In man, self-love embraces his body and each of its members, his mind and the different parts of which it is composed, and the very desire to keep them in the most perfect state. Everything that tends thus to preserve man is indicated to him by nature as having to be adopted, and everything that tends to destroy him as having to be repelled.

Thus, health, agility, the well-being of the body, and what can procure them; wealth, power, honors, the esteem of those with whom we live, are indicated to us by our nature as having to be sought, and the possession of them must be preferred to the need for them.

On the other hand, sickness, infirmities, bodily pains and what gives rise to them, poverty, lack of authority, the contempt and hatred of those with whom we live, are indicated to us as having to be avoided.

Zeno examines the importance of each of these things, and he measures the degree of aversion or love that man owes them by the quantity of evil or good they can produce. Virtue consists in knowing how to make a good choice, and to follow it: that is what he calls to live according to nature.

But in these calculations, one must not have regard only to the pleasures and pains of a single individual:

“Nature has taught us,” he says, “that the prosperity of two is preferable to the prosperity of one, and that the prosperity of a great number is preferable to the prosperity of two. Thus, we must prefer the well-being of our family to that of our individual, and that of the human race to that of the State [90].”

It is therefore not exact to say that the Stoics condemned pleasures in themselves, and that they recommended pains, as being desirable by their own nature; they did quite the contrary. To face pain, not to hold on to life, could be a merit in their eyes only in the case where one proposed to be useful to men; it doubtless did not enter their minds that an individual who braved death to satisfy malevolent passions was an estimable man. Contempt for pains is a vice or a virtue, according to the object one proposes for oneself, and the result one obtains from it: it is a vice in the evildoer who braves the punishments inflicted by justice; it is a virtue in the citizen who fulfills his duties, despite the threats and violence of tyranny.

This digression on the Stoics, and on the causes that brought about their doctrine, can make us easily perceive how the love of physical enjoyments, and the aversion to pains of the same nature, are one of the principal elements of power of which laws are composed, and how laws are modified, according as these passions are more or less energetic.

It is evident, in the first place, that if a population that has no influence on its own destiny, or that is deprived of all political liberty, finds itself, with regard to those who govern it, in the same position as were the slaves of a master who put some order into the exploitation of his domains, the men designated by the name of governors find themselves in the same position as possessors of slaves; they have to devote themselves to no intellectual or physical exercise, except to maintain their domination.

Having to devote themselves to no exercise of body or mind, and being able consequently to abandon themselves to absolute idleness, they are conscious of their existence only by a continuity of physical sensations. The facility that their power gives them to satisfy their passions, and the habit of indulging in them, increase their energy. All the men who participate in the power, as auxiliaries or as instruments, are moved by the same needs. Now, the collection of all these needs forms, in several States, one of the principal elements of force of a great number of laws, and particularly of those that pertain to political organization.

It is evident, on the other hand, that a population that has neither masters nor slaves, and that can freely dispose of its destiny, can live and perpetuate itself only by the products of its industry; and that, consequently, it is obliged to continually exercise its intellectual faculties and its physical organs; it cannot therefore have the sensuality that one generally encounters among the possessors of men. However, if it gives to the men it charges with government only as much wealth as is needed to indemnify them for their pains; if it organizes itself in such a way as to always remain master of itself, and to put the chiefs it has chosen in the powerlessness of taking anything from it, its laws will still be, in large part, the expression of its physical needs, or rather it will be these needs that will partly form the power of which they will be composed.

In all possible cases, purely physical pleasures and pains are therefore among the elements of force that constitute a law; but they are not always the pains and enjoyments of the same classes of persons. Among peoples who are completely free, that is to say, among whom one encounters neither masters nor slaves, it is the physical needs of the mass of the population that form the greatest part of the powers to which one gives the name of laws. Among peoples who are possessed by masters, under whatever form and under whatever denomination it may be, it is the passions or the physical needs of the possessors and their instruments that form one of the principal elements of the same powers, and particularly of those designated by the name of political laws.